Wake-up Call for Organized Religion

Nationally-syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts (left) has written an article about the conclusion of a new study -- the American Religious Identification Survey--conducted by researchers at Trinity College of Hartford, CT . To nobody's surprise, the survey of more than 54,000 Americans revealed yet another sharp decline in the number of people claiming religious affiliation. Pitts states:

[P]eople of faith should ask themselves: What is the cumulative effect upon outside observers of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker living like lords on the largess of the poor, multiplied by Jimmy Swaggart's pornography addiction, plus Eric Rudolph bombing Olympians and gays in the name of God, plus Muslims hijacking airplanes in the name of God, multiplied by the church that kicked out some members because they voted Democrat, divided by people caterwauling on courthouse steps as a rock bearing the Ten Commandments was removed, multiplied by the square root of Catholic priests preying on little boys while the church looked on and did nothing, multiplied by Muslims rioting over cartoons, plus the ongoing demonization of gay men and lesbians, divided by all those ''traditional values'' coalitions and ''family values'' councils that try to bully public schools into becoming worship houses, with morning prayers and science lessons from the book of Genesis? Then subtract selflessness, service, sacrifice, holiness and hope.

Do the math, and I bet you'll draw the same conclusion the researchers did.

Who can be surprised if the sheer absurdity, fundamentalist cruelty and ungodly hypocrisy that have characterized so much ''religion'' in the last 30 years have driven people away? If all I knew of God was what I had seen in the headlines, I would not be eager to make His acquaintance. I am thankful I know more.

Including that God and religion are not synonymous. God is, for the faithful at least, the sovereign creator of all creation. Religion is what men and women put in place, ostensibly to worship and serve Him. Too often, though, religion worships and serves that which has nothing to do with Him, worships money and serves politics, worships charisma and serves ego, worships intolerance and serves self.

The ARIS survey should serve as a wake-up call to organized religion. It continues in this manner at the risk of irrelevance. I am reminded of a line from the movie Oh, God!, with George Burns as the deity and John Denver as the grocery store manager reluctantly recruited to spread The Word.

''I don't even go to church,'' says the manager.

And God says, ``Neither do I.''

Well put. So how does Pitts' argument translate to Adventism? Is God and certain segments of the organized SDA church not synonymous? Granted, we are also perpetrators of our own "fundamentalist cruelty and ungodly hypocrisy." More importantly, how do Adventists shift the perception of those who see Adventism as a sectarian religion of the 19th century?

Borrowing from a thoughtful blogger to drive the point home further, physician and blogger Brenton Reading states in Epicenter Conversation,

“Since we first heeded the call out of Babylon over 150 years ago, we have sought to build ourselves a sanctuary and insulate ourselves from society. We have accomplished this by demonizing ‘secular’ culture, suspecting all other religions and denominations, and creating a structure separate from and similar to the surrounding society with our own elaborate denominational hierarchy, school systems, and even our own hospitals. In the process, we have often succeeded in recapitulating the error of the Israelites. Too often, we have forgotten that we have been blessed to be a blessing.”

Yes we have been blessed, despite our hermeneutic approaches to the Gospel. And I am optimistic. You see, my Adventism doesn't insulate itself from the rest of the world for sectarian appeal. The people in my Adventist circles and of my generation don't care to be in tension with their surrounding culture. They want to engage their surrounding culture! Many of this generation have evolved against a Neanderthal approach to Adventism . Our evolution has taken us from cozy Sabbath submission to complete Christ-submission--a daily obedience to love outwardly and upwardly.

Prolific author George Knight reminds us in his speech at the 2000 GC session:

“Our devil is not a dumb one. He knows that if he can discourage the best of our young people from taking over the church, it will be dead or dying. To reach the new generation, we must learn to communicate in the language of their day, just as Jesus used the language and idioms of His, and James White did in his. If the church insists on using the idioms of the nineteenth century to reach young people in the twenty-first, it will eventually end up the same as the Amish, who have maintained their forms and traditions but lost their mission to the world. ”

God is indeed the sovereign creator of all creation. And I believe that same Creator is raising up this new generation of Adventists to reach people of all nations and tongues with as many means as necessary.