"The judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

This article led to a reasonable discussion (by fark standards) and the above quote was thrown in at some point in the commentary. It was amazingly prophetic. My own disappointment with the faith I grew up with (and which I still actively participate in) is that it has largely become the "irrelevent social club with no meaning for the twentieth century". That greatly saddens me because I do believe the majority of the tenets of faith that Adventism is based on, but I do not feel that connected to the people in "the church". The social club is one I am not interested in. About the time I started high school I really decided I did not want to go to Sabbath School or church simply to be entertained. I started going to an adult sabbath school class that was discussion based only and had many members that were faculty of the local college/professionals in the local community. This was a boon for my spiritual growth because these were intelligent people struggling to reconcile parts of their faith with the rest of the world around them. If it was not for that period of my life I know I would not be a member of the church today.

The things that were disappointing to me at the high school level, have only gotten worse in my opinion, and I am not in the least surprised by the conclusions that article comes to because I see it repeated over and over among my own friends. I still believe that there is real value in a community of faith, I just wonder sometimes where that community is for me. I will write more on this soon because some of the questions asked on the fark discussion board are driving me to attempt to give an answer and I am struggling myself with how to do them justice.