Here’s a confession many Adventist leaders won’t make in public: we can be theologically right and relationally catastrophic at the same time.
We have the charts. We have the prophecies. We have 2,300 days mapped down with precision and a health message that basically predicted everything your doctor is telling you now. By our own accounting, we have the truth.
And yet people sit through our sermons, nod politely, and feel absolutely nothing.
That’s not a doctrine problem.
That’s a connection problem.
Truth, delivered without relationship, without empathy, without any visible sign that the person speaking it has ever suffered or doubted or ugly-cried at 2am — doesn’t land. It just hangs in the air like an evangelistic series banner on a church nobody drives past anymore.
Adventism has historically confused information transfer with transformation. We assume that if we can just get the Sabbath truth into someone’s head, the heart will follow.
But people don’t experience belonging through correct theology. They experience it through being known, being stayed for, being worth someone’s inconvenience.
The gap isn’t between us and the world’s intelligence.
It’s between our convictions and our humanity.
The churches that are actually holding people aren’t necessarily the ones with the best doctrine. They’re the ones where someone noticed you were missing. Where your mess didn’t disqualify you from the table. Where the truth, somehow, had a pulse.
Adventism has the raw material for that kind of community.
The question is whether we want it badly enough to get uncomfortable.
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