Hi, I Love My Church

I am a third generation Seventh-day Adventist on both sides of my family. I have probably eaten more haystacks on a Saturday afternoon than anyone else I know. I still have the pathfinder pledge and law memorized years later and I don’t feel “prepared” for sabbath if my clothes are ironed and the house cleaned Friday afternoon, all while listening to the heritage singers sing “heaven is for me”. Even now as an adult my upbringing within the SDA framework has left an imprint upon me that I feel would be impossible to erase even if I wanted to. The cultural identity that comes with calling yourself a “Sabbath keeper” is one I have been proud of, even when it’s a little out of touch with the current cultural climate. And thats just it. From its inception, Seventh-day Adventism has been ahead of most trends within Christendom. Anything from the second coming of Jesus, the temperance movement, abolition of slavery, and the topic of religious freedom, etc…..Many people would argue that it was the Seventh-day Adventist church that set the standard for other denominations to follow. Others would cry that the SDA church hasn’t lifted the standard high enough at all while others preach that the church needs to be more relaxed on many of our key distinctive doctrines. Is the SDA church the end all beat all church, the standard for other denominations? Or have we been left behind from a cultural standpoint?

I wish I could answer these questions definitively but the reality is that I can’t. The reason being is that the church is made of up thousand of people just like me. It is also made up of thousands of other who are not like me at all and can’t relate to any of my upbringing and yet they are also Seventh-day Adventists. I cannot make a bold statement about my church when I do not even understand half of it culturally. There are more SDA churches in the worldwide than McDonald’s, Pizza Huts and Subways combined. That is an incredible amount of churches. We have over 22 million members with the largest amount being within east central Africa. We have over 9,000 schools, almost 2,000 hospitals, and 57 publishing houses. And even though we all might agree on a rather informal creed that the outside world insists on holding us to, we the actual members of the SDA church are unique and different in every way.

As I have grown into adulthood I have left behind many of the traditions I was taught that I no longer find usual for me. I also find myself clinging to the way I was raised, especially in times of turmoil and chaos. Why? Why can we define what makes us an SDA so clearly in our own minds but when we try to explain it we often times realize we are simply reciting our own memories and upbringing. We hear people argue against our “beliefs” and we all know they are wrong and why yet they are quoting SDA sources.

Maybe I am rambling a little bit here and maybe my feelings are just my own and you cannot really relate at all. But I feel like that is probably not the case. And so while I do not have the answers and I definitely do not think Adventism does either, I know that my church, our church is here for a reason. And despite the sometimes blatant imperfections there is so much beauty in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.

That’s why I love it.