Aussies write for worldwide audience

New Adventist daily devotionals feature homegrown content

A new online daily devotional is sharing contributions from Seventh-day Adventists in Australia with subscribers around the world.

The Daily Walk is hosted by Boulder Church, a Seventh-day Adventist faith community in Boulder, Colorado, USA, and is distributed in five languages and to more than 10,000 subscribers. This week, the daily emails have included devotional reflections written by Nathan Brown, Book Editor at Signs Publishing in Warburton, Victoria, and children’s application activities supplied by Zan Long, a member of the Kellyville Seventh-day Adventist Church in Sydney.

The current series, Called, is beginning a study through the book of Romans, which links with a series of sermons in a network of Adventist churches that are collaborating on their preaching plans. Kellyville is part of this Global Resource Collective. “This is a way of engaging our kids in the content of the worship service,” Long explains. “The kids are hearing and reading themes and language that they then recognise during the worship service.”

This week’s devotionals titled “Grapes of Wrath” addresses the second half of Romans chapter 1. Brown says Christians often misuse these verses to condemn and exclude people who are different. The larger picture: God values our freedom to choose so much He allows us to make poor decisions—which we all do in different ways. “These verses are not a license to be judgmental, but a sobering reflection on how fallen we all are.” The writer, Paul, is “critiquing the excesses and evils he observed in the Roman society of his day,” says Brown, “not so he and his readers could feel superior to these ‘sinners’—he also includes a number of more domestic and even ‘churchy’ sins in his catalogue of 22—but so that together we might each and all respond to God’s call to repentance.”

“Grapes of Wrath” is the second series of 400-word devotionals Brown has written for the Daily Walk this year. The first—in March—considers “The Commoners” as culture-makers, drawing on the story of Paul’s ministry in Corinth, as recorded in Acts 18. Brown focused on the methods Paul used in his ministry and in his “ordinary” work as a tentmaker in the city’s marketplace and what we can learn from the letters to the church in Thessalonica, believed to have been written during the 18 months Paul lived there.

After the devotional writers have written their reflections, Long then seeks to connect the themes with the youngest members of her church family. “No matter how difficult the theme of a Bible text, there’s always a message of love when we experience the Bible in relationship with Jesus,” she says. “Our children thrive when they are engaged in Jesus conversation every day.”

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