seventh-day adventist : mackenzian

March 17, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Despair and resilience among LGBT+ Adventists

Illustration credit: Jared A. Wright/Spectrum Media

Remember the Andrews University researchers who wanted to hear from LGBT+ Adventist young adults last summer? Nearly 500 people responded, and 310 young adults completed the survey. The researchers are reporting early findings now.

On the Spectrum blog this week, Drs. Nancy Carbonell, Curtis VanderWaal, Shannon Trecartin, and David Sedlacek talked with Alita Byrd about what they’re learning from their study of family acceptance:

Research shows that around 9% of teens in the U.S. are kicked out of their homes when they tell parents about their orientation or identity. We wondered how that statistic compared to the Adventist church (we found the same rate in our study)…

Although we knew from the research literature that suicidal thinking and suicide attempts were much higher among LGBT+ individuals than the general population, we were shocked to find this level of despair among those who had grown up as Adventists… Conversely, we were quite surprised by how many respondents have remained deeply spiritual and have continued their involvement in religious activities.” —Curtis VanderWaal

There is no doubt that LGBT+ adults often see their parents, homes, and churches as very rejecting places, making coming out or understanding their sexual orientation or gender identity extremely difficult for the majority of these young people…

While many of our LGBT+ youth reported having a friend that they could share their joys and sorrows with (70%), less found this support from their parents (34.2%), few found support from their pastor (11.9%), and even fewer found their congregation [to be an] important source of support (9.3%).” — Nancy Carbonell

In survey responses, LGBT+ young adults explained parents’ and caregivers’ responses to their coming out. Forty percent disclosed their gender or sexual orientation to their families during their 20s, 20% haven’t come out at all yet, and a full three-quarters of the respondents reported anti-LGBT prejudice among their relatives that made the disclosure process more difficult.

As well as drawing implications for Adventist church workers and educators, Carbonell, VanderWaal, Trecartin, and Sedlacek are also placing reports in professional publications like the journal of the North American Association of Christians in Social Work, Social Work and Christianity (Spring 2017).

One of these articles, “The Impact of Family Rejection or Acceptance among LGBT+ Millennials in the Seventh-day Adventist Church” (VanderWaal, Sedlacek, & Lane), focuses on young LGBT+ Adventists’ experiences and what caring professions can do to support members of this population who might cross their office thresholds for individual or family/social systems counselling.

“Caregivers, clergy, and religious congregations,” the researchers write, “were generally not considered to be good sources of social support for respondents.” But many of us hope that can change.

If you want to learn more about the subset of social work research that Carbonell, VanderWaal, Trecartin, and Sedlacek are contributing to, check out the work of the Family Acceptance Project, based at San Francisco State University.

January 5, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Beyond the temptation to clock-watch

A text poster, black narrow all-caps on a teal-green background. The poster is framed in a simple black poster frame and hangs between two white round wall-clocks, one white-framed and the other black-framed. — Photo credit: Jonathan Simcoe

Where evil—hunger, prejudice, bigotry, oppression, materialism, greed, and global warming—persists, God’s reign remains a hope rather than a realization.” —Olive Hemmings

During the Exvangelical podcast interview I did a few weeks ago, Blake Chastain and I talked a little about Adventist apocalypticism: the preoccupying worldview that, when in shadow, drives some Adventists to see in every negative headline and tragedy an unambiguous sign of coming apocalypse. The fall 2016 issue of Adventist Today tackles this topic with “a new look at the end times.”

I appreciated a short commentary from Washington Adventist University professor Dr. Olive Hemmings. In “Prophetic Eschatology and the Ethics of the Kingdom,” Hemmings attempts to redirect Adventists from passive eschatology—clock-watching in anticipation of a time when God “cleans up Earth for us”—to what she calls “ethical eschatology.”

Ethical eschatology is the active waiting I wrote about during the pre-Christmas Advent season. The phrase doesn’t emphasize the eschaton event as much as it emphasizes ethics. The teachings of Jesus are chock-full of ethical demands. These teachings deny that we have anything to do with the divine timeline and rather insist that we’re responsible for how we regard the stranger: whether we recognize strangers as neighbors, neighbors as kin, and kin as the visible handiwork of God.

