Leaders, Misleaders, and Renewal, Part 1: Ruts and New Roads
by Charles Scriven | 15 August 2024 |
This essay will be the basis for our Adventist Today Sabbath Seminar, which you can join here.
I stopped short when I read this from a Wendell Berry poem: “…only the dead are changeless.” In the margin I wrote: “Why would anyone want to imitate them?”
And speaking of the dead: we Adventists are concerned—or at least we should be—about church leadership. For example:
- Thoughtful church members brood over top church leaders who just stay put.
- When Merikay Silver asked years ago for pay equal to that of similarly situated men, men at the top initially said “No,” citing both religious and legal reasons.
- When overwhelming evidence showed that Ellen White’s inspiration had been misrepresented—in fact, lied about—they sought (as many still do) to hide the truth.
- When it became clear that the earth is older than Bishop Ussher thought, headquarters doubled down: now and forever, the evidence be damned.
Behavior like this seems habitual, dangerous, sickening; pressing God into a box, and then making that box the last word, is sheer arrogance, and therefore (harsh as it is to say) sin. Yet it persists, repeatedly evident in efforts by General Conference administrators to make all Adventist thought an exact echo of their own.
Yet this can only freeze us into inflexibility—the condition of the dead, or the about-to-be dead.
They destroy our future
Any faith community that lasts, adapts. That’s why many Adventists, and surely most young people, cannot think well of religious close-mindedness. When the most influential administrators insist on it, they perpetuate a Gospel-indifferent, morale-breaking, leadership catastrophe. They destroy our future.
A claim like this goes constantly unheard, so let me say again: They destroy our future.
Our topmost administrators don’t even acknowledge, let alone confront, the possibility that they may be doing this. They seem never to engage fresh, let alone critical, perspective, and when they complain about it, they don’t bother with public, good-faith exchange of ideas. They see themselves above, or even demeaned by, conversation. But where Jesus is said to be Lord, such an attitude, though routine for totalitarians, is grotesque.
The line between good and evil cuts through every human heart, so casting stones from an I-know-better viewpoint risks self-deception: the ice is thin for anyone doing what I am doing here. Still, when the high officials double down on staying put, Christian witnesses must sound the alarm. Whatever the hazard, we must declare: whoever apes the dead by making no effort toward change, or even toward good-faith conversation, not only offends God but also hastens the end of Adventist Christianity.
(That this end may come slowly is no true comfort.)
Constructive Christian leadership
In all domains of church life—from Sabbath schools to worship services, from hospitals to schools to independent ministries—leaders matter. They persuade people, devise strategies, pull levers, make impressions. Anyone who affects outcomes, however modest or wide-reaching the sphere of influence, has leadership responsibility. Any such person embodies and symbolizes our life together as a church.
In that light, then, I here single out three indispensable frames of mind for Adventist leaders—Adventist influencers—today. I pass over traits, like integrity, foresight, and financial competence, that pertain to any leader. The following points address matters of piercing urgency among us, right now.
1) Expect Change.
This is my theme so far, and the Bible puts an exclamation point behind it.
When in Exodus 3 Moses asks to hear God’s name, a voice replies, “’ehyeh ‘asher ‘ehyeh.” In the translation we’re used to, God says: I am who I am. Now, based on closer attention to Hebrew grammar, a widely favored translation is: I will be what I will be.
In effect, God declares: “I will always be ahead of you; don’t stop anywhere.” Isaiah hears the same idea (chapter 48) from the same God: “I tell you new things, hidden things that you have not known.”
Hello, church, these passages exclaim: Ruts, No! new roads, Yes! When we overlook this, we are worshipping convention and assuring self-ruin. It is also true, of course, that talk like this feels scary. Does anything go? If everyone is taking new roads, what authority can prevent the collapse of Christian authenticity into careless fashion or sheer nuttiness? The answer takes us to the next indispensable frame of mind:
2) Make Christ the Center.
For Christians, the resurrection was a declaration that Jesus Christ is Lord. The core ideal in the Hebrew Bible is hesed, or loving kindness. The core hope is shalom, or peace and human flourishing. The core attitude is humility, both joyful and grateful, before God.
