BY RICHARD OSBORN
e wrestle in our personal lives with knowing and understanding
God’s will for us. But an even more difficult challenge confronts us in a body
of believers: How to find God’s will in the decisions we make in groups.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church at all levels conducts
most of its business through committees, boards, constituency meetings, and
every five years, at a worldwide General Conference quinquennial session such
as the one just concluded in Toronto, Canada. Have you ever wondered how God
can help a group of people from diverse backgrounds, with differing interests
and needs, find the divine will in our group decisions? Believers today don’t
have a cloud and fiery pillar, a Urim and Thummim, a rainbow, a fleece, a Most
Holy Place, Old Testament prophets, or even a modern-day prophet such as Ellen
White receiving visions.
To be honest, I have experienced moments of cynicism about
how God really works through church meetings. Members come together, each person
holding preconceived ideas, and sometimes not the ideas I agree with. We have
an opening prayer, special music, and a devotion. We listen to reports, recommendations,
and then have heated debate. Often just before a controversial vote, someone
will get up and say that we should pray before we vote. We spend a long time
in small groups praying, and it seems that everyone votes exactly the same way
as they intended before they even came to the meeting. It’s almost as if we’re
asking the Lord to bless the decision we have already individually made in advance!
From the pages of Adventist history, we find a story that
highlights important principles concerning how God works through our processes.1
The year? 1900.
The place? Australia.
The person? A 73-year-old fragile American woman
who doesn’t want to leave the warm country she has called home for nine years.
So why leave? Because the Lord impresses her that she must
return home with her son and secretary to give direction to a church she helped
found now floundering in controversy. She must attend a General Conference session
planned for Battle Creek in the dead of winter—February 1901. Ellen White packs
her bags for the three-week-long 7,000-mile voyage home on the boat. The drinking,
smoking, and dancing on the boat keep her awake every night to the point that
she prays for a storm on the final night of partying before the boat docks.
Such a large storm comes up as they approach San Francisco that neither she
nor any of the passengers can get out of bed.
She wonders how the upcoming session can find God’s will
while so many major problems abound: the location of too many institutions in
Battle Creek; a structure that doesn’t meet the needs of the growing church;
her concerns that the General Conference is dominating local conferences; John
Harvey Kellogg’s growing power; and the authoritarian attitudes of too many
church leaders.2
She wishes the meeting would be held in Oakland, California,
near St. Helena, where she has settled after returning from Australia. Having
been through two back-to-back winters, her very poor health makes her reluctant
to travel to Michigan in the dead of winter. But she decides it is more important
to save the extra $6,000 to $8,000 it would cost to have the meeting nearby
for her convenience. She views the 1901 General Conference session as vitally
important.
The trip starts badly when she loses consciousness for 12
hours in Los Angeles after preaching. Today we would probably put such an elderly
frail person in intensive care for several days, but within two days she’s on
her way. By train she travels to Vicksburg, Mississippi, where she spends time
with her son, Edson White, visiting with him on the Morning Star, the steamboat
ministry reaching former slaves in the South. Then it’s on to Memphis, Nashville,
and finally Chicago, where she preaches to 650 people and gets a firsthand view
of the medical missionary work started by John Harvey Kellogg. Her arrival in
Battle Creek after a 10-year absence must be bittersweet: her husband, James,
and two sons are buried there. She stays with John Harvey Kellogg, the man she
mentored as a young boy.
Delegates have come from all over the world for this meeting.
How could she help a group of independent-minded church members find God’s will
as a unified body?
Shortly after Ellen White arrives in Battle Creek in March
1901, she is urged to begin speaking in public, even though she is tired and
weak from strenuous travel. Every night Kellogg has a nurse give her a treatment
to help in the recovery process.
On March 28 she preaches to a publishers’ convention just
days before the General Conference session begins, speaking extemporaneously.3
She’s already thinking and praying about the important session scheduled to
begin in a few days. After leaving Australia and coming so far for such an important
meeting, she identifies six basic principles that can help find God’s will in
group decision-making—counsel that will help us nearly a century later as well.
She preached, “Unless we are close to our Saviour, unless
His power and grace are with us individually, we may be sure that we shall go
from this place thinking that we have not had a very wonderful meeting.” The
other possibility? “We can make a heaven here during this meeting. . . . Or
a hell . . . just as we choose.” If any had come unprepared to meet with God,
they should begin the meeting by humbling their hearts before God and putting
“away everything that interposes between our souls and Him. . . . He wants us
to do a great deal more praying and a great deal less talking. . . . God will
let this light shine into the heart of everyone who at this meeting will stand
in right relation to Him.”
Could too much group prayer be a bad thing? Some had suggested
they ought to spend several days in prayer for the Holy Spirit to descend on
believers, as at Pentecost. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea? Not to Ellen
White.
“I wish to say to you that the business which may be carried
on at this meeting is to be just as much a part of the service of God as is
prayer. The business meeting is to be just as much under the direction of the
Spirit as the prayer meeting.”
So the committee meetings we conduct are to be just as much
of God’s service as a prayer meeting? Richard Foster writes that “business meetings
should be viewed as worship services.”4 This prayer principle for group meetings
doesn’t negate the need for more personal prayer found in principle 1.
Why was she worried about too many days of prayer seeking
the Holy Spirit?
“There is danger of our getting a sentimental, impulsive
religion. Let the business transacted at this meeting stand forth in such sacredness
that the heavenly host can approve it.”
