MV Fall 2019

By Ed Barnett

When I think of a word like authenticity and apply it to life and the witness of the church, a mix of emotions fills me. May I share some of my thoughts on authenticity and the church?

To start with, I believe the church ought to be a place where authenticity runs supreme. If we can’t be authentic in church, something is wrong! If you have to question what the church says, then where would you turn? The church has to be transparent and authentic in whatever it says and does.

As a leader in the church, I firmly believe we must be honest. There are situations, however, where complete transparency is not warranted. In fact, we could put our- selves in a legal bind by sharing too much. For instance, if we let someone go because of sexual immorality, we don’t advertise that, but we don’t lie about it either.

When people think about our church, I want them to know it is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and admirable, as recommended by the Apostle Paul to the church in Philippi.

The problem is that sinners run the church. We all fall short of God’s ideal. In the Rocky Mountain Conference, my desire is to know that we are doing everything we can to be honest and transparent in our dealings with every church, every school, and every church member. I believe everyone who works in our office feels that way. If I found out someone felt differently, we would deal with them and the situation!

Today, we live in a world where we hardly know what is true or false. It doesn’t matter what political party you are involved with. Wherever you stand, you find yourself questioning everything that is said on either side. But it should not, it cannot, be that way in the church.

In 2015, at the last General Conference Session, it concerned me that a number of divisions in the church allegedly told their delegates how to vote. The delegates were told to use voting cards rather than using the electronic voting ma- chines so their administrators could see how they voted.

If that was true, and I heard it from enough of our leaders in the North American Division that I believe it, I’m disheartened. Such actions are not transparent. They are manipulative and controlling, not the way Jesus dealt with people. Neither should they ever be seen in the church.

Authenticity and honesty should be the way Christians endeavor to live their lives. The church should be a bastion of honesty and openness. It should be a place where manipulation, name-calling, and strong-arming are absent.

Authenticity means that we are open and honest in sharing our true thoughts and feelings. Love, anger, loneliness, hurt, and pain are all authentic feelings. We need to share those feelings honestly and openly and constructively. In contrast, we can’t become haters, always angry and upset with everyone and everything.

The church should exemplify what the Apostle Paul writes in Philippians 4:8. He says: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable.”

That is what the church ought to be! And when the church is operated in that fashion it will be a place where people want to be.

It’s my prayer that our conference office, along with every church, school, and every member would operate with that kind of authenticity!

–Ed Barnett is RMC president. Email him at: [email protected]

By Ron Price

When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new. —Dalai Lama Have you ever noticed how upset people can get when speaking with someone who holds an opinion different from their own? I’m sure you have, but have you ever wondered why this is so common?

Why should I be threatened because you believe some- thing that I don’t, and vice-versa? I always strive to grant others the right to be wrong whenever they choose to go against my “wisdom.”

OK, now that I have disengaged my tongue from my cheek (do we even use that expression anymore?), let’s get serious again. So many disputes occur when people take it personally that others do not agree with them. Well, if you haven’t discovered it by now, let me break it to you gently—no one will ever agree with you on everything all the time. And, if they did, you likely would get tired of having them around.

While it may indeed be easier to say than to do, I strongly encourage you to resolve not to take it personally when others differ from you in some way. You are not the Holy Spirit. It is not your responsibility to “straighten out” a fellow believer, or anyone else. As I heard at Western Slope camp meeting several years ago, “I want to be very conservative when it comes to leading my own life, but very liberal when it comes to how other people lead theirs.” Also, at the risk of offending some of you, might I suggest that a common reason you might get upset at another’s contrary opinion is that you are not secure in your own? If you know what you believe and why you hold to it, why should it bother you if someone else feels differently? Why would you want to change them or have them come around to your way of thinking? If it is a matter of salvation, or an issue of church welfare, you might have to advocate strongly for your position. Most arguments, however, do not concern such lofty matters.

Another common source of arguments or “heated” conversations in the church is that each and every one of us has a deep-seated desire to be understood. This desire starts at birth and does not stop this side of the grave. If you don’t believe me, observe a toddler who is trying to be understood but is failing in his or her objective. Trust me; it is not a pretty sight!

In my coaching and mediation practice, I often find people engaged in the “shoot and reload” method of communication. This happens when people are having two separate monologues rather than one dialogue. While very common, this practice is fraught with peril and unlikely to result in effective communication or problem-solving.

In “shoot and reload” communication, the goal is to persuade the other person that you are right and they are wrong. You may practice pretend-listening while the other person speaks, but in reality, you stay in your thoughts about how you will correct them if they ever have the decency to stop talking.

There will always be differing points of view within any organization, and the church is no exception. My strong recommendation is that you ask God’s help for you to:

• ●  Not take it personally when others think differently than you do;
• ●  Resolve to know what you believe and why you believe it so strongly that you do not feel threatened by opposing views;
• ●  Make it a personal priority to fully understand others before agreeing or disagreeing or judging in any way; and
• ●  Adopt an attitude that everyone you meet knows something you do not, and if you listen well enough, you are bound to learn something new.

Please note that listening and understanding does not necessarily mean you agree with what is being said. It simply means you respect the other person enough that you want to understand them. I like the sentiment expressed by psychologist Carl Rogers: “I have found it of enormous value when I permit myself to understand another person.”

I like what Jesus said even more: “Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.”

–Ron Price is a member of the RMC executive committee from Farmington, New Mexico. Email him at: [email protected]

By Reinder Bruinsma

In many developing countries tourists are constantly urged to buy “expensive” articles at ridiculously low prices. When I lived in West Africa, I could buy La Costa shirts on the beach for two to three dollars. Of course, they were fake. And so were the Rolex watches. They looked very real and did have the name Rolex, or some other exclusive brand name, but that did not make them genuine. They were made in China rather than in Switzerland. Sometimes, the fact that they were fake was not even denied. I remember seeing a market stall in Turkey with “genuine fake watches.” Most of us do not like it when cheap things are given expensive brand names. And, in fact, this is a form of deception and a crime.

