hen I consider the history of the Seventh-day Adventist movement, it is with a deep sense of awe. John Wesley’s words “What God hath wrought!” come to mind. There is a mystery here, something that cannot be wholly explained by human logic.
Think of the early Adventists who met together in 1863 for the first General Conference session. There were just 20 delegates. They represented a small, less-than-cohesive band of believers in the Northeast of the United States—only 3,500 members strong. How would their contemporaries have described this handful of people who gathered in Battle Creek, Michigan? Insignificant, perhaps? Irrelevant? Embarking on an enterprise that was destined for obscurity?
And yet here we meet today. Representing a church that is global, that is unified, that is growing and energetic—a spiritual community of more than 25 million men, women, and children. In outward appearance, this General Conference session looks nothing like that small gathering in 1863. But in fundamentals, it is not so different. We share a common spiritual DNA with those first General Conference session delegates. We, too, have come together to better organize our church for mission. We, too, are here to seek God’s will and to follow it into the unknowns of tomorrow, toward the day of Christ’s return.
As I look back over the past five years, there is no doubt in my mind that our Lord still walks with us on the path of history. He has called us and equipped us to play a part in the grand narrative of His redemption of humanity. His Spirit leads us still, and will continue to lead us until our mission is complete. These are the truths we affirm by our presence here today.
Unchanging Mission, Changing World
Pastor Paulsen greets church members at a midweek meeting in the Wuxi, China, congregation. His May 2009 visit to the People’s Republic of China was the first official visit by a General Conference president to that country since 1937.
Statistics tell us that Adventism around the world is still growing at an amazing rate. Since we met together in St. Louis, Missouri, we’ve welcomed some 5 million people into church membership; on average almost 3,000 men and women every 24 hours. While in 1863 there was one church member for every 373,143 of the world’s population, today the ratio is closer to one Adventist for every 400 people.
But numbers can’t tell the whole story. Beneath the bare statistics are a myriad of forces that are challenging and shaping our church. Internal pressures: from the mere fact of growth itself, which often strains our ability to provide spiritual nurture. External pressures: political, economic, and cultural shifts that we can neither foresee nor control. If nothing else, the global economic crisis of the past few years has shown us that no one—not the banker on Wall Street nor the factory worker in India nor the church administrator in Silver Spring, Maryland—can live in isolation. For good or for ill, humanity has never been more closely interconnected, bound together by fragile, human-made structures.
Now we’re walking into the openness of a new decade, grappling with the demands of a diverse, dynamic global family and facing a mission that still stretches out before us, often daunting in its immensity. And I believe Christ says to us today as He said to our pioneers, “I’m here. Take My hand. Let Me walk with you.”
The Community of the Spirit
As Christ neared the end of His ministry on earth He prayed for the unity of His followers: “That all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. . . . I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me” (John 17:21-23).
With these few words, Christ gives us a profound insight into the heavenly community of the Godhead—the “three living persons of the heavenly trio” (Evangelism, p. 615). Three coeternal persons, in perpetual, loving communion with one another.
It seems incredible that Christ explicitly invites us to share in the community of the Trinity. Through our relationships with fellow believers, He calls us to reflect—however dimly, however hampered by human frailty—the “oneness” that He experiences with His Father and the Spirit. This is powerful theology! This is the “community of the Spirit” to which you and I belong.
What does the community of the Spirit look like? For Seventh-day Adventists in 2010, it’s a defining question. It’s a question of identity and values; of what will hold this extraordinary family together and guide us in our mission.
The 66-language giant Bible that traveled through 13 world divisions in the “Follow the Bible” initiative is held aloft during a visit to the Dominican Republic.
Community=Unity
“For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body,” declares Paul, “. . . and we were all given the one Spirit to drink” (1 Cor. 12:13).
To me, unity in Christ is a core value of Adventist identity. We defer to one another, sacrifice for one another, take joint responsibility for safeguarding what has been entrusted to us. If we should fragment or begin to see ourselves as something less than a fully cohesive body, we will lose our way and cease to be what God has planned for us.
