BY GEORGE KNIGHT
This presentation was made during the Windows on Mission
portion of last summer's business meetings of the General Conference
session in Toronto. Although it has already appeared in the GC
Bulletin 5 of the Adventist Review, and in an abridged
form in Ministry, the church's journal for clergy, we believe
its creative and provocative suggestions deserve wider
exposure.--Editors.
eventh-day Adventism at the edge of the
twenty-first century is somewhere it never expected to be—on earth.
Beyond that, it has expanded beyond the wildest dreams of its
founders and continues to expand. When I joined the church in 1961,
there were somewhat more than 1 million Adventists worldwide.
That figure expanded to more than 2
million in 1970, 3.5 million in 1980, nearly 7 million in 1990, and
roughly 11 million in 2000. At the present rate of growth, we might
expect to find 20 million Adventists in 2013 and 40 million
somewhere between 2025 and 2030, if time should last. What a change
from 1848, when there were about 100 believers. To them Ellen
White’s publishing vision that Adventism would someday be like
streams of light extending clear around the earth must have seemed
like wild nonsense. If one of them would have predicted 11 million
Adventists, the others, like Sarah of old, probably would have
laughed out loud. There is a sense in which the impossible has
happened. Those early believers were few, poor, and weak. On the
other hand, the church today is many, with the most widespread
worldwide presence in the history of Protestantism, with billions of
dollars of assets and means.
Yet growth has brought about its own complications and
challenges. Things were simple in the early days of the Adventist
Church. All spoke the same language, all belonged to the same race,
all lived in a relatively restricted part of the northeastern United
States, and all had been reared in a culture that provided them with
a shared value system and set of expectations.
In the year 2000 Adventism
is far from simple. We hail from more than 200 nations, utilize more
than 700 languages, and vary greatly in our cultural backgrounds and
expectations. Adventism today has unparalleled finances and
reservoirs of skilled workers, yet it faces unprecedented challenges
in moving forward with its mission. Fortunately, our God is a God of
the impossible. For better or worse, He has chosen to use quite
fallible human instuments to finish His work.
If I were the devil (which is one of my favorite games), I would
pit all of my energies against the human element in God’s plan as
His church seeks to move from the present into the future. In fact,
if I were the devil, I would plan my strategy very carefully. I
would have a well-thought-out plan for frustrating the church in its
mission.
Upcoming Generation
The first thing on my agenda would be the upcoming generation of
Adventists. If I were the devil, I would put my best energies into
getting the church to reject the ideas and plans of the coming
generation. And that shouldn’t be too difficult, since in most areas
they don’t dress like their elders, sing like them, or even think
like them. When I get older people to frown on guitars, I will at
the same time help them forget that early Adventists didn’t even
allow organs in their churches. When I take a shot at their
so-called drama, I will help their elders forget that Jesus used
fictional stories such as the rich man and Lazarus and that Ellen
White used the term drama to refer to what we think of as soap
operas. And I certainly would encourage the older members to think
of their drama as some great evil rather than an enacted parable. I
would also help the Adventist Church to forget that their very
movement was largely begun by young people whose ideas were
innovative and creative.
Our devil is not a dumb one. He knows that if he can discourage
the best of our young people from taking over the church, it will be
dead or dying. To reach the new generation, we must learn to
communicate in the language of their day, just as Jesus used the
language and idioms of His, and James White did in his. If the 
church insists on using the
idioms of the nineteenth century to reach young people in the
twenty-first, it will eventually end up the same as the Amish, who
have maintained their forms and traditions but lost their mission to
the world.
The church needs to recognize that the upcoming generations don’t
even think like those of us born in the 1940s and before. Brand
loyalty is gone. The post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, postmodern world
also tends to be postdenominational. The church can no longer expect
mindless or guilt-ridden loyalty just because people were born
Adventist or because they think Adventism has the truth. To the
contrary, the church will need to demonstrate that it is truly what
it claims to be and that it is using its funds and resources
faithfully. Today’s youth have fewer qualms about using their funds
and talents outside of organized Adventism.
This is no small problem. The youth of the church are its
greatest asset, and the youth outside the church are its present and
future mission field. The youth are Adventism’s greatest opportunity
and its most serious challenge. The church must formulate plans to
reach their minds and enlist their support. They will be the church
of the future.
Thinking Small
If I
were the devil, I would get the church to think small. This tactic
is closely related to that of frustrated young people, because the
young have not yet discovered that everything is impossible. I know
Adventists who can give 110 reasons that almost anything that is
suggested can’t be done. And they usually buttress their argument
with Bible verses and Ellen White quotations taken out of context.