It is even worse when Christians are “fake” rather than “real.” Often Christians do not have a good reputation. For many, especially among the millennials, the word Christian tends to be synonymous with hypocrisy. Ask many of the younger generations in the Western world what they think of the church and the answer will most likely include terms like “politics,” “power-play,” “greed,” or, at best, “irrelevant.” In many countries the reputation of the church has been tarnished by endless cases of sexual abuse by the clergy. In the eyes of many Muslims the people in the Christian world are immoral, for is it not the Christian West where immorality is rampant?

Authentic

What are non-churched people and, in particular, those who have given up on the church, looking for when they look at us? What do they expect to see? They may know we are Seventh-day Adventist Christians, but are they primarily interested in whether we know and support all twenty-eight fundamental doctrines of our church? Do they expect to see people who are perfect, who have all the right answers, and who never have any doubts?

No, when they look at us, they want to see who we really are, deep down. Their question to us is not so much, “What do you believe?” It is not even, “What do you do?” The question is, “Who are you?” Not when you are in church or among like-minded family or friends. Who are you when no one is looking?

People want to know: Are we for real? Are we authentic? If not, why should they listen to us? People today, especially young people, can smell phoniness from a mile’s distance. If we are not real, forget it!

And, let’s be honest. There is also a lot of window dress- ing among Adventist believers. We all know the principles that are supposed to govern our lives. But do all of us live according to these principles, even when no other church members are in sight? I have noticed (and many of my pastoral colleagues have confirmed this) that often those church members who act and talk most piously are the ones with serious behavioral problems. Often those who always speak about the loose morals of others are the ones who need to clean up their own lives.

But what is new? Jesus did not mince words when addressing some of the religious leaders of His day. In the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 23, He repeatedly calls the Pharisees and teachers of the law “hypocrites.” He says: “You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean” (Verse 27).

And remember the story of Ananias and Sapphira in the Book of Acts, Chapter 5? They appeared to be very generous people. They decided to sell a piece of land and pre- tended that they were donating the full proceeds to the church. But they were phony. They wanted to look good; they gave to enhance their own reputations and the story clearly indicates that this was not acceptable to God.

We must never forget that we can perhaps fool people around us for a while, but we can never fool God. When looking at people we may like what we can see. But “the Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).

Becoming Authentic

So, how does a person become “authentic?” I cannot offer a concise ten-step program or an Authenticity for Dummies guidebook. It is not really about learning, or knowing, but about being. Here are a few aspects that are essential for being or becoming real.

Total Honesty

Being genuine presupposes that I am brutally honest, not only in my dealings with others, but also with regard to myself. Many of us are clever in the way we handle our own PR. We take great care with the image we project. But some of us may be quite different from this image. We may not be such a considerate husband as we want others to believe, or the caring mother we hope people think we are. We may not be so spiritual as our pious words in Sabbath School suggest. The reality, however, is that sooner or later the truth comes out. Somehow people can smell it, if things do not add up in how we present ourselves.

If you want to be authentic, start with being totally honest. Look in the mirror to discover who you really are. If you do not like what you see, work for change. Ask God to give you the strength you need to face your fakeness. It will earn you respect when people see you struggle. Living a lie does not bring you respect but only disillusion.

Admit Your Doubts and Mistakes

Admitting that you have doubts does not make you weaker. All of us have doubts, that is, all of us who do any thinking. The question is what we do with our doubts and uncertainties. Do we cultivate them and suggest to ourselves and others that our doubts and questions simply reflect our superior intelligence? Or do we prayerfully search for answers? Are we trying to deal with our questions—one by one—even if it takes a long time?

Be Vulnerable

Most human beings like to talk about themselves. But usually we tend to emphasize the things we do well, the skills we possess. We may exaggerate our role in the organization that employs us—a little (or not so little). We extoll the virtues of our children and may somewhat stretch the social status of some of our relatives. We tend to drop the names of important people we happen to know (even if that “knowledge” is extremely flimsy). People notice, and, as a result, they will not take us seriously.

It is only when we are willing to share—at some appropriate moment and with the right person(s)—that not all went well in our lives, that we made some serious mistakes, that our family situation is not always ideal, and our career had its ups and downs that people accept us as genuine.

It took me quite some time to learn this. One of the great tragedies for many who work in the church is to see that their children have not followed the same path. When people asked me whether my children were “in the church,” for a long time I tended to answer vaguely. Now, I openly acknowledge that my children have not become Adventist church members. I have experienced that most people do not judge me but rather sympathize with me. Many have the same experience and they appreciate that I dare to make myself vulnerable by also telling about some things that did not go so well in my life. In fact, often they are more willing to talk with me, knowing that I have some of the same problems they are facing.

Tell Your Story

We must realize that most people have a need to tell their story. They need to be listened to. But we must also keep in mind that people want to know our story. Knowing who we really are behind our professional or social facade, where we are coming from, helps to make us into real, authentic people.

Live Authentically

If we say we are Christians, the million-dollar question is whether our everyday choices reflect those beliefs. Has following Christ made us a nicer and more compassionate person? Can people see that we care? Can they see our integrity and honesty? Do we model inclusiveness when we interact with those who are “different?” Do we graciously extend forgiveness and accept forgiveness when we need it ourselves?

We must constantly ask these questions: Have the things I talk about to others become, at least to some extent, a reality in my own life? Can people see that I am living a life that matters? What do people see when they look at me? A faithful steward? A real disciple of Christ? A Christian is his or her relationships? Someone who is transparent and can be trusted? Not just occasionally but 24/7?

Christ: Our Model of Authenticity

Becoming authentic remains a work in progress. But in essence it is about gradually becoming more like Christ. He became truly human. He was not afraid to make Himself vulnerable. We do not become like Him overnight. In fact, we will never be at His level. But He can help us in our life-long commitment to authenticity. In His footsteps we can become real!

