For the past 12 years I’ve had the privilege of working for The Seventh-day Adventist denomination. My prayer is that I continue to work for them until Jesus comes back or I die, whichever comes first. I truly love this global community of faith; that said there are occasions that I become flummoxed by some of the things I am seeing and hearing within my church.
Recently I’ve been reading the biography of J.N. Loughborough by Dr. Brian Strayer. I have thoroughly enjoyed the read, it might be my favorite of the Adventist Pioneer Series thus far.
As I’ve read almost two-thirds of the book however I have found myself getting sideways on an issue…
The lack of inclusion of young adults at the highest levels of leadership within our church!
I have heard, ever since I accepted Jesus and started hanging-out around Seventh-day Adventist leaders the statement, “We need to make sure our young people have a voice within their church.”
Here is what I would say to how well that has gone: if young people truly had a voice in this church, a voice that anyone was listening to, a voice with a vote, then there would be a more diverse spectrum of ages amongst our church leadership at every level.
As it stands now though, at the highest level of leadership, The General Conference, there are currently no administrators under the age of 50…and I would venture to guess that there are not even any under the age of 60, if any of you are I apologize :). But it is not just at the General Conference level, The North American Division has the same problem; we have some leadership in their 50’s, but no one at a significant leadership level is below the age of 50 to my knowledge. The same is true within our Union leadership.
I got sideways as I was reading the Loughborough biography because I am reading stories about young adults that are in great positions of influence within our church…oh and when I say young adult, I’m not talking about 40’s and 50’s, I’m talking about 20’s and 30’s, even a few in their late teens. Presidents, GC executive committee members, top theologians, General Conference sent evangelists.
Reading these stories makes me so proud of our early church and so disappointed with our current church.
Young in leadership is just something that is not seen anymore…
Something that is not even given a chance to be seen or experienced at any level other than the local church and maybe, just maybe a local conference or two, at least here in the United States.
There is much talk about giving the young a voice, but folk the young need more than a voice they need to be in on the decision making process, they need at times to be the actual decision makers.
Let me ask what I believe is a very logical question: If the church is trying to figure out ways to retain the youth and young adults of our church would it not make sense for the young to be deciding what actions are going to be taken to reach & retain those demographics? Every successful business in the world has figured this out, why can’t the church?
Hear what I am not saying. I am not saying that we should put those of the older ilk out to pasture. We are a multi-generational church, so we should have multi-generational leadership…AT EVERY LEVEL!
People like Pastor Rodlie Ortiz should be sitting at any table at the highest levels of this church that are visioning and strategizing for church growth, if you don’t believe me ask Pastor Dwight Nelson. Pastor Anthony Wagenersmith I believe would be an asset to the Biblical Research Institute. He has a brilliant theological mind, before we were even out of seminary he was a grad assistant that was delivering lectures to other graduate students. Gina Creek, is a gifted writer, that writes in a unique voice; she should be at the Adventist Review or Signs of the Times or writing copy for The GC. Pastor Taj Pacleb is one of the most gifted traditional evangelists I’ve ever heard, why aren’t we tapping him for global evangelistic events or media posts? Pastor Benjamin Lundquist is in my opinion the most innovative youth and young adult leader out there right now. Every youth and young adult leader should spend time with him. These are just a few, the list could go on and on!
My point is the young adults are out there, out there ready to lead at the highest levels. Just like they were in the first 50 years of our church.
But their church isn’t inviting them to even consider such a step.
Their church, our church, my church just keeps talking about giving them a voice…
but what good are their voices if they are not being heard in the rooms making the decisions?
If their voices don’t actually have a vote when the decisions are made?
Please church that I love, be a church that truly represents ALL of us! Give us more than a voice!
So I was going to get on here and rant about how our Adventist publishing houses were dropping the ball by not having ebooks available! But before I spouted I decided to do a quick search and I found this by Pacific Press Publishing & this by Review & Herald Publishing. So my rant is not going to be quite as intense. But I still want to rant a little. I praise the Lord that I see the church entering into the realm of ebooks, but their progression into this realm is far too slow and under marketed!
As much as I love books in my hand and as much as I didn’t want to embrace the tablet culture I find that almost all of my reading is now done on my Kindle! The only things I haven’t been able to read primarily on my Kindle, my Adventist literature. For those items I have to drive 45 minutes north to the nearest Adventist Book Center, which means I’m not reading most of the new Adventist material out there.
Every single published material of the Seventh-day Adventist church from books to magazines should be available through the kindle store, the Nook store, or whatever is the preferred reader of choice. (Pacific Press seems to be ahead of the rest on this, most of Review & Herald stuff is primarily in google book format which is cumbersome). I believe that if our publishing institutions did this then we would increase readership in many areas and spread the message much more quickly.
Let me give you two recent scenarios to illustrate my point:
Two of the preachers I appreciate most, Dwight Nelson & David Asscherick were discussing on twitter a quote by NT Wright from his book Justification. Because this book is not Adventist I knew that I could immediately go to Amazon Kindle Store and purchase that book. On the same day Pastor Dwight plugged his most recent devotional book, “The Chosen.”
Yes, there is a link to Amazon to buy the book. But if you went to Amazon as I am writing this, you would notice that there is only one copy, and it is being sold for $15, not including shipping and handling. So if I buy it there I have to wait on it and pay almost $20 for it. Or I can drive 45 mins north and buy it at the Adventist Book Center…or maybe which is what probably quite a few folk do, they just don’t buy it.
But say that same book was available through the Kindle store like Justification is. Then if a person read that tweet of Dwight’s (and a lot of folk read those tweets: Dwight has been on twitter for a little over three weeks and he already has well over 300 followers), and being a person that uses twitter so probably also uses other techno stuff, they jump on their iphone kindle or Nook app and they immediately go to the kindle store and Download the book which is sent wirelessly to their kindle, iphone, and ipad all at once and it was for only $9.99 versus $20. Answering me this, which seems more convenient?
Yes we won’t for a very long time completely get rid of books on paper, and indeed there are many people that don’t use any of the technology I am speaking of, but there are enough people that do use tablet readers that for us to not flood that market with our materials is just a lack of foresight and evangelistic creativity on our parts! 11% of all the United States alone have a tablet computer that is equal to 44 million people. And then think about these facts just in light of Amazon and their Kindle:
As of early 2011, Amazon had over 137 million active customers worldwide.
110 of 111 New York Times Bestsellers are in the Kindle Store.
Amazon’s Kindle Store pays out 70% to its Direct-to-Kindle authors.
Since April 2011, for every 100 print books sold on Amazon, it’s sold 105 Kindle books.
So far this year, Amazon has sold more than three times as many Kindle books as last year.
These statistics continue to rise. It begs the question – why aren’t Adventists marketing Kindle books like crazy! What’s holding us back from our piece of the Kindle pie?
One more area where I see us getting into the e-market really benefitting our readership, and that is with the Adventist Review, and our other magazine publications. I get the Adventist World just like all other baptized SDA’s, but I would probably subscribe to the Adventist Review if I could do so through Kindle. I mean I can read, Newsweek, Fortune, & Runner’s World on my Kindle why not the Adventist Review. I was once having a conversation with Bill Knott the editor and executive publisher of AR, and he was saying to me that one of his desires is to see readership of the Church’s flagship paper up amongst the younger generations! I would say to my friend, Elder Knott, get it on the Kindle and other such devices and market it and watch the level of subcribership potentially go up!
So that is my rant! I’m glad to see something is happening, but outside of Pacific Press, much more needs to be taking place! We should not be the tail of things, but the head!