Shawn Brace Page 2

23 Jun

CLOSING THE GAP BETWEEN TRUTH AND TRUTH

In

By Shawn Brace … A church member of mine, Emily, recently became friends with Jennifer (not their real names) when they both brought their daughters to a gymnastics class. While they sat there watching their little four-year-old girls do tumbles and somersaults, they got to talking and immediately hit it off, going very deep, very quickly.

Week after week, Jennifer would tell Emily a little more of her story, which often ended with both women in tears. Jennifer revealed that she had come from a very toxic, abusive, fundamentalist Christian home, where, among other things, girls had to wear long dresses, they couldn’t wear makeup or cut their hair, and they had to follow strict rules of entertainment. This is to say nothing of the shame-based messaging she constantly heard, leaving her with the gut-wrenching impression that her value and identity were based on her conformity to strict human standards.

Needless to say, and quite understandably, Jennifer came to the point of rejecting the whole thing altogether. If this is what organized religion was all about, why bother with it? There’s only so long a person can exist in such a traumatic environment. Powerfully, Emily, ever mindful of the mission of God, would week after week sit with Jennifer in her pain, listening to her as she processed her grief. As a missionary for Christ, Emily understands that we are called to embody the gospel and provide space for others to tell their stories without judgment or condemnation or attempting to leverage their story for the purpose of “converting” them.

And yet not surprisingly, such a posture was attractive to Jennifer, and she started admitting to Emily that she still believed in God, and missed music and singing a great deal. She was just so skeptical about the church thing.

It was at that point that Emily started telling her about our church—about how our mission is to be a “safe, serving, and Jesus-centered” community that embraces people; that doesn’t use shame as a weapon to promote conformity; that invites people into the family of God, no matter where they are in their faith—or lack of faith—believing that every person has dignity and value. Emily even pulled her phone out and showed Jennifer the promotional video from our church, which beautifully articulates these very values. And then she very sensitively invited her into the circle sometime, while making it clear that it was okay if she never joined.

That’s where the story is for now. I don’t know what will become of Jennifer. I don’t know if she will someday show up at our building and worship with us. I don’t know if she will sit at Emily’s dining room table and enjoy spiritual fellowship with her. It’s a story that’s still being written.

But as Emily shared this story with me, a light suddenly turned on. I don’t know for sure, but I’d be willing to bet that as Jennifer went away from their conversation that day, with Emily’s invitation ringing in her ears, there was a question that she wasn’t asking herself and there was a question she was asking herself.

I’m willing to bet that she wasn’t asking herself, “I wonder if that church has ‘the truth’?”

Instead, I bet the most pressing question in her mind was, “I wonder if that church is ‘safe’?”

And those two questions are worlds apart—in fact, they’re centuries apart—but most of us Adventist Christians, still living in a different world and in a different century, don’t grasp the incredibly important significance in this shift.

Unfortunately, most of us are still asking and answering nineteenth-century questions, and our witness has suffered as a result.

Are We Just “Thinking Things”?

American Christianity, from which Adventism arose, came of age in the wake of the Enlightenment. Western society, in the eighteenth century, went through an intellectual revolution where reason and rationalism became king. Whereas prior to the Enlightenment, the world was an enchanted place, as philosopher Charles Taylor puts it, the Enlightenment disenchanted the world. Suddenly it wasn’t that God magically upheld the world; the world was governed by natural laws that could be observed, measured, and calculated.

While Christianity, for the most part, felt threatened by the Enlightenment, it soon realized it must embrace it if it was going to engage society on its terms. It thus adopted Enlightenment assumptions, with its heavy emphasis on scientific inquiry. Historians have noted that American Protestants, especially in the nineteenth century, utilized the scientific method of Francis Bacon to defend their religious views. Bacon was an English philosopher who had lived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, serving as England’s Attorney General and Lord Chancellor. But he was most noted for his development of an inductive approach to science that resulted in him basically being heralded as the father of modern science.

This Baconian method, as it has been called, became the lens through which Protestants in the nineteenth century looked at the world and read the Bible. The Bible became primarily a book of objective facts that contained data points that must be mined to arrive at general conclusions. If one simply plugged in the right formulae, he or she could come up with the right answers, like the pharmacist does in filling his or her prescriptions. The primary concern of the biblical interpreter was thus to establish the propositional rightness of one’s conclusions, using scientific methods, and just as the scientist could rest in the certainty of his or her conclusions, using the right formulae, so too could the biblical interpreter. What’s more, they could also be certain that anyone who disagreed with their conclusions was being intentionally rebellious, since the Baconian method, rightly employed, always established objective theological “facts,” which no honest person could dispute.