So the kingdom (or kindom) is less about location, where we are, and more about relation, how we interact wherever we are. As Hemmings explains, “The kingdom of God becomes an ethical reality defined by righteousness [mishpat and tzedakah, that is, justice]… Divine perfection resides in the heart and in the world where justice reigns.”

It’s fitting that reflections on the Second Coming dovetail with reflections on the First. In a companion web article, writer Warren Nelson explains that he is an agnostic who enjoys the atmosphere and rituals of Christmas in the United States, and it’s the Christmas’ story’s ethical implications that energize him most: “This is one time when I am willing [to] suspend my disbelief and actually accept the idea that changing our minds about each other can actually change how we treat each other… Can you imagine the number of people in the world who would respond to a message of no fear and tidings of great joy? Earthly peace and goodwill? And that’s what this baby brings? Who wouldn’t rejoice, believer or not?”

“We don’t have to wait for some future moment to ‘get to heaven,'” Nelson continues. “It’s here. We just need to get past the fear and find it among us by, of all things, loving one another.”

Herb Montgomery of Renewed Heart Ministries has been working through this theme since last January in an extended series on a compilation of Jesus’ sayings. Follow his work on his site.

[The full fall issue of Adventist Today is only available to subscribers; sign up on the AToday website.]

July 3, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Research: LGBTQ Adventists, 18-35yo

Illustration credit: Jared Wright/Spectrum Media

Last spring, LGBTQ Andrews University students planned a bake sale to raise funds for a regional LGBTQ youth housing/anti-homelessness project. Thanks to off-campus attention, the students raised thousands of dollars from hundreds of donors around the US.

Over a year later, Andrews University researchers are still contributing to this conversation in their own professional way.

Curtis Vanderwaal, chair of Andrews University’s social work department, and David Sedlacek, professor of family ministry and discipleship, have co-developed a survey-based study to gather qualitative data on LGBTQ Adventist youth and young adults’ experiences with relatives, peers, and their church.

What’s it like for this demographic as they learn about their gender and sexuality and/or disclose it to others? What feedback do they receive from their families or friends? What roles do their congregations or community leaders play in their story?

The survey invites responses from LGBTQ people from an Adventist background who are currently between 18 and 35 years old. Active church membership is not required.

It isn’t a quick survey. Questions include items on family acceptance and rejection, and other topics that might be challenging.

But this study gives people in this demographic an opportunity to share their experiences frankly and contribute to the community record. The researchers are following standard research and data collection protocols with the survey design and with the way they’ll store and process submitted responses.

Expect to hear their reports on this study by the end of the summer.

A note from one of the researchers, Curtis Vanderwaal:

This research study is examining the impact of growing up Seventh-day Adventist and LGBT+, particularly focusing on the role that families played as LGBT+ adolescents explored and expressed their sexuality and identity. We are requesting that ONLY persons who grew up Seventh-day Adventist, identify as LGBT+ and are between 18 – 35 years old complete this survey. Participants DO NOT need to be current members or attend the SDA church.

This survey should take approximately 20-25 minutes. We know this is a long survey, but we believe the wide range of issues we included are important in understanding the Adventist LGBT+ experience. Your participation will be completely anonymous.

After completing the survey, PLEASE use email, Facebook and other forms of social media to distribute this message and link to LGBT+ friends and family members who grew up Seventh-day Adventist and are between 18-35 years old. We believe this survey is the first of its kind in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. You can complete the survey at the following link:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/LGBTAdventist

—Curt

If you meet the criteria for this survey, consider participating. If you know people who meet the criteria, share it with them.

Thank you!

October 22, 2015 By Keisha McKenzie

Blessed are the Mistaken: Unlearning the Fear of Error

This post is part of the #RIPGC Synchroblog for Great Disappointment Day, 2015.

A landscape photograph of Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument in New Mexico. Image credit: Keisha E. McKenzie — Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks, NM | Image: Keisha E. McKenzie

“From error to error one discovers the entire truth.” —Sigmund Freud

One of my favorite TED presentations comes from journalist and researcher Kathryn Schulz. Her talk, “On Being Wrong,” starts with uncomfortable, knowing grimaces and chuckles from audience members remembering—or so they think—how it feels to be wrong. When asked to name the emotions of wrongness, they mention embarrassment, devastation, and rejection. “But actually,” Schulz says, “You guys are answering the question ‘How does it feel to realize you’re wrong?’ Realizing you’re wrong can be devastating, it can be revelatory, it can actually be quite funny… [But] being wrong feels like being right.”