In other words, she favored a businesslike, sacred atmosphere
in church business meetings.
Her sermon continued, “God wants you to stand in a position
where He can breathe upon you the Holy Spirit, where Christ can abide in the
heart. He wants you at the beginning of this meeting to lay off whatever of
controversy, of strife, of dissension, of murmuring, you have been carrying.
. . . Remember that you will make the meeting what it is. . . . Talk with God,
and He will be with you.”
Her language grew stronger in frustration: “And if you do
not draw from heaven power and grace and treasures of truth to give to the people,
then, for Christ’s sake, stop your work till you realize the importance of a
close union with God.”
“He is knocking, knocking at your heart. Open the door and
let Him in. Empty the heart of all selfishness, by living right, eating right,
thinking right. Enthrone the Saviour in the heart. . . . May the Lord help us
to take steps heavenward.”
Was God’s will accomplished at the 1901 General Conference
session? Ellen White expressed her astonishment at what had happened. Her earlier
concerns about “one man or the minds of a few men”5 exerting “kingly power”6 didn’t materialize. In what may have been
the most significant General Conference session in the history of the denomination,
these things happened:
- Union conferences were organized as regional units,
helping to disperse the power of just a few leaders at the General Conference.
- Representation on the General Conference committee
was broadened from a handful of men to 25 members representing all aspects of
the church’s work.
- Church departments began to be formulated.
- The payment of Bible teachers from tithe and the need
for establishing church schools were voted for the first time.
- Young people’s societies were organized.
The prophet believed the God of heaven and His angels had
“walked up and down the aisles”7 of the Battle Creek Tabernacle to give the
delegates “right and peaceable minds.”8 She admitted that advance instruction
had been given to her, but “until the sum was worked out at this meeting, I
could not comprehend this instruction.”9 Not even she understood the implications
of the messages given her, but by the group working together, God’s will had
been found.
Sometimes we wish today that Ellen White could be present
to give us advice on how to proceed at a difficult moment. But isn’t it interesting
that when she was ministering she often just provided general principles—which
we still have available today?
She admonished the delegation, “Press together, press together.”10
We find this same principle in Proverbs 11:14: “Where no counsel is, the people
fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.” In Matthew 18:20
we read, “For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them”
(NKJV).
As Adventists meet together in groups, trying to discover
God’s will, let’s always remember to press together once the decision has been
made. In the history of our church, each time a challenge came, God gave church
members meeting in groups the insight, the determination, and the courage to
find solutions that could only have been divinely inspired.
Novelist Lloyd Douglas tells how, as a university student,
he lived in a boarding house where a retired music teacher was confined to a
wheelchair and unable to leave his first-floor apartment. Every morning Douglas
would engage in a ritual by which he would walk down the stairs, open the teacher’s
door, and ask, “Well, what’s the good news?”
The man would pick up his old tuning fork, tap it on his
wheelchair, think about the very middle note on a piano (“middle C”), and say,
“That’s middle C! It was middle C yesterday, it will be middle C tomorrow, it
will be middle C a thousand years from now. The tenor upstairs sings flat, the
piano across the hall is out of tune, but, my friend, that is middle C!”
Donald McCullough says of this story, “The old man had discovered
a constant reality on which he could depend, an unchanging truth to which he
could cling.
“Jesus Christ is our tuning fork, ringing out middle C in
a cacophonous world of competing truths; his pitch defines tonal reality and
sets every other note in its proper place. . . . When we listen to middle C
two things happen: the revelation of Jesus Christ both separates us from God
and unites us to God.”11
A college classmate of mine, David Lamoreaux, tunes pianos.
When I watch him tune a piano, it takes three strings in the upper register
for each note to be perfectly and individually tuned.
When we meet as church members in groups, we need to find
the perfectly tuned middle C of Jesus Christ in our lives. If we empty our lives
of self-centeredness and open ourselves to God’s will, we can find middle C
in our meetings. That doesn’t mean we will all be in agreement on every issue
discussed. The debate may be vigorous and heated at times.
But if we find middle C, we can leave a church meeting in
harmony and peace. We’ll find that God speaks to us through the community of
faith working together in love as the complementary parts of the body of Christ.
______________
1 Arthur L. White, Ellen G. White Biography (Hagerstown,
Md.: Review and Herald Pub. Assn., 1981), vol. 5, pp. 13-110.
2 Barry David Oliver, Seventh-day Adventist Organizational
Structure. Past, Present, and Future, Andrews University Doctoral Dissertation
Series, Vol. XV, 1989, p. 125.
3 Portions quoted in Ellen G. White, Selected Messages
(Hagerstown, Md.: Review and Herald Pub. Assn., 1958), book 3, pp. 336, 337
and full text in Ellen White, Sermons and Talks, vol. 2 (Silver Spring,
Md.: Ellen G. White Estate, 1994), pp. 151-155.
4 Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path
to Spiritual Growth, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), p.
182.
5 White, Ellen G. White Biography, vol. 5, p. 76.
6 Ibid., p. 77
7 Ibid., p. 110.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Donald W. McCullough, The Trivialization of God. The
Dangerous Illusion of a Manageable Deity (Colorado Springs: Navpress, 1995),
pp. 66, 67.
_________________________
Richard Osborn is vice president for education, North American
Division of Seventh-day Adventists.
