You build a battleship differently than a cruise ship. The design reflects the purpose. The same holds for a church.
The doctrines at a church’s core should not be arbitrary. They should reflect what the community exists to do. In the Adventist tradition, the foundational doctrines do something I find remarkable: they answer the questions that confront every human.
Philosophers have named three of them. They cross cultures and centuries. Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? Identity. Purpose. Destiny.
Most of us accumulate partial answers — from family, work, community. But the questions return, usually at the worst moments. Loss. Illness. The death of someone we love.
Let me tell you about one of those moments.
My youngest daughter was twenty months old when a friend’s twenty-two-month-old son went in for what everyone expected to be routine hernia surgery. Within hours, doctors referred him to a larger hospital. That hospital referred him further. By the end of that day, the family sat in the University of Iowa hospitals with a diagnosis of one of the most aggressive childhood cancers the staff had ever encountered. The tumor mass could double in twenty-four hours.
He survived the cancer. Months of chemotherapy saved his life — but damaged his heart. At nine, he landed on the transplant list. He received a heart. We spent a great deal of time with that family through all of it — not doing anything special. Mostly just sitting where they sat. Talking about what they wanted to talk about.
The father asked me once why people visited but didn’t return. I told him the truth: we genuinely grieve what happened to your child, but we don’t want to admit how grateful we are that it didn’t happen to ours. He nodded. He already knew.
The transplant didn’t hold. His heart deteriorated in ways doctors couldn’t explain. He needed another. On Father’s Day in 1996, his father worked — a half-million-dollar surgery demands income even with insurance — and the boy made his father breakfast that morning. His father left for work. The boy had a catastrophic heart attack.
He was fourteen years old.
I had to tell his father. It remains the hardest thing I have ever done.
Throughout that ordeal, the father asked why. Why? Of course he did. I had one answer — the only honest one I could find. Because there is sin in the world.
Not because they had done something wrong. Not because God punished them. Because we inhabit a broken world, and sometimes the brokenness falls on those who least deserve it.
After the funeral, the father told me our family had given them the only comfort they received. I didn’t know what to say. We had done nothing remarkable. He said: you were just there. And when you said ‘because there’s sin in the world’ — you didn’t blame us, and you didn’t blame God. You told the truth.
If Adventists contribute one thing to Christian theology that no one else contributes with the same clarity, it is the doctrine of the Great Controversy — the understanding that a cosmic conflict runs behind what we see, that suffering does not signal divine indifference, and that God did not author the brokenness. The story of Job explains why bad things happen to good people. It neither blames the victim nor excuses evil.
This is one of four pillars.* The others — the Second Coming, the Sabbath, and the understanding that death is sleep, and that God does not torment anyone eternally — each answer some part of the same questions. Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going?
Adventist theology, at its best, takes those questions without flinching. It provides answers that persist through trials—even the most severe. I know this not from a textbook but from a hospital waiting room on a Father’s Day, and a message I never wanted to deliver.
These are the timbers of the ship. Not walls to shelter behind. Structural members that can survive life’s storms.
Next: What the world most needs from us — and why warning people differs from helping them.
*Theses are the four “landmarks” listed by Ellen White, see CWE pp. 30-31.
If you’d like Ed to speak at your church, contact him at
BibleJourneys@Yahoomail.com
Put “Speaking Inquiry” in the subject line.