The Disappointments of 1843, 1844, and for some Adventists, the unsettled decades between 1844 and the late 1860s, represent a period in early Adventist history when our community lived out what it meant to both be wrong and also realize we were wrong. Through our early writing and teaching, we responded to our realization of wrongness by revising and refining new explanations of October 22, 1844, and its implications for our theology and daily lives. But we haven’t sat with the beingness of wrongness, and we sharply resist anyone who suggests we might be wrong about any substantial belief today: such people are dangerous, threatening, and must be avoided.

Over the last two decades, I’ve begun noticing ways that our aversion to error plays out. College and university researchers whose very discipline depends on healthy protocols for failing and adapting have found they can’t openly explore or question conclusions that the Biblical Research Institute or current GC president have determined. There’s a long line of human casualties to this pattern in Adventist science, theology, psychology, and medicine going back to the 1800s. Over 170 years, we’ve accreted an intellectual climate that’s hostile to young scholars who train for years to explore ideas and then graduate into a community that’s deeply ambivalent about the openness and vulnerability that research requires.

I worry about that. Unlike the early members of our church who shaped this community over decades with new stories about the scriptures and the God who inspired the minds, lives, and experiences of His children, we’ve spent prime community years reluctant to face up to what we think we know and what life mirrors back to us, and to think new thoughts as a result. Like farmers refusing to drop seeds into the soil, like stewards burying the potentials entrusted to us, we’ve been failing by being unwilling to fail. The very culture of listening and learning that allowed Adventism to become what it is has become a monster to resist. That shift isn’t sustainable for our community or for the individuals who compose it.

On those issues where we perceive the stakes as too high for us to change, where this group or that is warned about the lake of fire and the loss of souls, we’ve had little room as a movement to move beyond what Adventist philosopher Timothy Golden has called “epistemic hubris.” The only options we’re acknowledging right now are “stay the course” with all the suspicion of difference that that entails, or open up the gate of our world and risk destruction. We’ve been taught that only one of these ways is viable, and so that closed perspective is what we use as we work and vote in the church community.

But it is possible to discern truth through relationships with people who are different from us, to risk learning something new with and from those who vary from us, and to account for this learning as we see our old, familiar world with new eyes. It is possible to do this and not in fact be destroyed. Our Adventist ancestors did it and we’re the proof of their survival.

October 22 isn’t just a milestone for our church. It’s also the birth date of my grandmother, a wiry high-cheeked Jamaican woman who moved fluidly between the market, the kitchen, and the weekly Sabbath School. Grandma was born just 72 years after that first Great Disappointment. Had her parents’ parents heard the Millerite pitch about the coming of Christ, maybe they too might have watched the skies into the wee hours of the next morning. Grandma died over a century after 1844, still waiting, still hoping, now with a passel of descendants to wait and hope as she once had.

My church and my grandmother both were born in a different world than the one we live in today. But Grandma grew with enough grace to receive reason and express faith as change. As a convert in the 1930s, she learned to honor the Sabbath by so vigorously guarding the principle of limited labor that she, her husband, and her ten children would not bathe on Sabbath morning and ate juice and cold meals after church. She was relieved when the family discovered that these rules, well-intentioned as they were, were neither necessary nor helpful to them. I will not mock her or the church that taught her rules she later grew beyond and shed.

Grandma was blessed as she fully inhabited the truths she could perceive. She was just as blessed as she saw more truth and trusted the Truth-Maker enough to digest the nutrients in yesterday’s wisdom, release the husk, and openhandedly receive the wisdom that the Spirit deigned to share each new day. We too ride that cycle of insight, release, and learning as we revisit where our community has been and reflect on what it might become.

