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COLLEEN TINKER
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the incorporation of the Seventh-day Adventist church. In honor of this event, General Conference president Ted Wilson addressed the members of the world-wide organization’s executive committee on Sabbath, April 13, at the Seventh-day Adventist Tabernacle in Battle Creek, Michigan, the city where Adventists officially incorporated.
In his sermon Wilson emphasized that they “should have been home by now,” and asked why they should celebrate any more anniversaries when “we could be in heaven”. He further asked the members if they had been “as faithful to God’s commands and counsels as they might have been.”
Moreover, Wilson reminded the congregation that God had called them to a unique message and mission, and he asked them how long they, like unfaithful Israel, would keep breaking their promises to God.
After chiding members for failing to be faithful in carrying out the work of declaring the Adventist gospel—the Three Angels’ Messages—to the whole world so the end could come, he challenged them to proclaim those messages, to “reap the results from The Great Controversy Project”, and to commit to enter New York and other cities with their new “mission to the Cities” project. Moreover, he reminded them that members should be utilizing fully the “right arm of the Gospel,” the organization’s comprehensive health message.
Wilson reminded his flock that the Seventh-day Adventist church is “uniquely intended for this movement”, and its special message will not pass to another group. “You and I are part of the final church God has prepared.”
Cause of the guilt
We all learned the story that laid the foundation for Wilson’s challenge: William Miller predicted that Jesus would return to earth in 1843. When that date failed to produce the second coming, the Millerites recalculated and produced a new date: October 22, 1844. Many of the Millerites lost their crops and sold their household goods. They believed that they would be in heaven when the sun rose on October 23, and they let everything go.
Many of those disappointed Millerites repented and returned to their churches. There were a few, however, who refused to believe they could have been wrong in spite of Jesus’ clear statements that no one could know the day nor the hour of His return (Mk. 13:32-37). They persisted in trying to find a way to explain that October 22, 1844, was a valid date, and they came up with what the late Walter Martin termed “a poor face-saving technique” to explain its significance: the investigative judgment.
Ellen White’s visions confirmed the investigative judgment scenario, and the founding Adventists led by James White and Joseph Bates, with Ellen White giving prophetic guidance to them as they tried to understand Scripture, pounded out the framework of Seventh-day Adventist doctrine. In May, 1863, in Battle Creek, Michigan, they formally incorporated as the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
After the organization’s formal incorporation, Ellen White continued to deliver testimonies to the Adventist flock reminding them that if they had done their duty, Jesus would have returned long before. Ted Wilson’s chiding this spring is not simply his own idea. He is delivering the message Ellen White left as her legacy to Adventists.
For example, She wrote in The Desire of Ages, pp. 633-34, “By giving the gospel to the world it is in our power to hasten our Lord’s return. We are not only to look for but to hasten the coming of the day of God…Had the church of Christ done her appointed work as the Lord ordained, the whole world would before this have been warned, and the Lord Jesus would have come to our earth in power and great glory.”
In 1900 she put guilt-inducing pressure on her flock with these words: “Christ is waiting with longing desire for the manifestation of Himself in His church. When the character of Christ shall be perfectly reproduced in His people, then He will come to claim them as His own” (Christ’s Object Lessons, p. 69).
Three years later she wrote in the General Conference Bulletin, dated March 30, 1903, “I know that if the people of God had preserved a living connection with Him, if they had obeyed His Word, they would today be in the heavenly Canaan.”
The core of Adventist guilt, however, is built on the unbiblical idea that we humans help to usher in Christ’s return. In reality, that day is already fixed. Jesus stated clearly that it is a day known only to the Father (Mk. 13:32), but it is “that day”, the “Day of the Lord” of which the prophets and apostles spoke throughout both the Old and the New Testaments. We cannot hurry or hinder the Lord.
Adventism’s response
Ted Wilson is doing exactly what Ellen White would have wanted him to do. He is organizing a multi-faceted evangelistic plan that incorporates the whole Adventist “world church”. He is enlisting their energy first to blanket the world with 166,600,000 copies of the book which, Wilson is fond of reminding his flock, Ellen White most wanted Adventists to distribute: The Great Controversy. The year 2012, therefore, was designated “the year of the Great Controversy”. This book, translated into all the major world languages, edited, and often retitled The Great Hope, was mailed or otherwise delivered by local churches, conferences, and individuals to non-members around the world.