It should be noted that this was all well and good and relevant to the time. Such a method, utilized by Adventists, gave us the raw materials—such as the Sabbath, the sanctuary, and the Second Coming, among others—that helped us form the most powerful and beautiful picture of God, rightly constructed, that I’ve ever encountered. These raw materials were likely only uncovered because we utilized this Baconian method. So, we praise God for such an approach.

The challenge is, not only is our current cultural moment asking different questions and looking at the world through different lenses, we are also not simply, in the words of James K. A. Smith, “thinking things.” We are feeling things, relational things, social things, physical things. We are whole beings. In other words, we want to encounter “truth” not only in its propositional form—as a list of propositional facts that one either mentally assents to or doesn’t—but in all its full-orbed beauty.

It just so happens, amazingly, that, according to Scripture, the idea of “truth” is much bigger than its narrow Enlightenment-definition. To be sure, it includes intellectual and propositional content; but it entails so much more. In Hebrew, the word “truth” doesn’t have much to do with the rightness of an intellectual idea, as though it was simply scientific fact; the word, ‘emet, denotes the idea of “firmness,” “faithfulness,” “reliability.” In other words, “truth” has not only intellectual dimensions, but relational, social, and emotional ones. It’s no wonder, then, that when Jesus defined truth, He said, “I am . . . the truth” (John 14:6). Truth is a Person, not just a proposition. This is what Ellen White means when she uses one of her favorite phrases to describe our quest: we want “the truth as it is in Jesus.”

We are thus people of Truth not simply because we happen to preach and proclaim propositionally-correct ideas. We are people of Truth when we are faithful, reliable, safe, and trustworthy people; when we live lives that consistently display the fruit of the Spirit (see Galatians 5:22-23). And a church that determinedly proclaims “present truth,” while neglecting, and sometimes even consciously downplaying, the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control—is in no intelligible or biblical way a church that loves, values, or proclaims the Truth.

Indeed, love is, always was, and always will be, “present truth.”

Perhaps there is no more sobering and confronting words than Ellen White’s on this. “Many take it for granted that they are Christians, simply because they subscribe to certain theological tenets,” she observes. “But they have not brought the truth into practical life. . . . Men may profess faith in the truth; but if it does not make them sincere, kind, patient, forbearing, heavenly-minded, it is a curse to its possessors, and through their influence it is a curse to the world” (The Desire of Ages, p. 309).

Talk about an eyeful!

But this is what it means to close the gap between truth and Truth. There are thousands of Jennifers in the world, burned out by religious communities that have settled for a Baconian version of truth, when God is calling us to continue down the path beyond Bacon to a far more beautiful, robust, and wholistic experience of Truth.

And whenever it is we finally and fully embrace it, I’m convinced we’ll set the world on fire.

–Shawn Brace pastors in Maine and, along with his wife Camille and three children, is seeking to learn how to live out the gospel in his neighborhood and city. You can listen to his podcast “Mission Lab” at https:// missionlab.podbean.com. Email him at: [email protected]

29 Mar

DYING TO CHANGE

In

By Shawn Brace … One of the big advantages we have in my conference, Northern New England Conference, is that we are dying—at a very rapid pace. It’s not simply that we’ve reached a plateau; we’re hemorrhaging at a pretty significant rate, with a decrease in membership the last five years.

And that’s a very, very good thing.

Some who have read these first few sentences may be fairly confused. After all, how is the fact that our conference is dying a good thing?

It’s simple: because of the dire situation we find ourselves in, we are primed for a massive paradigm-shift. Most conferences aren’t nearly as fortunate. Things are pretty good for them. Tithe is up, membership is modestly increasing, and their institutions are thriving. They are excelling at institutional, status-quo Adventism—running great church programs and events, providing religious services for the already-convinced, but hardly making an impact on their communities or keeping up with the birthrate across America (not to mention losing their own youth at alarming rates).