As Paul wrote so many moons ago, we see through a glass darkly, and when completeness comes, what’s in part disappears. We’re nowhere near open enough to risk the destruction we fear from releasing our partial views of God, the world, and each other. Our challenge today is to grieve our disappointments and release our expectations in such a way that we keep our connection to each other warm and whole, and stay open to new material, new perspectives, new thoughts, and new people. Our openness to the new is not for its own sake, but for the sake of the health of our community. All living things grow. All living things change.

Any habit of mind or behavior can become entrenched with enough practice: restricted risks and suspicion of change certainly are Adventist storylines, but they aren’t our entire story. The root that the early Adventists worked with all those years ago is also part of our communal culture: adaptability, imagination, disciplined reflection, and an openness to wisdom that heals and enriches all kinds of people, not just some.

That’s the root that I want to water now. No more nourishment to the models that are passing away; just the water of love on the root of my faith. Wherever the new springs up, wherever the wind takes it, whether it unfolds in familiar places or blossoms as the rose in wildernesses far from home, I’ll be there.

Blessed are the mistaken, for they shall inhabit a new story.
Even if it’s a story we write together on the way.

This article is part of the RIP GC synchroblog. Read the other contributions on the #RIPGC Twitter hashtag or the RIP GC website.

November 2, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Update: 4th Adventist Position on Ordination

In my post on the ordination discussion at last month’s General Conference Annual Council meeting (#GCAC14), I shared several background resources including the 1973 Camp Mohaven Report; Dr. Olive Hemmings’ book on ordination, interpretation, and culture; and the three positions that the Theology of Ordination Study Committee presented to the wider church:

(1) the headship principle means that only men may be ordained;

(2) the Spirit gifts without regard to gender, and so men and women may be ordained;

(3) the headship principle is the norm but the ordination of women is God’s Plan B to rebuke failed male leadership.

I’ve just received a fourth position on the theology of ordination that was shared with some Annual Council delegates but not presented at GCAC14.

J. David Newman waves goodbye to a smiling, applauding congregation in Fulton MD, July 2012 — Newman on his last Sabbath as senior pastor of New Hope Adventist Church, MD, July 2012 | Photo credit: New Hope Adventist Church via Flickr

The author, J. David Newman, is editor of Adventist Today and adjunct professor of religion at Washington Adventist University. He writes:

“The three positions stated in the TOSC report assumed that there is no issue with the term
ordination itself. In fact the word ‘ordination’ was used synonymously with ‘select’ and ‘appoint.’

But the word ‘ordination’ has a very specific meaning in our church and that is why there is so much debate on whether women can be ordained as elder or pastor. It is interesting to note that the church has already approved the ordination of women elders but now debates whether a woman pastor can be ordained.

The TOSC does not explain why we have three ordinations in our church—deacon, elder, pastor.

It is the position of this paper that the real issue is ordination itself, that it is actually a Roman Catholic practice and not a Biblical practice. If we were to cease to ordain there would be no issue over women’s ordination. This paper examines whether the practice of three levels of
ordination can be found in the New Testament.” —J. David Newman, “A Fourth Option”

Newman is writing a book on the history of ordination from the Roman Catholic church through to early Adventism. He hopes the manuscript will be available in time for the 2015 General Conference session in San Antonio, TX, and tells me that “for those who want a deeper study, there will be extensive end notes to each chapter and several appendices.”

In this article, Newman describes the church’s practical ordination policy, analyzes the 5 distinct words translated “ordain/ordained” in the English King James Bible, and explains that the denomination’s method of setting apart distinct leadership classes with differing levels of authority over church rites may have organizational merit but “cannot be found in the New Testament.”

Read the 17-page paper on his website.

October 21, 2014 By Keisha McKenzie

Synchroblog: Coming Back to Prayer

This is a contribution to the 2014 Queer Theology Synchroblog under the theme “Coming and Going.” Other contributions will be compiled on the QT site by October 22.

The article I contributed to last year’s synchroblog on creation was based on Genesis 1:2, and I reference it in this piece.

“I, though I saw and heard these things, refused to write for a long time through doubt and bad opinion and the diversity of human words… I spoke and wrote these things not by the invention of my heart or that of any other person, but as by the secret mysteries of God I heard and received them in the heavenly places. And again I heard a voice from Heaven saying to me, ‘Cry out therefore, and write thus!'” —Hildegard von Bingen, Scivias