The Seventh-day Adventist Church has historically had a weak ecclesiology. This is due, in part at least, to the church’s eschatology, which made the church virtually irrelevant. Adventism arose as a movement, drawing attention to the nearness of Jesus return and preaching a message of personal preparedness for ‘the day of the Lord.’ The early Millerites had no intention of forming a new denomination.
Even after being expelled from their local Baptist, Methodist and other churches, these Adventists did not expect to organize a church. Questions of what it meant to be the people of God on this earth were far from their minds. Indeed, for nearly two decades after the Great Disappointment, the little band of Adventists resisted organization, claiming that organization was the first step toward becoming Babylon. Eventually, the need to sustain the work into the future made it necessary to organize and so, in 1863, the Seventh-day Adventist Church officially formed.
Still, ecclesiology did not register on the theological radar for over a century! It wasn’t until 1980 in the 3rd version of the Fundamental Beliefs that the church finally articulated it’s ecclesiology. Today our official statement reads as follows:
The church is the community of believers who confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. In continuity with the people of God in Old Testament times, we are called out from the world; and we join together for worship, for fellowship, for instruction in the Word, for the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, for service to all mankind, and for the worldwide proclamation of the gospel. The church is the bride for whom Christ died that He might sanctify and cleanse her. At His return in triumph, He will present her to Himself a glorious church, the faithful of all the ages, the purchase of His blood, not having spot or wrinkle, but holy and without blemish. (Gen. 12:3; Acts 7:38; Eph. 4:11-15; 3:8-11; Matt. 28:19, 20; 16:13-20; 18:18; Eph. 2:19-22; 1:22, 23; 5:23-27; Col. 1:17, 18; Jude 24.)
I share that brief history to say this: the Seventh-day Adventist Church has, in my view, backed reluctantly into its ecclesiology. We hoped we would never need one. Due to this reluctance, we have still not done serious ecclesiological work (one exception being Richard Rice's small volume, Believing, Behaving, Belonging. Yet I believe there are, implicit in the Adventist psyche, the seeds of a robust ecclesiology that can give renewed meaning to a new generation of Seventh-day Adventists who wish to be the people of God, giving tangible witness to the present and arriving reign of God.
An Incarnational Community – Being the Body of Christ
The official Adventist statement of belief begins by saying the church is “the community of believers.” The important word there is community. The Apostle Paul frequently refers to the church as the Body of Christ (ex. Rom 12:5; 1 Cor 12:12,27).
The literal body of Christ became known to human beings through the incarnation – “the word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:14, The Message). When the Father and the Son gave the Spirit to the church after Jesus’ ascension to heaven, the church became the incarnation of God on earth – the body of Christ.
The key implication for the question we are addressing in this series is that the church is the church only as a community. Individually I am not the church. As people enter the church through baptism, they die to self. They are joining themselves to a social reality that places togetherness and community above individualism.
This is especially important because of the radical individualism that characterizes Western culture. The church becomes a place where my individualism gets challenged. This is why churches that make their whole ministry about catering to people’s “felt needs” are in many ways not the church at all. This is a serious challenge to our ways of worship, theory of church growth, our reasons for meeting in “small groups,” and so much more.
An Alternative Community - the Church as Embodied Witness
The Seventh-day Adventist Church is not historically a mainstream movement. Deep in the Adventist psyche is a sense that we are different. Some have even observed a sort of inferiority or martyr complex. We’re not like other churches. We’re not Catholic. We’re not like those “liberal churches.” We’re also not Pentecostal and many are uncomfortable with being labeled Evangelical. We worship on a different day, we eat different food. We have been patently sectarian in almost every way.
While many of us (myself included) have attempted to throw off the stricture of sectarian identity in recent years, I have come to realize that this “differentness” is a resource.
One theological imagination about the church is that, in the words of Peter, we are a “peculiar people.”
But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light” (1 Peter 2:9, KJV).
The central task of the church is “witness” – or in the Greek, marturia. Part of being witnesses is to demonstrate, in our communal life, what the kingdom is like. The body of Christ is called to be a demonstration – an embodied witness – of the loving reign of God. This leads many theologians, like Stanley Hauerwas, to assert that the number one thing the church can do to give witness to the gospel of the kingdom is to be the church. When the church is focused on being the church – and not trying to be a corporation or an amusement park or something else – the world is able to see what God has in mind of the whole world. In this way, the church is a foretaste of the coming kingdom.
