I Went to Church Last Sunday
Loren Seibold | 6 December 2024 |
I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. It shouldn’t be that hard to get up on Sunday and pick out a church and slip quietly into a pew. My excuse, most Sundays, has been that years after I’ve officially retired, Saturday is still a work day—mostly the online Adventist Today Sabbath Seminar. Sunday is my day of rest.
But last Sunday I finally did it. I select a church I used to drive past when I was a local pastor. It’s an old building, with way too much of its tiny interior occupied by pipe organs (one upstairs and one down) and choir. I’m not a Vineyard sort of guy: I choose the formal service, the one for grown-ups.
I warn myself when I go in that I try not to be critical. I’ll try to receive a blessing.
The service starts with a female rector, accompanied by men in long dresses, and assistants and choir members in fluffy white pinafores, carrying sticks with crosses and candles on the top, marching up the center aisle.
Not what I’m used to, but okay.
When I entered I was given a sort of church bulletin on steroids. It’s complicated. Lots of standing and sitting, lots of different books to find pages in. I don’t sight-read the unfamiliar hymns like I used to—I’m well out of practice—and the chants are a particular challenge. But I manage to follow along.
I notice that there’s more Scripture read aloud here than in most Adventist churches. (We Adventists prefer to talk about the Bible in worship rather than actually listen to it.) The collects and prayers from the Book of Common Prayer are insightful, too. A few are profound. I’m moved by the confession:
Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent. For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your Name. Amen.
Canned prayers? Some would say. Yet I’ve heard many supposedly “from the heart” prayers in my churches that are precisely like the “from the heart” prayer of last week—including the weekly blessing of the largely extinct colporteurs.
It’s impossible not to notice that I’m in the bottom half of the age spread in this room. But that would be true in most Adventist churches I go to. And it would be unkind of me to complain that no one I pass in the halls speaks to me: the last few Adventist churches I’ve attended, few would have spoken to me except that I was the preacher and stationed at the exit door.
I belted out the Nicene Creed with the rest, from beginning to end. (Unlike some Adventists, I know what small-c “catholic” in “holy catholic church” means, and I believe in it.) The difference between “begotten” and “made” that the creed makes such a point of is of more historical interest than practical—but then let’s not forget that the key to understanding Seventh-day Adventism is a date nearly 200 years ago when nothing actually happened.
In honor of the first Sunday of Advent, the rector does a nicely composed sermon about Jesus’ promise to come again, and how people got discouraged when he didn’t—and he still hasn’t returned, but he’s nonetheless among us now. In an Adventist church the preacher would have been sidetracked by numbers and beasts. Here, the message is straightforward: Jesus is coming again, we don’t know when, but in the meantime, trust in what he offers through his spiritual presence.
15 minutes, and without any unnecessary detours. I’ve given far worse sermons, and spent more time doing it.
As for the bread and wine, I doubt the meaning I attach to it is the same as the meaning the parishioners do. But inasmuch as in most Adventist churches communion appears to mean mostly that we’ve gotten it over with for another quarter (as evidenced by the number who make a surreptitious getaway when they’re set free for the footwashing), I didn’t feel out of line.
I was, if not perfectly, at least sufficiently, comfortable that I will probably return some time. It did me no harm, and at least as much good as the Adventist church I visited while on vacation, where the sermon was tedious, the special music was crawl-under-the-pew awful, and I arrived and departed with no more recognition than if I’d been an incorporeal spirit.
At least here, the pastor introduced herself to me.
Us and the others
A few of my friends, and some of my once-upon-a-time church members, wouldn’t have approved of my attending even once—especially because the pastors are “priests” in fancy dress who utilize symbolic objects and chant prayers and light candles and process and recess back and forth and believe that the bread and wine are more than object lessons.
Some would just be puzzled. A few would fear that I’m apostatizing.
I understand our Adventist antipathy toward other churches. I don’t agree with it, but I understand it. The given reason for our separationism is our theological superiority over benighted Babylon.
But I’m convinced our isolation is rooted mostly in insecurity. I’m not saying we don’t believe what we say, but in our hearts we suspect that our failed prophecies and silly legalisms and peek-a-boo conspiracies would make us appear weird to anyone with a bigger view of the world.
Some of us even take pride in being weird—“peculiar” is the biblical word we use. But we’re weird nonetheless, and we can only sustain the fiction of superiority if we close in with one another, like those oxen in the Arctic who form a defensive circle with horns outward.
But since our enemies—those very apostate Christians I worshiped with—aren’t actually attacking us, we usually deploy the horns on one another.
Mostly, I think, we graze only with our own herd because in the wild we might learn that we’re not that significant after all. Our superiority can only be sustained if we’re never reminded that we have fairly little to feel superior about. So we tell one another that it’s threatening out there and we have to stay in here to be safe.
And in fact, many of us do have to stay in here to be safe. We are unequipped for dialogue with other spiritual communities. Having “the truth” has meant social and theological isolation.[1] There is a reason why we thrive only in institutional communities, where we can go to church, to work, to the hospital, and to school, with all the same people. We don’t do as well when diluted.
There is much that is lovely about us. The thing that is not lovely is our defining ourselves by our enemies.
Perhaps a step to overcoming that would be for all of us to go to church next Sunday.
- My friends in Loma Linda say, “We’re not like that at all. We’re not isolated. We’re respectable and respected. We’re in dialogue with others.” You also don’t seem to understand the church you’re ostensibly part of: some of us haven’t forgotten that the leader of our church canceled your meeting when you tried to dialogue with other Christians. ↑
Loren Seibold is the Executive Editor of Adventist Today.