–Reinder Bruinsma has served the Adventist Church in publishing, education, and church administration on three continents. He writes from the Netherlands where he lives with his wife Aafie. Among his latest books are In All Humility: Saying “No” to the Last Generation Theology, and a daily devotional, Face-to-Face with 365 People from Bible Times. Email him at: [email protected]

By Barry Casey

Jonathan Franzen, author of multiple best-selling novels, including The Corrections, found himself as a young writer feeling distinctly ill at ease in American culture. Although he was successful, his marriage was falling apart and he couldn’t seem to concentrate enough to finish the book he was working on. He felt cut off—or more honestly, he felt he had withdrawn in frustration—from his friends, his peers, the people he loved and respected, and the literary world.

In an essay for Harper’s Magazine titled, “Why Bother?” he says, “Not only did I feel that I was different from everyone around me, but I felt that the age I lived in was utterly different from any age that had come before.”1 He felt alienated and uneasy, cursed with the perception to see the damage being done to personal relationships as people retreated behind their computers. He wondered if there was still a place for a literate audience in a world in which everything seemed an artifice, a show, done for commercial reasons and lacking authenticity. He felt himself to be in a darkness that he called “depressive realism” where everything he saw seemed to contribute to his sense of alienation. He realized he had given up on the possibility of an imagined world, practically a necessity for a novelist. All he could see was the glittering superficiality of this one.

Eventually, he arrived at what he called “tragic realism,” and what he meant by “tragic” was fiction that raises more questions than it answers and that serves as a counterfoil for the rhetoric of inevitable optimism that pervades American culture. He says, “For me the work of regaining a tragic perspective has therefore involved a dual kind of reaching out: both the reconnection with a community of readers and writers, and the reclamation of a sense of history.”2 And he found that in its insights into the darkness and unpredictability of life, as well as the beauty and clarity of it, tragic realism has an intensity that is almost religious.

I read Franzen’s essay with appreciation, not only for the penetration of his insights and the skill of his writing craft, but also because it spoke to my experience as a member of a religious community. As a Christian, I believe in an imagined world too, the Kingdom present in spirit and still to come. Like Franzen, my individuality and humanity spring from an appreciation of history and a deep regard for the intellectual legacies of writers, thinkers, artists, and musicians. As an individual and a Christian, I am convinced that an authentic search for Jesus enlivens and ennobles my humanity. Like Franzen, I am temperamentally inclined to tragic realism, to its acceptance of the light and dark of life, and to the intuition that our very finitude creates a longing for transcendence. Christians know something about tragic realism, living out of the crucifixion and with the continuing presence of evil.

Franzen’s dis-ease with our times and our culture is echoed in the paradox of being a spiritual pilgrim who nevertheless loves this Earth. One pole of this creative tension for me is my appreciation of the goodness of humanity and what it has achieved in its cultures and religions. The other pole revolves around a keen awareness of the disparity between the transcendence of God and the hobbled finitude and misery of humanity. A tragic realism finds a workable way forward between hope and fear.

But as a Christian of the Adventist variety, I am also at odds with the position of those in my religious community who seem to value perfectionism over grace and conformity over a willingness to be led by the Spirit. It seems to me that an authentic Christian experience widens its scope to be as inclusive of others as it can be, while becoming, through prayer and action, as focused on Christ’s life as it needs to be. Grace gives us the liberty to work within our human limitations as we aim to follow Jesus. This is not cheap grace. It is to recognize that God is with us at all times, especially when we fail, to be there and to say, “Well, that didn’t go too well, did it? Let’s try it again!”

Like novelists and poets, people of faith learn, through necessity, to become masters at handling ambiguity. Most situations in life are not binary; we must be wary of those who sell the either/or model when both/and is more often the case. Tensions arise between our roles as members and as individuals. Organizations, churches included, aim to accomplish their mission with the least amount of internal friction possible. But as individuals, we are constantly called to find our way around, over, and yes, through conflict. It teaches us patience.

A lot of us are ambivalent about who we are as Adventists, and we spend quite a bit of time struggling with it. Are we still a movement? Does a movement have assets in the billions, properties around the world, and thousands on the payroll? Even more critically, are we the hinge of history or just another Protestant denomination? The questions point to our sense of mission and that, in turn, to our identity.

We began as a movement set against much of nineteenth-century America. We opposed slavery, ostentation, and the accumulation of wealth; we were pacifists and believed that the body was the temple of God. Because the first Adventists had stepped out of existing denominations, they tended also to define themselves by what they were not—a kind of via negativa of church polity. That energy carried them for years and sustained mission work around the globe. As they trained to be servants, they benefited from their education. Their institutions thrived—education, health care, hospitals, publishing—and they became prosperous.

Movements through time evolve or die, and we evolved. We are far from the agrarian, self-sufficient, and experimental movement that survived through tenacity and God’s grace. A curious thing happened on the way to the twenty-first century: for many Adventists in North America and Western Europe the church’s identity as a nineteenth-century millennial movement smacked into our experiences in  our post-modern societies.

Jonathan Franzen went through a period of silence as an author, expecting that his novels and essays would speak for themselves. Alas, nobody noticed. Franzen says, “Silence, however, is a useful statement only if someone, somewhere, expects your voice to be loud.”3 If we opt out of the culture, will anyone notice? And do we opt out so that they will notice? Is that our reason to be a movement, to be known as singular, what we liked to call “peculiar”?

Speaking to Southern regional writers, Flannery O’Connor noted that, “An identity [as a Southern writer] is not to be found on the surface . . . It is not made from what passes, but from those qualities that endure, regardless of what passes, because they are related to truth. It lies very deep. In its entirety, it is known only to God, but of those who look for it, none gets so close as the artist.”4

If Adventism asks itself what makes its identity unique and distinct from other Christian groups, it asks the wrong question. The question that gets at our authentic identity is not what makes us different from other religions or even other Christians. It is, “Are we being faithful to the vision of Christ as we understand it?” O’Connor thought that Southern identity in its clearest form was often found in the extremes. In religion today, extremes are part of the problem.