What kind of embodied witness does scripture call for? The New Testament is loaded with these narratives and mandates. The church witnesses to the forgiveness of God by being a reconciling community; a community that knows how to receive and extend God’s forgiveness. The church witnesses to the grace and hospitality of God by receiving strangers and extending God’s hospitality to ‘the other.’ The church embodies God’s future reign of peace and justice by being agents of peace and justice in the world today. The church gives demonstrable witness to God’s intention to heal all creation by being agents of healing and wholeness in our communities, caring for the environment and bringing God’s healing to the point of the world’s greatest pain.
We are also called to give witness in ways that are even more “alternative” and counter to the prevailing culture. It is not enough for the church to witness to God’s kingdom by the things it embraces. We are also called to the more difficult task of bearing witness through resistance.
There are some things that are just inconsistent with the gospel of the kingdom. For example – and here again, Adventists are uniquely positioned to be this embodied witness – followers of the Way of Jesus cannot embrace our world’s way of violence. Jesus was a person of uncompromising peace. He was a pacifist. Our Adventist forebears understood this. And so we are called to give witness to God’s reign of peace by resisting war and other forms of violence and exploitation.
The calling of the church is always unique to time and place. Our time is a time of globalization and the near deification of free markets. This has led, culturally, to a moment in time when virtually everything, including human relationships, have been turned into objects and commodities. It is my feeling that the gospel requires the church to be imaginative about the way it lives its life in the midst of this kind of global capitalistic empire. Too many Christians, and churches, drink far too uncritically from the cultural well of capitalism without asking some basic questions about what it means to be God’s peculiar people.
I don’t know all the ways that this plays out but I’m pretty sure it means that churches that are serious about witness must question the unrestrained consumption that characterizes our society. We have to question our energy consumption. We need to question our living patterns that have placed us in gated-communities, far from our places of work and worship, which require long commutes which fragment our lives and destroy the environment.
So, being an alternative community is about both embrace of certain ways of being in the world and well as resistance to the ways the world attempts to “force us into its mold.” Sabbath can help us learn to resist and “unplug” from these destructive patterns of life.
In all these ways – and many more – the church is designed to be an embodied witness to the reign of God. This is about more than simply being social activists. It is also about more than proclaiming a reduced gospel of “saving souls.” No one but the church can do this work. Only by taking seriously the question of what it means to be the people of God in a place can the church move past narrow and reduced forms of witness, to a fully rounded demonstration of God’s future.
An Eschatological Community – Witnessing to the Telos of God
And speaking of God's future, an Adventist theology of the church must include an understanding of what it means to be an eschatological community. From our initial days as a people, Adventists have had their eyes on God’s horizon. We are a people oriented toward the future of God and how God’s future is approaching us in the present.
As such, our sense of what it means to be the church cannot be short-sighted. This is where our embodiment of God’s kingdom goes beyond mere social activism. Our witness is pointed forward to God’s ultimate future, which is now only seen “through a glass darkly.” As one theologian friend of mine is fond of saying, “Jesus said the kingdom of God is at hand, not in hand.” Some churches have acted as though the kingdom of God was in hand – that is, they were bringing the kingdom of God into being. Other churches have behaved as though the kingdom were not even at hand, but something far in the future and unrelated to life today. Jesus teaches us that the kingdom, while not yet in hand, is certainly at hand. This is what makes our Christian witness unique and important.
Adventists are perfectly positioned to speak of the church as an eschatological community, oriented toward the telos – the purposes – of God. The church is always doing many things at once: forming people in the narrative of God through worship and other practices, so that they can witness to what God is up to in the world now and ultimately what God has in mind for the whole world in the future.
Being a Missional Church
What I have shared is just the tip of the iceberg about the church. While I have not used the language of “missional church” in this essay until now, all that I have said is about what it means to be a missional church.
I will get one more stab at some of these themes in a few days when I write on the doctrine of Baptism. More could also be said about the church as politics, the church as a community of practice, the importance of Eucharist and what it means to be a Eucharistic community, and so much more.
For now, my argument is that the church is essential. We cannot carry out God mission in the world without the church! After all, it is "His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of
God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly
realms, according to his eternal purpose which he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Eph 3:9-11).
About two weeks ago I wrote a piece on the doctrine of the church. In that piece I argued that the church is an alternative community – a distinct polis – called together (ekklesia) by Christ and sent to be witnesses to the reign of God.
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