Has the Adventist Church lost its unique identity, Aunty?
9 June 2025 |
Dear Aunt Sevvy,
Has the Adventist Church lost its unique identity? I feel like it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish us from the rest of the Christian world. We are given the specific instruction to be a “peculiar people.”
What do you think, Aunty?
Signed, Proudly Peculiar
Dear Peculiar,
Aunty has heard the argument for Adventist uniqueness since she was young. 1 Peter 2:9 has long been cited to suggest that we should strive to be different, even if people think us odd. We shouldn’t mind even if others regard us as weird or bizarre—that’s just part of God’s plan for us!
To further that end, the church helpfully provided us with many rules and restrictions, with little thought for whether they were actually spiritually edifying—or just made us different.
The word “peculiar” has changed meaning from what it meant when the King James Version was written. If you go back to Deuteronomy 14:2, from which Peter quotes this word, it is clear that when God describes Israel as “peculiar” he means that they are people who God especially loves and wants to bless. Similarly, we Christians are special because of the value God places upon us, not because we are odd or unusual. Modern versions reflect this by describing God’s people not as “peculiar,” but as “his treasured possession.”
Aunty refuses to believe that just being unusual is valuable in itself. It depends on what makes us unusual. Aunty would be pleased were people to say that Adventists are unusually kind, unusually fair and just, unusually prayerful, unusually honest, unusually wise and thoughtful, and unusually easy to get along with.
And so what if we share these qualities with other Christians? They are also special to God!
But to be unique for its own sake, because of what we eat and what we wear and when we worship and dozens of other differences? There’s nothing wrong with these things, but they seem to Aunty to be of much less importance than being like Jesus.
Which, by the way, also means being humble—not proud of how odd we are.
Aunt Sevvy
Sevvy has collected her answers into a book! You can get it from Amazon by clicking here.
You can write to Aunt Sevvy at DearAuntSevvy@gmail.com. Your real identity will never be revealed.