A better word, at least for now, is “radical,” referring to that which goes back to the root, radix, from the Latin. Asking whether we are faithful to Jesus’ message is radical simply because Jesus was radical then and His message, still today, is extremely radical. If we still want to be unique in our society, even peculiar, we need only align ourselves with Jesus’ radical message of love conquering hatred and prejudice.

Franzen pulled himself out of his dis-ease with the realization that he was not in this world alone. All of us are muddling our way through life; we are a community of the stumbling but hopeful. He quotes Flannery O’Connor who said, “People are always complaining that the modern novelist has no hope and that the picture he paints of the world is unbearable. The only answer to this is that people without hope do not write novels.”5

Neither, it could be said, do Christians write their life stories without hope. In a fractured world like ours, hope is the path toward our true, authentic selves.

–Barry Casey taught religion, philosophy, and communication for 37 years in Maryland and Washington, D.C. He is now retired and writing in Burtonsville, Maryland. More of his writing can be found on his blog, Dante’s Woods. Email him at: [email protected]

References

1. Franzen, Jonathan, “Why Bother?” in How to be Alone. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, p. 93.
2. Franzen, p. 93.
3. Franzen, p. 87.
4. O’Connor, Flannery. “The Regional Writer” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.
5. Franzen, p. 92.

By Nathan Brown

Over the past few years, I have been intrigued by a series of conversations with my friend Dr. Lisa Clark Diller, professor of history at Southern Adventist University, in which she has explained to me that one of her key tasks with her students is to shift them away from seeing either historical events or the present as somehow inevitable. After one of these conversations, I invited Lisa to contribute a chapter to a book project I was working on at the time. The chapter she wrote included the following summary:

“The job of the Christian historian is to help us be more creative in seeing how many choices there have been in the past and, by implication, how many there still are today. So when we try to understand the past, we are expanding our imagination. Things did not have to be as they are. Recognizing this can cause us to change how we act now and create new possibilities for the future. This is what the biblical prophets did. While they predicted outcomes based on current actions, they were always begging people to behave differently so that they could have a different result.”1 It is part of our human psyche to tend to think that the way things are is the way things ought to be, even when it isn’t. We too easily come to understand our experiences as expected and natural. And the inevitability of the status quo is also urged on us by the loud and collective voice of the powerful interests that benefit most from the way things are in our societies.

But the assumed inevitability of our past, present and future is something that perhaps we as Adventists need particularly to guard against. While we might see the hand of God guiding in key historical events, we also insist on free will. None of us—whether kings or queens, bishops or pawns—is merely a piece on some kind of cosmic chess board. We cannot proclaim freedom to choose at the same time as assuming the inevitability of the status quo or that the history of the future has already somehow been written.

The realities of the world around us are not inevitable, nor are they unchangeable, as overwhelming, intransigent, or gloomy as they might sometimes seem. Whether in the words of the Bible or those who echo its vision in so many ways, prophetic voices are those that urge hope-fueled alternatives to the way things are, and better futures than the assumed continuities or extrapolations of those present realities.

Comparing the liberal disregard of God in their politics of justice and compassion, theologian Walter Brueggemann describes the “tendency in other quarters to care intensely about God, but uncritically, so that the God of well-being and good order is not understood to be precisely the source of social oppression. Indeed, a case can be made that un- prophetic conservatives did not take God seriously enough to see that our discernment of God has remarkable sociological implications.”2

It has been observed many times that the winners most often write the history. This is one of the ways by which the powerful tend to defend the status quo. But too often they also influence the dominant theology. Without great care and much prayer, theology too easily morphs into—or is co-opted toward—a justification of the world as it is and the inevitability of the divide between the poor and the powerful, with their many injustices and outrages.

The faithful and prophetic voices reject these assumptions of inevitability. Our vision of God and His kingdom always offers an alternative reality. Neither our ultimate confidence nor our greatest fears are invested in the powerful, the political or economic structures, or the status quo that our society urges us to accept (see Psalms 146:3).

The actions of God as we see them recorded in history have not been inevitable, rather they have always been disruptive, counterintuitive, and a real threat to those in power: “His mighty arm has done tremendous things! He has scattered the proud and haughty ones. He has brought down princes from their thrones and exalted the humble” (Luke 1:51, 52, NLT). Observing God’s revolutionary acts should give us pause. It is sobering to hear the voices of the prophets and recognize the ways in which we might be on the receiving end of their warnings and rebukes—simply read any of the Hebrew prophets, without assuming we are the “good” people in the story. While we are tempted to applaud as the prophet critiques those we don’t agree with or don’t like, the louder we applaud, the sooner the prophet’s focus will turn on us.

But the rejection of inevitability also frees our imagination. The world did not and does not have to be as it is. Guided by the glimpses we see of God in the Bible and in our world, we can imagine societies shaped by Sabbath economics and the redistributive principles of jubilee, for example. We might imagine what it would mean to reclaim our roles as gardeners and stewards of Creation. We can see a shopping mall, airport lounge, detention center, or even a church as filled with people, each one of whom is created and loved by God, meaning that these are places filled with the love of God.

We will be people who begin to hear the voices and the stories of those whose voices and stories are not usually heard. Joining with God, our preference will be always “for the least of these” (see Matthew 25:40), giving ear and amplification to the “weakest reed” and the “flickering candle” (see Matthew 12:20). We honor the humble and welcome the stranger, seeking justice and creating beauty in both obvious and unlikely ways and places.

