BY CHARLES C. SANDEFUR

HERE'S A WORD OF SCRIPTURE I'VE been interacting with for the past year that's found in Ephesians 2. Notice these verses: "But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ. . . . Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit" (verses 13-22, NIV).

How do we inhabit the vision of that text in which Christ is the absolute cornerstone of this church, in which we are no longer aliens and strangers and foreigners in the Adventist Church, but fellow citizens?

Simple Memories
My family lived in Hawaii in the 1950s. At the time, it was the crossroads of all the Seventh-day Adventists who traveled back and forth from the United States to the South Pacific, to Asia, to the Far East (as we called it then). We had a guestroom downstairs for all the patriarchs of the church who visited: R. R. Figuhr, W. B. Ochs, M. N. Campbell, L. E. Froom. They sat at our dinner table and told stories about my church. Other missionaries came by and obediently and awkwardly put on their costumes from foreign countries and mumbled a few words in a language that most likely they themselves did not understand. I was transformed; I was mesmerized.

I remember the day in 1957 when it was announced in the Adventist Review that the Seventh-day Adventist Church had 1 million members. But I still viewed everybody who wasn't part of my congregation as aliens and as strangers, not as fellow citizens.

Something happened to the Adventist face starting 25 or 30 years ago. We had been growing in an orderly fashion; then we just exploded with growth. In the past year I have had a front-row seat to see that growth.

I want to take you on a tour of what I've seen in my church, and what it means for us to inhabit this text in Ephesians. In Bolivia, in Bangladesh, in Burkina Faso, in Ukraine, in Switzerland, in the United States, there are no longer foreigners and aliens in this church. We are all fellow citizens.

What I've Seen
I've been to 43 countries-including Texas-in the past year! I've worshiped in every one of our divisions. I've met hundreds and thousands of Seventh-day Adventists. I apologize for trying to prove something by anecdote, but this is my testimony.

I've worshiped with small congregations in huge sanctuaries. I've worshiped with large congregations squished into tiny sanctuaries. I've worshiped with old, established-what I'd call "faith of our fathers" churches-fourth- and fifth-generation churches. I've worshiped with congregations that are still dripping wet from last week's baptism. I've worshiped in churches that are full of enthusiastic (I won't use the word "charismatic") fervor. And I've worshiped in churches in which it seemed that the congregation were unwilling to raise their right hands to approve a transfer of membership for fear they would be accused of having too much fervor.

I have worshiped around the world. And I realize how wonderful and great and sprawling this church is, and how little I represent it.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church is an overwhelmingly new church. Less than 1 percent of Seventh-day Adventists have been members of the Adventist Church as long as I have (I am now a patriarch). Very few Adventists around the world have been members more than 50 years. Fewer than half have been Adventists more than 12 years. Two thirds of all the Seventh-day Adventists who have ever been baptized are alive right now. We baptize more people in some individual months than existed in the church the year Ellen White died. We are a new church-overwhelmingly new-and the epicenter of Seventh-day Adventism has moved from North America to the Southern Hemisphere.

We are a church that has at least 1 million Seventh-day Adventists who are illiterate. Thousands of our brothers and sisters are living with the stigma of AIDS. Thousands and thousands are hungry right now. More Adventists speak Spanish than English. The new Seventh-day Adventist Church is overwhelmingly poor.

What I've Learned
As I've gone from country to country I've seen a strong belief system in the Seventh-day Adventist Church around the world. I've been amazed at how biblical Seventh-day Adventists are.

But in different parts of the world different parts of the biblical canon are quoted more than others. We all grow up with our little canon within the canon, don't we? We don't quote Leviticus 19:14 as often as we quote John 3:16. And my brothers and sisters around the world have opened up to me new texts.

I had a Seventh-day Adventist brother meet me after church and say he wanted to talk to me about money. I was ready; my defenses were up. I knew I was going to get "the ask." I didn't get "the ask." This brother was puzzled about what it means to sell all that you have and give to the poor. He wanted to know, not how I interpreted that text for myself, but how he, poor as he was, should interpret that text. I've never had a church member, in all my pastoral ministry, ask me what that passage meant for her or for him.

I have found that we've become overwhelmingly experiential. As one union president said to me, "we are an experiential church here. We have very porous boundaries between our beliefs and our experience. We believe that they move back and forth between each other."

I've sensed an Old Testament faith, in addition to a New Testament faith. It is as though many of our believers are living out those primal stories of the Old Testament in which they were wrestling with principalities and powers, demons, signs, and wonders.

One woman came up to me one Sabbath when I preached in Southern Asia. She said, "Would you come to my house?" So I made a pastoral visit. She asked, "Would you pray for me?"

