Living heritage

Return of Murdoch Lecture places history in context

Brenton Stacey/Jordan Pearce
Public relations officer/Bachelor of Arts student
Avondale College of Higher Education
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia

Heritage is not a source of information about the past but of inspiration for our quest to discover meaning and purpose.

So argued Dr John Skrzypaszek is his Murdoch Lecture, “Our heritage: sources of information about the past or a therapy for people uncertain of who they are?”, which opened Avondale Alumni Association’s Homecoming, August 23. John presented the lecture in his role as director of the Ellen G White Seventh-day Adventist Research Centre.

He used several quotes from Ellen White, a Seventh-day Adventist pioneer, to acknowledge the tension between the preservation of heritage and its relationship to identity in the contemporary life within the church. “We must walk in the light which shines upon us” (Testimonies for the Church Volume 1) illustrated John’s point about how identity “does not retain a perpetual quality. To remain relevant to its time and place, personal and social identity undergoes continual modification and renewal,” he said. This creates what John called a “cultural distancing.”

John also referred to our spatial dimension, where we ascribe identity to not only our immediate social construct but also to our environment. This places the cognitive, evaluative and affective characteristics of identity formation in the so-called “senses of time,” which “builds a bridge over the space of cultural distancing and ignites elements of emotive assimilation and a process of creative contextualisation.”

He noted how Ellen “directs our minds to the heart of the matter—the significance of the spatial perspective.” The process of “striv[ing] earnestly for identity with the Redeemer” (Testimonies for the Church Volume 6) “centralises our vision on what God cares about—‘live for the saving of souls for whom Christ laid down His life.’”

Here, John said, we find the “heartbeat” of our heritage—the “living heritage, a therapeutic source of inspiration, one that ignites and inspires faithfulness, zeal, commitment and passion” in the lives of people searching for meaning, purpose and self-understanding. The challenge: to nurture and revive this heritage.

At the conclusion of the lecture, president Professor Ray Roennfeldt invited questions, one of which alluded to the value of finding identity in the church. John responded with a question of his own; “God, what do you say?”

Dr Don Hansen, a former senior lecturer in history at Avondale, expanded on this in his response. “We have been invited to re-experience the joy of re-discovering that God really is love, that His grace is always sufficient for us and that our Christian heritage is too precious to be ignored.”

Avondale dedicated the lecture to the late Dr Arthur Patrick, a former curator of the Ellen G White Seventh-day Adventist Research Centre. “Here we are again doing Adventist historical reflection,” said Dr Lyell Heise, director of the Institute of Worship for the church in the South Pacific and a trustee, with Arthur and others, of Women In Ministry, an independent association of church members providing support for women in ministry. “And of course we are doing it in the light of the gospel and of our pioneers, but we are also doing it in the warm light that remains to cheer us from the enormous heritage left to us by pastor, scholar, friend of ours and friend of Jesus, Dr Arthur Patrick.”

Links

Presidential reunion
Alumni honour former leaders at 25th anniversary celebrations