Church or Movement? Advent Christians Must Decide
In my earlier article, A Short History of the Advent Christian Search for Structure, I made the following observation:
You can only understand the Advent Christian denomination if you understand that it was a movement that formed a denomination to advance its publication interests as a movement[…]The education of pastors, the formation of ecclesial structures, simply could not get the time of the day - they believed the day of Christ’s return was chronologically imminent. This and the associated adventual truths demanded publication above all else.
Going a step further, it is my belief that the denomination has been engaged in a tug-of-war from its founding, caught between acting as a movement versus acting as a church. In years past this was exposed by the pre-occupation with publications. This aspect has subsided and our national ministries are giving the sort of attention to leadership development, church planting, and other areas that one would expect would concern a church. Nevertheless, a certain tension persists, indicating that this tug-of-war remains.
Successful movements build a broad coalition centered by a common cause. Insofar as the common cause remains the same and primary, people with differing convictions in other areas are welcomed all the same. Other concerns are eclipsed by whatever is central to the movement. In the case of the Second Advent movement, the common cause was alerting others to Christ’s soon return. Advent Christians eventually grafted conditionalism and belief in the sleep of the dead to that cause. Apart from some select practical matters that apparently required decision in forming and developing the denomination (church government; ordinances; conscientious objection to war), we find no other theological positions staked out. This can be partially explained by Advent Christian noncreedalism, ‘no creed but the Bible’, but it also matches neatly with the priorities of a movement. If you want a broad coalition, you don’t narrow the field with further theological qualifications.
This explains how the Advent Christian General Conference has come to be a ‘big tent’ denomination in which both Calvinists and Arminians, Complementarians and Egalitarians, and adherents of various other doctrinal opposites can all call themselves Advent Christians. The tent was so big that even non-Trinitarians could be called Advent Christians until 2017 with the passage of the Advent Christian Statement of Faith.[1] As far as their remaining status within the denomination goes, I heartily endorse the appeal that Lou Going recently offered here.
The origins of this doctrinal development could be explained in various ways, but one simple explanation is that the denomination has finally begun grappling with its identity. As long as the denomination has retained its movement mindset it has felt little compulsion to address doctrines beyond the adventist-conditionalist cause, perhaps with the exception of the battle over the Bible in the 60s. The denominational decline in available pastoral leadership, the closing of churches, the tightening of ministry funds, all these practical concerns have fueled scrutiny of our identity. Such matters are the concerns of the Church, not a movement. As we take on water it has become obviously imperative that we get our priorities straight.
As I have said, this realization has been reflected lately in the operations of ACGC’s ministries, but the decline has still continued. I have already pointed out my structural concerns and so in addition to this I must raise doctrinal concerns relative to this movement-church tension. I don’t know any Advent Christian church that bars Christians from church membership who disagree with our distinctives. At Rockland Community Church, we require that candidates agree with the Statement of Faith and simply review the Advent Christian distinctives. Our pastors and churches intuitively recognize that these secondary doctrines do not set the boundaries of the Body of Christ. They also recognize that it would be incoherent to elevate these doctrines to prime importance when we are utterly apathetic about so many other areas of secondary doctrine.
Loosening our grip on some of our distinctives would only amount to extinction if we are a movement, not a church. Movements must be steadfast in maintaining their niche points of concern, but churches need not. If Rethinking Hell shifted to a position neutrality on the question annihilation, we would certainly wonder what the point of the organization would be henceforth. If the Advent Christian church shifted to positions of neutrality on certain secondary doctrines we would remain the church no matter the degree to which we redefine Advent Christian identity.
More than our distinctiveness, we should be concerned about the health of our churches. If it remains our conviction that we can tolerate secondary differences, that we can be a big tent denomination, then we should go all the way. The hard reality is that we need outsiders to strengthen our leadership – we can’t raise up enough leaders from within in the short term. As it stands, the Declaration of Principles is aggressively sifting out those potential leaders, the very same sort of people we welcome into the membership of our local churches. As it stands, there is no clear connection between the Declaration of Principles and the mission of our churches because each have different priorities. The DOP reflects the priorities of a movement; our churches are just struggling to be churches.
In closing, two things:
1. I hope my words here will prompt you step back and ask, “What are we really doing here?” I love our history and distinctive doctrines, but I love our churches and their Gospel work more. I believe we can maintain continuity with our past while taking ownership of the present.
2. I’m not at all suggesting dispatching with distinctives and am not so naïve as to think we can include Christians of every stripe in our leadership – that would be altogether impractical and unproductive. I am suggesting that we need to re-articulate our distinctives and that consistency (in fact adventual consistency) would suggest that we should be more permissive of differences in secondary areas. Regarding this, I will offer more specifics in a follow-up article.
Forthcoming Article:
An Outline for Renovating Advent Christian Distinctives
[1] I mean here “definitionally” Advent Christian; it must be acknowledged that a small percentage of non-Trinitarians remain in the Advent Christian body despite their disagreement with the Statement of Faith.