Then she got up and walked out of the room and motioned for me to follow. She went to this corner of her property and that corner and this corner and that corner, and she said, "Pray in the four corners of my property that my house and my home and my family will be safe from the principalities and powers, and from the demons."

"Why did you become a Seventh-day Adventist?" I asked.

"Because I found that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was more powerful than the gods of my village."

That's what I mean by Old Testament faith.

I've also learned that most of my brothers and sisters want to belong to a world church. They want to feel part of something that's grand, to worship a cosmic and universal God, to participate in a world church.

I was with a congregation in Africa. They were getting ready for an ordination service, and they invited me to help. There was a moment of awkwardness when they confessed that they hadn't participated in an ordination service before. I asked, "How do you do it in this country?"

They answered, "We don't want to talk about how we do it here; we want to talk about how the church does it." Not, How is it done in America? But, How does the church do it? They wanted to be part of an expression of a global church.

I've also learned, in many of the countries I visited, that the church integrates its views of church and society differently from what I've been used to. Some of the positions that the Office of General Counsel and others have so carefully crafted out of our Western democratic traditions on separation of church and state are viewed differently in other parts of the world.

My Seventh-day Adventist Church is adaptable, very adaptable, not compromising. I've had people ask me, "Is it 'Adventism light' where you go overseas? Do they believe as strongly as we believe?" The answer is yes.

But Adventism has this wonderful ability to adapt. As one conference president told me, "Jesus was adaptable. We have to adapt Adventism, not to make it understandable, but to make it believable." Jesus was so adaptable that He could come as a first-century Jewish male Palestinian. The Christian community has adapted to that. Palestine is no longer the cultural or emotional epicenter of what it means to be Christian, and neither does North America have to be the epicenter of what it means to be Seventh-day Adventist.

The Challenge of Rapid Growth
The Adventist Church worldwide is growing astronomically. We're already growing so fast that the Office of Archives and Statistics can't keep count. So we use different matrices, trying to determine what the membership of this church is. For those of us who believe that everything needs to be done decently and in order (1 Cor. 14:40), that is becoming impossible at the rate at which we are growing.

I talked to one pastor: "How much has your church grown?"

"I've lost count," he said.

I asked, "How do you manage this wonderful chaos?"

"We don't manage it," he said. "We celebrate it."

We celebrate it! We are more representative of the populations of this world than ever before. We represent the world in which we live and the world for which Jesus died more than we've ever represented it before. And we are growing so fast that some of those anchor points, institutions, and behaviors that I grew up with, that were part of the deeply woven roots that made me a Seventh-day Adventist, don't exist around the world. You can't keep your supply lines filled as fast as the Seventh-day Adventist Church is growing. But we're moving with the Spirit, and we ought never to slow down to let the rest of us catch up with Him.

I keep thinking of Numbers 11, in which Joshua came to Moses after Medad and Eldad were found prophesying. Joshua said, "We've got to get control of this; we've got to get in front of this, Moses!"

Moses said, "I wish everyone were prophesying."

"What?"

"Yes, I wish everyone were prophesying."

We began as a movement in the 1840s and 1850s and 1860s, and we became a denomination. Now, because of our rapid growth, we have become a movement again. We are growing so fast, we are growing so vibrantly, that we can no longer provide all of those services and those Adventist accoutre-ments that were so important to me as I grew up. We have fewer schools per member than ever before. We have fewer congregations, fewer pastors, per member. And we ought not to begrudge that. We ought not to try to overmanage it. We ought to celebrate it.

It's easy for me to feel threatened. I celebrate growth, I cheer for it, but then on Monday morning I worry about it. But the stance I've taken is that I want to feel like a proud parent. I'm most proud when I look at my sons and realize that they're smarter, they're better looking, and they run faster than I.

When I look at my church, I see its deep levels of faithfulness, I see the struggles it goes through, and I'm so proud of my church. My church needs me (it needs a few patriarchs), because, yes, there is a real challenge in a new church that's growing so fast. Adventism cannot fully experience its richness in just a few days. It takes a while to learn the richness and the fullness of life in Jesus Christ and its Adventist expression. We need a few "pediatricians" around, a few patriarchs, to help create roots so that this church will stay strong and learn the vocabulary of grace. There will be times in which we will have to be faith for our younger church members. We'll have to pray not just for them, but for them.