Over the past five years we’ve given priority to strengthening the bonds of unity within our community, and to nurturing members for mission.
While the logistics are impressive, the true value of this publication lies in its ability to connect us with one another; to provide spiritual nurture; to ground us in the essentials of our faith and identity; to remind us that our family extends far beyond the pews of our local church.
Community=Witness
On January 3, 1875, Ellen White was ill at home in Battle Creek when she received a vision of the world enshrouded in darkness. “Then . . . she saw little lights glimmering through the darkness. These lights increased in power. They burned brighter, and they were lifted higher and higher. Each one lighted other lights, which also burned brightly, until the whole world was lighted” (Arthur L. White, Ellen G. White: Volume 2: The Progressive Years 1862-1876, pp. 459, 460). The following day at the opening ceremony for the Battle Creek College, she described what she had seen and urged her listeners to think more broadly, more ambitiously, about their mission responsibility.
“Lights glimmering in the darkness”—this interplay between darkness and illumination featured in so many of Ellen White’s visions. It’s a powerful metaphor that has shaped our identity and fueled our development as a global mission movement. She saw clearly that when everything else is stripped away, the community of the Spirit exists for witness—to lead men and women from darkness into the light of Christ’s salvation.
Community=Service
A young Haitian girl looks to the future as temporary housing tries to care for the massive humanitarian tragedy brought about by the 2010 earthquake
A few months ago I stood in the midst of a group of Adventists in the Dutch city of Delft. Five years ago we had no functioning church in this thoroughly secular city. Today, there is a thriving congregation of some 150 members. Why? Because a small group of Adventists chose this place to establish the “Alivio Foundation”—an organization that helps unwed teenage mothers among the Antillean immigrant community.
For me, this phenomenal story represents a truth I’ve seen borne out many times: our response to the “stranger among us” is an unfailing litmus test for the health of our community. It doesn’t matter whether the “stranger” is a neighbor or someone who lives half a world away. The community of the Spirit is called to extend hospitality and compassion; to engage with the day-to-day realities and hurts of humanity. As followers of Christ, we can never look at another person in distress and say “This does not concern me” (The Desire of Ages, p. 504).
A Broad Mission
From the vantage point of 2010 it seems incomprehensible that early Adventists once debated whether the call to “go into all the world” meant actually leaving the North American continent, or merely working among the immigrant communities already established here. And yet, I wonder whether today we’re confronting a similar paradigm shift when it comes to thinking about our mission.
Pastor and Mrs. Paulsen interact with young adult members during a televised Let’s Talk event in April 2006. The president hosted 28 Let’s Talk events with young adults, pastors, women, and laypersons around the world during the past five years.
Have we grasped the many implications of our rapid growth as a church? Do we understand the strength of our voice and presence in many parts of the world? That we should no longer be thinking in terms of our “smallness,” but our “bigness”? (And, conversely, have we dared to really acknowledge the vast scale of those unentered areas of the world where the name of Christ—let alone “Seventh-day Adventist Church”—has never been heard?)
The community of the Spirit to which we belong exists for one purpose only: to call men and women from death to life and to prepare them for an eternity that begins now—among the realities of this world. As we plan for tomorrow we must articulate a mission that is broad, that both embraces and builds on traditional models of witness, and that acknowledges the changing terrain on which we operate.
As I look through the minutes of that first General Conference session of 1863, I picture a small group of men and women just beginning to comprehend the enormity of the task before them; individuals struggling to define the community they should become. In the years that followed, these early Adventists demonstrated, time and again, their courage and their vision. They didn’t tailor their plans to their limitations, but to their mission—no matter how overwhelming that seemed.
Today, we meet here as a significantly larger group of believers, with resources and opportunities greater than our forebears could ever have imagined. I pray that our vision, our courage, and our commitment will not be less than theirs.
“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen” (Eph. 3:20, 21).