Author: shermancox

The first model of relating Adventism to the Black experience is to not relate them. This approach would take one of two forms. The preacher would either preach Adventism or preach on issues related to Black experience. In other words the preacher might preach on the relation of the the Sabbath to the Gospel or preach on how the Gospel affects the educational plight of black people.

Some preachers would sometimes preach on issues of relevance to black culture and then other times preach on “Adventist” issues. What it means however is that one’s sermons are either Authentically black, or authentically Adventist, but not both, certainly not at the same time.

The problem with such an approach is that it makes Adventist teachings irrelevant for daily living. Whenever the preacher preaches on Adventism the people will not hear about the God who is working things out for their daily living. Instead the people will hear something devoid of human experience.

Too often this is how Adventism is presented and preached. I think that we must put a little Adventism in our Black cultural preaching and put a little Blackness in our Adventist preaching. How do we do that?

We will continue looking at another model for this interaction in the next post of this series.

Should one even attempt to integrate a black cultural perspective (or any cultural perspective) with Adventism. One might argue that such an integration is not needed. On this very blog one commenter stated that we should just “Preach the Word.”

While I understand the sentiment, we also must “Preach to the People.” If you are to be heard or understood one must preach in not only in the vernacular, but even making use of the culture of those who we are preaching to. This is what Jesus did when he used the popular idea of the dead being able to talk to the living in the parable of Lazarus and the Rich man. Paul did the same thing when he spoke to the culture on Mars hill. While we must ever be mindful of what C. E. Bradford wrote in the book Preaching to the Times, that we are to preach TO the times and not merely preach the times, we also must interact with the culture that we find ourselves.

Preaching the Word to the People

To much preaching could be done anywhere. If your preaching does not change at all depending on audience, then the congregation is irrelevant to your preaching. No you must preach to real people. If you do that, then you must take into account the people in your preparation of the sermon.

“Preaching the Word” does not take away your responsibility to show how the “word” is relevant to the cultural perspective of the congregation that you are speaking to.

Great preaching is Encounter

Great preaching is an encounter between Spirit, preacher, and congregation. Even though you may preach the “same sermon” again, you will never really preach the same sermon again if you are open to the leading of the Spirit and interact with the congregation.

So preaching that takes seriously the culture of the Black community is needed, as well as preaching that takes seriously any culture that God has called you to preach to. Thus let us look at how we can relate these two perspectives to preach a relevant and faithful Gospel to God’s people in these last days. In the next few days we will look at some models to do that very thing.

On page 20 of Charles Bradford’s book Preaching to the Times he states:

Seventh-day Adventist preaching should be distinguished by something different. It must bring to the present situation those insights and understandings that are found only in the prophetic portions of the Bible. All true Seventh-day Adventist preaching has Revelation 14:6-12 as its frame of reference…all sermons and doctrines wind up somewhere in the neighborhood of this threefold message.

Again we come to the unique aspect. I have often said, if I go to a Baptist church I expect to hear a Christian sermon, but yes I expect to hear something that lets me know that this is a Baptist church. The same with a pentecostal or methodist or whatever. Also the same with an Adventist church. Here Bradford gets to the core of the Adventist preaching identity. What are we doing? What should we be doing?

Now in preaching our “unique commission” we should not fall into the trap of simply lecturing on the facts of these portions of scripture without making it relevant to the people. If you preach the Sabbath, then the Sabbath must be seen as more than just a day you go to church on or a day you get to take off from work. If we are going to preach the Sanctuary, then it has got to be more than chronology and celestial geography. And if you are going to preach the Second Coming, it has to be more than just a threat of hell to entice you to come to the alter.

Preach Adventism, yes we must. But always find a way to preach Jesus in it. And also find a way to preach Adventism’s connection to real life in it. Because in the end, it is better to hear a great sermon that will help to strengthen and empower than hear a lecture on facts that seem by our presentation to be irrelevant to real life.