In all of this, we join with God in His mission of disruption and rejection of the inevitable. And we do this not in diminishing or disregarding the faith we claim, but precisely because of our faith and its distinctive insights: “What is desperately needed are people who speak distinctively and movingly from within Adventism to the larger community; voices who, from the core of Adventist particularity, express a universal message for our time; people who allow the power of the gospel to challenge those who oppress the vulnerable.”3

Our discernment of God must have “remarkable sociological implications.” It is universal and personal. It urges our freedom to choose—and insists that we choose well. It seeks to reshape societies and remodel economies, to rebuild communities and renovate lives. It demands the best of our human imagination, creativity and problem-solving. It requires effort and energy.

It culminates in the ultimate disruption and discontinuity of the Second Coming. But, because of this hope, it begins today—in ourselves, our churches and our communities— whenever we choose love over fear, courage over safety, generosity over consumerism, humanity over tribalism and nationalism, thoughtfulness over assumptions, welcome over prejudice, others over ourselves, the prophetic over the inevitable.

–Nathan Brown is a writer and editor at Signs Publishing in Warburton, Victoria, Australia. His book For the Least of These was recently published as a companion to the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, Third Quarter 2019. Email him at: [email protected]

References

1. Lisa Clark Diller, “My Historical–Prophetic Imagination” in Nathan Brown and Joanna Darby (editors), Manifest: Our Call to Faithful Creativity, Signs Publishing, 2013, p. 168.
2. Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (Second Edition), Fortress Press, 2001, p. 8.
3. Charles Scriven, quoted in Zdravko Plantak, The Silent Church: Human Rights and Adventist Social Ethics, MacMillan Press, 1998, p. 135.

By Dany Hernandez

The older I get, the less I know. I’m learning to live with this tension in my life. I don’t like it, but I have to embrace the fact that I’ve been wrong many times in my life, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be wrong many more times. But this is not about right or wrong. This is about not pretending. This is about being comfortable enough with who I am, with who we are as a church to maybe admit we’re flawed. This is about looking at ourselves in the mirror and admitting there are times when we might be wrong and owning it. Some of you reading this will agree with the previous statement, while others of you will push back, perhaps with some anger and resentment at me for suggesting such a thing.

Let me ask you not to take this personally, or as an attack on our dear church. After all, we all want something better, more effective, and more world-changing from our congregations around the globe. But there’s a problem from my perspective.

We’re really not that real.

In 1991, Canon USA came out with an ad campaign featuring an up and coming professional tennis player named Andre Agassi. Flashing his outlandish outfits and bleached long hair, he would remove his sunglasses, stare into the camera and proclaim, “Image is everything!”

That same year I began pastoring my first church in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. On Friday nights, we would hang out at the beach and provide food and basic necessities to a group of homeless individuals. The following morning, we would pick up any who wanted to attend church and take them to spend the day with us. Soon there was some rumbling among our dear church members.

“Pastor,” they said, “do you know some of them are going outside to our parking lot and smoking before the church service? What will our neighbors think?”

I became keenly aware that for a lot of us, image is everything. And, because image is so important, we created a culture where pretending is better than truth, and image more valued than reality. Why do small groups have such a challenge becoming part of the culture in our Adventist churches? Because a small group requires vulnerability, honesty, and authenticity. Reader’s Digest recounts the story of a bishop who had just had a cup of tea with a parishioner and commented, “I’m glad to see in what a comfortable way you are living.” The churchgoer replied, “Oh, bishop, if you want to know how we really live, you need to come when you’re not here.”

Can We Be Trusted?

One Thousand Gifts author Ann Voskamp recently posted on her blog: “I have felt it—how no one wants anything of anyone but to be honest and real and to trust enough to take off the mask.”

Here’s part of the challenge. To you, these examples might not seem like a big deal, but to me they speak of the lack of authenticity we sometimes display to others. How many times do we plan a cooking school for our community as a means of getting “names” and getting them comfortable with the church before we invite them to an evangelistic meeting? We’ve talked ourselves into believing we are really doing it to help our neighbors live healthier lives and be- cause we love them enough to want them in heaven. And what’s wrong with that? Maybe nothing—but maybe every- thing. How many times do we launch a series of meetings in a conference room of a hotel and keep the fact we’re Adventists hidden as long as possible before the big reveal? Think about it . . . we call it strategy. Let’s not tell them we’re Adventists until Week 4. We gather and pray that God will impress the minds of the people who have been attending the meeting for three weeks as we finally tell them the truth about who we are. We’ve grown up in a culture where we’ve normalized a lack of transparency. So many times, we pretend not to be something in order to lead people to become the thing we’re pretending not to be.

And one of my favorites—friendship evangelism. Really? Why don’t we just stop at “friendship?” You know why? Because we really don’t know how to do something without strings attached. Because no matter how great your intentions, if you’re not honest about who you are and what your motives are, then you are no better than a used car salesman detailing the outside of a car while rust eats the vehicle away from the inside. At some point, you’ll realize that what you purchased, what you bought into, is not really what was presented.

Would it be so wrong to become friends just to be friends? Would it be so horrible to help people live healthier lives so they can be healthier? But what about the Great Commission? We’ve bought into the idea that God needs our assistance by not being transparent and authentic in our motives. We believe that only with better strategy and slick marketing can God work in the hearts of people. How arrogant of us. How about we love people because they deserve to be loved?

One of the most impactful things that theologian John Stott ever said was this: “When our good deeds are motivated by evangelism, our philanthropy reeks of hypocrisy.” So, on the one hand we say, “We care about you” but the ultimate message is, “But only if you become one of us.” How many people did Jesus feed, heal, and comfort who never became His followers? We have no clue, and I suggest that Jesus didn’t keep track either. The good things from Jesus extended from a heart of compassion, not from a desire to convert individuals to a specific belief system.