The distribution of Ellen White’s flagship book paved the way for the 2013 initiative: NY13. This initiative launches a worldwide program which will be pursued over the next several years. NY13 includes more than 160 evangelistic outreach meetings in New York City. Concurrently, the Adventist organization held an International Field School of Evangelism at the Luso Brazilian Adventist Church in Corona, New York, during June.
According to a news story released on June 18, 2013, by the Adventist News Network (ANN), “The NY13 initiative is the first in the 'Mission to the Cities’ campaign, which was unveiled in 2011 by Adventist Church President Ted N. C. Wilson. This year’s outreach meetings and training in New York City are the basis for future outreach campaigns worldwide.”
According to Robert Costa, associate secretary of the Adventist Church’s Ministerial Association and the coordinator of this program, “We’re learning how to reach people in cities in ways that are sensitive to their cultural context. The goal is to equip leaders with tools to launch comprehensive evangelism initiatives in their own territories.”
This urban evangelism includes “several months of community service and involvement by church members, as well as follow-up work.” In fact, the evangelism meetings currently ongoing in New York are following the plan taught in the Field School; the meetings follow “months of several comprehensive outreach events, including prayer ministries, community service and health education events,” says the ANN press release.
Jerry Page, secretary of the Adventist’s Ministerial Association, said this “is a marathon of compassion that must have an ongoing and sustained presence in the cities, and must continue beyond 2013.”
Implications
As they commemorate their 150th anniversary, Seventh-day Adventists are confronted by their corporate failure to complete their mission reiterated over and over by their prophet Ellen White: to finish the work so Jesus can come.
As a true Adventist, Ted Wilson is consistent in scolding his flock for still being here to celebrate 150 years of existence. He knows that Adventists are losing their sense of urgency; they’re beginning to question when or if Jesus’ soon return will happen. So he’s reminding them what “inspiration” has told them: Jesus will return. There will be no other last day remnant church or message. Adventism is the new Israel. They have disobeyed and are still wandering in the figurative wilderness, but the day is coming when the Sunday law will be passed, and the Adventists will finally be silenced by religious persecution.
Wilson’s message is urgent. Adventists should feel embarrassed by their corporate failure to finish the work. Jesus has not yet returned because they, Seventh-day Adventists, have failed to preach the Three Angels’ Messages to all the world and they have thus far failed to reproduce the character of Christ—perfect law-keeping—so Jesus can return.
Wilson assures his flock that the General Conference itself will not be “decentralized, neutralized, or sidelined”—in spite of many Adventists’ deviation from proclaiming historic Adventism. He will not let them off the hook; they have one reason to exist: to finish the work so Jesus will come back. They have prevented His return, and only they can make it happen. Ellen White summed up this Adventist dilemma in 1909 when she wrote, “If every soldier of Christ had done his duty, if every watchman on the walls of Zion had given the trumpet a certain sound, the world might ere this have heard the message of warning. But the work is years behind. While men have slept, Satan has stolen a march upon us” (Testimonies for the Church, vol. 9, p. 29).
The groundbreaking NY13 initiative is just a harbinger of what the Adventist organization plans for the next few years. They are taking their evangelism programs and their evangelism field schools on the road. They are raising up a generation of lay people who will be taught how to enter their communities with health screenings, vegetarian cooking schools, and various community service projects as means of recruiting people to come to the meetings where they will hear and receive Adventist “truth”.
Adventism is turning its 150th commemoration of its corporate failure to achieve its mission into the launch of a worldwide initiative to make more members. No matter what progressive Adventists may say, nothing has changed. Adventism is still the self-proclaimed remnant church of Bible prophecy, and Ellen White is still at the helm.
Ted Wilson is doing exactly what she would have wanted. †
Sources
http://www.adventistreview.org/issue.php?id=6222&action=print
http://news.adventist.org/archive/articles/2013/06/18/ny13s-evangelism-school-offers-methods-to-reach-other-major-cities
Copyright 2013 Life Assurance Ministries, Inc., Casa Grande, Arizona, USA. All rights reserved. Revised July 10, 2013. Contact email: proclamation@gmail.com
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VOLUME 14, ISSUE 2