Such apostles of negativism have apparently never read
Testimonies for the Church, volume 6, page 476: “New methods and new
plans will spring from new circumstances. New thoughts will come
from new workers who give themselves to the work. . . . They will
receive plans devised by the Lord Himself.” New workers are often
young workers.
The apostles of negativism need to learn the lesson of the
bumblebee. It is aerodynamically impossible for bumblebees to fly,
but they don’t know it, so they do it anyway.
Thinking small in Adventism means Church X baptizing 50 in 2001,
rather than 25; it means topping the 20 million mark by 2004 instead
of 2013. With small thinking, the church will be on the planet for a
long time.
I think of my friend in Hawaii, Arnold Trujillo. He now has 29
churches and companies with 5,500 members, but has publicly stated
that his goal is to have 10,000 home church units of 12 members each
by 2005 and is currently laying groundwork for that expansion. Is
that a vision or a delusion? They may be close together. Never
forget what Jesus commanded the 11 disciples to take the gospel to
“all the world” and never forget the impossible task that faced our
own forebears in Adventism. What we need is to think about the
magnitude of the latter rain and faith. How can we think big and
best utilize our funds and our resources to make our dreams come
true?
If I were the devil, I would get people to believe that there is
only one way to do something and that everybody has to do it that
one way. Take worship, for example. A few years ago in the North
American Division we had some tension over what was called
celebration worship. Now, I don’t know much about celebration
worship, but I do know that in the average Adventist service I can
fall asleep during the invocation, wake up at the benediction, and
tell you exactly what happened.
The church needs to realize, as Ellen White put it, that “not all
minds are to be reached by the same methods.” Worship styles, for
example, are related to a person’s socioeconomic class. What may
reach some upper-middle-class community may not appeal to
Pentecostals or high church Anglicans or Orthodox or Islamics. I’m
not saying that we become Pentecostals or Islamics, but we ought to
have modes of reaching out that appeal to them. Adventism does not
need one or two ways of worshiping, but 50. Another way of saying it
is that if everybody in the church looks like me, we aren’t reaching
out very far.
I have spoken about worship, but the same can be said for
evangelism. Our God has created variety everywhere. We must move
beyond single-crop harvesting in any given community and reach out
for all of God’s children. If we are going to reach those most
unlike us, we need to consciously develop methods and procedures
that are quite unlike our traditional ones.
New Technology
If I
were the devil, I would downplay the importance of new technologies
in finishing the church’s work. New technology has tremendous power
for both good and evil. Too often we have left the field to the
devil. H.M.S. Richards once told me that he had to fight the
brethren at every step. Radio in 1930 was too new, too radical, too
innovative, too untried, a “waste of the Lord’s money.”
Today we stand at the frontier of technologies for spreading the
three angels’ messages that Richards didn’t even dream of. Today as
never before, we need a generation with the H.M.S. Richards spirit
but with twenty-first-century imaginations.
Before leaving the topic of technology, I need to say that I
thought the NET idea was crazy. Who would go to a church and watch a
preacher on a screen? I am glad that I was wrong. The NET program
has put Adventists at the very frontier of some types of worldwide
communication. What other ideas are out there for discovery? And how
can we best utilize them?
Lay Involvement
If I
were the devil, I would make pastors and administrators the center
of the work of the church. It must have been the devil who gave us
the idea that the pastor should do all the preaching, give all the
Bible studies, be the church’s primary soul winner, and make and
carry out business decisions for the church.
We need to move beyond seeing
churches as entertainment centers for the saints. We need to get
more priests into the priesthood of believers. If we wait for the
clergy to finish the work, Adventism will be on earth for a little
longer than eternity. The challenge is to create a generation of
Adventist pastors and administrators who become equipers who are
skilled in helping people use their talents in the work of reaching
the world. Pastors need to become enablers, not mother hens hovering
over their fledglings.
Al McClure is reported as saying at a church planting convention
that any church that doesn’t spin off or plant another church in
three years ought to lose its pastor. And if Elder McClure didn’t
say that, he should have. Adventism needs to take definite steps to
recast the role of the pastor into that of enabler.
If I were the devil, I would undermine the importance of the
local congregation. One of the great needs of Adventism is the
creation and maintenance of vibrant local congregations. A healthy
congregation is not a group of independent individuals, but a unit
of believers reaching out to the community around them.
