Why the Seventh-day Adventists are Succeeding

This article by Dr. William J. Whalen is some­thing all will read with interest. It appeared in the magazine U.S. Catholic, published by the Claretian Fathers, Chicago. The author is pro­fessor of history at the University of Purdue.

In preparation for this presentation the author must, of necessity, have done much research into the history and present standing of Adventism. It is an excellent example of good public rela­tions revealing a kind and appreciative approach to those holding very different views from one's own on theology. Even when touching upon the question of the Sabbath and the Antichrist, this author shows no unkind bias and closes with the urge that his fellow Roman Catholics "aban­don the defenses of the Counter Reformation," and "have the intelligence to distinguish between unacceptable theological positions and those prac­tices and customs which might be put to the service of the church." All who are called upon to comment on the beliefs of others have in this article a commendable illustration of Christian courtesy.--Editors.

ONE hundred years ago all the Seventh-day Adventists in the world could have held a meeting in a medium-sized audi­torium. The 4,000 Adventists in 1865 lived in the United States and Canada.

Since then the Adventists have quietly extended their network of churches, schools, missions, and publishing houses throughout a world that they confidently believe to be entering its final days. Today this American-born church operates in 189 countries and reports 1,428,000 adult mem­bers.

Unlike most Christian denominations, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has barely been touched by the current ecu­menical movement. Mainline Protestant churches have no more contacts with the Adventists than does Catholicism. Some theologians lump the Adventists with the Mormons, Christian Scientists, and Jeho­vah's Witnesses as cultists while some in­fluential fundamentalists have recently urged their fellow Protestants to take a second look at Adventism and perhaps re­verse this harsh judgment.

Roman Catholicism fares rather poorly in Adventist preaching and literature. Some Adventist authors carry on an old-fashioned vendetta against the Church of Rome, whose popes were responsible for changing the observance of the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday and thereby heading Christendom down the road to apostasy.

With this in mind we may wonder if Catholics can learn anything from their Adventist neighbors. Can a denomination so far removed from the Catholic heritage have anything to offer us? I think the an­swer is Yes.

Like Catholics, the Seventh-day Advent­ists are deeply involved in parochial edu­cation. In fact, the Adventists maintain the largest worldwide private school sys­tem next to that maintained by the Ro­man Catholic Church. Their educational system includes 5,074 schools with 342,472 pupils from kindergarten to graduate and medical schools.

An Adventist congregation will try to open a grade school if as few as 20 pupils are ready to enroll. In the United States only the Catholic Church and the Lu­theran Church-Missouri Synod conduct more parochial schools. Yet the Adventists no doubt enroll a higher percentage of their young people in church schools than any other church. Right now the Advent­ists educate six out of ten of their school-age members in their own institutions from first grade through college. We Cath­olics do not come close to this percentage on the high school and college level.

This relatively small church, which re­ports 346,000 adult members in the United States, supports two universities, ten liberal arts colleges, and two junior colleges. Its highly regarded medical cen­ter at Loma Linda University in Califor­nia trains physicians, dentists, and medi­cal technologists. The Adventist Church runs more colleges and universities than the Protestant Episcopal Church which is ten times its size or the Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ) which is seven times as large. A recent survey indicates that there are three times as many Adventists who are college graduates than you would find in the general American population.

What we Catholics should bear in mind is that this extensive educational system is financed without the donated services of religious sisters, brothers, and priests. Ad­ventist salaries would not make a teacher rich but they are higher than what most Catholic schools pay teaching sisters. The need for far more lay teachers in parochial schools has thrown some Catholics into a panic; they assure us that the Catholic community cannot afford such increased expenditures. The lesson might be that our Adventist and Lutheran friends have been staffing their parochial schools for decades with lay teachers on salaries.

True enough, the Adventist educational network does not run on pennies. The Ad­ventists consistently rank near the top of all church members according to per cap­ita contributions to their church. Most Adventists fall into the middle and lower middle classes; they are rarely found in the upper echelons of corporations or on Wall Street. But in 1962 the Adventists contributed an average of $213.97 to their church and another S38.46 to the missions. Remember that this figure is per member not per family; we might multiply these figures by a factor of three to obtain the average family contribution: about $750.

How many middle-class Catholic fami­lies who groan about the rising costs of parochial education try to meet their church obligation by tossing a dollar or two into the collection basket on Sunday? Naturally, religious oriented education will cost money but the evidence indicates that the affluent Catholics of this country have not begun to sacrifice to the extent that some of their Protestant neighbors have sacrificed for their churches, schools, and missions.

