Absolutely. That’s probably the central risk of doing satire from the inside of any faith community.
When you don’t know the church from the inside, you don’t always catch the tone. You miss the affection underneath the exaggeration. You don’t see the years of potlucks, hospital visits, Pathfinder campouts, late-night board meetings, and quiet acts of faith that make the jokes land. Without that context, satire can look like dismissal instead of devotion.
But that misunderstanding cuts both ways. The people most likely to misread Adventist satire are often the people least inclined to engage seriously with Adventism in the first place. For everyone else—the ones on the edges, the burned-out, the half-in and half-out—the humor becomes a kind of shorthand: Oh. You see this too. I’m not crazy.
Barely Adventist isn’t trying to be a press release for the denomination. It’s a love letter written in the margins, with coffee stains and crossed-out sentences. The goal isn’t to convince outsiders that Adventists are flawless. It’s to let insiders breathe, laugh, and remember that faith was never meant to be brittle.
And here’s the quiet hope underneath it all: satire often opens doors seriousness alone can’t. A joke can invite a conversation. A laugh can lower defenses. Sometimes humor is the first moment someone feels safe enough to look closer instead of walking away.
So yes, satire gets misunderstood. But it also gets people listening who never would have otherwise. And if the price of being honest and human is that some people don’t quite get it—that’s a risk worth taking.
Because the church isn’t held together by image management.
It’s held together by grace, truth, and the humility to laugh at ourselves while still taking God very seriously.
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