Most of us did not pick our church. We were carried into it.
We learned the memory verses before we could read them. We knew the Sabbath by the smell of Friday baking. For many Adventists, faith arrived the same way our surname did.
And yet staying is far from automatic. Pew Research Center’s 2023 to 2024 Religious Landscape Study found that 35% of American adults now hold a different religious identity from the one they were raised in. A majority, 56%, still identify with their childhood religion. Our own church has counted its losses too. The General Conference Office of Archives, Statistics, and Research reported that from 1965 to 2014, 13,026,925 of 33,202,016 Adventist members left. That is a net loss rate of 39.25%, roughly four in ten.
So we are given a starting place. We are not given a finished faith.
Scripture seems to expect this. Joshua spoke to people who had grown up inside Israel’s story, and still he said, “choose you this day whom ye will serve” (Joshua 24:15). Our understanding of the great controversy rests on the same conviction. God values freedom so highly that He will not force love from anyone, even when forcing it would seem easier.
Even those who leave rarely leave completely. Many who grew up Adventist and no longer believe still carry it with them: the Saturday rhythm, the vegetarian habits, the hymns they can sing without a book. The culture stays even when the conviction goes.
Being born into a faith gives us a head start. A head start still asks for a choice. Those of us raised Adventist have to decide whether we believe it, and those who joined later already made that decision once.
Jesus never asked the disciples where they were born. He asked, “But whom say ye that I am?” (Matthew 16:15). Wherever our story began, that question is the one that matters, and He is still asking it with love.
Photo: PH3 Joyce V. Johnson, USN, 1984. Public domain, via National Archives / Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Two_choir_girls_sing_a_hymn_during_Easter_Sunday_services_at_the_North_Chapel_-_DPLA_-_1cb300ef04b336d0abba03f9f392639a.jpeg
Head over to Adventist Today for current events, analysis, and opinion on all things Adventist.
