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What
Are the Ties that Bind?
Laura
L. Vance, Seventh-day Adventism in Crisis: Gender and Sectarian
Change in an Emerging Religion. Urbana-Champaign: University
of Illinois Press, 1999.
Reviewed
by Grace Fields, Ronald Lawson, Judy Rittenhouse, and Charles
I. Stokes.
(From
Spectrum magazine, winter 2001)
Submitted
as a doctoral dissertation at Simon Fraser University, this
is a book whose author purports to deal with the crises that
face today’s Adventism. Laura Vance, a professor at Georgia
Southwestern State University concentrates on a North American
Seventh-day Adventist Church that she came to know and, she
feels, understand, as a result of her attendance at services,
intensive interviews, and literary research. Choosing not to
write just one more history of Adventism, Vance uses what she
calls "crises" to "explicate" Adventism.
Her
first apparent objective is to examine how and why a church
whose founding depended so greatly upon a woman came to be male
dominated. She wants to understand why Adventism "for decades"
has been beset by "contention concerning the propriety
of women's public participation in leadership." Her second
objective is to master the "dynamic of doctrine" in
Adventism as successive waves of conflict over rethinking of
the "sanctuary question," justification vs. sanctification,
secularization of the church and its institutions, and even
over the effect alleged plagiarism in "Sister" White’s
foundational "red" books may have had on emergent
theology.
Her
third objective is to put in critical relief how Adventism handles
questions that involve gender and what the preferred structure
of the Adventist family is, along with issues of divorce and
whether there have been changes in how the Church views appropriate
sexuality--including the role of gay and lesbian members. Because
in point of fact these matters led her to study Adventism, one
gets the impression that she formulated her list of crises before
she began writing.
In
effect, Vance has written two sets of essays about Adventism.
Part 1 is a set of essays that do not break any new ground as
she examines Adventism as a religion. The essays in part 2 analyze
the denomination on a sociological level. This bifurcation is
hard to defend, but scant evidence of professional editing in
the book worsens matters. At the very least, the dissertation
writing style and format need softening. There is clearly a
disconnect between her rather favorable treatment of Adventism
as a religion and her opinions about the challenges to Adventist
society that her crises limn out.
When
Vance wrestles with how to characterize the Adventist "church,"
she is guided by the familiar sociological categorization of
sect and church. One senses her implicit judgement that Adventism
is still a sect. To be sure, she recognizes that Adventism is
no longer simply North American, and to that extent she is ready
to call Adventism a denomination. Although she allows for the
possibility that direction setting at the General Conference
level may increasingly take place beyond these shores, she chooses
to emphasize what she has found around her in North America.
Vance's
research methodology involved regular attendance at and participation
in the life of at least two local churches for more than six
months. She went to and stayed at several camp meetings. She
discussed a wide variety of local, conference and wider issues
with her acquaintances. She interviewed pastors, administrators,
and educators. She poured over more than a century of Review
and Herald issues trying to trace the emergence of conflicts
and crises. She visited widely the centers of Adventist culture,
the so-called "ghettoes." She came to be, she feels,
in a position to understand the trappings of "conference"
structure, from the local level to the General Conference. Withal,
she attempted to immerse herself in an Adventism whose doctrines
and characteristics today had deep roots in a nineteenth-century
past.
Vance
approaches Adventism as if she has the essence of today’s
Church after cataloging who does what, where the action is,
and how decisions are made. Yet most American Adventists will
sense that she doesn't quite get it. To insist that Vance understand
what we Adventists feel in our bones, what binds us to each
other, and how we respond to the Church as we experience it
is probably asking too much. Yet without those feelings and
that array of life events, she was likely to mishandle what
she calls "crises" and mischaracterize what she calls
"doctrines."
Because
Vance never quite tells her readers what a crisis is, we do
not know her criteria for selecting critical issues. In any
case, she does not seem to consider the survival of Adventism
to be at stake. If one ventures that crises are those events
that tear the Church apart, not one of the issues she asserts
to be critical has made any significant difference at the local
church or conference level in North America. There are, to be
sure, individual churches here and there where the sanctuary
question or the ordination of women have been divisive issues,
but typically these have been non-issues in most places.
In
part, this is true because "as we know" women tend
to "dominate" the local church anyway. They constitute
the Sabbath School leadership; they are treasurers, church clerks,
and the majority of the church boards. For women, the Church
has a role for their families that is crucial. Church is where
the wife and the husband, mother and father, work together to
get things done, from welcoming the stranger to maintaining
the church and school facilities. More often than not, it is
the woman who pushes her husband forward to leadership.
Ellen
White’s role has been and remains that of a guide. The
local church simply has not believed the attacks on her because
she is needed. Indeed, she has had the effect of strengthening
the authority system in the local church. By the same token,
complex arguments over the sanctuary, righteousness by faith,
or the meaning of the divinity of Christ have not reached local
congregations. More important have been the issues of vegetarianism,
what to eat, and how to keep the Sabbath, and behavioral matters
such as dancing, card playing, jewelry, the lottery, theater
attendance, smoking, and mind-altering drugs. Who would replace
Ellen White on these issues? Pastors come and go after relatively
short stays, but families remain and the Church retains its
permanence because in large measure the "red" books
provide the answers.
Although
what Vance calls crises have left little trace in local churches,
there are and have been "contemporary issues" that
do affect the local church. The recent defenestration
of a General Conference president in a plethora of unfavorable
publicity is not one of them. This had the potential to be a
schismatic event, yet it has passed over as a summer storm now
largely forgotten.
Not
so easily disposed have been the problems of diversity and ethnicity.
Throughout the United States and Canada, the typical city has
African-American churches, Haitian churches, Hispanic churches,
Portuguese and Brazilian churches, German, Hungarian, Czech,
East Indian, Filipino, Korean, and even African churches, along
with white or Anglo churches.
Many
of these groups have shown themselves impatient with the structure
of decision making in the conference system. In Canada, language
differences have been divisive and some English-speaking churches
in Quebec have become French speaking. These waves of ethnic
change have been far more important than doctrinal matters to
the structure and viability of the conference organization and
the survival of institutions.
Moreover,
throughout the world church, there is growing concern with unity.
Language, vision, role, ethnicity, culture, and political status
are becoming more and more divisive. Witness the problems in
the Balkans, Hungary, Fiji, and other South Pacific nations.
To say that there is an Adventist culture that one encounters
everywhere is no answer to the questions about world church
unity.
Though
they appreciate what North America has meant to the Church,
many members elsewhere argue that they are more true to the
"Adventist way" than are North Americans. These members
tend to look on the kind of crises that Vance has stressed as
typically North American and irrelevant to their experiences.
The granting of "independence" to the North American
Division raises even more critical issues, such as whether the
division's support of "missions" will decline as local
ethnic problems are faced. What does this portend for world
church unity?
The
long-term rural ethos in North American Adventism is now being
challenged by urbanization in the United States and beyond.
The massive growth of the Church in third-world cities and the
return of the Church to the central city raise questions of
evangelical methodology. Urban churches have adjusted worship
services and even liturgy to attract and hold a younger and
less traditional membership.
Vance
came to the study Adventism from the classroom. There, today’s
problems for the Christian church were defined in terms familiar
to readers of Christian Century or the New York Times,
for that matter. She must be pardoned for having done what her
professors have suggested and approved. She cannot be pardoned
for an unenlightened, pedestrian, and irrelevant treatise on
Adventism.
©
2001 Spectrum/AAF
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