The One Project Focuses on “The One” at the Center of Adventist Faith
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By the Adventist Today News Team
If you had to name the one, single, most defining characteristic of the global Seventh-day Adventist faith, what would you say? The seventh-day Sabbath? The Second Coming? Conditional immortality? If you were to ask a hundred random people (those who had at least heard of the Adventist Church) what might they say? There is a rapidly growing movement within the Adventist denomination today among pastors, educators, conference officials and others who say it should be “JESUS. ALL.” These people, part of something called “the One project,” (www.the1project.org) maintain that Jesus as the One, the only One—loving Him, praising Him, centering all of one’s life in Him—was the single focus that brought together the first beginnings of our denomination, and that we may have blurred or sometimes even lost that singular vision over the century and a half of our existence. They think it’s time we got it back.
According to Japhet De Oliveira, Co-Chair of the One project, “In July 2010, five simple Jesus followers (Alex Bryan, Japhet De Oliveira, Sam Leonor, Tim Gillespie and Terry Swenson, all pastors or youth workers) got together in room 602 at the Holiday Inn in Denver” and after two days of fasting and prayer “acknowledged again that Jesus was number one.”
This was the beginning of the One project, which, in the year-and-a-half since that meeting, has grown rapidly.Today the project has a website and other web-based content, youtube videos, the first stage of an iTunes app, a Facebook group with 1,051 members so far, and twenty-eight partners ranging from the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary, General Conference Youth Department, and AdventSource to Fowler Films and RE:LIVE Ministry. Several union conferences in North America and several European unions are among these partners, and numbers are growing.
This is their vision: “We are committed to the idea that a Jesus-driven, Jesus-bathed, Jesus-backed, Jesus-led, Jesus-filled, Jesus-powered, all-about-Jesus Adventist Church is the uncompromising directive from our past, the joy of our present, and hope for our future. We claim the Primal Adventist Impulse: a longing to be with Jesus.” Through conferences, conversations, web-based content, and publications “the One Project seeks to stimulate preaching, worship, and adoration of Jesus within and through the Adventist church.”
This weekend a national conference is convening in Seattle and it has had such a large response that the organizers have had to reserve an additional 200 hotel rooms. July 28-29 an international event is scheduled for Sydney, Australia, and November 2-3 a European conference in Denmark. Next February 11-12 another national conference is planned for Chicago.
There are endless things Christians, Adventists included, can debate (and long live the conversation!) but there’s one thing on which every true Christian can agree: Jesus was the Beginning. He is the End. He is the One. Now and forever!
Jesus. All. Pass it on. With all the variety among Adventists, this movement is refreshing and long overdue.
Minor point: it is Sydney, Australia, not Sidney. But thanks for the information. Not sure I can attend, but it would be good.
I celebrate that there is a renewed emphasis on studying about and knowing Jesus. Still, I am puzzled by something I have observed in the very limited number of specific comments I have heard and read about these meetings. The recountings describe participants devoting themselves to studying their Bibles and prayer, but actually spending most of their time reading and discussin "Desire of Ages." What I have not heard or seen mentioned a single time is any emphasis on doing the thing Jesus desired most that His followers would do: seek and embrace the Holy Spirit so they could be empowered for ministry. Perhaps someone could shed some light on this.
William, I understand your apprehension. I hope that after the meetings are over we will get a first hand report on impressions gleaned from the meetings. I know I will, since my wife is attending. I know several of the leaders and have a lot of confidence that their use of The Desire of Ages is not an attempt to defang and revitalize the Church's primary source of extra-Biblical authority in order to go back to the future. Far from it!
If you haven't heard or seen what you are looking for, I suspect it's because of limited exposure to the thoughts and statements of those responsible for making the gathering happen. These people are not reactionary or traditional Adventists trying to put new wine in old wineskins. Check out the sermons of Tim Gillespie or Sam Lenor on the internet, and I think you'll be reassured.
This focus on the Jesus warms my soul. How can it be otherwise? Jesus is all over the place when it comes to revisit the 28 fundamental beliefs of the Adventist faith. He should be at the center of Adventist faith because He is the Core, the foundation, the alpha and the Omega, from creation to second coming. So, yes, I applaud with all my heart.
I hope that someone is keeping a detailed record from the inside of how this organization developes over time. There are several paths it could take. What will happen as the ethos it projects begins to interface seriiously with the institutional Adventist church will be one sign of how it is progressing. One could compare and contrast it with GYC "movement", but "The One" group projects a very different "feel" which certainly is not reactionary such as the whole thrust of the GYC has come to be. Some very positive things might come out of "The One" that will produce some very needed rethinking about what the Adventist faith tradition is all about. If if it it thought for whatever reason that one needs to keep EGW inside the mix, using "The Desire of Ages" rather than the "Great Controversy" provides a counter weight to what the new GC administration is up to.
Ervin,
Whether it is "reactionary" or whatever, please remember that youth have an internal drive to be distinct from their parents as they form their own adulthood. Part of that is calling-out what they see as things that just don't work for them and their faith, whatever label they put on it. Please, don't be disturbed by any reactionary attitudes you see in GYC. It is the face of the church of tomorrow. Don't defend against it. Instead, seek to understand it. You just might learn some things and grow from them as I did from my son during his adolescence.
As I grew up in the Adventist Church, I often heard that preaching Christ was what the "Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians" did and Adventism was invested with the mission of "adding on" what the mainline churches were missing—i.e., the Three Angels' Messages. "The Sabbath" was seen as the "seal" that one respected and kept the commandments, as it was deemed the least popular of the 10 and required the most sacrifice to observe.
"So we are not really, actually, truly a church?" I inquired. "We are simply adding to the truth others are proclaiming throughout the world? We are not a full-service Christian church?"
"No, we are a church," I was told. "But we emphasize certain doctrines. Those other churches talk about Jesus all the time, so why should we? Why should we duplicate what is already being done? We have Present Truth to share, for our time, and we should concentrate on this special mission."
"So what you're saying is that the other denominations are really the "church" and we, the Adventists, are simply adding parts that they are leaving out?"
"No," I was told. "These other churches are fallen and we are not to mingle with them. We are to bring people out of these churches."
"Then how will they continue to hear and think about Jesus, if they leave those congregations and come to our side, where we emphasize the law and the Judgment?"
"Well, once you've accepted Jesus, that's all you need, and those fallen churches are doing an adequate job introducing people to Jesus. Present Truth for our time is not Jesus, but commandment keeping and the Judgment. Jesus just can't come until this end-time message is preached. It's vitally important to concentrate on this alone, so Jesus can come as quickly as possible."
I suspect many Adventists have been exposed to this reasoning. I was not convinced that Present Truth somehow trumped continued meditation on the life and teachings of Jesus. I sense that many other Adventists are coming to similar conclusions and welcome (however carefully) a renewed focus on Jesus, not just as an add-on, but as the centrality of Present Truth.
Edwin,
An excellent observation. Perhaps our greatest challenge with "The One" and GYC is that we are being confronted with the reality that there is more to faith than what we've put in our little conceptual box.
Edwin, with good reasons Adventists were called "sheep stealers." It was Paul who wrote:
"I aspired to preach the gospel, not where Christ was already named, that I might not build upon another man's foundation."