The Church Said It First

In a place the essay does not visit, a child is eating. The food came through an agency founded by Seventh-day Adventists, and some of the money for it moved through the United Nations system. The child does not know this and does not care.

A recent Fulcrum7 essay argues something true in one respect: world leaders have begun to say out loud that the United Nations is failing at the one task that justified it, while the Adventist church, which holds a seat inside that system, stays quiet. The essay faults that silence. I want to say something different. The church has not been silent about the UN's failures. It has been saying so, in its own pages, for a century — since before the UN existed. What it has refused to do is conclude that rebuking a failing institution means abandoning the people that institution's failures have made hungry.

Our Own Editors Got There First

Here is what the silence charge cannot account for. The denomination's own press has been declaring the failure of world government for a hundred years. In 1923, when the League of Nations was still fashionable, Signs of the Times looked over the peace machinery of its day and found "the sorry spectacle of sixteen or more world conferences, all of which have ended practically no further along than when they began" (Signs of the Times, 1923-05-29, p. 9). By 1938, with the League dissolving in front of it, the Oriental Watchman put the point in a headline: "The League of Nations Expires" (The Oriental Watchman and Herald of Health, 1938-05-01, p. 32). The critique now coming from the UN's own leaders is a century old, and it was made first in our own papers.

Why the Church Stays

Strip away the particulars and the charge is capture: a church that once warned against worldly confederacies has, the story goes, been absorbed into one. But the captured-church story still has to explain a small puzzle. If the church has always known the institution is broken, why hold a seat inside it at all?

The paperwork is not in dispute. The church holds special consultative status with the UN, "which permits the church to make statements to the commission, attend U.N. conferences and meetings" (Review and Herald, 2005-05-05, p. 40). Since 1997 its relief agency has held the higher general status, with the right to speak in the chambers where relief is actually coordinated. The church's own explanation for the seat is this: "We simply cannot afford to stay away" (Review and Herald, 2005-05-05, p. 40).

That sentence is the mechanism. A relief agency does not feed people by standing outside the room where the food is coordinated. In a famine, the trucks, the airstrips, the permits, and much of the money move through the same system the church has spent a century criticizing. The Adventist Review put it plainly when it reported that "the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) joined the United Nations and the rest of the world" (Adventist Review, 2019-08, p. 11). Joining is not endorsing. A church can hold in one hand a century of editorials declaring the League and its heirs failures, and in the other a sack of grain for a child — because both hands belong to the same conviction. The institution is broken, and the broken institution is full of people.

One number deserves a harder look than it gets: $32,045,660 in what is called UN support to ADRA in 2016. No page in the denomination's own press carries that figure. Much of what gets counted as UN money in relief is in fact bilateral money from individual governments. The distinction is not pedantry. A church yoked to the UN is one story; a relief agency that takes grants from national governments is an ordinary one.

An Empty Room Is Not an Altar

The UN's meditation room is the quiet chamber where the church's own reviewers once noted that "we could not use any of the symbols with which man has been accustomed to link his religious feelings" (Watchman Magazine, 1962-01-01, p. 33). In place of cross or crescent stands a six-and-a-half-ton block of iron ore, lit by a single shaft of light. One reading sees in that block an altar to an undefined spirit, installed in the house the church has joined. But the room's designers said plainly what they were doing: they removed every symbol precisely because people of many faiths would meet there, and no one tradition could be preferred. A room stripped of every symbol is closer to the opposite of an altar — a deliberate refusal to name any god at all. A church that has spent a century criticizing the UN is not deceived by that room. That is not the part of the arrangement worth worrying about.

What the Charge Gets Right

And yet the charge is not built of nothing. There is a real tension between a church that printed, in 1868, "he who would be a friend of the world, is the enemy of God" (Review and Herald, 1868-03-17, p. 2), and one that now keeps accredited representatives at UN headquarters and celebrates UN Day. A church that warned its readers in 1944 that "Men now are talking much of united action among the nations and among the churches" (Review and Herald, 1944-02-24, p. 5) owes an account of why it now sits inside the confederacy its grandparents were taught to distrust.

The old warnings, though, are about spiritual fellowship — about whose cause a believer adopts as his own. A friend of the world in 1868 did not mean a relief worker who accepted a food grant; it meant a believer who made the world's values his allegiance. Collapsing the two converts a warning about apostasy into a prohibition on feeding the hungry.

Which brings us back to the child eating. The institution is failing; the church has said so for a century and would agree. The question the charge answers wrongly is what follows. You do not rebuke a broken institution by walking away from the people inside it. You name its failures, and you feed its victims, as ADRA does, and you refuse to pretend those two acts are in tension. They are the same act. A church that believes the world is failing and that the hungry still deserve bread has not lost its warning; it has understood it. Leave the hungry out, and what remains is a clean argument and an empty room — a shaft of light falling on nothing anyone is meant to kneel before.

— Naomi Okonkwo, Global Church Correspondent