We have big dreams, we Adventists. With a prophetic mandate woven into our DNA, we want to impact our world for Jesus and His kingdom. And as we watch what impacts our culture today, we see that it takes big stuff to get the world’s attention.
Well, we have some big stuff, too. God has richly blessed us with a highly visible and fully professional hospital system. We have major media outreach ministries, both church-sponsored and independent. We have a nationally known medical school along with several colleges and universities, some of which show up high on the list of the U.S. News & World Report rankings of colleges.
We’re proud of these entities and ministries, and we stand behind them. And not just as a statement of support. Often what we do is stand behind them in terms of expecting them to be the big stuff that captures the world’s attention. So, we stand back and let them be our big splash. After all, it takes big stuff to impact our world.
And, of course, that feels safer. Standing behind something big makes us feel less vulnerable. Plus, we are always anxious about being too close to the world, because, well, we worry about what the world might do to us if we stand too close. After all, if you take a clean, white glove and grab some wet mud with it, you don’t end up with glovey mud, you end up with a muddy glove. So, we keep our distance from the mud and depend on other things, bigger things, to interface and impact the culture. Bigger things are more immune to culture’s potential contamination.
When I was senior pastor of the Keene Adventist Church on the campus of Southwestern Adventist University, our church and the university partnered to present a full-on depiction of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as other campuses have done around the North American Division. It took about 450 volunteers to make it work, and we used various settings all over the campus and in the church to depict important scenes in the life and death of Jesus. Some 5,500 people saw the presentations annually, with most of the viewers being either non-churched folks or people who were members of other denominations. Every year we would get busloads of members of other churches bringing many of their members to walk through our two-and-a-half-hour program, many walking on an Adventist campus and in an Adventist church for the first time in their lives.
In addition to the major goal of telling the gospel story to as many people as we could, one of our goals in this large event was to be an entrée, if you will, to the Adventist name and to let them know that we believe in Jesus and His sacrifice as our only means for salvation. It was big stuff. But we did it because we wanted to make it easier for our local Adventist churches to reach their own neighbors since the big stuff of our program introduced Adventists easily in a positive, Jesus-connected way.
So, it wasn’t the big stuff, in the end, that would be the touchpoint for connecting with people. For that, we depended on the willingness of the members of our local churches to take good advantage of the seeds we’d planted. In the end, it still takes individual men and women, young and old, to reach out on a very personal level and make the contacts that can lead to changed lives and connection with the Savior.
Do we need the big stuff? Absolutely. But those things alone are not enough. The real impact on our culture comes one person at a time, when we, when YOU, become the hands and feet of Jesus. You want to impact your culture? Good. So do I. But it happens best one person at a time, reaching out for one person at a time. You might think that one person at a time hardly impacts the culture. But in the end, it may be the only thing powerful enough to actually do it.
Mic Thurber is the RMC president. Email him at: [email protected]