Shifting perspectives; eschatological challenges

The world is reshaping—constantly. This has become an unrelenting reality for most of us. While we fervently wish that we could slow it down, it is likely instead to speed up. Change can be stimulating, exciting, and by all means necessary, but, as many have observed, in our time it seems to have become the only constant.

While our thinking, our institutions, and our very humanity used to remain unaltered long enough to provide us with trustworthy points of reference, a sense of moral direction, and a settled identity, now they regularly morph into shapes and sizes that may be almost unrecognizable. And the resulting changes are so far-reaching that, painfully, our world just doesn't feel as secure as it used to. The things that once were staunch and stable just aren't anymore, and we have come to instinctively suspect many of them.

Ravi Zacharias speaks of our world as congested with "historical drifts," "factors of influence," and of course, "pluralism." He describes how the omnipresence of these in many cultures has "reconstituted" our moral environment, and, in fact, ourselves. The global roaming and mixing of people has inevitably spawned all kinds of novel ways of viewing reality, one another, and our humanity.

On the demographic side, Zacharias points to the United States as having absorbed 8.6 million immigrants during the 1980s, saying by way of illustration that during that decade, 11 percent of those multitudes specified Los Angeles as their ultimate destination. At the same time, he quotes a popular local political figure who quipped, "Where else but in Los Angeles can you find a fast-food out let where a Korean is selling kosher tacos?"¹

It is not unfitting or difficult for us to vault from Los Angeles to our churches, many of which could have the same kinds of things said about them. The challenge for us ministers comes, of course, when the new factors of influence and interaction, and the resulting pluralism do not only have social, political, cultural, or ethnic manifestations, but when to those influences are added issues of basic faith, doctrine, and essential Christian morality. And all the shifting and displacement climaxes with the misplacement of those formerly unquestioned values and legacies which were so much a part of a Christian faith. Traditionally the faith has been crafted through centuries dominated by more distinctly spiritual outlooks and less by rationalistic-materialistic worldviews.

For pastors, the epicenter of the resulting pressure lies in the fact that these clashing but interactive influences have tended to cause serious shifts at the heart of our basic religious outlook, and more significantly, in the recesses of our deepest faith commitments and convictions.

In other words, the significant challenge to pastors is more spiritual than it is merely intellectual, philosophical, or even theological. It is not so much a matter of faith versus science as it is a matter of transcendent, spiritual certitude versus relativistic, postmodern materialism.

But perhaps the most challenging question is, How much of this kind of diversion or drift has occurred in the pastoral soul? What about the set of my spiritual sails, or the state of your deep-seated convictions?

What must prod us unceremoniously into internalized, reformative action is the realization that today our role demands a high degree of certitude (unspoiled by that pedantic, know-it-all posture that stands first in line in repulsing our fellow humans!). The world we live in cries out, despite our understandable questions, for a soundly based Christian and Seventh-day Adventist sense of identity and above all, for first-hand divine direction.

This is ours to seek, even while we face the extraordinarily complex issues of our time. It is ours to find before we cave in under the weight of the presumptions of a so-called brave, new, secularized world.

Is it too much to say that sorting through these kinds of challenges is important to the eschatological role of the Adventist minister? If so, then let's thank God, for it throws us back into the hands of our Lord in a way that we may not yet have known.

As we uninhibitedly open ourselves to God, He will use the challenge of shifting perspectives to firmly shepherd us into the very kind of experience with Him that we must have in order to successfully wade through the final swellings of Jordan. Thus we will be qualified to lead our people, hand in hand, to the far side of the river where lies the Promised Land.