Just two years ago, a group of Seventh-day Adventist pastors formed a network that would "empower the next generation of pastors to think creatively about the future of the Adventist Church."
Just two years ago, a group of Seventh-day Adventist pastors formed a network that would “empower the next generation of pastors to think creatively about the future of the Adventist Church.” This group, called “Re-Church,” includes pastors, church leaders and lay leaders.
“We deal a lot with evangelism in the post-modern context, [such as] urban ministry,” says Ryan Bell, pastor of the Bucks County Adventist Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “[It’s] about a mentality [of] reaching new generations and a new culture.”
Re-Church sprung off of the Seeds conference, a church-planting movement at Andrews University, an Adventist institution in Michigan. “We started…doing a young adult track,” Bell says. “It grew into post-modernism and what the church might look like in the future.”
One of the main functions of Re-Church is the annual conference. The first one, called “Loving Babylon,” was held in 2002 in New York City. This year’s conference, called “Dancing With God: Steps to Loving Well,” was held Aug. 13 to 16 in Lake Arrowhead, California, and had about 70 participants.
“Our relationship with God is much like a dance,” Bell says. “It’s not so much a mathematical formula. We learn a relationship with God a lot like we learn dance steps. When you dance with a partner, there’s always a leader. We want to reflect like we’re following God in a dance. The dance steps are spiritual discipline, prayer, fellowship and love.
“It’s a beautiful metaphor,” he continues. “We talk about the gospel as music. When you hear the gospel, it makes you want to dance with God.”
Bell says that the conference last year focused on getting into the city, being active in witness, and loving the world. This year they “pulled back and reflected. It’s more about loving God. A key part of mission that’s hard to separate is we can’t love God if we don’t love the world and we can’t love the world if we don’t love God. The two are so intertwined,” he says.
Re-Church members say the friendships and mentorships that have been formed have provided a wealth of support. “[It’s a] self-organizing [group] on a frontier to help each other network, resource, encourage, explore topics [and] practical issues that we have,” says Samir Selmanovic, pastor of Crosswalk Ministries at the Azure Hills Adventist Church in southern California. The Web site, www.re-church.org, says that Selmanovic’s ministry is centered around finding ways to make Christianity intelligible to secular people and raising a church as an agent of good in society.
“It’s a survival issue for me. It’s a lifeline in ministry,” Selmanovic says. “We try to keep it really genuine. It’s recharging time, every year.”
At the conference “people kept saying that ‘Last year we talked about methods of evangelism through love. This year challenged us to think that spirituality is through evangelism,’” Bell says. “People are hungering to experience spirituality, rather than seeking answers to questions. Spirituality is evangelism for the 21st century.”
Re-Church is “a network of friends conspiring to change the church and the world around us by first changing ourselves.” The Web site says Re-Church “exists for support in the perils of ministry and healing when we are injured.”
“I’ve made a lot of friends in ministry who are like-minded, forward-looking, ready to risk things,” Selmanovic says. “We encourage and [are] encouraged.”
Re-Church “is fully convicted that God is doing a new thing in our midst—that there is an emerging church that we are only just beginning to see. We believe that He is calling mission leaders to listen, challenge and form His church for a new generation. We are also fully committed to the best of Seventh-day Adventism—it’s teaching and history—and feel passionately about letting that best shine,” reads the Web site.
“When it comes to being a pastor or lay church leader, the really important [thing about the] relationship is connecting with God and making sure His life is flowing through us—that we’re doing His will,” Bell says.
Though Re-Church members are primarily based in North America, Bells says the group is not exclusive to one area.
