Dec. 22 - The Why Of Success

The ground produces a crop by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then full grain in the ear. Mark 4:28, REB.

Why do some things grow and others fail to do so? Why did the minute Sabbatarian movement with its unpopular doctrines not only survive but prosper?

That question is impossible to answer with absolute certainty, but the historical data suggest several reasons. Before exploring them, however, we need to look at a closely related query: why Millerism succeeded. It appears that the two movements experienced success for largely the same reasons.

A series of non-Adventist scholars have also asked the question of the "why" of growth, especially in terms of Millerism. One of them suggests that the movement arose at the right time. Thus natural disasters (such as changing weather patterns) and economic/ social crises (such as the panic or depression of 1837) provided a climate in which people were looking for solutions in times of stress and tension. In short, Miller's message supplied hope in a world in which human effort had failed to achieve the expected results. In other words, the worse things get, in human terms, the more feasible millennial options appear to be. We find that truth illustrated in Seventh-day Adventist history by the upsurge in evangelistic results during World War I and other troublesome periods of the twentieth century.

A second non-Adventist scholar saw the success of Millerism in its orthodoxy--its essential harmony with other religious forces of the day. Millerism's one essential "heresy" was its view of the premillennial Advent. But the movement's very orthodoxy in most matters left the populace open to its one unorthodox message.

A third answer to the success of Millerism is that it grew up in an era of revivalism that provided it a method to proselytize, an atmosphere of millennial hope that gave direction to the movement, and a pervasive temperament of faith that enabled people to respond to the revival and accept the vision of the new world to come.

Those external factors certainly provided the soil in which both Millerism and Seventhday Adventism could prosper. But even more important were the internal forces (which we will examine the next few days) that drove Millerism and Seventh-day Adventism in the success of their respective missions.

Those same forces, I might add, inspire not only movements to action, but also individuals. They thus have meaning for our lives in the twenty-first century.