Reviewing the Adventist Review

February 18, 2010
Vol. 187, No. 5
www.adventistreview.org/index.php?issue=2010-1505#

GENERAL COMMENT
This issue is pretty much standard fare. I do have things to say about two of the articles, CLAIM YOUR CAMPUS and PRESS POWER, after reviewing of the rest of the magazine.

WORLD NEWS AND PERSPECTIVES
ADRA along with Loma Linda doctors and nurses are making a difference in Haiti. Hopital Adventiste d’Haiti is serving as the clinical center for the country.

Kent Hanson’s blog and email ministry has a worldwide readership of 4,000. Check out the email version at http://mondaygrace.com.

Bert Beach, longtime Adventist worker and religious liberty leader, is looking forward to attending his fifteenth General Conference Session in Atlanta, Georgia.

REVIEWS
STRETCHING OUR FAITH by Sandra Blackmer recounts a personal story in which she learned to be a successful public speaker.

Roy Adams advises readers that STAYING CALM when your contribution to a project goes unrecognized is a smart move in God’s eyes.

Fredrick A. Russell and George Johnson, Jr., and Alvin Kibble remind us that February is Black History Month. Russell’s forbearers never got the 40 ACRES AND A MULE they were promised, but “even in the face of these inequities, [Russell contends that] “God has blessed African-Americans as a people, notwithstanding their bad start in this country”.

George Johnson Jr. profiles three African Americans who are MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN THE HALLS OF POWER. Darron Paul Monteiro works in the White House Office of Public Engagement, Debra C. Anderson is the Deputy Chief of Staff and Communication Director for Representative Chaka Fattah, and Mark Brown is a Senior Information Security Officer for the Department of Health and Human Services.

Alvin Kibble reminds us that the spirituals like THE MORNING TRAIN reveal “the sagacity and spiritual awareness of these slaves of yesteryear. Wisely, they warned us not to wait for the evening train. ‘The evening train may be too late!’”

LIFE IN A PHRASE by Andy Nash demonstrates that you only need six words to sum up a formative period in your life. Andy, here are my six words. “God loved Job, an honest man.”

Kathryn Lay reminds us that when our lives change IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE, hope remains.

With CHURCH TRENDS, Monte Sahlin begins a new series about “action-oriented information about the Adventist church and the world in which it works”. This information is vital, and I don’t understand why it’s not available online. The following websites and addresses are those supplied by Sahlin.

SDA’s in North America: A Demographic Profile can be obtained from the Center for Creative Ministry at www.creativeministry.org or 800-272-4664; Why Our Teenagers Leave the Church: Personal Stories From a 10-year Study—Roger Dudley; Valuegenesis Ten Years Later: A Study of Two Generation—Gillespie, Donahue, Boyatt, and Gane; and Ministering With Millennials—edited by Dudley and Walshe. These materials can be obtained from the local Adventist Book Center or through AdventSource at www.adventsource.org or 800-328-0525.

COMMENTS
In CLAIM YOUR CAMPUS, Jimmy Phillips argues that if the Adventist Church will only “give young adults meaningful roles within the church”, they will stick around as adults. In my opinion, that tactic will only work if young people can be given a powerful voice in a campaign to modify the official 28 official doctrines of the Adventist Church. This creed is now set in concrete and defended officially and irrationally as God ordained, in spite of the fact that a preface to SEVENTH-DAY ADVENTISTS BELIEVE states that “understanding is ever progressive” and Adventist doctrines are “the product of Adventist growth ‘in grace and knowledge’”.

Asking young, educated Adventists to stay connected to an organization that refuses to ordain women, demonizes homosexuals, requires a belief in the literal interpretation of the Bible, discounts scientific evidence, and espouses ideas that have originated from extra biblical sources, is asking the impossible. For these young people (and older ones as well) the Adventist Church as an official organization is irrelevant.

PRESS POWER by Bill Krick makes a relevant point when it comes to the power of the press. Spiritual ignorance cannot “successfully contend with the mass distribution of myth-exposing literature” when it finds “its way into the hands of the common people”. Maybe that’s why half of Jimmy Phillips’s high school class “is no longer actively involved in the church, many of whom drifted away during college.”