A Seventh-day Adventist is expected to contribute ten per cent of his gross income before taxes. Besides this basic tithe many Adventists contribute another 10 per cent to support their church's missionary, wel­fare, educational, medical, and publishing programs.

We might expect that any church which expected the world to end at any minute would concentrate on purely religious concerns. This is what Jehovah's Witnesses do; they have no hospitals, homes for the aged, orphanages, colleges, clinics. Their only interest seems to be to warn man­kind of the impending battle of Arma­geddon.

Not the Adventists. Their urgent belief in the Second Coming has not dampened their commitment to education or medical care or service to others. No church can boast a more impressive record of medical service than the Seventh-day Adventist, considering the total number of Adventists.

Last year more than 3,850,000 patients were treated in the 124 Adventist hospitals and 146 clinics and treatment rooms. Around the globe the Adventists employ 488 M.D.s, mostly Loma Linda graduates, and 15,642 other medical personnel. In­cluded in the total of hospitals arc 37 in the United States and Canada.

From their earliest days the Adventists have promoted health reform, the preven­tion as well as the cure of disease. An Ad­ventist layman, Dr. J. H. Kellogg, invented corn flakes and changed the menus at mil­lions of American breakfast tables. Ad­ventists started the pioneer Battle Creek sanitarium for treatment of nervous dis­orders and introduced the techniques of hydrotherapy and physical therapy.

Respect for the human body has led Ad­ventists to insist on total abstinence from liquor, tobacco, and narcotics. For similar health reasons, which may be debated, the majority of Adventists have adopted vege­tarianism. If not vegetarians, all Advent­ists observe the Old Testament prohibi­tions against the eating of pork, ham, and shell fish.

Comparative studies indicate that these health regulations make Adventists less susceptible to heart disease, lung cancer, and other killers. We Catholics sometimes rest content with defending the use of liq­uor and tobacco by Christians and object­ing to prohibition without providing our young people with a statement of the posi­tive health values of temperance and even abstinence.

Most Protestants as well as Catholics re­ject the Adventist interpretation of the Sabbath commandment as demanding the observance of Saturday. Nevertheless we might profit from an examination of how the Adventists try to keep their Sabbath holy. For the devout Adventist the Sabbath begins at sundown Friday as it does for orthodox Jews. Meals are prepared on Fri­day so that food preparation need not take the wife's time on the Sabbath. Saturday morning is spent in church and Sabbath school. The rest of the day is devoted to Bible reading and study, simple family recreations such as nature walks, prayer, and discussing Bible topics with friends. The radio and TV are silent until the end of the Sabbath at sundown on Saturday.

Could we contrast this observance of the Sabbath with that which characterizes the conduct of millions of Christians? In too many homes Sunday may be a day free from regular employment but it is really just another day of the week. If we take a stroll through many neighborhoods we will see Christians painting their homes, washing the car, hanging storm windows or screens, carrying on various do-it-your­self projects. We know that shopping cen­ters and stores could not make a profit on Sunday if millions of Christians did not choose that day of the week to buy furni­ture, automobiles, appliances, groceries, and clothing. We profess to be shocked that the Soviets deliberately erased the re­ligious significance of Sunday in order to undermine the role of religion in the lives of the Russian people. Have we not done much the same thing in the United States and often in defiance of the laws designed to preserve the values of a day of rest?

Our Adventist friends remind us that the Sabbath was not given only to a band of desert people centuries ago but to each generation of men. God asks that all men set apart one day out of seven to His serv­ice as well as to the re-creation of the hu­man body and spirit. The author of man's nature knew that such a day was essential to man's spiritual, emotional, and physi­cal well being. We not only disobey His commandment but we flirt with personal disaster when we ignore the significance of the Sabbath. As Catholics we have often aimed at a minimal observance of the Lord's Day; we attend Mass and avoid servile work, broadly defined. Perhaps the Adventists can remind us that the creative and holy observance of the day demands more than this bare minimum.

Another area of high priority for our Adventist friends is that of the missions. This church sent its first foreign mission­ary to his assignment in 1874. He planted the faith in Switzerland and now four out of five Adventists live outside the United States. The Adventist takes seriously his personal duty to preach the gospel to all men and to aid those who are called to be full time missionaries.

Only a few countries, among them Af­ghanistan and Vatican City, lack a con­tingent of Adventist missionaries. Even tiny Pitcairn Island, settled by the Mutiny on the Bounty seamen, has been visited by the indefatigible missionaries and today all the descendants of the mutineers are faithful Seventh-day Adventists.

With funds received from the regular tithes of members the Adventist Church employs 57,000 men and women as mis­sionaries, teachers, printers, and medical personnel. This means that one Adventist out of every 31 is a full-time salaried em­ployee of the church. The president of the church receives about $100 a week and all other church workers, even physicians and college presidents, receive somewhat less.

Nor do the Adventists limit their evan­gelization to foreign countries. They offer free Bible correspondence courses which have already enrolled more than 3,500,000 students. Some Adventists follow the ex­ample of the Witnesses and Mormons and go door-to-door to interest householders in their doctrines.

Every media of communication has been employed to present the Adventist mes­sage. This church runs 43 publishing houses which print books, magazines, and tracts in 228 languages. The Voice of Prophecy program is carried in English and Spanish on 922 radio stations while Faith for Today is shown on 222 TV sta­tions.

Generally Adventists rear small families of two or three children so that relatively little increase in church membership comes from the birth rate (unlike Mormons). Nevertheless the church reports six times as many members today as were reported in the 1906 Federal census. Their evan­gelistic methods do win converts and their educational system cements the loyalty of Adventists to their church and minimizes leakage.

While the Mormons administer a huge welfare program they limit their assistance to fellow Mormons in good standing. The Adventists extend their help to people of any or no religious faith. They are usually on the spot whenever a disaster occurs—tornado, earthquake, flood, or explosion. The church owns mobile disaster units which can be dispatched to the scene. Within the community the Adventists often sponsor free first-aid classes. From two large warehouses on each coast the Adventist Church ships relief materials to help stricken areas overseas.

Each Adventist congregation organizes a Dorcas or welfare society whose mem­bers engage in activities somewhat like those undertaken by the St. Vincent de Paul Society and the Salvation Army. The Dorcas members meet regularly to repair clothing, collect food, and make bandages.

Adventists do not believe in killing even in war but they do not seek classification as conscientious objectors. Instead the church trains its young men at its own ex­pense to serve in the army medical services as noncombatants. One such Adventist soldier won the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery on Okinawa during the second world war.

We can see that the decision to become an Adventist would not be made lightly. The convert would be expected to tithe his income, attend Sabbath services every week, abstain from all unnecessary work on the Sabbath, forgo liquor and tobacco, educate his children in parochial schools, avoid dancing, card playing, and movies, give up cosmetics and jewelry, sever any connection with a secret society. Yet the Adventists seem to be purposeful, con­tented people who derive a deep satisfac­tion from their religion.

The Adventist Church traces its history to the excitement over the Second Coming generated by the preaching of William Miller in the early nineteenth century. Miller, a War of 1812 veteran, searched his Bible, especially the Books of Daniel and Revelation, and announced that the end of the world would come in 1843. Later he set the date on October 22, 1844. When that day passed without incident most of his following melted away.

One group of adventists in Washington, New Hampshire, continued to have faith in Miller's prediction. Eventually this group accepted the interpretation that the event on October 22, 1844, was not sup­posed to be the end of the visible world but the cleansing of the heavenly sanctuary by Jesus Christ. Never again would the Adventists set a specific date for the Second Coming but they remained convinced that history was drawing to a rapid close and that Christ would appear in the very near future.

To this basic doctrine of Adventism the tiny New England congregation added the belief that Christians should observe the Old Testament Sabbath rather than Sun­day which had been designated by an early pope. The role of the pope in chang­ing the observance has given the move­ment an anti-Catholic orientation. Many Adventists seem to consider the pope to be the Antichrist.

The movement grew and the Adventists were able to establish a national head­quarters in Battle Creek, Michigan. This headquarters was moved to Takoma Park, a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1903.

Pre-eminent in the SDA movement for nearly 70 years was Mrs. Ellen G. White, who is considered a prophetess by the Ad­ventists. She wrote 53 books and more than 4,500 articles, many of which were based on visions. The role of Mrs. White as a prophetess has disturbed Protestant fundamentalists who would otherwise agree with many Adventist positions, such as their literal interpretation of the Bible and sturdy opposition to the theory of evolution.

Many aspects of Adventism repel the Catholic or Protestant but we have seen that in certain areas—parochial education, church support, Sabbath observance, mis­sionary commitment, health reform, wel­fare activities—we may discover some things in Adventism which in an adapted form might enrich our lives as Catholics.

As we enter even more fully into the ecumenical age and abandon the defenses of the Counter Reformation we may find whole treasuries of examples in the lives and practices of our separated brethren. We should have the intelligence to dis­tinguish between unacceptable theological positions and those practices and customs which might be put to the service of the Church.