But not in my conference. And the administrators—blissfully, wonderfully—get this as well. They get that we must either change or go extinct. They get that in order to reach and have an impact on our region, which is the most secular and unchurched region of America, we can’t try to put new wine in old wine skins. They understand that our paradigm of what it means to be the church, and what it means to do evangelism, can’t just be tweaked; it needs to be massively-overhauled, not just to be more relevant to our surrounding communities, but to also align more faithfully with authentic, Scriptural Christianity.

Re-Imagining Church

Five years ago, my church paradigm came crashing down. We had set out to plant a new church in Bangor, which is the third largest city in Maine, but really had no idea what we were doing. We settled on the idea that in order to plant a successful church, we needed to have the “holy trinity” of church planting: good music, preaching, and children’s programming.

But something funny happened as our church planting team was plotting our course, preparing to launch: we fell in love with what church could really be—and it had nothing to do with putting on a good program. As we sat around in a cozy living room, reclining on overstuffed chairs, sipping hot drinks, praying, studying Scripture, and worshiping together, sharing life with one another, a thought seemed to formulate in our minds: why does church have to be more than this?

Instead of worrying about programs, forming committees to nominate other committees, dressing up in our “Sabbath best” each week to passively sit through worship services, sinking all this money into maintaining buildings, why couldn’t it be experiencing natural and organic community together?

And what about the real concerns and issues—such as the opiate epidemic—that is affecting my community, I wondered.

A couple of my church members were concerned about our church planting efforts, and they wanted to call a meeting to hash a few things out with me. As the meeting started, one gentleman, quite perturbed said, “Do you realize you’ve taken two out of our three piano players to start this new church? What happens if we come some Sabbath and there’s no piano player?” As I pondered his question, my mind suddenly shot back to a city council meeting I had attended a few days before that was addressing Maine’s opiate epidemic, and something sobering jolted me: in the church we were worried about losing piano players, while our community was worried about losing lives.

I had come to realize that for most of us, church is a program or event we show up to once or twice a week. We mostly sit as passive consumers as someone else performs ministry for us, “feeding us” week after week. If we’re inclined to participate in ministry, we mostly think serving God consists of helping to put on the programs, with aspirations “to someday ush with the best of them,” as Caesar Kalinowski humorously puts it. But such “ministry” essentially consists of putting on programs for the already-convinced.

What’s more, I’ve noticed that many of us seem to implicitly think that one of our primary tasks as Adventists is to be the great guardians of truth. We spend a lot of time arguing about theology and answering questions that no one else is asking. I love the beautiful picture of God that Adventism has come to understand. The world desperately needs to encounter it. And it’s precisely for that reason that I am depressed that we have buried it under a pile of man-made traditions, rules, and lifeless rituals, and turned “truth” into a checklist.

At the risk of creating a false dichotomy, we have thought our task was to put on programs and defend truth, when God has invited us live lives of other-centered love that reflect His glory to the world.

Three Cataclysmic Shifts

I would like to propose three things when it comes to the change the Seventh-day Adventist Church desperately needs. First, we need to recapture and sell out to the gospel. We have made Adventism about everything else. However, we need the gospel. Understanding, living, and proclaiming it is the key to all other change.

Secondly, we need to recognize that church is a family that shares life together, rather than a program we attend. Pursuing relational forms of church life is the natural outworking of understanding and embracing the gospel. The goal of evangelism is not that people would accept truth, but that they would accept truth so they can live in community with one another and be a blessing to the world.

In Acts 2, the early church shared life together every day–eating, praying, worshipping, and rehearsing the gospel. Thus, for us, as for them, church is happening as much at supper on a Tuesday night as it is when we’re hearing the Word proclaimed on a Sabbath morning.

At its foundation, church is the organic network of people filled with the life of the Spirit and compelled by the gospel. And the really awesome thing is that in our increasingly secular contexts, this resonates with post-Christian people. They are very unlikely to walk through the doors of our church buildings, but they will gladly sit at our tables and share a meal with us. People aren’t looking for a “church” anyway— at least as we’ve wrongly defined it—but they are looking for a family.

Thirdly, we need to understand that the primary posture of the family of God is that of being sent. We don’t wait for people to come to us to consume our programs in our buildings. We go to them. “As the Father sent Me so I am sending you” (John 20:21). The way Jesus came was in the flesh, when the “Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood,” John 1:14 (MSG). This is what we call the “incarnation,” the most fundamental truth of the gospel, and if Jesus says He sends us the same way the Father sent Him, this means we live incarnational lives, moving into neighborhoods and living out the gospel in the midst of peoples and cultures that don’t know Jesus and don’t know our beautifully unique understanding of Him as Adventists.

