By Colleen Tinker
This week on December 3, 2018, Adventist News Network (ANN) announced that the Adventist organization has adopted a new “brand promise” as its public identity.
“We can help you understand the Bible to find freedom, healing and hope in Jesus” now defines the Adventists’ self-appointed role in the world. According to ANN, “The Adventist Promise sets a clear expectation of what the worldwide public can expect from all Adventist entities and members.”
This statement of identity “was approved by the General Conference Administrative Committee to become the core message of adventist.org,” ANN reports, and it was presented to the world leaders of Adventism at the Annual Council in October.
Why a “Brand Promise”?
According to the online BusinessDictionary.com, a brand promise articulates “benefits and experiences that marketing campaigns try to associate with a product in its current and prospective consumers’ minds”. This definition was followed by sentences that used the phrase in context: “You may want to make a brand promise so that your customers know that they can always rely on you,” and “You need to keep any brand promise that you make so that your customers will always trust and rely on you.”
ANN further explained: “The Adventist Promise aims to deliver a clear message about what the movement stands for, and seeks to leave a lasting impression on people in the 21st century…[It] shines a spotlight on people’s needs rather than on a long description of the church, its institutions and history. It positions members of the public as the focus, with the Church serving a mentor role in helping people understand the Scriptures.”
Adventist leaders are urging “every media channel of the denomination” to “communicate it as the core brand promise of the Church.” Associate Director of Communication for the General Conference, Sam Neves, says that every member of the Adventist organization worldwide is “being called to help deliver on the Adventist Promise by actively helping people understand the Bible.” He also warns Adventists that the “public will lose trust in the Adventist Church” if everyone representing Adventism, from leaders to institutions to the people in the pews, do not deliver on this promise.
With deliberate intent, the focus of this Promise is the felt needs of the public, not the actual beliefs or practices of Adventism. Neves stressed the importance of this focus and said, “It is about them. Our Promise is not a promise to ourselves, it is a promise to them. We are not the hero.”
The ANN article announcing the Adventist Promise stated, “It is not the role of the Church to bring freedom, healing and hope…[Neves] maintained that the Adventist Promise is about helping people understand the Bible so that they get to know Jesus for themselves and through Him, find the hope they have been craving.”
General Conference president Ted Wilson endorses the new statement with his comment: “The Bible is the foundation of our understanding of God. It is His Holy Word. It is the written Word that points us to the Living Word, Jesus Christ. If you wish to know God’s will for your life, you must read His Word, understand His Word, and fulfill His Word—-all through humble prayer on your part and the leading of the Holy Spirit in your life…Jesus said in John 17:17, ‘Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth.’ That’s why it is so important that we individually study and understand the Bible for ourselves as we look forward to Christ’s soon return.”
Implications
This Adventist Promise deliberately turns people’s attention away from Adventism per se and creates an impression that the organization is all about humanitarian good deeds. It is a way to direct not only the public’s attention to Adventism’s concern for humanity’s “felt needs”, but also to get the members to see themselves more as helpers of the needy and less as purveyors of unusual doctrines.
It has seemed to me for several years that in the public sector, Adventism has been positioning itself as a significant provider of humanitarian direction and intervention. More than representing itself as a church with unique doctrines, it has been presenting itself as a source of disaster relief and human rights/social justice policy and practice on an international level.
Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) receives grants from the US government, particularly from USAID, and it provides humanitarian aid in more than 130 countries. Its statement on the ADRA webpage says, “ADRA works in more than 130 countries to bring long-term development programs and immediate emergency response to communities through a network of global offices.”
Thus, in many places in the world, people’s first thought about Adventism is humanitarian aid, not unique beliefs that define a church.
In addition, Ganoune Diop, director of the Adventists’ Public Affairs and Religious Liberty (PARLA) department, served as Adventism’s liaison to the United Nations in New York and Geneva before his election to PARLA in 2015.
Now, as director of PARLA, Diop continues addressing interfaith agencies and working with governments and faith organizations to achieve human liberties. For example, in January, 2017, Diop led the Adventist organization in co-sponsoring a symposium at the United Nations in New York, “focussed on the role of faith-based organizations in international affairs, and specifically in the challenge of peace-making around the world.” Adventist leaders called for “international cooperation to end abuse in refugees in Libya,” and they encouraged “an ‘Inclusive Society’ in visit with Columbian leader” among other things, including continuing the Reformation by encouraging the European Parliament to practice “grace and tolerance”.
Of course, none of these are bad things! The point, however, is that the Adventist organization is positioning itself in visible places internationally not so much as a church with an end-time message but as a humanitarian organization dedicated to fixing problems of disaster, oppression, and poverty.