The task of the world church in General Conference organization
is to coordinate funds and personnel in order to send Christ’s
message to the far corners of the earth. Thus congregationalism as a
form of organization is not sufficient in itself. On the other hand,
the denomination in the long run will be only as healthy as its
local congregations. What can be done to create health in our local
congregations?
Growing Bureaucracy
If I were the devil, I would create more administrative levels
and generate more administrators. In fact, if I were the devil, I
would get as many successful church employees as far from the scene
of action as possible. I would put them behind desks, cover them
with paper, and inundate them with committees. And if that weren’t
enough, I would remove them to so-called higher and higher levels
until they had little direct and sustained contact with the people
who make up the church. Now, don’t get me wrong. I believe in church
organization. But I also believe in food, and I know that too much
of a good thing has less than healthy results. Many Adventists
believe that Adventism needs to trim down the number of its
administrative types and its administrative real estate so that more
money and energy is put into fighting the battle on the front lines.
Many Adventists are tired of paying the massive bill for a
multilayered system.
At the 1999 Annual Council in Brazil I pointed out that there is
no church in the world with as many administrative levels to support
as Adventism. When that article was published in the Adventist
Review, the editor wanted to insert “except Roman Catholicism.” I
responded by telling them to add “including Roman Catholicism.” The
Roman Catholic system has two levels above the local congregation,
while Adventism has four. The current system was developed in the
horse-and-buggy era, when even the telephone hadn’t come into its
own. The challenge for the church in the twenty-first century will
be to reorganize for mission along lines that take into account
modern transportation and communication.
I am just completing a book on the history of Adventist Church
organization in which I suggest a three-tiered, totally restructured
model that is arranged in such a way as to capture the advantages of
a worldwide church while at the same time providing for local
initiatives. More and more Adventists are realizing that there are
other ways to structure the church in the postmodern world that
would free up both money and workers for finishing God’s work on
earth. Too much money, claim many, is being used to run the
machinery, as if the machinery were an end in itself. Many of the
potential opportunities of the future are contingent upon successful
restructuring in a manner that will free up resources. This task may
be one of the greatest challenges we face at the beginning of the
twenty-first century.
Holy Spirit
If I
were the devil, I would make Adventists fearful of the Holy Spirit.
Too many of us fear Pentecostalism when we think of the topic of the
Holy Spirit. On the other hand, we need to remember the Bible
teaching about the necessity of the Spirit in Christian work, and
Ellen White taught that the reception of the Holy Spirit brings all
other blessings in its train.
Some years ago I noted at a General Conference presentation that
Adventists don’t really believe the 27 fundamental beliefs.
Especially the one about spiritual gifts. We believe in spiritual
gift rather than gifts, and most of us restrict that gift to one
person who’s been safely in her grave for the past 85 years. What
would it be like if suddenly today in the pulpit I got the gift of
tongues, a true gift? I might be carried off. What if I got a true
gift of prophecy? There would most likely be a massive committee to
study the situation for the next 10 years. Now, I have to admit that
even talking about such things makes me nervous, because the Spirit
is impossible to control.
On the other hand, we have the promise in Joel 2 of the spiritual
outpouring in the last days, a spiritual outpouring that will most
likely split the church right down the middle. How much do we really
think about the Holy Spirit and the outpouring of the latter rain?
Are we so focused on goals and structures and human endeavor that we
have forgotten the essential power behind each of them? What steps
can be taken to allow the Spirit its proper place within Adventism?
Or do we hope to complete our work without His troublesome presence?
Numbers Game
If I
were the devil, I would encourage the denomination to keep playing
the numbers game. The worst thing that ever happened to Adventists
was learning how to count. We count numbers, churches, institutions,
money, and everything else. While numbers may have their proper
place, they have very little to do with the reality of a finished
work. One result of the numbers game is that we tend to put our
money where we can get the most baptisms for the least money. Where
we can get the most results. That has meant that we have not put the
kind of effort needed into those parts of the world that are the
most difficult to reach. In the North American Division the most
difficult group to evangelize happens to be Caucasian. Some years
ago I wrote the division president that if we didn’t start putting
more effort toward creatively evangelizing that self-satisfied
group, in 50 years the largest unreached people group in the world
could be White North Americans.
