In our quest to connect with and love our neighbors, my family and I have had many cool and moving experiences, but something that happened just recently left me perhaps smiling the most.

Back in September, an elderly couple in our neighborhood sent out an email to everyone in the neighborhood—via our neighborhood email list—wondering if anyone would be gone during Thanksgiving and asking if they could perhaps “AirBNB” out their home on behalf of their daughter, who would be in town for the Thanksgiving season. After my wife and I chatted about it, we decided we could make it work and offered to rent out our place to the elderly couple during the week of Thanksgiving.

A couple weeks before Thanksgiving, we held an “Open House” in our home, inviting all our neighbors to join us for a night of fellowship and connection. The elderly couple came and I chatted with the husband for a little while. In the course of our conversation, he shared with me that he and his wife had gone to Notre Dame for college, and his wife was from South Bend, Indiana. I told him that my wife and I had gone to college just up the road from South Bend, in a little town called “Berrien Springs,” and he said to me, “Oh, yes. We know Berrien Springs. My wife had some family who lived there, I believe.”

A few days later, when the couple returned to our home so we could show them around in anticipation of their daughter’s stay, the wife, Pam, immediately launched into something she excitedly wanted to ask. “You guys went to Andrews, did you? I had two nieces who went there.” I had forgotten that I had talked with her husband about it a few days before, and was initially confused by her question, not expecting that a non-Adventist neighbor in Portland, Maine, would know anything about little Andrews University in little Berrien Springs, Michigan.

“Andrews University?” I clarified (realizing that I’ve had people in the past confuse it with St. Andrews University). “Yes,” she said with a gleam in her eye. “My two nieces went there. I’m wondering if you perhaps knew them. They were twins.”

Finally, I asked her the names of her two nieces, and when she said their names, I nearly fell to the floor. Not only did I know them, having gone to Andrews with them some 25 years before, I very much had a romantic interest in one of them when I was a freshman (this isn’t breaking news, since I shared this with her 25 years before, and was now explaining it to her aunt 25 years later).

It was such a surreal moment, especially since I haven’t talked with the nieces in almost 25 years! And I very much I realized that the “two degrees of separation” in Adventism had struck yet again.

Incidentally, it’s not the only “Adventist” connection in my neighborhood. I learned the first time I met another one of our neighbors that his dad and step-mom are Adventists as well, who live in Hagerstown, Maryland. I’ve subsequently met the parents when they visited, and learned we have a number of mutual friends, including another one of my good Andrews schoolmates who used to spend a lot of time at their house when he was classmates with their daughter at Highland View Academy.

Of course, none of this is surprising to a seasoned Adventist (though what’s surprising to me is how we’ve made these connections with non-Adventists in one of America’s most secular cities). Whenever I meet a fellow Adventist for the first time, we spend half the time trying to figure out our mutual Adventist connections (“Oh, do you know so-and-so? She graduated from Andrews in 2002.” Or, “You work at AdventHealth? Do you know so-and-so?”), knowing there will almost always be someone we discover we both know.

And that is actually one of my favorite features of Adventism. There are many reasons for it—from our education system to our hospitals to our camp meetings and prayer conferences and religious publications. But, for whatever reason, Adventism is truly one big, global family, allowing us to go just about anywhere in the world and meet someone who knows someone we know. Whenever we travel, we can go to a local Adventist church and have “instant family” (partly because we have instant credibility when we can note our mutual connections).

Of course, to be clear, one of our biggest strengths can also be one of our biggest weaknesses. Because we are so closely connected, many of us can get so comfortable in the “bubble” that we virtually never leave it, at least to any significant degree. We end up only ever spending time with ourselves. We can go to Adventist schools from kindergarten to grad school, then work at an Adventist hospital or school or supporting ministry, and attend an Adventist church every Sabbath, and basically never have to spend any extended time with anyone outside our Adventist “bubble.”

This is a huge problem, in my estimation, that needs to be fully confronted and challenged—and it’s why I’ve not only committed myself to personally busting out of the “bubble,” but also spending the bulk of the time I devote to ministry to Adventists encouraging them to follow suit. Truly, I’ve found so much life and energy and fulfillment in life outside the “bubble,” and believe that God calls us to embody his love to those who aren’t already consciously familiar with it.

With all that said, and despite the ways we perhaps take it a little too far, Adventism has captured—or maybe just fallen into—what I think is the whole purpose of the story that God has invited us into. We were created, I do believe, for community, for fellowship, for connection. This is the whole goal of the gospel project—to restore relationships and bring us into family together.

And this family was to be a multi-ethnic, multi-generational, multi-linguistic community, tearing down the boundaries and barriers that sin has erected. This is, after all, what John sees in his vision of that “great multitude” in Revelation, a group which no person could never, consisting of people from all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues (Revelation 7:9).

Thus, Adventism, when it’s at its best, epitomizes this grand vision. And it’s this feature of Adventism that I’m most grateful for and excited about.

Shawn Brace is a pastor, church planter, and author in Portland, Maine, and a DPhil Candidate at Oxford University. You can subscribe to his weekly newsletter at shawnbrace.substack.com Contact him at: [email protected]