Be Cold, or Be Hot

What if the message to Laodicea is a call to authenticity? Maybe it’s the same message Amos preached centuries before: “I’m tired of your fundraising schemes and your fancy mission and vision statements. I’m tired of your songs and sacrifices. . . . You know what I want? You know what I really want?” says the Lord. I want oceans of justice and rivers of righteousness.” Maybe the message to us is, “Quit faking it. . . . Be cold, or be hot, just don’t pretend. Don’t play it safe. Be truthful about your motives, be honest about your struggles, be real about your doubts.” Because there’s nothing more offensive than pretending, nothing worse than a lack of authenticity.

The transparency and authenticity of Paul is honestly quite refreshing in a Christian and/or secular culture that longs to elevate its own voice and brand to position ourselves for success. When was the last time you heard from an “expert” or pastor these words: “I came to you in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling” (1 Corinthians 2:3)? Imagine your pastor standing in front of your congregation and stating those words. Think of the words of King Jehoshaphat when he said, “I don’t know what to do.” What made him a great and humble king perhaps is summarized in those few words. Yet this very sentiment is what our hearts long for and, in fact, what secular culture longs for: authenticity.

The Apostle Paul summarizes the biblically authentic life we all need to model.

“Not that I have already reached the goal or am already perfect, but I make every effort to take hold of it because I also have been taken hold of by Christ Jesus. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and reaching for- ward to what is ahead, I pursue as my goal the prize promised by God’s heavenly call in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:12).

Go and live authentic, imperfect, messy lives before a broken, imperfect, and messy world so that others may see Jesus redeem and transform you into His image.

–Dany Hernandez is lead chaplain at Littleton Adventist Hospital. Email him at: [email protected]

By Joshua De Oliveira

My first year of college felt like an expansive test of my willpower. Within the first few weeks of school, I had to strap a backpack to an asphyxiating friend who had been carried to my room at two o’clock in the morning after having consumed too much alcohol. Only a couple of weeks later, some dorm mates and I would stay up with a friend well into the night as he made incoherent and rambling conversation, a trashcan between his legs and vomit all over his clothes, sheets, and the rug at his feet. He would later laugh at all the stupid things he’d said that night and thank us repeatedly for not hospitalizing him.

Over the past year, many people have asked me to explain why I’m teetotal. The answer could be simple—albeit reductive: I could just say, “I’m an Adventist, and Adventists don’t drink,” and leave it at that. But I find that, for me, the answer is a lot more complicated than that.

I grew up in the church, the son of a pastor, and I was surrounded by Adventists during my childhood in Berrien Springs. Even after leaving the Adventist school system for the local public middle school, most of my closest friends were Adventist. For that reason, alcohol was not of any cultural importance to me. As sheltered as it might sound, discovering that any adult I knew at the time drank would have truly shocked me.

Despite a drastic demographic shift in my friend group and wider community when I moved to Colorado and began attending Boulder High School, the sway of alcohol was not all that great. I knew plenty of kids who drank, along with a pot dealer I bunked with while in Italy, but my core friend group was ultimately uninterested in boozing. And, I think, because they weren’t interested, I wasn’t interested. While I can attribute a good deal of my lasting sobriety to my straight- edge, rule-following, risk-avoidant personality, I can also easily state that I am not a person of above average willpower—I could have easily begun drinking and it wouldn’t have particularly mattered that it was “not Adventist” to do so, simply because I had no real reason to believe that it was a destructive behavior. I hadn’t seen enough of it to know.

When I eventually arrived at university, the sheer pace of the drinking culture came as a shock. I initially balked because alcohol had always felt foreign. Also, I was—and continue to be—afraid of the police and of breaking the law, and I felt completely out of my element. I didn’t refuse because I was Adventist, although I would certainly argue that my Church-supplied estrangement from the wider drinking culture for much of my life contributed to my initial refusal.

However, when things slowed down and there seemed to be less vomit in the bathroom stalls and fewer hospital visits, I had to seriously consider why I had chosen to be teetotal. I came to the somewhat uneasy—and not particularly glamorous, spiritual, or pious—conclusion that the reason I don’t drink is a whole combination of different influences. I can’t easily say that I’m a “grade A” Adventist who follows all the rules perfectly and that’s why I don’t drink, because I’m not perfect and a lot of the time being perfect isn’t even my fore-most concern. But I can say that growing up with Adventism and all its unique cultural appendages has given me the power to step back and think about what I value and determine what I really want out of my life.

My first year of college was a steep learning curve, in ways I never anticipated. But that same first year also gave me the opportunity to make some concrete choices in my life, to finally stop drifting through indecision. Because I have come to the conclusion that I don’t want alcohol to be a part of my life, I own that decision. It is mine. But no matter what, I can’t dismantle my understanding that without Adventism in my life, I might not have even thought of sobriety as a decision for me to make. For that reason, I’m thankful to my faith community for giving me the space to ask questions and come to my own conclusions.

–Joshua De Oliveira is a sophomore at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, where he studies environmental earth science.

By Becky De Oliveira

One Word

I’ve done graphic design, including hundreds—perhaps thousands—of assignments for Seventh-day Adventist institutions and organizations, for more than two decades. My experience leads me to conclude that the authenticity problem in the Adventist church can be summed up in one word: earrings.

Try to guess how many times I’ve removed earrings from a photo using Photoshop. Let me put it this way: If I just had a dime for every time I’d be—in the words of country singer Maren Morris—“sitting on a big [mild expletive] pile of dimes.”

Not only have I removed earrings (and necklaces and bracelets and nose rings and lip rings and eyebrow rings and finger rings) from stock photos of models who are not personally known to anyone in the church, but I have had to erase them from pictures of people who actually go to church every week wearing these items. Everyone can see that they are wearing them. So who are we trying to fool? And how must the photographed person feel when they see their edited photo? They certainly would be aware that their earrings and other “adornments” have been removed. What does this communicate exactly? It doesn’t seem to say, “Come as you are.”

