Ending not with a full stop but a semicolon

Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church

Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped solidify the anti-slavery movement in the north of the United States. Published in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the fictional, anti-slavery book before the issue took the United States to civil war.

Her book shattered sales records. Nathaniel Hawthorne, two years earlier, wrote a popular book, The Scarlet Letter. It earned him $1500 over 14 years. Moby Dick earned Herman Melville a mere $556.37 in the 40 years between its publication and his death. Uncle Tom earned Harriet $10,300 in the first three months. The first print run of 5000 sold out in 10 days; 300,000 sold in nine months; and 1 million within 12 months.

She had fame (pop-star status in England, when she visited)—notoriety in the South—and a name that would sell anything she wrote, despite never repeating the success of Uncle Tom.

In old age, though, Philip McFarland (in Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe) pictures her a little old woman whose mind is somewhat “hazy.” In her 80s, one of her children described Harriet as “not now above a child of two or three years.”

McFarland finishes his biography: “She has been confined to her bed with brain congestion and paralysis since Monday, sinks into a deep stupor on Tuesday night, and dies on Wednesday, in her 86th year.”

That’s it. Full stop.

Life. Your life. It had a beginning. It has an end. There’s success. There’s failure. There’s health. There’s sickness. There’s joy. There’s sadness. In the end, famous or not, it all comes to a full stop.

And yet we have eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11). We want more. Fortunately, the One who placed eternity in our hearts offers it (see John 3:16).

Harriet Beecher Stowe knew that. She was a woman of faith, so her life ended not with a full stop but a semicolon—a pause. The good news is the John 3:16 promise is available to all.

A call to follow Jesus and act like Jesus

Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church

We now live in a post-Christian world.

In 1949, historian Herbert Butterfield wrote that “we can just about begin to say” in the West, no one was forced to be Christian to gain favour at court, to gain public office or by government compulsion. That was the “Christian” world.

Sixty years on, this seems odd.

Michael Frost* and Alan Hirsch (in The Shaping of Things to Come) criticise the church, though, for acting as if we’re still in a Christian world. Christianity, they say, has three “flaws in its DNA—it is attractional, dualistic and hierarchical.”

“Attractional” is the mistake of believing if we get our programs, our seating, our music, our preaching, our children’s or youth ministry, our parking right then people will come. This come-to-us approach not only doesn’t work, it’s unbiblical. The New Testament has a go-to-them mentality.

“Dualistic” refers to Christianity separating the sacred from the profane, the holy from the unholy, the us-in-here and the world-out-there to the point that there’s a gap between belief and everyday life. A whole-of-life spirituality is needed.

“Hierarchical” is as it sounds—a top-down model of leadership. No matter how they’re structured, every denomination has it. The problem is we now live in a world where egalitarianism and community are valued.

If Michael and Alan are right, what do we do? Are you ready for a revolution?

But what would this revolution look like? What should it look like? Here’s a clue from Dallas Willard: “Religion has many critics, but Jesus very few.”

Followers of Jesus acting like Jesus is the best response. Always. That’s never changed.

* Michael Frost will be a presenter at Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Salt Conference, July 15-17, 2011.