The Collegedale Spanish-American Seventh-day Adventist church was founded as a mission group in 1985. It all started as a group of Southern Adventist University students, both Hispanics and Americans, decided to have a Sabbath school class together. They moved around campus until the university and some Adventists neighbors decided to help them make their dream come true of having their own temple.
I had a chance to sit down with the church’s current senior pastor, Gamaliel Feliciano, and SuCasa’s former and current youth directors, Martha Calderon and Carolina Bonilla, as they explained how the original congregation developed into the SuCasa church. Join me as we learn the history behind a congregation that has found a way to bridge its generational gap.
Kaleb and his stepfather Tim. (Photo courtesy of Kaleb Eisele)
By Megan Yoshioka
Kaleb Eisele is the founder of the storytelling platform Humans of Adventism. Although he grew up Adventist and is a member of the Adventist church today, at one point in his life, he left the church. As a young person and a member of the Millennial generation, he felt unheard and like his opinion did not matter within the church.
“When I left the church, I didn’t feel like my voice mattered,” Eisele said. “I felt like my job was to be quiet and to do what I was told — kind of to just accept the offering plate job. Or, accept the choir singing job, which I didn’t want to do.
“Honestly, as someone who is working full-time, in college, married … I really felt like, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t want to be a junior deacon. I’m sorry I don’t want to join the choir. I have plenty of things to offer the church, but not those things.’”
According to Eisele, his stepfather, Tim Baumgarten, played a significant role in his decision to return to the church. Baumgarten is a member of the Baby Boomer generation and, as a corporate trainer, works often with the topic of intergenerational communication. He applies his skills at work, in church and even within his family.
“One of the great things Tim has always done in our relationship is just ask my opinion,” Eisele said. “And I think that was something really important to me as a young person in Adventism.”
In an interview with our journalism class, Eisele said his decision to come back to the church all started in a living room. On Saturday afternoons, Eisele said he and his family of three different generations would sit down and talk about difficult topics, including religion. In those discussions, Eisele said he felt that his family genuinely desired to get to know him and understand his perspective, even if they disagreed.
“It was really early into those discussions that I felt something different, something that I had been lacking in my other church experiences,” Eisele said.
Through those conversations, Baumgarten said he started recognizing generational differences between himself and Eisele. He also noticed the generational gap within their church and saw a need for better understanding.
“The more I dove into this, the more I started understanding how much none of us knew about each other — and it went in two directions,” Baumgarten said. “We kind of took the living room talks and introduced them to the church. And it really began this journey. It really began to open up our folks.”
Eisele started feeling more heard within his church. He recalled one day when he was invited to speak at the church board meeting about a social media strategy and creating a church Facebook page. Regardless of the board’s decision to accept or reject his idea, Eisele said he just appreciated the fact that they created a space for him to speak and share.
The board actually ended up asking Eisele to present his idea to the rest of the church body. Eisele said he went before the church, introduced the idea and explained the importance of the internet in today’s society. After his speech, two older men approached him.
“Afterward, I had two older men, probably in their 70s or 80s, come forward and say, ‘If you’ll do this for us, we’ll pay for it,’” Eisele said. “‘Whatever equipment the church needs, we’ll buy it. We don’t even have to micromanage it, we believe in you.’ And that really changed things for me.”
Intergenerational communication led Eisele back into the church and opened opportunities for him. It set the foundation for trust between him and older church members. And, according to Eisele, “It all started in a living room.”
“As somebody who was raised Seventh day-Adventist… [and] decided to leave the church for several years, intergenerational communication is something that was very important in bringing me back into the church experience, back into connection with my Adventist family,” Eisele said.
Valuegenesis is a research project that documented the faith and values of young people who are attending Seventh-day Adventist high schools in North America. It focused on three areas: family, school and church. The first survey was conducted in 1990, the second survey in 2000 and the third in 2010.
When the project first began, only 10 questions were about doctrine. For the most recent survey that was conducted, another 15 questions were added so that all doctrines could be explored.
According to the book, Valuegenesis: Ten Years Later, it is crucial to track what kind of commitment young people have regarding their own theological system.
In summarizing the additional 15 questions on doctrine, the average “definitely believe” score in the 2010 survey was 71%. The range of score was between 39% and 91% in most doctrines.
