Hints and Guesses

Sixteen years ago a fire destroyed nearly every physical artifact of my childhood and young adult years. Much to my surprise, last week I discovered something I’ve carried through moves overseas and back, one divorce, and one remarriage.

About eighteen years ago, I wrote these words for the Adventist Review* in response to the question “If you are still an Adventist 10 years from now, why?”:

“The church must allow absolute freedom to explore the doctrinal foundations of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, whether they number 22, 25, 27, or 28. My belief in the church is worth nothing if I am not permitted to question, to examine logically, or even to disagree. My questions may disturb more staid, conservative Adventists of all ages, but the blind obedience of adolescence is no longer enough. The church must shed its traditional fear of intellectual thought and let its members search for the truth that it claims to hold.”

It was a brief blurb in a sidebar, and if I remember correctly I wasn’t the only young adult invited to answer that question. I didn’t keep the magazine; all I have is half a ripped page, with an ad for Kettering College of Medical Arts on the reverse.

You might notice that my passionate** answer doesn’t directly answer the question***; we’d just had a guest speaker who spoke as I’d never heard an Adventist speaker speak before. Old ideas new to me and challenging to others; during the Sabbath afternoon session, the union conference president rose and spoke against the guest speaker. Some of the speaker’s words still ring true for me today.

I believed those words when I wrote them, and I believe them now, although in a different way. The blind obedience of adolescence is at least that far behind me****. I don’t have a belief in the church, but I still have ideas about what I’d like the church to be.

I’m tempted to wonder if the church is listening, if the church has moved beyond that place of fear. But that’s the wrong question; “the church” is an institution, and institutions don’t listen. People do, at least some of them. I don’t know how; when the shouting gets so loud, I can hardly hear myself think. That’s when you’ll find me moving off to the side, looking for the others.

*For which issue, I cannot yet say. It was likely published some time in 1991.

**At least that’s how I read it; I can still conjure up the emotions I felt when I wrote it.

***Yet the editors printed it anyway. Even I was surprised.

****Some might say I was never blindly obedient. You may not have been paying attention.

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