Seventh-day Activists

by Carl McRoy

Part 2 of the Seventh-day Activism series begins where the DJM (Dudley, Joseph, and Moore) episode ended, with Elder Earl Moore’s mic-less mic-drop, “There is no white money in that van.”

Why was that important?

Pre-Regional Consequences

If it wasn’t for regional conferences, Team DJM might have ended up like James K. Humphrey. Originally from Jamaica, Elder Humphrey was a former Baptist minister who became an outstanding Adventist evangelist and pastor that eventually left the denomination to form the United Sabbath Day Adventists.

Humphrey believed the wholistic lifestyle taught by Adventists had the best potential of any movement to uplift Black people in America. However, he and his congregation began fundraising to build their own health and education facilities outside normal church channels because of the limited access and prejudicial treatment experienced at Adventist institutions.

This complicated situation led to a split in the church and the denomination’s loss of one of its most talented ministers of the era. Dr. Clifford Jones summarized the dilemma like this:

“Unable to reconcile Christianity’s emphasis on love and inclusion with what he considered the discriminatory practices of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, Humphrey concluded that the time was ripe for African Americans to establish their own organizations… Doctrinally, Humphrey was a Seventh-day Adventist to the end.”

Never Say Never

Prior to this schism, Elder Humphrey and other Black Adventist ministers had agitated for separate conferences so they could build and enjoy educational and health facilities that were supposed to be part of the Adventist lifestyle. In 1928, they were told to never bring up the subject of Black conferences again.

After several racial crises in the church, the 1944 General Conference Spring Council voted that regional conferences should be formed for the “development of the work among the colored people in North America.” Regional conferences were given autonomy to hire, develop, and promote people of color for local church and conference leadership. They could decide the best means for ministering to people that the denominational structure and leadership had previously neglected and abused.

This kind of organizational change has precedence reaching as far back as the controversy between Hebrew and Greek believers in Acts 6. The Greeks were empowered to supervise ministries that were alleged to show favoritism toward Hebrews. Those first “deacons” helped bridge the gap between the “spiritual” work of the apostles and supplying the material needs of widows and other vulnerable populations in the church.

Forthtelling Prophecies

I’ve heard it said in official church meetings that we need to stay out of social issues because they will distract us from the prophetic message we should be proclaiming. Some insist that only Jesus’ second coming can fix the injustices of the world; therefore, we should just preach the Gospel and the signs of the times, so we can hasten His coming. It isn’t surprising, but disappointing, that the same admonitions given during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s are still used to dilute Adventist activism in the 2020s.

One of the problems is that this point of view overlooks that prophecy isn’t just foretelling future events, but also involves forthtelling about contemporary events. We see both at work in Daniel 4. After interpreting Nebuchadnezzar’s dream to mean that God was going to dramatically humble him, Daniel appealed to the king to “Renounce your sins by doing what is right, and your wickedness by being kind to the oppressed. It may be that then your prosperity will continue” (Dan. 4:27, NIV). The king’s rightness with God wasn’t just about his vertical relationship with heaven but his horizontal relationships with humans.

Interwoven Threads of Civil and Religious Liberties

Another problem of the “just preach the gospel” argument is that Adventists who go to court over workplace accommodations for Sabbath, do so primarily based on Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Seventh-day Adventists are beneficiaries of the movement that many of our former leaders condemned. Our religious liberties and civil rights are interconnected threads that affect our quality of life in this “great web of humanity.”

Even the most conservative among us Adventists today owe a debt of gratitude to people of various denominations who were labeled as radicals back then. We should also ask ourselves how people are supposed to enjoy religious liberties when they were terrorized at their houses of worship to prevent them from exercising basic human rights?

Orthodoxy vs AND Orthopraxy?

A third inconsistency is that the Adventist activists we highlighted in in part 1 regularly preached public evangelistic meetings and were firmly anchored in the fundamentals of their faith. They didn’t choose between social activism or biblical fidelity. They chose social activism and biblical fidelity, or better yet, they showed their faith through their actions (James 2:14-18). In fact, their actions prefigured our modern version of Fundamental Beliefs that hadn’t even been drafted yet. The voted summary of beliefs they had in 1968 were fewer than what we have today. While retaining the essence of yesterday’s theory, today’s statements speak more to the implications of everyday living that activist pastors of the past were trying to enflesh.

Carl McRoy serves as Director of Literature Ministries for the North American Division.