By Mark B. Johnson, MD, MPH

Boulder is different.
Everybody agrees with that.
It is an enclave of liberals in a sea of conservatism. It is the ancestral home of today’s potheads. It is the Land of Fruits and Nuts. It has been called “fifty square miles surrounded by reality.” It is a hotbed of eastern religions and New Age adherents; although a 2012 Gallup survey identified it as being tied with Burlington, Vermont, as the “least religious metropolitan area” in the nation.

It is also the most educated U.S. metropolitan area, according to a 2011 U.S. News & World Report analysis of the 2010 census.

Boulder is the least religious, most educated metropolitan area in the United States.

And we are called to “evangelize” it.

We’ve been in Boulder for a very long time. The first Seventh- day Adventist church in Colorado was built in Boulder in 1880, and we’ve had a healthcare presence in Boulder County for over 120 years. In fact, an argument can be made that Boulder’s reputation as a mecca for healthy eating and active living is in large part due to our church’s early influence and activities there.

We Adventists are good people and great neighbors. We’re healthy (we live 10 years longer than average Americans). We believe in education (we have the largest Protestant educational system in the world). We are “right” about the Sabbath, the beasts, the horns, the dates and the warnings in the Bible. So why haven’t more Boulderites seen what we have to offer?

Perhaps they have.
Perhaps that’s the problem.
The word “evangelize” has various meanings. One of them is “to convert or seek to convert someone.” Another is “to promote something enthusiastically.” The Greek root of “evangelize,” however, is euangelion, which literally means “good news.”

Perhaps what Boulder is saying to us is, “Please don’t ‘evangelize’ us unless you have good news.” Perhaps we’ve been seeking to convert people to Adventism by enthusiastically promoting a message that really isn’t such good news.

I have been an Adventist all of my life. I was born in a mission hospital in Africa. I went to Adventist schools for twenty years. I served as a student missionary. I thought about becoming an Adventist pastor and missionary, but ultimately felt that perhaps as a medical missionary I could combine preaching with healing.

I have always loved my church.
I have not always loved the God of my church.
It did not come from my parents and I can’t pinpoint any one particular teacher or pastor as the source, but somehow, growing up in a very Adventist environment, the God I came to know was an arbitrary, exacting, severe, harsh, and unforgiving Judge, who was watching me closely to catch me making errors and mistakes. He was then going to punish me, and His minimum penalty was eternal death.

It was not good news.

How could that have happened? In our sinful state we shrink from God, and Satan has masterfully played on that trepidation to make us fear and distrust God even more. Ellen White writes, the “enemy of good blinded the minds of men, so that they looked upon God with fear; they thought of Him as severe and unforgiving. Satan led men to conceive of God as a being whose chief attribute is stern justice—one who is a severe judge, a harsh, exacting creditor. He pictured the Creator as a being who is watching with jealous eye to discern the errors and mistakes of men, that He may visit judgments upon them,” (Steps to Christ, pp. 10, 11). She goes on to note that Satan “led them to doubt the word of God, and to distrust His goodness,” causing “men to join him in rebellion against God, and the night of woe settled down upon the world. The earth was dark through misapprehension of God.” (The Desire of Ages, pp. 21, 22). Unfortunately, much of the world, including much of Boulder and many Adventists, still live with a “dark . . . misapprehension of God.”

The answer to this problem is not more education. It is not healthier living. It is not being right about the Sabbath and the beasts and the horns and the dates. It is not about being nice people and good neighbors.

The Answer is Jesus.

“Christ came to represent the Father. We behold in Him the image of the invisible God. He clothed His divinity with humanity, and came to the world that the erroneous ideas Satan had been the means of creating in the minds of men, in regard to the character of God, might be removed. . . . [Satan] sought to cast his shadow across the earth, that men might lose the true views of God’s character, and that the knowledge of God might become extinct in the earth. . . . Jesus came to teach men of the Father, to correctly represent Him before the fallen children of earth. . . . The only way in which He could set and keep men right was to make Himself visible and familiar to their eyes. . . . The Father was revealed in Christ as altogether a different being from that which Satan had represented Him to be. . . . The love of Jesus, expressed for the fallen race in His life of self-denial and sufferings, is the manifestation of the Father’s love for a sinful fallen world,” (The Signs of
the Times, Jan. 20, 1890).

Until we are convinced that Jesus is the Good News, we will continue to focus the “good news” on ourselves: our church, our doctrines, and the many truly nice things we are doing around the world. That may be “good,” but it’s not the Good News.

The statement is unequivocal: “Christ came to represent the Father. . . . The only way in which He could set (justify?) and keep (sanctify?) men right was to make Himself visible and familiar to their eyes. . . .”

The Good News for Boulder is Jesus—and that the Father is just like Him.

–Mark B. Johnson, MD, MPH is public health executive director for Jefferson County Public Health in Lakewood, Colorado, and is chairman of the Vision Board at Boulder Adventist Church.