Pardon me, but it’s hard to find a new theme when we seem so vulnerable to pontifical drift. Vulnerable even when we want to seem like a Reformation movement. The theme I refer to is ecclesiology.  It won’t go away—and it had better not: we seem poised for yet another abdication of our historic ideals. The leader of the church’s “Fundamental Beliefs Review Committee,” Elder Artur Stele, said the following—I mostly paraphrase—in an interview published in the April, 2012, issue of Adventist World—NAD:

I have just returned from Passion Week.

For 17 years now, at the Southern Adventist University’s Sonrise Pageant, students and others from the community have enacted the week’s events on the Sabbath before Easter.  Now some eleven thousand people, in waves beginning on each half-hour, gather in the university sanctuary, then walk through the campus for a mile or so, past a hubbub of pens and booths and mini-plays.

Today I was with them, along with several members of my family.

Wednesday I heard a miracle. Twice.

Twenty-seven singers from La Sierra University, in California, had found their way to Kettering, Ohio. Under Director Earl Richards, they sang a lunchtime concert for Kettering College students, faculty and staff, and later sang a “devotional” for Kettering Medical Center leaders.

“With your forgiveness, O God, wash away my self-deception.”

I wrote that prayer on May 8, 1989. At the time I was attending to a Bible verse or two each morning—a discipline I have mostly failed to keep up—and that morning my focus was the beginning of Psalm 32. “Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered,” the Psalmist declares, and then: “Happy are those to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.” 

Church life remains vibrant, even in the older strongholds of Adventism, not least in the larger (and sometimes friskier) congregations. Still, as you know from the Spectrum website, what our church needs, now more than ever, is independent news and commentary. No community can thrive except as people outside the leadership circle, not just those on the inside, have a voice.

Due to age and jet lag, I spent the very early Sabbath hours, just a week ago, reading essays by Barbara Kingsolver, ruminating on Adventist scholarship, and lapsing into rage as well as gratitude. But mostly gratitude. 

In the North American Division of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, women as well as men may now serve as president of a conference.

Monday morning delegates endorsed a motion to “re-affirm” a policy that would permit both “ordained” and “commissioned” ministers to occupy the conference presidency. Yes votes numbered 162; there were 61 no votes. And because women may, under current policy, be “commissioned” but not “ordained,” the motion opens the door for women who are serving as commissioned ministers to step into a role heretofore denied to them.

Sunday morning delegates to North American Division year-end meetings addressed the Great Controversy Project, a favorite initiative of the General Conference President, Ted Wilson.  The project involves raising the money and finding the will for mass distribution of Ellen White’s famous book, and many NAD leaders appear to have mixed feelings about it.

“Hope and Wholeness.”  That, in a phrase, is what the North American Division has embraced as its mission. 

Friday morning the North American Division year-end meeting began with a reading of world Adventism’s current mission statement, an admirable if somewhat conventional document of about a paragraph in length.  Then NAD President Dan Jackson introduced a summary version that would express, for North America, the kernel of the world church’s statement.

In spirit and language alike, Ted Wilson’s leadership evokes another era, one older Adventists can still recall. In key respects he is the second coming of Robert Pierson. So, like Pierson, he speaks (very properly) of revival and reformation. But with respect to his fears, Elder Wilson is also redolent of that era: he is ill-at-ease with the sort of ferment that was heating up in the 1970s.