The numbers problem takes on different configurations in various
parts of the world, but we need to face it consistently in our
planning if we ever hope to reach all of God’s children. If I were
the devil, I would get Seventh-day Adventists to forget, or at least
to downplay, their apocalyptic heritage. Adventism has never seen
itself as just another denomination, but rather a movement of
prophecy, with its roots in Revelation 10-14. It is that belief in
Adventism as a special called-out people with an urgent message that
has driven the church to the ends of the earth. When that vision is
gone, Adventism will become just another toothless denomination that
happens to be a little more peculiar in some of its beliefs than
others.
Our approach to apocalyptic in future planning will determine
whether Adventism will continue to be a movement or will be
transmuted into a monument of the movement and eventually a museum
about the movement. While we are on the topic of apocalyptic, it is
important that we speak to the people of our day. It just doesn’t
get people excited about the nearness of the Advent to tell them
that there was a great earthquake in Lisbon in 1755 and that the
stars fell in 1833.
I have no problem with those events in their historicity and
their power on people in the nineteenth century. But we need to help
people see the ongoing apocalyptic events in the framework of our
day.
If I were the devil, I would get Adventists to hold that all of
their beliefs are of equal importance. On the contrary, the plain
fact is that having a saving relationship with Jesus is at the very
center of Christianity. That relationship is not at the same level
as eating a pork chop. I have known Sabbathkeepers who are meaner
than the devil. I have known vegetarians who are meaner than the
devil. The church needs to think of its beliefs in terms of what is
primary and what is secondary, of what is central and of what is on
the edge.
The Bible picture is clear that all genuine Christianity flows
out of a saving relationship with Jesus Christ. It is all too easy
to be an Adventist without being a Christian. In Adventism’s entire
outreach program the centrality of Christ needs to be made
crystal-clear.
The challenge is to structure our outreach consciously so that
people become Christians and they become Adventists because
Adventism is meaningless outside of a Christian framework.
Infighting
If I were
the devil, I would get Adventists fighting with each other. Any old
topic would do—worship styles, theology, dress standards. Anything
would do for my purposes if I were the devil. After all, if
Adventists were busy shooting all their bullets at each other, they
wouldn’t have many left over for me.
The devil has been quite successful in this strategy. What can be
done to help us find and defeat the real enemy?
If I were the devil, I would get as many Adventists as possible
to think tribally, nationally, and racially. I would make the church
one big power struggle, without regard to mission or efficiency.
Having made that statement, I hasten to add that there are
injustices that need to be rectified and complex situations that can
never be made completely straight. My plea is that even in the most
difficult and unjust situations we need to behave as born-again
sisters and brothers, all able to discuss these things without
losing sight of the mission of the church, which makes the issues
meaningful in the first place. Adventism needs to develop mechanisms
to enrich and enlighten its multiculturalism and its
internationalism.
And last, if I were the devil, I would get Adventists to look
miserable on Sabbath. Let me ask: When do Adventists rejoice?
Sundown Friday, or sundown Sabbath? Too many of us act as if Sabbath
were the penalty for being an Adventist, instead of a sign of our
salvation and the greatest blessing of the week. This unfortunate
attitude shows up in too many of our churches. I have been to
Adventist churches in which no one has even greeted me. Not wanting
to make them feel uncomfortable, I didn’t say anything either. The
only thing they didn’t know was that I was the speaker that day. And
then partway through the sermon I asked them, “If you were not an
Adventist Church member and you came to this church, would you ever
come again?” And then I told them that if I were that non-Adventist,
I’d never come back.
It takes more than correct doctrine to fill a church. We need not
only doctrinal truths, but the truth as it is in Jesus. Now, I am
tired of playing the devil. Where does God come into all of this?
If I were God, I would encourage the Seventh-day Adventist Church
to start thinking, planning, and acting in a manner that will defeat
the devil’s gate plan. I would encourage Adventism to multiply the
power of its blessings, treat its challenges and invoke them in an
honest and Christian manner, and put all its energies into
maximizing its missiological opportunities. Success will not come
about by accident. It will be the product of deliberate thought,
planning, and action.
In closing, I would like to thank the General Conference
administration for the call to significant thinking and discussion
in five windows on the church. You know, this is a dangerous
operation. I am not sure whether you know that or not. It is one
thing to get the worms out of the can; it is another thing to get
them to go back in. The assignment today is for each of us, and we
will get a chance to make a list of what he or she considers to be
the greatest opportunities for the church today and the biggest
challenges as the church faces a completed mission in the
twenty-first century.
_________________________
GEORGE KNIGHT presented this
speech at the General Conference 2000 session in Toronto.
