intersections

Update and coverage of my transition

I want to say a very hearty thank you to everyone who has written such kind words of support for me and my family. Your confidence in me and what we have been working to accomplish in Hollywood gives me strength when mine in failing. It's been a difficult time but we recognize that God is leading and trust God to show us the next open door. Thank you for keep us and the my beloved Hollywood Adventist Church in your prayers.

In case you have missed it and are interested in reading, there have been several articles posted about this online in the past few days.

Spectrum Blog

A Great Sabbath at Hollywood, by Alexander Carpenter

Conference and Ryan Bell Share Statements on Resignation, by Bonnie Dwyer

GLAAD

Evangelical Pastor Fired for Supporting Marriage Equality and LGBT Inclusion

Adventist Today

Hollywood Pastor Fired for Being Too Innovative, by Monte Sahlin

 

Please keep in mind that each article is written from the particular perspective of the author and the news outlet and represents part of the story. It is important for everyone to understand that there were multiple reasons for the conference to ask me to resign.

Related articles

Evangelical Pastor Fired for Supporting Marriage Equality and LGBT Inclusion

An open letter to friends and church family

Eight years ago my family and I moved to Hollywood to begin what has become the most rewarding and inspiring chapter of our lives. Our family has thrived in this urban, spiritual community commited to peace, love and justice.

Sadly, this phase of this experiment is coming to an end. This Sabbath will be my last Sabbath as the Pastor of the Hollywood Adventist Church. Hours and hours of conversations have led to this point but here is the short version.

Some of the leadership decisions I have made have led the Southern California Conference administration to the conclusion that they cannot trust me to lead this church as a Seventh-day Adventist Church. They have graciously acknowledged my creativity and passion for the community we serve. They have acknowledged that the church is known in the community for its good work whereas before it was less known. But they feel that my leadership has led our church outside the accepted framework of Seventh-day Adventism. We have not been able come to an understanding about these things and so my denominational employment will end on or about April 1, 2013.

This turn of events breaks my heart. I have served the Seventh-day Adventist Church imperfectly for 19 years. It is the only thing I have done since graduating with my Bachelors Degree from Weimar College when I was 22 years old. But sometimes people grow in ways that are incompatible with the institutions they have been a part of.

I am beyond grateful to have served the Hollywood Adventist Church for the past 8 years. We have built an authentic community which is diverse in every way: young and older...and now children!, multi-ethnic, poor and middle-class, gay and straight, artists, business people, teachers and civic servants. 

While I will be leaving paid pastoral ministry, I am not angry with the Seventh-day Adventist Church. This denomination has given me my whole career and most of my education. I have been able to do the things I have done because the church has supported me. For that I remain grateful. I wish her only the best and I believe that there are many signs of hope within the denomination including the advances in Women's Ordination. At the same time there are signs of calcification and retrenching that cause me deep concern.

My future is not yet clear, but I am hopeful and confident in God's leadership. Please keep my family and me in your prayers as we make this difficult transition. We have no plans to move at this point, so we will be in Los Angeles for the foreseeable future.

Do not lose faith. And when you do, cling to hope. And when hope fades, resort to love.

Now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. —1 Cor 13:13

Born in failure

Cross-posted from the Hollywood Adventist Church website.

Today is Friday, October 22, 2010.

That's 166 years since the same date in 1844 when groups of Millerites expected Jesus to return to earth on that day to set up his eternal kingdom. In the aftermath of that disappointment a core of those devastated believers clung to their hope of the soon return of Jesus and end of sin and suffering. From the pain and turmoil of those early days the Seventh-day Adventist Church was born. I've always found it interesting that our church's founders are among those "crazy" people who actually predicted the day of Jesus' return. In spite of that, I grew up with a kind of reverence for those early pioneers. William Miller's Bible study method was even praised and taught to me, in spite of the fact that it got him into so much trouble. Despite the ignominy of the event, Adventists have clung to this founding narrative.

At the same time we have tried to minimize the embarrassment. We have, in so many words, said, "We weren't really wrong, exactly. We were just mistaken." At least that's how I remember hearing the story told as a child and a student going through Adventist schools. What is it about religious people that prevents them from admitting to being wrong? Why have we made being right a spiritual value? Throughout history, doing right is a virtue, but not necessarily being right. But somehow, since the Enlightenment, we have elevated being right over doing right. In fact, doing right can often mean admitting that we haven't been right.

So there is a kind of ironic humor, it seems to me, in the fact that the church that believes itself to be the remnant church of Bible prophecy was born out of the embarrassment of being completely wrong in their interpretation of the Bible. I know, someone will still say, "They weren't really wrong, they were just mistaken." Sure. I see that you're trying very hard to not be wrong. But think about it. Utter failure & weakness. Isn't this the perfect place to start a new movement of God's Spirit?!

But such a movement's success will depend on learning to stay there. What if being God's remnant somehow required us to start with this crazy episode of being radically, profoundly wrong? What if the core lessons we needed as God started a new movement of His Spirit at the tail end of the Second Great Awakening, were the lessons of humility and agility. Perhaps God values theological agility over theological stability. Perhaps God values humility over perfection. Perhaps perfection is found in humility. Perhaps God values doing right over being right.

