Adventist Heritage Month: THE BLACK AdVENTIST EXPERIENCE

Dear Guests, Friends, and Members:

We’re in week four of five in which we're celebrating Adventist Heritage, including Adventist diversity. This Sabbath, I'm delighted that Chase Wilder, our Summer Intern from La Sierra University, is back with us. Chase is pursuing a career in Pastoral Ministry. He's been preaching since he was a child, and it shows! I know many of you have appreciated his energy, style, delivery, spirit, and content as we've heard him past.

Chase is preaching on the Black Adventist experience, sharing a historical sweep of Adventist interpretations of scripture that contributed to resistance against the empire, particularly with reference to racial injustice. This message explores a recovery of these interpretations of Scripture, adapted for the current struggles of our modern era.

Our theme today deals with the Black Adventist experience. While no single brush or color can paint this vast canvas, we can start with a general picture of this history. Africans brought and sold as slaves and emancipated after the Civil War (recall Seventh-day Adventists organized in 1863 in the midst of the Civil War) found themselves in the political turmoils of the Reconstruction Period that followed. Reconstruction was a movement working to integrate these former slaves into American social, political, and economic life. It didn't succeed (and if we read modern politics correctly, it still hasn't fully succeeded). There's been tremendous resistance both past and present. Jim Crow followed. Prejudice, fear, and hatred live on. Our present moment represents another spike in the dangers and foment of racial hate and divide fanned by nationalism, fear, a false sense of legitimacy and current presidential leadership.

Today, Black work in the Adventist church is organized by independent Conferences. In the Southern California Conference, there's an African American Region. Our Pacific Union has a Vice President for Black Ministries. Even today, in order to create spaces of more equal opportunity, and to minister to the population that's been suffering most from racialization, Black Churches exist to serve the unique needs, stylistic preferences, and communication modes of Black Americans.

Hollywood, as I mentioned before, is not "purple" in the sense that we're seeking to blend red and blue political thoughts. No, we’re purple in that our church reflects a great diversity: a hope for a different world, a space where the Spirit is given space to change lives. These are lives lived in any color of skin, from any background, with any level of education, with love and safety offered to our most vulnerable populations. We see a place that might truly thrive on difference, and the ways in which the uniqueness of all facets and corners of God's Created world worship together.

Welcome one, welcome all,

Pr Greg