Jesus took all these to heart. In attunement with the Christmas angels, he sought peace “on earth.” For him, this made forgiveness paramount, and love became a reaching out to all, enemies as well as friends. Although God had long spoken through human witnesses, Jesus alone, so Hebrews 1 said, was the “exact imprint” of divine life. What he did and said, the character he embodied, thus became the defining standard for Christian authenticity.
In his light, Christianity is not so much a doctrine, as in “Believe these propositions!” as a way, or way of life. But never, certainly, is it a matter of anything goes: it’s about following Jesus. Still, this “Way”—what first followers called themselves—cannot be content with stasis. True faith looks to God’s own Spirit, Jesus said in John 16, not only for strength, but also for deeper comprehension. The guidance comes to fruition, he said in Matthew 18, at precisely the point of good-faith exchange. Where “two or three” sharers of the Way engage in honest conversation, there God in Christ is present, stretching the faithful to new places and new agreements.
Again, ruts, no! New roads, yes! And on the journey, our conversation is how Christ remains the center. Spirit-led conversation—the kind of give-and-take that points beyond itself to the walk, not only the talk—is how grace embeds Gospel truth into lives and institutions. And only thus embedded—thus rescued from mere wordiness into concrete reality—can Christian conviction make a difference.
As aware persons all recognize, the world market for pious speech is fast declining. When Adventist leaders make our main mission a “message”—i.e., just getting information out—they entirely miss the point. Actual embodiment of the way of life Jesus announced is what matters; anything less is irrelevant.
A third leadership frame of mind, therefore, is essential
3) Build Christian Communities.
This effort must proceed by grace, by the sense, again and again renewed, of Christ as our center and his Spirit in and ahead of us as both support and guide. Truly embraced, this third frame of mind says “Yes” to possibility and hope; with equal urgency, it says “No” to self-preoccupation. Summoned into generous relationality, Christians enter spiritual families marked both by difference—of need, background, and age; of station, education, and politics—and also (however imperfectly) by loyalty to Christ.
We live in his light, and one implication is the sense that feelings of superiority—as by the better-off, better-placed, or better-educated—can only make the good Lord cry and the angels laugh. A certain patience marks life together in Christ; not surrender, certainly, to ignorance and self-satisfaction, but the kindness and humility proper to our shared finitude and brokenness.
As for the administrative roles so often associated in Adventist life with high achievement, the imperative to build Christian communities strips them of all their justification—except as support for the twos or threes or more who share a thoughtful, caring Christian commitment together. Christian communities—congregations—are the embodiment of Christ. They are the only physical evidence of the Resurrection. On them every other expression of faithful conviction depends. Schools, hospitals, and ministries for kids; music groups, media initiatives, service projects—all these derive from something more basic than themselves. Their purposes, leaders, and support rise up from congregational soil.
Either we, or the wider world, may ask what Christianity, or Adventist Christianity, is ultimately about. What it is really for? Church bureaucracies can give no convincing answer, nor any preacher or theologian. Only Christian life tangibly shared offers convincing display of Christian conviction. That is why preoccupation with baptismal statistics is misleading. Jesus did, to be sure, ask disciples to widen the circle of faithfulness. But when baptism does not entail sustained participation in a Christian community, it is an empty ritual.
Why, then, are congregations so little upheld as the most important of all Christian institutions? Why, especially when they venture out of ruts, are they so little trusted? Why is so favored a place given to top-down orders and initiative? Why not wider acknowledgment that cookie-cutter standardization can only impede, not enhance? Congregations are where the Spirit typically does its work, giving strength, healing differences, helping to blaze new trails. They are the factor that most likely determines whether, in our varied kinds of brokenness, we stay the Christian course, or drop away. They determine, in short, whether Christian movements bear effective witness in the world.
Charles Scriven, now retired in Tennessee, taught at Walla Walla, served as pastor at Sligo in Takoma Park, and was president of Columbia Union College (now Washington Adventist University) and, later, of Kettering College. For about 13 years, he was chair of the board of the Adventist Forum. His publications (besides many journal articles) include The Transformation of Culture: Christian Social Ethics after H. Richard Niebuhr and The Promise of Peace, the latter church-published (Pacific Press).