If we are going to truly be all that God wants us to be as Adventists, we must make this paradigm-shift to avoid extinction.

Since making this shift myself five years ago, my ministry and life have never been more exciting, adventurous, and fulfilling. I could tell you scores of stories, but perhaps Luke and Sarah’s story best illustrates both of these points most poignantly.

My wife, Camille—who, until only a few years before, had never had a non-Adventist friend—met Luke a few years back at a story time at one of our local libraries. Camille, seeking to live an incarnational life, brought our kids to story time each week, and met Luke, who was a stay-at-home dad. They hit it off and soon we all hit it off, as Luke introduced us to his wife Sarah. We began spending lots of time with them, going hiking together, eating together, sharing life with them, and blessing them as much as we could. And what became quickly apparent was that they knew absolutely nothing about God and the Bible.

Eventually, we introduced them to some other members of our missional community and then we invited them to join us for a special telling of what we call the “Story of God.” It’s essentially an eight-week telling of the big story of Scripture, tracing the major themes, in narrative form, that are woven throughout. We didn’t hold this in our church building, though; we held it at my in-laws’ house, sandwiched between a meal and our own stories.

At first, we couldn’t tell if they were getting anything out of it, or enjoying it. Then, finally, a couple weeks in, Sarah cleared her voice and spoke up. “You know, I was just telling Luke on the way over here,” she explained, “that this is the most loving group I’ve ever been around in my life.”

The gospel was working; being God’s family—the church—was working; living incarnationally was working.

Until Adventism makes this cataclysmic shift, we will struggle to impact the world to the degree God intends for us to impact it.

— Shawn Brace pastors in Maine and, along with his wife Camille and three children, is seeking to learn how to live out the gospel in his neighborhood and city. In 2018, he replanted his church to align more fully with God’s missional vision, focusing on the gospel, community, and discipleship. You can track his journey via his podcast, “Mission Lab” (https://missionlab. podbear.com/) and his forthcoming book on the topic. Email him at: [email protected].

05 Jan

A SIN OF RACIAL PREJUDICE

In

By Shawn Brace — Much to my chagrin, I don’t cry much. But this last summer I found myself sobbing after I decided to do what many other people around the world did in May: I pulled up YouTube on my phone and watched every second of an 8 minute and 46 second video. And I cried and cried and cried.

I cried as I watched a black man having his life literally asphyxiated out of him. No, he was not a sinless and perfect man. Who among us is? But George Floyd bore—a tragically past tense verb—the Imago Dei. He was a child of God just like all of us. And yet his life was taken from him in broad daylight by sinners who felt no remorse about casting stones.

As I re-watched the video a few times, another figure caught my eye and ear as well. A bystander on the sidewalk kept pleading with the police to stop murdering Floyd. At times, the bystander’s language turned entirely vulgar, utilizing four-letter words that the privileged are taught never to use.

And yet a strange thought came to me, perhaps too scandalous for the pious mind. I heard Jesus in that man’s voice, cuss-words and all. After all, if such a cold-blooded tragedy doesn’t raise the ire from the God who once cursed a figtree for not bearing fruit (see Mark 11:12-25), what does that say about this God who allegedly died for George Floyd?

The question is, does God have a church who will join Him and that man on the sidewalk, willing to shed traditional forms of polite piety for the sake of speaking up and advocating for the “least of these”?

Our History of Social Justice

It may come as a surprise to many, but Seventh-day Adventists used to be at the forefront of social activism, zealously fighting against slavery and the racism that justified it. Our early history is littered with pioneers who passionately argued that being an Adventist and being an abolitionist were not mutually exclusive. In fact, some perhaps would have said they were necessarily mutually inclusive.

Figures such as Joseph Bates, Uriah Smith, J. N. Andrews, and James White staunchly spoke out against slavery, expressing their views frequently in all the major church publications, including the Advent Review and Sabbath Herald. John Byington, who became the first president of the General Conference, participated in the Underground Railroad, even building small chapels to hide runaway slaves. In fact, Byington had left the Methodist Episcopal Church and joined the Adventist faith partly because the former was so soft on the slavery question while the latter wrote and spoke passionately about it.

