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Ministers Summit: Update one
07 February 2008
Knight: Adventists must make stand
Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister, Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church
If the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the developed world does not stand for something, it will die.
This is the prediction by Adventist historian Dr George Knight, keynote speaker for the Ministers' Summit organised by the church in Australia and held on Avondale College's Lake Macquarie campus, February 5-10. "Why have a Seventh-day Adventist denomination if what's there is not important or necessary?" he asks.
Dr Knight is calling the church back to what he calls its "apocalyptic vision." "If Adventism loses its apocalyptic vision, it has no reason for its existence," he says. He notes growing churches tend to be conservative churches that stand for something, and they take their stand against culture.
Jesus Christ would not fit well in today's society, he adds, because He was not politically correct. "If Jesus had been politically correct and lacked sanctified arrogance, His movement would have lasted for only a short time as a minor Jewish sect."
Dr Knight refers to the early Adventist Church where it believed it had the truth; that it had a prophetic mission that drove it to the ends of the earth; and it believed it was not just another denomination. The church has become the most widely spread Protestant organisation in the world because of this attitude. "When we lost the prophetic understanding of who we are, we began to shrink," he says.
His response to the problem is to point us to the prophetic Bible books of Daniel and Revelation, particularly Revelation, "the book that made us a people." But their messages need to be seen in a different way.
He uses Revelation 5 to explain what he means. Here Jesus is the Lamb and the Lion of Judah. We need to know the "lambishness of the Lamb" (the death of Jesus as a sacrifice), but also the Lion of Judah as the all-conquering One. Jesus must be central to any understanding of Revelation, but the gospel demands both the Lamb and the Lion aspect of Jesus must be revealed. These two halves make the whole. "Being a prophetic people is not only about being right," he said, "it's about being like Jesus."
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