Advent Christian, the Mountains can be Moved
The 2023 ACGC Triennial Convention was hosted at Ridgecrest Conference Center in North Carolina.
The 2023 ACGC Triennial Convention came and went last week at Ridgecrest Conference Center. Important business transpired in that time. The delegate body endorsed the Nashville Statement, but with an added caveat in the ACGC preamble that this does not include an endorsement of the CBMW organization. A procedure for amending the Statement of Faith and Declaration of Principles was adopted as proposed. Added to these was the passage of a Resolution on Sexual Abuse (see here).
Break-out sessions on International Missions, Church Planting, Leadership Development, Pastor Care, and Sexual Abuse were all very engaging. As a member of the panel discussion on restructuring the denomination, I was very pleased by our discourse and encouraged by the comments before and after that indicated real interest in exploring the possibilities of revitalizing our denominational forms. Despite earnest efforts, a motion to create a task force was unable to make it to the floor. Even so, I remain hopeful that such a task force will be formed given the popular interest in this study and the pressing need to consider all of our options.
More than all this, I was encouraged by the many conversations I had in all the in-between times. They reflected a passion for the Gospel and a fervent desire for the renewal of Advent Christian identity.
All well and good. And yet, walking away from such a convention, one is easily crushed by the immensity of the task before us. How can we replace all our retiring pastors? How can we hope to be a church planting denomination when we’ve hardly planted any? How can we zealously act as one body when we don’t seem to know who we are? It all seems impossible.
Perhaps it is improbable, but I want to tell you - with God it is possible. The disciples were astonished when Jesus cursed a fig tree and it quickly withered away. In Matthew 21:21-22 he says to them,
Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what was done to the fig tree, but even if you tell this mountain, "Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will be done. And if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.” [CSB]
The disciples will not be troubled by a fig tree nor be stopped by any mountain. Only one thing stands in question - will they have faith? By faith, the valleys are raised and the mountains made low. By faith, an old man and his aged wife left home and hearth for a land they did not know to give birth to a nation that would be their own. Not by their power, nor the apostles by theirs, but by the power of God.
Will Advent Christians have faith? If we will, I believe God will cast our mountains into the sea. Faith is not mere sentiment, nor should it be confused with hope. Faith is putting your hand to the plow and not looking back; faith is leaving Ur for the promised land. Faith acts.
I have seen the weakness of Advent Christian faith. Cynicism saps efforts to do anything that seems beyond our strength. And so we grow progressively weaker because we look only to human strength rather than the strength that God supplies.
Faith will lead us to prayer - utter dependence upon the grace only God can give. Faith will lead us to invest in every way in planting churches and raising leaders. Faith will lead us to take our Second Advent hope seriously and act with missional urgency in the United States and across the world.
Faith is not optimism. Faith is just taking God at his Word. Let us take Jesus Christ at his Word and toss some mountains.
