The renewal of Adventism

One hundred and forty years have now passed since the ‘Great Disappointment’ of 1844. During the last decade, a period of great turmoil in the Adventist church, two principal mechanisms for coping with the unexpectedly long delay of the advent have emerged. According to an official church statement, ‘… the crisis is brought on by our inexcusable delinquency in failing to adopt God's plan for finishing the work’. On this account, the church has not been true to its charter, and must now do all within its power to ‘preserve the landmarks’. It is a call to restore primitive Adventism. Others would invoke the authority of Ellen White to argue that, in the history of Adventism, calls to ‘preserve the landmarks’ have left people's minds ‘sealed against the entrance of light’. They fear that an undue preoccupation with the past will make the Adventist church an irrelevance in modern society. They believe that each generation of Adventists must discover its own ‘present truth’ and not simply remember the ‘former truth’. One such attempt to seek renewal calls for Adventists to embrace a more radical form of discipleship by rediscovering their roots in Anabaptism.