Of course, perhaps none were more outspoken than the prophet herself. Ellen White was clear on the slavery question, maintaining that any person who had pro-slavery sympathies should not have fellowship with Adventists, and insisting that the Fugitive Slave Law, requiring northerners to return enslaved people who had escaped, was to be dis- obeyed. “We must abide the consequences of violating this law,” she wrote. “The slave is not the property of any man. God is his rightful master, and man has no right to take God’s workmanship into his hands, and claim him as his own.” What is so fascinating about the pioneers’ attitudes toward the slavery issue is that they apparently didn’t feel that speaking against it would undermine their evangelistic opportunity. They didn’t worry that it would distract from their gospel witness. In fact, they felt that to not speak against slavery would undermine their gospel and evangelistic credibility. This they did, even while understanding that being staunchly abolitionist would close evangelistic doors in the southern states. But it was the price they were willing to pay in order to maintain gospel integrity and consistency.

Indeed, they viewed abolition and anti-racism as a gospel work. They were intimately connected in their minds. They even thought it was “present truth,” identifying America as the “land beast” of Revelation 13 partly because of its practice of slavery.

Is It Still “Present Truth”?

As we look across the landscape of Adventism today, one wonders if we still think that the work of anti-racism is a gospel work that reflects “present truth.” Some argue, of course, that since slavery was abolished long ago, and that further still, since the Civil Rights act was passed in the 1960s, the work of anti-racism resulted in glorious victory for America long ago. Those battles have been fought and won, both within and without the church, and we must instead focus on issues that will unite us rather than divide us.

Some further argue that harping on questions of racism distracts from Adventism’s primary calling to proclaim the Three Angels’ Messages. Those who focus on social justice and equality are playing a political game, the thinking goes, manipulated as pawns by political actors. We are therefore to bury all such questions.

For many of our brothers and sisters of color, however, it is anything but a distraction and it is anything but a political question. It is a lived reality. It is their reality.

A few months ago, one of my black friends, who had organized the Black Lives Matter march in our city in the wake of George Floyd’s death, which I gratefully marched in, offered this poignant perspective on such an attitude. “As a Black child, man, father,” he wrote, “no media outlet, politician, or organization has tricked me into thinking any- one is racist. Every single opinion I have about racism has come from my own experiences in school, in my community, and in the workplace as a Black American. Saying people of color are being tricked is essentially saying we are too stupid to interpret facts.”

In 1 Corinthians 12, the apostle Paul, in explaining how the church of Christ is like a body, noted that “if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26, NKJV). For those of us who are white, who were raised in a context in which our skin color and race were never used against us as a liability, we may have a hard time understanding how racism could still be a problem.

But we are all a part of the body. And we need to learn how to trust our brothers and sisters of color and feel their pain with them. When they say they are frightened when they get pulled over by the police, we should take their word for it rather than trying to explain their anxiety away. When they say that the words we speak come across as insensitive and uncaring, we should honor their vulnerability and authenticity. No one ever changes their views by having someone invalidate them anyway. We bring healing to the suffering in our midst by suffering with them, not by telling them they have no reason to feel like they’re suffering. And we bring healing by speaking out, like that bystander on the sidewalk, against the ways in which our brothers and sisters of color are still being marginalized and excluded.

A few months ago, I got an unexpected message on Facebook from a young black man I didn’t know. He had attended one of our Adventist universities but struggled because of the climate of racism that he constantly felt on campus. A mutual friend of ours had sent him a number of posts I had written on Facebook in the weeks before that highlighted the important need for Christians to pursue the work of anti-racism.

Many of the posts had raised the ire of some of my white friends on Facebook, but connected deeply with my friends of color. When this young man reached out to me, he indicated that my posts had caused him to weep. He had never heard a white man, much less a white Adventist pastor, speak so powerfully to his experience. He had been tempted to give up on the Adventist church, but my posts had given him hope.

I don’t say this to imply any sort of moral superiority. I am far from perfect and have a lot to learn. But there are many people of color who are still wondering if they belong in our church. They wonder if it is safe for them.

We must learn to suffer with those who suffer, weep with those who weep, and curse with those who curse.

–Shawn Brace pastors in Maine and, along with his wife Camille and three children, is seeking to learn how to live out the gospel in his neighborhood and city. In 2018, he replanted his church to align more fully with God’s missional vision, focusing on the gospel, community, and discipleship. You can track his journey via his podcast, “Mission Lab,” [https://missionlab. podbean.com/] and his forthcoming book on the topic. Email him at: [email protected]

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