THE NEXT ADVENTISM


Building From the Shards


A HEALTHY FAITH DOESN’T MEAN ABANDONING THE PAST, BUT BUILDING WITH IT BY LOREN SEIB OLD


I have a friend who, every time I try to talk about my hope for the Seventh-day Adventist church, angrily responds: “What’s the point? It’s a lost cause.” My friend is a good man. He believes in Jesus. But he’s bitter


against the church, and his bitterness casts the rest of his faith in a shadow. He blames the church for, among other things, lying to him about Ellen White (it did), excluding women from ministry and LGBTQ people from most everything (it did that, too), and the way its leaders responded to Desmond Ford (hardly praiseworthy). Tis man was raised on a frightening eschatology, with an


abundance of rules, guilt, and criticism and with minimal assurance of salvation. Yet, most of his friends to this day are Seventh-day Adventists or ex-Adventists, and though he doesn’t attend a congregation, he’s never replaced us as his community. My friend is a fellow traveler with us—an angry one—even when he’s not fully with us. I’m glad to have him among my friends, but I can’t help but


wish he were happier. He has torn down his church, but the shards get in his way.


Rebuilding I tell this story in the context of a quote I read recently from psychotherapist Craig Lounsbrough. “Any new beginning,” he wrote, “is forged from the shards of the past, not from the abandonment of the past.” Here is a simple truism about life: our past stays with us.


What I have experienced in my past shapes my present life, for good or ill. Tere is no way to completely erase memories and experiences so that I become a sort of existential “free agent,” untouched by what went before. I can try to forget it. I may succeed in burying parts of it. I can


choose to reject what I was taught. I might even separate myself from my family, my church, my career, or my nation—and sometimes that is a necessary, or at least justifiable, reaction. But I am shaped by that past, even when I’m not consciously


aware of it. Its shards, to use Lounsbrough’s word, are there, and they can either wound or become life-building material. As


Lounsbrough wrote to me when I asked him about this quote: “We live in an escapist society, where we want to believe that simply abandoning something resolves the issues that are part of whatever that is. Yet that leaves us with unresolved issues that are certain to impact our lives profoundly. We can run from situations, but the impact of those situations remains, regardless of how far or how hard we run.”


Why Bother? People sometimes ask me why I still strive for the Adventist Church. Tere are two reasons. One is that there is so much good in us—in what we have


been and what we could be. I personally have much to thank this church for. It taught me about Jesus. It encouraged me to get an education. It has given me friends around the world, who remain the core of my support system. Te health emphasis (particularly eschewing harmful substances such as tobacco and drugs) has saved me from many problems. Te Sabbath (when it has been offered as a restful blessing rather than a demand) has been a lovely practice. Tat said, I acknowledge that Adventism’s rigid


fundamentalism has done deep spiritual harm. Fear and guilt have been too much with us. Because we love our rules, our “doables,” we have a shaky grasp of God’s grace. We have jettisoned many dear people who didn’t conform to our notions of goodness. Te idea that we alone are special to God, which separated us from our communities and fellow citizens, has made us both arrogant and insecure. As for the imminent return of Jesus, that idea ran out of runway long ago, yet we keep warning that it will happen “soon.” All of that has come at a cost: looking across most congregations in North America, you will see predominantly gray heads. Te second reason I keep striving to make it better is that it is,


in fact, my church. It is as much a part of me as my family, and me of it. I love our people, even when I question our doctrines and organizational identity. Using Lounsbrough’s metaphor, I think there is value in building with it, rather than abandoning it. For me, the good still outweighs the bad. (I realize that this is not true for everyone, and I don’t disparage others for making a different choice.) My aspiration for the Seventh-day Adventist Church isn’t the


same as that of our church leaders or evangelists. Teir answer to disappointing Adventism is usually more Adventism: do what we’ve always done, believe what we’ve always believed, act as we’ve always acted—just with more vigor, louder preaching, and bigger budgets for more people in more offices.


WWW .A T OD A Y . OR G 5


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