At the same time, this humanitarian positioning is not divorced from Adventist doctrine under the surface. As Diop says in his article online explaining Adventism’s representation at ecumenical, interfaith organizations, “The rule of thumb is not to hold membership in any ecumenical body that eradicates or erases the distinctive Adventist voice in reference to the sovereignty of God the Creator, the Sabbath, and the Second Coming.”
Underlying agenda
Significantly, the first of his three Adventist distinctives refers not primarily (as it would appear to an uninformed reader) to a sovereign Creator God, but to the underlying agenda of a literal six (or seven, as some Adventists say) day creation which established the seventh-day Sabbath as a “creation ordnance”.
Also significant is the fact that these three doctrines are the Adventist “bottom line”. Adventists do not make alliances with a body that “eradicates or erases the distinctive Adventist voice” regarding these three things. Notice that Jesus, His shed blood, and His resurrection are not part of that bottom line that must not be erased.
Diop also states, “In principle, Adventists choose not to be involved in doctrinal alliances with other churches because of the Adventist adherence to a wholistic and integrated approach to biblical doctrines and because of that seeks to uphold doctrines that Adventists consider to have been sidelined, changed, or forgotten in the course of church history.”
Again, Adventists have always taught that Sabbath and the second coming were sidelined, changed, or forgotten doctrines, and God raise up Adventism to restore them.
In spite of the apparent non-sectarian focus on human rights, Diop leads the Adventist organization internationally in partnerships with ecumenical organizations with the underlying “agenda” of protecting and promoting Adventism’s unique doctrines.
Note that the important doctrines Adventism’s humanitarian focus upholds are not the biblical gospel or the need to believe in Jesus; instead, it stands on the doctrines that any monotheistic religion could endorse.
To be fair, Diop also writes about Adventists being “committed to call all peoples to fix their eyes on Jesus,” reminding “all Christians” of “the second coming of Jesus”. He tips his hand, however, by supporting his belief in engaging with other Christians by liberally quoting from Ellen White. In other words, his and the Adventists’ commitment in these humanitarian efforts is not for the gospel. Neither is it primarily to make Adventists.
Diop does work to achieve programs and legislation that protect Adventist distinctives, but he is not proselytizing as much as he is creating a public image of concern for felt needs. He is helping to establish Adventisms’ reputation as an organization that will defend the weak, feed the hungry, and legislate aid and protection for the oppressed.
Bringing the members along
Now, with the establishment of the Adventist Promise, the organization is bringing the membership into a position of seeing themselves as an extension of this external humanitarian focus. For ANN to state that the focus is not on the Adventist organization but on the public, they have revealed that they want the members to embrace that idea that they are providing what the community needs, not that they are trying to bring people to believe their doctrines.
They also want to deflect criticisms of Adventist doctrine from the outside. By creating a universal public Promise of teaching people to read the Bible so they can find “freedom, healing and hope in Jesus”, they can dismiss doctrinal criticisms and reassure the members that they are about helping the world, not about defining the state of the dead or the nature of salvation.
Of course, the explanation of how this Promise will “work” reveals that the end game is the same: to create such indebtedness and unconscious obligation that people will be lured into becoming Adventists because of the unexpected warmth of being invited personally into Adventists’ homes and churches to “study the Bible”.
Studying the Bible with Adventists, however, means exactly what it has always meant: teaching people to read Scripture through the interpretive lens of the great controversy worldview. Adventist Bible studies, no matter how much Adventists deny it, are proselytizing events because Adventist interpretations are established by the prophetess.
This new Adventist Promise is a marketing move. It is not a change in Adventism’s beliefs or practices; it is, rather, a means of disarming the unwary public and of rallying the “home team” to serve the neighbors ultimately by teaching them how to see Scripture through Adventist glasses.
Brand Promises create the public’s and the members’ expectations for an organization. Perhaps this is a good place to establish a brand promise for Life Assurance Ministries: We promise to tell you the truth about Seventh-day Adventism. †
Sources
- Seventh-day Adventist Church Adopts New Brand Promise
- ADRA Homepage
- ADRA Financial Report
- Adventist Public Affairs and Religious Liberty Homepage
- Ganoune Diop’s statement
- May 18–24, 2024 - May 16, 2024
- We Got Mail - May 16, 2024
- Should We Leave the “Isms”? - May 9, 2024
Whether it is this new Adventist Social Gospel of the Gospel of the Three Angels; Adventism is steeped in a false gospel message.
A “Read the Bible” campaign will be interesting. The new Discipleship Handbook has the same message (p. 14), but when you examine the daily reading plan you will discover that along with Bible reading are Ellen White readings for virtually every day.