Leaders, Misleaders, and Renewal, Part 2: “They talk at us, not with us”
by Charles Scriven | 16 August 2024 |
Change is difficult as well as energizing. In obliterating complacency, Christ brings challenges as well as solace. Nor does anything I’m saying here entail disdain for helping administrative units to function well. For a large—in our case, international—communion of congregations, administrative units are necessary to worldwide functioning and mission.
The argument I am making does advance, however, one implacable, widely unacknowledged truth, which I can put in terms Skip Bell and his Andrews University colleagues once developed at book length: True leadership does not equate to “positional authority.” True leadership is “relational.”[1] The pertinent relationships involve God and people alike, and pull us into a shared, strenuous, and patient reaching for goals. Such an activity, it goes without saying, can be no cakewalk.
To say this another way: constructive Christian leadership is not so much being over as being with, not so much direction and control as assistance, inspiration, and example. Much discouragement attends the fact that our topmost leaders so often resist this. In our smaller domains of influence, all of us, of course, could do better. There is, after all, no perfection in relationships.
I have made my case. Can I end now with hope?
Perhaps not.
My adult life matches the span of contemporary Adventist controversy over the place of women in church life. When I attended the Seminary at Andrews, the faculty was learned and forward-looking, ready, we all saw, to follow God out of ruts; enthusiasm for Adventist ministry, moreover, was such that many of my classmates were children of highly educated Adventist professionals. But no one in classes I took was a woman, nor did I feel any lack because of this, or even really notice. I never heard a faculty member talk about it.
Still, within two or three years of my 1968 graduation, Adventist women were voicing, to considerable notice, their hope of eventual welcome into Adventist ministry. Because I had great Seminary teachers (the best of whom, tragically, soon left, or were eased out), I found it easy to begin identifying with these women’s cause.
The arguments for it were compelling in part for the pathos they evinced. But it was becoming clear, too, that theological obstacles to change—church tradition; patriarchal influence in scripture—can be surmounted. The apostle Paul made affirming note of women in leadership roles, and twice declared women and men equal. Jesus questioned conventional role distinctions as between women and men. He told the disciples, moreover, that the Holy Spirit would continue to ease us into new light, including difficult new light.[2] These facts were convincing enough that, long years later, even the now more conservative Seminary went public in support of equality for women and men in ministry.
Nevertheless, stay-put administrators—at the top, by no means everywhere—resisted. They still resist, unmoved either by the pain women feel or by the evident trajectory of scripture. Not even the fact that scripture nowhere opposes the ordination of women has cracked the hard shell.
And this has been tragic. For nearly three generations now, our church has been bleeding members, not least younger ones, over its mistreatment of women. A year or so after I became the pastor of the Sligo Adventist Church in the mid-1980s, a young couple that both my predecessor and I considered hugely valuable lay leaders told me were departing Adventist Christianity. “We can no longer belong to a church that has an official policy of discrimination,” they said. It was heartbreaking. And I very well knew that they were two among many to come.
To this day, though, they resist this change. To this day, there is an official embrace of discrimination.
What top administrators overlook—but pastors who deal in human reality, not just doctrinal abstraction, can hardly miss—is that those who leave over this are not coming back—ever. If the church overcame its discrimination—less delicately, its misogyny—some might return, but how many? And this does not address the reality that many of the upset keep their names on the church books but hardly participate. Will the children of these non-participants one day enliven Sabbath Schools, run Pathfinder clubs, lead out in congregational worship? I need not say.
So again, now that I’ve made my case concerning leadership, and noted all these exasperating difficulties, can I end with hope?
Openness, here & there
There is some evidence for Adventist openness to change. Here and there, convention-breaking scholarship and congregational life testify to this. So do initiatives in independent journalism, book publishing, film-making, service projects, and other lay-led ministries. Numerous women, moreover, have, despite opposition, found a way into pastoral ministry, and many administrators outside of headquarters continue to support them.
The trouble is that Adventist culture has granted immense symbolic influence to its top leadership. General Conference officialdom, along with quinquennial General Conference sessions, have come to stand for real Adventist Christianity, so that beliefs and policies affirmed in distant meeting places feel everywhere like who we really are, no matter the happenings elsewhere.
That fact ensures that felt hope practically requires that truly constructive leadership instantiate itself, at least in small ways, at the very top. A start to this end would seem simple enough. A highly placed church officer or two, or thinkers at General Conference-dominated institutions such as the Seminary at Andrews, the Adventist Review, or the Biblical Research Institute, could chime in. They could engage in the give-and-take Jesus imagined. But whether from fear, pride, or indifference, they likely won’t.
I have offered here a specific, and at least plausible, challenge concerning leadership. But no one in church leadership circles will say what I have missed, or mis-stated, or perhaps gotten right.
And here, arguably, is the great catastrophe facing Adventist Christianity. Silver Spring’s best-known influencers, along with people directly beholden to them, shy away from, or openly resist, exchange of ideas, or at least such exchange when the topics address disagreement. They talk at us, not with us.
One or more of them could disprove this. I hope for that every day.
- Skip Bell, ed., Servants and Friends: A Biblical Theology of Leadership (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 2014). ↑
- On women in leadership, see Romans 16. On equality, see Galatians 3:27-28 and 1 Corinthians 11:11, said by historian Thomas Cahill to be the first “clarion affirmation of sexual equality….ever to be made in any of the many literatures of our planet,” in his Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (New York: Nan A. Talese / Anchor Books, 1999), 141. On Jesus’s refusal of limiting women to conventional roles, see Luke 10:38-42. On the Holy Spirit, see John 14:26 and 16:12-13. ↑
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) 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).