The Fellowship of Believers
I've spent some 20 Sabbaths around the world, in all kinds of churches. I've found out that almost every Adventist church has Sabbath school. They study the Sabbath school lesson. We pray on Sabbath, we sing on Sabbath, we worship on Sabbath, we witness on Sabbath, we have fellowship dinner on Sabbath, we play soccer on Sabbath, and we play the piano on Sabbath. We worship until 12:00 (not 12:01) on Sabbath. And we worship until it gets dark on Sabbath. We celebrate the Sabbath in a variety of ways.

Despite a hundred different ways of keeping the Sabbath (some controversial, some that make me uncomfortable), the candle of the Sabbath cannot be blown out. Adventists still celebrate it, and they participate in holy time. The Lord of the Sabbath is greater than some of our behaviors on the Sabbath.

What do you call the 17-year-old girl with HIV that I met in southern Africa who was just baptized the previous Sabbath, who was holding an infant on her hip and holding her 3-year-old by the hand, who had a Bible in her hand but could not read-what do you call her? You call her sister.

What do you call the 8-year-old kid who by every account was baptized months or years too early but who says that he loves Jesus? You call him brother.

Seventh-day Adventists are not a natural affinity group. We are thrown into the company of people with whom we would never associate unless we were Seventh-day Adventists, people we would not ordinarily choose to be with, who wouldn't ordinarily choose to be with us. We are living proof that we don't create community-God does.

There are a hundred opportunities and issues for misunderstanding in this church. There are a hundred ways to break up this church. But there is only one Lord who can be the chief cornerstone of this church. And the price I pay to live in this wonderful community called Seventh-day Adventism is to have a spirit of forgiveness.

I know the importance of gender, class, race, country, and age. God is God of the unique, and He doesn't deny all of those aspects of what makes us human beings. But in Jesus Christ we transcend those. And that is our unity as Seventh-day Adventists.

There's no other way this church will ever stay united than through Jesus Christ. Even the church manuals, the working policies, are just dim reflections, three degrees removed, of what it means to say that Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of this church. It is tempting for us to add supplemental cornerstones: "Jesus, You're not enough. Let's add another cornerstone." We can make it race or gender or class. In these tempting, conflicting times we can make it patriotism or nationalism.

But if Jesus Christ is the cornerstone and we are in His temple, we are part of His kingdom. We are not just a hermetically sealed group that others can walk by, watch, and then decide, after window-shopping, whether they want to join. We are called to witness and to engage the world for Jesus' sake. We are told to use words and actions to share the good news, to be the good news, to fight for love and justice. Seventh-day Adventists need to define love and justice in this world, for we are part of God's kingdom. And we need to describe it the way Jesus would describe it. We need to show the world the incredible "otherness" of what it means to be part of God's kingdom.

A Parting Wish
If there's a wish I have as I travel around the world, I wish that at baptism more of our believers could feel that in becoming baptized they are being given the gift of service; that to be part of the priesthood of all believers is to be part of the servanthood of all believers. I wish we could proclaim more boldly what a strange and peculiar people we really are. As part of God's kingdom we're not trying to be relevant; we're trying to tell people that there is something more incredible and more explanatory of the world than the way the world views itself.

We have a strange way of eating that's called the Lord's Supper. We have a strange way of keeping time that's called the Sabbath. We have a different view of the future; it's called the Second Coming. We have a different view of community; it's called forgiveness. We have a different view of the world; it means loving it for Jesus' sake. It means taking strangers and calling them neighbors. It means taking people who have been stigmatized by HIV/AIDS (or whatever else) and embracing them, asking them to become brothers and sisters. It means caring for them for their sake, not for our sake.

If Christ is the cornerstone, then we are a Second Coming church. And we will engage ourselves not just in preening to get ready for Jesus to come. We will spend time doing the kinds of actions that our returning Lord would applaud.

That 17-year-old girl I wrote about, the one who is living with HIV and has two children-I attended her church. She was standing in the foyer; she spoke English. She had just been baptized two Sabbaths before; she was a new Seventh-day Adventist. I decided to congratulate her. But before I had a chance, she said to me, "Welcome to my church!"

I've thought about that, and I've realized that she was welcoming me to her church. Not just to her congregation, but to a new, fertile, vibrant, expanding, growing, alive church that embodies the kingdom of God, that says that Jesus Christ and only Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of this church.

And I said, "Wow! Now I'm the stranger. Thank you for welcoming me to your church."

Jesus Christ says to us: "No matter where you live, how long you've been a Seventh-day Adventist, how many generations you've been a part of this family, you are no longer foreigners and aliens. You are now brothers and sisters."

Now let's go and live that inheritance until Jesus comes.

*Provided by the Office of Information and Research, North American Division.

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Charles C. Sandefur is president of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) International. This piece is adapted from a morning devotional presented at the 2003 Spring Meeting of the General Conference Executive Committee.