Adventist History

[Gregory Matthews]

Earlier this month, the General Conference held a conference on Adventist History.  The following extensive article reports on that conference.  The article covers so many aspects of that conference that I cannot summarize them.   But, I  often find them to both be interesting and previously unknown to me.

See:

https://spectrummagazine.org/article/2018/01/11/situating-adventist-history-conference-report-day-2

 

[Gregory Matthews]

The preceding post reports on the 2nd day of the conference.  For a report on the 1st day of the conference see:

https://spectrummagazine.org/article/2018/01/09/situating-adventist-history-conference-report-day-1

 

[debbym]

In these readings i see highlighted the humanity of Adventists, and how we are subject to the socio/political/religious forces, along with everyone else, and how this is able to connect us to our communities for witnessing, but also can play us and distract us and dilute our walk with God and our call to present Christ as our all in all.

We sustain such great losses to the power of our witness when we yield to the voices of those following other gods, within the church our outside of the church.  We so easily lose our way and show our divided loyalties to Christ.

On one hand it seems we have invented much of our own culture, and a counter culture identity, as seen in SDA mecca's.  And we have measure ourselves as to how good we have become Adventist.  The moment we engage in this, our witness is shadowed.  There is no Salvation in attaining Adventist holiness, or in  the success of our institutions, or in attaining a holiness in the world of other various religious practices.

Like with Saul we can delineate each step of the development of various problems, but that only shows that whatever is in us will bloom and grow into destruction, when we do not follow Christ.  There is no great  insight as to what particular forces worked successfully in his history,  human pride, presumption, and self-sufficiency  can and will express in literally billions of ways.

I am amazed to see how God blesses us inspite of everything we are, and in spite of our deep errors and weaknesses to make His love and power to save known.