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Caught in the Middle
January 1, 2008 - 12:00am - Dennis Hokama
They’re Adventists, but rather than Adventist distinctives, their focus is the cross of Christ. Where do evangelical Adventists fit in?
Laurel Dominesey loves Christ. For her, Jesus is a “real person” who wants a “real relationship.” She confidently identifies herself with Christianity. Christ, she says, is everything.
Dominesey, 20, attends church on Saturday, is enrolled at an Adventist college, and doesn’t eat pork. She believes in living a moral life and is happy to be identified as an Adventist.
But quietly, she grapples with reservations.
As a teenager, Dominesey, who was born Catholic, became particularly impressed by Adventism when she went on a mission trip with two Adventist friends. She talks warmly about her first experience at her home church near Buffalo, New York. “Nonjudgmental, accepting, welcoming … they notice you,” she says. “And people see you for you.”
But when Dominesey left her small Adventist church near Buffalo and discovered the wider world of Adventism, she felt confused. In Buffalo, she hadn’t considered the morality of jewelry or dairy products. “It was a shock. And it was frustrating,” she recalls. “People treated me as guilty of something. They assume you don’t have this relationship with God.”
Ironically, it was Dominesey’s relationship with God that offered freedom from the guilt laid on her. “Now that my heart has changed, I can see the good in Adventism,” she says, referring to individuals who have refreshed her with their authenticity. These individuals have helped her see the good things in the Adventist message, which she calls the “pilot light” that keeps her faith alive when emotion runs low—a foundation she supports and trusts.
In fact, Dominesey’s hesitation about Adventism doesn’t concern the fundamental beliefs themselves. “I don’t think there is a problem with the Church,” she says confidently. “I think there is a problem with some of the people in the Church. We need to see people for who they are … get to know their life. Let’s talk about things that really matter.”
For Dominesey, what really matters is Jesus. Yet the seemingly half-hearted gospel message in Adventism leaves her in reservation. Because the message that makes a wild fire of her faith seems to leave her church’s pilot light at a flicker.
Renee Harms, 31, was born and raised in Adventism. She is a graduate of Walla Walla University and a former resident of Portland, Oregon, where she loved her home church.
Now that she has moved to a new city in Utah, she has been disappointed with what she feels is a lack of vitality at the local Adventist churches. “I have yet to find an Adventist church that feels good when I walk in,” she says. “Generally, I sense an emphasis on religious Adventist practice before I get a sense of it being Spirit-filled.”
In the meantime, Harms is surrounded by new friends who are sincere non-Adventist Christians, and she has visited various evangelical churches in her area. “They are so approachable, love the Lord, and have this positive spiritual energy that I admire!” says Harms. “So how could I say that they are lacking?”
Pastor David Newman of the New Hope Adventist Church, a fast-growing and ethnically diverse congregation outside of Washington, D.C., has written extensively on the point of focus within the Adventist Church, particularly in North America.
“Adventism is experiencing great difficulties trying to decide whether the cross or the distinctives are our focus,” Newman says. “Two weeks ago an individual emailed me the experience they just went through in their local church. The key lay leader in the church told the whole congregation that people who hear about the Sabbath and do not accept it will not go to heaven. He continued that people like Billy Graham will not make it to heaven because he knows about the Sabbath but never accepted it. This mindset is especially prevalent in our smaller churches and in our rural churches.”
Newman says that when people hear about New Hope, he wants them to immediately recognize that they are Christ followers before knowing them as Sabbathkeepers.
“Some people believe that we can have a double focus,” says Newman. “That is impossible. Focus by definition must be on one object. The message of Adventism is not the Sabbath, end-time events, the sanctuary, health, etc. Important as they are, Jesus is the only way to eternal life. We believe that we can be thoroughly evangelical while being Adventist.”
The perspectives of Dominesey, Harms, and Newman represent those who feel a love for and loyalty to the Adventist Church but who often feel disappointed in the lack of gospel emphasis within the Church. They also raise important questions, such as: Who are the true Adventists? What does one need to believe to be an Adventist? And, finally, is being an evangelical Adventist a redundancy or an oxymoron?
What Is “Evangelical Adventism”?
Many of the features of evangelical Christianity were baptized into Adventism in 1957, when the Adventist Church published Seventh- day Adventists Answer Questions on Doctrine. It was written in response to questions posed by Walter Martin, author of the wellknown book Kingdom of the Cults (original printing 1965).
Martin, a Southern Baptist who made a career out of judging who was a cult and who was not, met with a group of Adventist scholars in order to ascertain whether Adventism should remain classified as a Christian cult or if it belonged to the sisterhood of Protestant churches.
The Adventists who worked with Martin answered enough of his questions correctly to receive a passing score by his reckoning, and on that basis, Adventists were thereafter no longer classified as a Christian cult. Evangelical Adventism had been born, though some influential traditional Adventists were not shy in questioning its paternity.
Larry Christoffel, associate pastor of the Campus Hill Church and an assistant professor of religion at Loma Linda University in Loma Linda, California, is a self-proclaimed evangelical. He says that evangelical Adventism is “authentic Adventism”—that it is “Adventism as God meant it to be.”
In an article Christoffel co-authored, “Evangelical Adventism: Clinging to the Old Rugged Cross,” he lists six salient answers in Questions on Doctrine that presumably differentiate evangelical Adventists from historic Adventists.
1. Scripture, not the writings of Ellen G. White, is the basis of Christian faith and practice.
2. Jesus Christ is eternally God and sinless in His human nature.
3. The substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ for the salvation of sinners was finished at the cross, though He continues a mediatorial work in heaven.
4. Justification is through faith on account of Christ’s accomplishments and is not in any way based on our obedience to the law.
5. Jesus Christ and Him crucified is to be the center of Seventhday Adventist belief and practice.
6. There are genuine, spiritually mature Christians outside of Seventh-day Adventism.
Some of the implications of these affirmations are that evangelical Adventists like Christoffel could not require baptismal candidates to avow any Adventist distinctive, so long as they declared “Christ and Him crucified.”
When Adventist Today spoke to Christoffel about this, he confirmed that he was happy to baptize people into Christ and did so without requiring any commitment to Adventist distinctives. But such a generic Christian baptism, he said, did not make them members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Newman handles the baptism issue somewhat differently. “Everyone who joins New Hope,” says Newman, “whether by baptism or transfer has to take a class with me. And in that class I tell them that New Hope is Christian first and Adventist second. Then I explain what that means.”
With regard to a recurring concern for end-time events among Seventh-day Adventists, Christoffel believes that the gospel is inextricably linked to the Advent in the Bible itself, from Genesis to Revelation, citing Genesis 3:15, Isaiah 61:1,2, Matthew 24:14, and Revelation 14:6,7,14ff as examples. Therefore, he says, “Evangelical Adventism is a redundancy.”
http://www.atoday.com/magazine/2008/01/caught-middle