Valuegenesis indicates strong adherence to the core of Adventist beliefs. It seemed clear that as students aged, the more they were able to understand some of the more complex doctrinal statements of the church. For example, the question that explores the Millennium, which is when Satan and his angels will occupy the desolate earth and a time when the wicked will be judged, moves from 40% “definitely believe” among sixth-graders to 64% among twelfth-grade students.
From the study, it’s clear that youth develop their ideology and theology as they grow. As their identity becomes more stable and their lives reflect their goals and vision, Adventist young people tend to have a clearer view of what they believe. Since building a Christian ideology is an important identity issue for growing teens, you can easily see the church’s role in that development.
The importance of the Valuegenesis research project is very significant for being able to see how young people are understanding, not only the doctrines of the Seventh-day Adventist Church but other aspects of their faith as well.
*All information was taken from the book Valuegenesis: Ten Years Later on pages 66-71.
But is sexual assault and abuse really an Adventist problem? To take a deeper look into this question, I looked into the Clery reports of all 12 Adventist institutions in the United States. These reports are required by The Clery Act, which demands that institutions report statistics on certain crimes, including sex offenses. 1
Above are the statistics of the sexual offenses for each university in the last three reported years, which ranged from 2016 to 2019 depending on the institution. For more detailed information, simply visit the safety page of any of these institutions and look for their annual safety report.
Also, it should be noted that there are different ways to interpret these statistics. Just because one institution has higher rates of reporting does not necessarily mean that it is not happening just as much or more on other campuses. The institution may possibly have a better method of reporting, which may lead to more survivors coming forward.
It should also be noted that most sexual assaults go unreported, therefore it is likely that the rates are much higher. RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network) reports with information from the Department of Justice that about three out of four cases of sexual assaults go unreported.2
These considerations should be maintained until more data can be collected.
The initial purpose for this research was to determine if there’s a generational divide on race in the Adventist church. The problem is that there’s not a lot of data on that question. Adventist-specific data is harder to come by. That’s where we have to be the ones who find out. Journalism is a truth-seeking field, and the truth on this needs to be sought out.
We looked at the history and took a glance at how the Adventist church has handled race. The results were a bit mixed. But that doesn’t answer the big question: how do Adventists feel about it? Is there a divide? It seems that way, but facts aren’t reported on how things seem. They’re reported on how things are.
To find out how things are, I am conducting a survey. The survey aims to give Adventists a space to respond to how they feel about racial issues and race in America. That’s how we’ll figure out just how divided we are, if we are at all divided. Once we figure that out, we can begin to move forward with bridging that gap. At the very least, we can begin to understand why.
The survey has been out for quite some time and when you read this, we’ll likely have data compiled. But this is an ongoing endeavor and if we really want to fully understand it, then more responses are absolutely critical.
Focus on the Family, a well-known Christian media outlet, posted an article in 2010, over a decade ago. The question posed by the reader sadly rings true to this day.
“How can a nation that was built on slavery and that’s still full of racial discrimination today possibly have ‘biblical roots’?” the person was quoted as saying. “I’ve been hurt by racism in so-called ‘Christian’ America,’ and I just don’t understand why so many conservative evangelicals say this country is based on ‘Christian values.’ As an African American who has faced racial hatred, I find this perspective unbelievable. If that’s Christianity, then I want nothing to do with it!”
Eleven years later, and this is still true, if not worse than it was then. Racial issues have gone nowhere, and Christians don’t seem to be too bothered by that. The Barna Group, an evangelical Christian polling firm, reports that in a July 2020 poll, 19% of practicing Christians believe race is not a problem at all today, an increase from 11% in 2019. This is despite 2020 being a year filled with racial injustices: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many more have died.
The Barna Group also reports that 30% of self-identifying Christians are unmotivated to address these issues. If we look at the demographics of the Christian church, we can see just who these Christians are. According to PEW Research, just 9% of white Christians are younger Millennials and 13% of black Christians are younger millennials.
The largest group here is the white Baby Boomer segment. They represent 37% of the white population of Christians, which could indicate why the church tends to feel a certain way about racial issues. White people, try as they might, struggle to understand the challenges of being a minority. If we look at the sample size of populations taken for this information, we can see the white population outnumbers the rest of the groups combined. The white Christians sampled for this research is a whopping 17,441. The next closest group is Latino with 2,863.
As we can see, the division between white and nonwhite is striking. Most younger generations sampled for this research are in the vast minority. Generational divide, indeed.
