I became friends with Eugene Prewitt and his lovely wife during the Theology of Ordination Study Committee, which met four times to study female ordination in 2013-14. Eugene is a very solid, principled conservative Adventist, and he wrote a book about female ordination during TOSC. So I was delighted to find out last week that Elder Prewitt was coming to my church, Country Life SDA Church, on the weekend.
Eugene is a bit of an odd duck; he seems almost to delight in provoking people. This “sermon” is a brutal take-down of easy missions and church strategy that prioritizes sending people and resources to areas already largely Christian or even saturated with Seventh-day Adventists—like Jamaica, where Adventists are twelve percent of the population, so more than one out of every ten people is an Adventist.
Now, Elder Prewitt and his wife have spent most of their lives in difficult mission areas; the last four years they were in Bangladesh, a predominantly Muslim Country, and before that they spent four and a half years in Malaysia, another very difficult, mostly Muslim country. So if he talks the talk, he has walked the walk; this is NOT a case of “do as I say, not as I do.” His appeal is do as I do.
Still, one has to question whether it is necessary to provoke an audience with such gusto. He stated that our church (which last I checked was about 350 members) should be “split up into eight (8) pieces”; we would all step up to leadership, and our three pastors (one full time, two part time) could then be sent to the mission field. (He acknowledged that he doesn’t get invited back to large churches.)
350 divided by 8 is 43. I don’t agree that 43-member churches are any sort of an ideal. As a young adult, I was in a 50 member church in rural northeast Texas where average attendance was about 20 to 25. Our pastor had a three-church district and was only at our church once every three weeks. Yes, I got to preach a lot, teach Sabbath School, be an elder, and sometimes play the piano (which I cannot do), but it was not fun and we struggled. By the time I decamped for southern California after five years, I was frustrated and burned out. Sorry, but tiny churches are not the ideal.
I am and will remain friends with Eugene Prewitt, because he is a fearless man of God, and I like to think of myself as being someone who values telling the truth above political expediency. There should be a little Eugene Prewitt in all of us—just maybe not as much as there is in Eugene.
I solicit your thoughts on his presentations, one in the morning, one in the afternoon:
If you would like to help Eugene with his ministry in Bangladesh, send money here:
MVO (Mara Vision Outreach), P.O Box 240, Addy, WA 99101. Indicate that the money is for Eugene Prewitt’s mission, other wise it will not go there.