If the dissemination of information alone were sufficient to accomplish conversion, then Seventh-day Adventists, of all people, ought to be spiritual giants. With our numerous publishing ventures and worldwide network of literature evangelists, the Adventist Church is the best thing that has happened to paper since the government talked people into taking it for money.
The ability to articulate personal beliefs—to have a theological basis for a belief system and to understand its biblical focus—is essential. But knowledge alone is insufficient. Perhaps this has been the great lack in Adventist evangelism: an over-reliance on correct theology as the essential ingredient for attracting and incorporating individuals into the church without the appropriate regard for the sociological factors of friendship and involvement that must also accompany doctrinal understanding.
Adventists prize the truth. In fact, our love of theological correctness has been historically expressed with this very phrase: “the truth.” The phrase was code to describe the entire subcultural phenomena of the church. Our pride in theological accuracy and orthodoxy, combined with a distinctively conservative lifestyle, has often produced a closed society into which we ostensibly welcome new believers but, practically, make it difficult for them to join.
Dangers of communalism
Too often, Adventists have fostered communalism that John Stott describes as a “disastrous development.” He refers to it as “the rise of a Christian community which, instead of being scattered throughout the non-Christian community as salt and light, becomes isolated from it as a distinct cultural entity on its own.”1
This is evidenced by numerous Adventist communities that have sprung up around educational institutions, publishing houses, medical facilities, organizational headquarters, or other Adventist entities. Now all is not bad in these communities. There is much to recommend the pleasant atmosphere, the safe, secure environment, and the separation from “worldly influences” that such communities provide.
However, to the extent that such communities (whether Berrien Springs, Collegedale, Cooranbong, Salisbury Park, or Stanborough Park, etc., as present-day offspring of Battle Creek and Takoma Park) fail to integrate Adventist believers into the life and worldview of those to whom they minister, we have added to an isolationist “communalism” more than we have preserved piety. Or worse, we have actually come to equate piety with isolationism. As one wag said it, “Adventists are like fertilizer. Spread ’em around, they do a lot of good. Pile ’em together, they stink!”
Impious humor aside, however, the very survival of Adventist growth among indigenous Western population groups may depend upon our ability to break out of this communalism. Donald McGavran and Win Arn discuss the history of the Swedish Baptists in North America, who grew chiefl y among Swedes until the late 1930s when they grasped new vision and realized they were living in the midst of multitudes of unreached people who were not Swedish Americans. They resolved to cease concentrating on just those of Swedish background and to win individuals from all backgrounds. They grew from forty thousand in 1940 to more than one hundred thousand in 1976, and projected that they would double again within the next ten years.2
Adventist Church growth is changing rapidly. The movement was founded in the United States among an Anglo constituency and was for many years largely Anglo and, for the most part, middle-class. Speaking to Adventists about their church growth in North America, Carl George says, “your reports show Adventist growth going up year-by-year, but studying those reports carefully shows that your best growth is not occurring in the Anglo world, but among third world minorities. I don’t see anything wrong with that at all. I think it is wonderful that you are extending the gospel beyond the Anglo parts of society.”3
However, with regard to this issue of communalism, Carl George identifies problems that will prevent additional growth for Adventists: “nor should this plateauing of Anglo growth be viewed as a failure for the church. The white populations of North America have changed. Anglos, who showed the greatest potential for Adventist growth until 40 or 50 years ago, no longer present a recruitable target, at least by your current methodologies. Part of this can be attributed to lifestyle changes in America. Part can be attributed to the fact you segregate your children in Adventist schools, diminishing your contact with Gentiles.”4
At a time when first world church growth has virtually halted, we continue to “communalize” at our own peril. Furthermore, even if it were successful, “communalism” is not biblical. Stott correctly points out that the place for the converted individual is back in the world. “Conversion must not take the convert out of the world but rather send him back into it, the same person in the world, and yet a new person with new convictions and new standards.”5
Imagine! Godly people living in the midst of an ungodly environment. Salt, flavoring and preserving; light, illuminating and warming. That is discipleship!
1 John R. W. Stott, Christian Mission in the Modern World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1975), 119.
2 Donald A. McGavran and Winfi eld C. Arn, Ten Steps for Church Growth (NY: Harper and Row, 1977), 81.
3 Carl George, Empty Pews, Empty Streets (Columbia, MD: Columbia Union Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, 1988), 50, 51.
4 Ibid.
5 McGavran and Arn, 121.
