Advancing Adventists

As 1,307 delegates from 102 countries gathered for a World Conference of the Seventh-day Adventists in San Francisco last week, there was a note of gentle irony in their choice of one of their meeting places -the Cow Palace. Vegetarians by conviction, almost all Adventists abstain from meat. They tend to abstain from alcohol, nicotine, coffee, tea, cosmetics, jewelry, dancing, card playing, movies, the theater, and "sensational" TV shows.

Some of these aversions they share with other strongly fundamentalist and austere Protestant groups. What sets the Seventh-day Adventists strikingly apart from their fellow Protestants is two major points of doctrine. One is that the Adventists honor Saturday as the Sabbath, the Biblical seventh day. The other is the belief that the second coming of Christ is premillennial and imminent: "The time is not known but near."

Girdling the Globe. That this apocalyptic message finds good growing weather in the apocalyptic temper of the nuclear age was clear in the statistics cited at the conference. Since 1958, time of the last convention, 350,000 new members have been baptized (by total immersion), swelling the church's ranks to 1,307,800. In 1961 a record 101,600 members were added to church rolls. Rigorously tithing, Adventists poured more than $223 million into church coffers in the past four years, a gain of $54 million over the previous four.

With these funds, the intensely mission-minded Adventists deployed a task force of 1,861 missionaries, maintained 13,000 globe-girdling churches, supported 5,091 denominational schools, financed 108 hospitals and in clinics, including leper colonies. They are strong in the South Pacific, and have breached the Iron Curtain, counting among their members 20,000 in Communist China and 40,000 in Soviet Russia. But Adventists are proudest of all of the tropical growth rate of the South African Division: 70,000 converts in the past four years.

Un-Christian Practice? Paradoxically, the color question stirred up the one breath of dissidence at the San Francisco conference. "The religion of the Bible recognizes no caste or color," said third-term Adventist World President Reuben R. Figuhr, reiterating the historical position of the Seventh-day Adventists. But militant Negro Adventists, banded together in the Laymen's Leadership Conference, charged that church practice is "unChristian" compared with officially stated policy. Case in point: Burrell Scott, 38, building contractor and leading lay official of the Negro Adventist Church of Oberlin, Ohio, journeyed to San Francisco to register a protest that his daughter Erica, 13, had been rejected for admittance to the Adventists' Mount Vernon Academy in Mount Vernon, Ohio. (The school was all white last year, will admit one Negro this fall.) Complained Scott testily: "Some of our ministers believe there's a separate white heaven and a colored heaven."

Whether yielding to outward pressure or inner conscience, the San Francisco delegates went on to elect Frank L. Peterson, 69, the first Negro vice president in General Conference history, thus assuring Negroes of a larger voice in future church affairs.

Cosmic Cataclysm. The U.S. Adventist movement dates from the early decades of the 19th century, when an upstate New York farmer named William Miller convinced some 50,000 Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians that Christ's second coming would take place on Oct. 22, 1844. His forecast's failure for a time cost the movement much credibility. The Seventh-day Adventists, formally organized in 1863, have made no specific predictions, and the faith has become strong.

Dr. Francis D. Nichol, editor of the denomination's Review and Herald, spoke for the entire conference when he said: "The spirit of the modern scientific age to which the churches have so largely succumbed is against the very idea of a cataclysmic, supernatural event, but that is precisely what we declare that the Advent will be."

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