Nicholas P. Miller, The Religious Roots of the First Amendment: Dissenting Protestants and the Separation of Church and State. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

This book is superb. And it is yet another reason for soul-searching in Adventist life, especially in the corridors of church power. 

“Jesus alone, / Cornerstone.” That phrase began the Tuesday session it had the one before, but with the song now starting to feel like a signature anthem. The One Project, with 700 voices rising, was already an inspiration. Due to the substance and delivery of the day’s talks, it was about to be, at least for many, amazing.

In 2010 five friends, all engaged in Adventist pastoral ministry, met for fellowship, reflection and prayer in Room 602 of a Denver, Colorado, Holiday Inn.  After two days they looked at one another and “acknowledged again,” one of them wrote later, “that Jesus was number one.”

What good is a state of denial? 

So let me just say it: If we don’t shift toward a new kind of Adventism, our church will go out like a spent candle. It’s a matter of time, but it will happen. 

For the nineteenth straight year, as December was giving way to January, the Spiritual Renaissance Retreat brought 140 or so Adventists to Monterrey on the central California coast. Every attendee heard critiques of conventional Adventism and calls for new and more biblically faithful vision for the future.

10. Let’s see…there’s the church/corporate press and there’s Spectrum, Adventism’s leading independent voice. (If you need to hear more, keep going.)

9. You love the church; you’re too smart to think all is well and too passionate to give up on change for the better.

8. You don’t stick your head in the sand; the Truth doesn’t scare you into self-deception.

7. You’re fed up with crypto-Romanism—the top-down, authoritarian perspective on church life.

They’ve decked the malls.  The supermarket music is oblivious (mostly) to the Christmas songs you find in Luke.  And even the “lead article” in the December Ministry, the Adventist magazine for pastors, misses the meaning of the Incarnation.  

It’s harder than ever to perceive Jesus through the season’s ribbons and wrapping.

Now General Conference officers are claiming that “oneness in Christ” forbids union conference initiative, such as that taken by the Columbia Union, to eliminate gender as a factor in pastoral credentialing.  Now the Male Headship Alliance—a plausible enough designation, I would say, for the loose confederation that includes Doug Batchelor—is backing a petition to stop the Pacific Union Conference from taking a similar initiative.

Both seem willfully, almost defiantly, oblivious to Scripture.

  “The word of the Lord came to me: Mortal, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel…. I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy.” —Ezekiel 34

Pardon me, but it’s hard to find a new theme when we seem so vulnerable to pontifical drift. Vulnerable even when we want to seem like a Reformation movement. The theme I refer to is ecclesiology.  It won’t go away—and it had better not: we seem poised for yet another abdication of our historic ideals. The leader of the church’s “Fundamental Beliefs Review Committee,” Elder Artur Stele, said the following—I mostly paraphrase—in an interview published in the April, 2012, issue of Adventist World—NAD: