As we were approaching the New Year of 2011, I received a special supplement to the Signs of the Times magazine in the mail. The title of this piece is, “2012 Doomsday or Distraction?” What is it about our human nature that makes us sure we can predict the future, determine the date for the end of the world, or predict the exact day of Jesus’ return? I received this literature to encourage me to have our church order thousands of these pieces to distribute or sponsor mailing them to our whole zip code.
I’m not any kind of last day’s expert, but I found the pamphlet pretty well done . . . and painfully incomplete. The topic about date-setting for the return of Jesus or the end of the world provided a near perfect opportunity to humbly use our denomination’s experience as a warning to others not to take the same path.
You see, the Seventh-day Adventist movement was born following the “great disappointment” of the group from which we came. Many of our early pioneers had been sucked into the date-setting that ended with the “great disappointment” when Jesus did not return to our earth on October 22, 1844.
To think that Seventh-day Adventist editors of “Signs” would fail to include, if not highlight in this document, our own experience is some kind of spiritual blindness. It reminds me of what it would be like for an alcoholic to write about the evils of alcohol but fail to share his/her own experience.
This gross, intentional omission, in my opinion, only further erodes trust in our denomination. In contrast, imagine how much confidence building careful self-disclosure would have created –“Take a lesson from us – we've been there, done that. We know the fallacy of date setting – don't make the same mistake or be sucked in by it."
But no! On page 10 of this pamphlet is a long list of failed dates when Jesus was predicted to return or the world was to end, and 1844 is conspicuously absent! For me, that makes the entire piece disingenuous and an embarrassment to me and the denomination I love and serve. I have written the Signs editors but have yet to hear from them. Here’s a portion of what I said:
“Next time, and regularly in Signs of the Times magazine, PLEASE don't hide truth and write in a self-promoting, self-flattering way. Our failures are as valid as all those other failed dates, and we can learn from them and use them to help others not fail where we did. Do better work next time, and I'd recommend either adding truth to this piece or pulling it. Otherwise, it only stands to do harm to our movement when our critics, who know our history, see the blaring omission in our telling of the story.”
As Henri Nouwen writes so poignantly, “We are wounded healers.” But if we pretend not to be wounded, if we present ourselves as having it all together – without error – we deny the world the opportunity to learn from our wounds. Setting dates for the world to end and Jesus to return is a bad idea. We know this from personal experience and maybe, just maybe, if we are transparent, we can help others not miss what Jesus said, “No one knows the day and the hour except the Father,” and, “At an unexpected hour the Son of Man will come.” (Matthew 24:36; Luke 12:40)
Andy McDonald
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