It seems to me that at this time in our church's history we could use to relearn these lessons of humility and agility. As the edges of our denomination seem to be hardening, let create a faithful Adventist witness which remembers our founding narratives and learns afresh that the greatest moments of hope arise from the deepest disappointments. If we listen we can  hear the footsteps of God's coming amid the noise of our apparent failure.

Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!

Meet me in Atlanta

I leave for Atlanta on Sunday, June 20 for the Innovative Impact conference and then the Adventist General Conference Session. Here's where I'll be. I'd love to meet you if I haven't have that chance yet.

June 20 - 22
Innovative Impact - on Monday evening there will be a screening of Stained Glass: Hollywood Blvd, after which I'll be speaking and fielding questions about the film and our church. Hope you can make it!

June 23 - 29
Find me at the "Big Tent Adventism" booth where I'll be helping out with Spectrum/Association of Adventist Forums and also promoting New Name Pictures. Come by and get a DVD of our latest work and learn more about New Name Pictures.

See you in Atlanta!

Mass Mailing the Gospel?

The gospel is not mainly a 'good idea' and anytime we claim we can reduce it down to a pamphlet we end up...well, reducing it. But the gospel that Jesus lived, and then died for, is irreducible in that sense. It must be lived out in community. By claiming the gospel can be mass mailed we are weakening the power of the gospel in our time. I don't want to be a part of that.

The fact remains that Jesus calls us to get up off the couch and lay down our lives for people. If the gospel could be mass mailed, don't you think God would have avoided risking his "one and only Son"? The nature of the truth of God's good news required Jesus to be incarnate among us. Why would it be any different now?

In case you missed it, I posted an article with this title on the Spectrum Blog last week. The statement above is part of a comment I added today after quite a few commenters misunderstood my point.

Here's the piece in its entirety, but I'd encourage you to also join the conversation over at Spectrum.

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This morning I received an email from Remnant Publications. I don't usually pay attention to these emails but this one really caught my eye. The subject line reads, "Evangelilsm [sic] by Mass Mailing." My first thought was, "This is a joke...an eye-grabbing headline to force me to look deeper only to discover the author of the email reminding us that, of course, we cannot do evangelism by mass mailing."

It did grab my eye, but when I looked deeper it quickly became clear the author is not jesting. The headline inside the email reads, "Hit the streets with soul-saving literature without leaving the comfort of your own home!" (See the email here)

Adventism I can believe in

(Crossposted at the Spectrum Blog)

Seventh-day Adventists are perennially concerned about identity. Who are we? What do we believe? Who gets to decide? Our anti-creedal position stands over against our ever-expanding list of Fundamental Beliefs; our belief in 'progressive revelation' over against our claim to have the truth.

I am one that believes this dialectic tension is good for the church and that our determination to live in that tension is generative and healthy. But there are many voices who wish to collapse all such tensions into a single pole, declaring once and for all what the "truth" of a certain issue is. This is usually accompanied by a corresponding move to define out those who do not believe in this more narrow interpretation of what counts as a "real" Adventist.

rest

I have an article in the current issue of Vibrant Life magazine (which, by the way, has been completely redesigned under the leadership of my friend, and Seminary classmate, Heather Quintana. If you think you know about Vibrant Life magazine, you should check it out again).

My article is about the Sabbath. The tagline they gave it perfect: "We live in an overworked, hyperconnected world. So how can we recover our humanity? Sabbath rest is a good start."

You can subscribe, or request a free issue, here.

NEW BOOK: The Promise of Peace

There's a new book out from Pacific Press that I highly recommend. I had the chance to review the manuscript before it was published and write a blurb for it. Here's what I wrote:

Charles Scriven's The Promise of Peace will give hope to a new generation of Adventists who desperately long to re-appropriate their faith and traditions in a way that gives meaning to their lives and helps them shape a more peaceful and just world. I will be using this book with all my new members.

I just got my copy in the mail, but I plan to order a bunch more. After all, I have to make good on my promise!

Order yours here!

Video: Holy Saturday worship

The video includes excerpts of our Holy Saturday worship service which I have written about here and here.

All of our Holy Week resources, including sermons and the program and liturgy we used for Friday, Sabbath and Sunday, are compiled at the Hollywood Adventist Church website.
Easter 2009: Holy Saturday on Vimeo.

Holy Saturday and the Death of God

"Cross"-posted at the Spectrum Blog

In Hollywood, our Lenten journey is nearly over. Today is Holy Saturday. For Adventists, every Saturday is Holy because we remember those words in the very beginning of the story, "So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation" (Gen 2:3). Each Sabbath is a wonderful pause in the creative work of God. Indeed, the pause itself is creative, like a musical rest or dramatic pause in theater. The absence of speech or activity is, itself, creative and moving.

But this Sabbath is different. As Eric Severson has said, "The gaping silence between Good Friday and Easter Sunday cannot be explained as a welcome pause or an artistic hiatus.... Holy Saturday is blunt and bleak and uncomfortable."