When I was editor of a publication called LIFE.info, designed to be a Christian lifestyle magazine with topics that most anyone might relate to, I once had to write a letter of apology to the entire Adventist Church in Scotland. If memory serves me correctly, it was because I’d accidentally neglected to edit out the advice of our non-Adventist nutrition writer who had suggested that white meat, such as chicken, was a healthy option, and that alcohol should be consumed “in moderation.” I’m well aware of the official Adventist stance on meat and alcohol—but these pieces of advice were in line with what most nutritionists would recommend. And this kind of “editing” seems to neglect the fact that many Adventists are meat eaters. Some of them drink and wear earrings. Adventists view pornography. They get divorced. They shout at one another in the car on the way to church. They take drugs and abuse children and beat their wives. Some of them sing along to rock/rap/country/hip-hop songs with objectionable lyrics. Not all of them do all of these things, but some of them do some of these things, at least some of the time. But we can’t have people thinking we’re falling short of the standards, even

if these standards (not wearing earrings) are not standards anyone else would even recognize as indicative of holiness. My brother and I, as adults, have often commented that the central oddest feature of our upbringing in Adventist churches and schools was the utter lack of perspective. Is drinking coffee really just as sinful as embezzling from your employer? We were taught—mostly implicitly—that all sins are equal. No wonder Adventists have trouble with authenticity. What a burden to carry.

Who, Me?

I can’t quite figure it out. The church leaders—usually communications professionals—who have asked me to remove jewelry from photos are always sheepish and apologetic about it. They don’t care about the jewelry. But nor do they feel like fielding endless rabid phone calls from the faithful. (Dear reader, that may well be you.) I’ve also sat in hundreds of Sabbath School classes where we’ve discussed these sorts of issues and everyone agrees that we should lay them to rest, that people should be accepted without reservation no matter what they happen to be wearing. At least half the women in any given group are them- selves wearing earrings and rings and necklaces and bracelets. Many have tattoos or nose rings—or both. Admittedly, the churches I have generally attended are not on the more conservative end of the spectrum—and I certainly sympathize with people who make the personal choice not to wear jewelry. I know many Adventists still make that choice, but it seems that most people favor extending grace toward others and allowing them to be as they are—at least in matters that can be designated as “style over substance.” We all talk about living love and modeling Christ’s character in accepting people and allowing them to grow. So who exactly are all the people—these teaming swarms—who freak out when they see a photograph of a woman wearing earrings and promptly get on the horn to complain? I’m not sure anyone will admit to being such a person. I’ll wager that at the average church, if you asked for a show of hands, not a single hand would appear. Who is doing all this intimidating of soft targets, mostly church employees and young women?

I am a researcher and a topic I’d love to study is the phenomenon of individuals issuing anonymous death threats—often for surprisingly trivial reasons. When British comedian Sue Perkins was named as a possible replacement for Jeremy Clarkson as Top Gear host, she received dozens of death threats, including one in which the individual indicated he’d like her to burn to death.

This is just an example of the kind of thing that passes for discourse these days. But here’s the most important thing: No one readily admits to issuing death threats. No one brags about it on Facebook. Statistically speaking, given the number of death threats that occur each year (when Obama was president, there were apparently 30 threats per day against him alone), you or I must know people who issue death threats. Unless, of course, they are all done by a 400-pound guy sitting on his bed in New Jersey.

It would follow that we must also know the people making enraged calls about earrings. They are among us, perhaps talking about how much they value authenticity.

Do We Really Want Authenticity?

Malcolm Gladwell talks about how consumers say they want one thing while really wanting another. He uses coffee as an example, saying, “If I asked all of you what you want in a coffee . . . every one of you would say I want a dark, rich, hearty roast. What percentage of you actually like a dark, rich, hearty roast? . . . somewhere between 25 and 27 percent of you. Most of you like milky, weak coffee . . . . But you will never, ever say to someone who asks you what you want that I want a milky, weak coffee.”

I wonder sometimes if we are the same—we say we want “authenticity” but what we really want is conformity. I had a client once for several years who always insisted she wanted a really “edgy” design but she always chose something traditional, usually based around a navy blue color scheme.

There are many reasons we struggle with authenticity— like all people do. There is the continual sway of social media and the need to impress other people, for instance. But I don’t think we can discount the possibility that we don’t really want it or encourage it. Perhaps one reason authenticity is so hard to come by in our churches is that there is a size-able if somewhat hidden population that is uncomfortable allowing people to exist simply as they are without kicking back. I don’t know that death threats are commonplace in our churches, but other kinds of intimidation are, even if these are subtle and pitched as “concern.”

We have a great deal to gain from being ourselves and accepting others as themselves (baring, of course, violent, abusive, or criminal behavior). I have to believe that God created us each for a reason and that existing fully as the people He made us to be, rather than weak copies of a supposed ideal, is part of what we are here to do. The strength of our individual characters is what allows us to do great things in the name of God, not merely abstain from sins or behaviors that might be frowned upon by our communities.

If we are to have faith communities that truly exist in authenticity, we have to really mean it when we say we want our “coffee” dark, rich, and hearty. (Note: When I say “dark coffee,” I mean “authenticity.” It’s a metaphor.) Perhaps it is an acquired taste, one that we must begin learning to appreciate now. The Bible indicates that this is what God wants from us—honesty: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John1:8, ESV). Being authentic means accepting our own imperfections along with those of others; it means cultivating a culture where authenticity is actually encouraged.

–Becky De Oliveira is a doctoral student in research methods at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. Email her at: [email protected]

By Jessyka Dooley

Every good business, church, school, etc., will have some kind of vision and mission statement they cling to as their compass for their journey forward and as a metric of success. In the Rocky Mountain Conference Youth Department, our vision is for every kid, teenager, and young adult to “Live the greatest story.” We dream of making that vision a reality by working diligently on our mission to “Make it easy for kids to know God.”

Maybe you’re beginning to think of your company’s vision and mission, or maybe you personally have your very own “motto” that you live by. Normally, I love a good mantra, but recently I read one that made me throw up in my mouth a little. As we were driving through a neighbor- hood, I saw a beautiful school building. On the front of the school carved in stone read, “Douglas High School: Defend the Tradition.” Once my nausea subsided, I turned to tell my husband, Kiefer, about this school and promptly spat out, “Man, it would be terrible to have to attend that high school.”

I love traditions, and I bet you do as well. My family has a handful of incredibly special traditions during Christmas time. One of our traditions is to cut off a slice from the bottom of our Christmas tree and write the year on it. Each year we lay out all the past years and add the new one. Traditions make things extra special. But I cringe when I hear the word “defend” in front of “tradition.” Why? Because I feel like it elevates the tradition itself over the culture the tradition creates.

Looking back on history we see many beautiful traditions and many harmful ones. I, for one, am thankful we have blotted out many traditions which have caused other human beings harm and, in many instances, death.

In his article, published in the Human Rights Watch 2013, “The Trouble with Tradition: When ‘Values’ Trample over Rights,” Graeme Reid points out the flaw with the idea of defending traditions. He states, “In countries around the world, Human Rights Watch has documented how discriminatory elements of traditions and customs have impeded, rather than enhanced, people’s social, political, civil, cultural, and economic rights.”

The idea of tradition in itself is neither right nor wrong, but it is what we make it, and so many times, we become so glued to traditions that they become our idols, our gods.

Let me point out that it would be easy to begin ragging on the church and how we place tradition over love, creativity, and our communities, but I want to take it a step deeper. You see, it’s too easy to find the flaws on the bigger scale, such as in religion and government. It’s more difficult to look in the mirror and see how each of us places tradition over people and the greater good.

We not only expect but also demand that our pastors and leaders pull us through troubling times. That they fix the wrongs of our church’s or country’s traditions that no longer fit for real time. We challenge our communities to be authentic, real, and vulnerable, but are we all those things ourselves?

I honestly have no clue what it would be like to walk through the doors of Douglas High School. I don’t know what it looks like for the faculty, staff, and students to “defend the tradition.” I don’t even know what their “tradition” is. What I can tell you is that the Jesus I read about in the Bible defends people first and traditions last. He is constantly in conflict with leaders in the church who adamantly “defend the tradition.” If we genuinely believe that the character of God was fully and perfectly revealed through Jesus, then we cannot ignore the very obvious idea that our God is for others.

As I think of traditions, ideas, beliefs, and values that I hold near and dear to my heart, I’ve felt the need to hold them up against the question, “Does this tradition, value, belief, [you fill in the blank], bring someone else harm, or does it bring life, joy and peace?”

Authentic Christians, genuine followers of Jesus, will always, first and foremost, be defenders of the people.

–Jessyka Dooley is RMC assistant youth ministries director. Email her at [email protected]

By Shayne Mason Vincent

Over the years, I have become more compassionate toward pretentious people. I came to see that the bigger the mask, the darker the secrets of the night. Human beings are right to be skeptical. We live in a world overflowing with violated trust, judgements, and the kid who stole my entire matchbox-car-collection when I was eleven. Trust, in a turbulent world, seems so unreasonable. It’s much easier to simply maintain the mask.

Larry Crabb, in his book, Real Church, Does it Exist? Can I Find It?, said this about why we avoid authenticity: “At all costs, I feel compelled to protect myself from ridicule, rejection, or revulsion.”

You see, the reason most of us choose facade over authenticity is simply because it’s lonely. Authenticity isn’t wanted in polite society. Conformity is king. And for those few seekers of truth who dare cross the boundary of propriety, the reward is typically rejection. It’s a price common- sense is loath to pay. It’s far easier to simply dance in the masquerade ball.

But God loves authenticity. We can’t just write people off because they’re exasperating; we’re even meant to love them. And just here is where popular Christianity seems to nearly always get it wrong. Sin isn’t just fornication and drunkenness, those are secondary sins, coping mechanisms. Sin’s real impact is the lifeless, soul crushing drudgery of earning love through conformity. The illusions of value based in success.

So, if our spirit longs for more than dry bones, then we will have to confront ourselves with a very serious question: “Are we willing to accept the consequences of being true to ourselves? Are we really willing to pay the price of what could possibly be the loss of friends, church approval, career, or rejection from loved ones? Are we truly willing to plunge the blade right through our reputation in order to be truly alive?”

Ezekiel 37:4-6 (NLT) says, “Then He said to me, ‘Speak a prophetic message to these bones and say, ‘Dry bones, lis- ten to the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Look! I am going to put breath into you and make you live again! I will put flesh and muscles on you and cover you with skin. I will put breath into you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’”

If we really do prize truth above all other things, then we will need to trust that Jesus will empower us when He ignites our bones. He knows on a deep personal level what it’s like to be rejected. When He loved those society hated, His reputation paid the price.

When He exposed fake religion, they murdered Him for it. Yet, in being true to His own calling, He brought a whole world of dead bones back to life! And His authenticity has stood as the very emblem of courage for the past two millennia. So, we have no reason to be afraid of standing out in the crowd, because Jesus will be right there with us in the furnace: Daniel 3:25 (NLT) says, “‘Look!’ he shouted. ‘I see four men, unbound, walking around in the fire, unharmed, and the fourth looks like a God.’”

In abandoning the mask, in refusing to bow the knee before the golden image of approval, the rewards we will find will be worth far more than the losses. What we lose are fake friendships, and formal platitudes. And what we gain are real love, authentic fellowship, and deep spiritual growth. Fear is replaced with peace. Dry bones come back to life. Broken trust is healed. And we are no longer alone. And in this place of Spirit-filled honesty, it is then that God enfolds His wounded children under the shadow of His wing. Authenticity has restored the circle of unending love through grace.

–Shayne Mason Vincent is lead pastor of the Casper Wyoming District. Email him at: [email protected]