Chapter 15. For All the Saints

I rode to college with Aunt Velma and Ricky in their station wagon, seven hours across Tennessee from Memphis to Southern Missionary College. The expressway was finished all the way to Chattanooga except for a thirty-mile stretch just west of the city where the highway worked its way down the face of the Cumberland Plateau. East of Chattanooga we traveled a two lane highway, then a narrow country road that snaked past poor farms in cramped valleys. Finally, we entered a broader valley. Half a mile farther, we reached the main entrance to the campus, a sweeping circular drive set in expansive lawn and framed with flower beds. At the head of the drive stood the imposing white-pillared porch of administration building. Off to the left was the women’s dorm, to the right the men’s, echoing in more prosaic fashion the colonial style of the ad building.

Behind the college, forested hills cut across the horizon, appearing to crowd in on the buildings.

I registered for 18 hours of classes, including calculus, chemistry and honors English and a required Bible class. Every time I went to the cafeteria, I met new people. Every time I went anywhere, I met new people. It was heaven. The first Friday night, the church was packed for vespers.

The program began with hymn singing. The building had decent acoustics and a good pipe organ. The students sang with hormone-driven energy. I was transported. I was used to classic sacred music from our church back home. In the choir I had sung the Messiah and works by Sibelius, Bach, Brahms and Hayden. We did passably well. But singing with twenty to forty people, mostly middle aged or older, to an audience of two hundred–also middle aged or older–scattered about in a church that sat six hundred–had never come close to the fire and life of fifteen hundred college students starting a school year.

The final song in the set was “For All the Saints.” A “high brow” hymn not ordinarily sung in Adventist churches. I experienced a special satisfaction realizing that I knew the music better than many around me, knowing the offbeat timing at the beginning of each stanza. But the organ carried everyone, and the entire place was enraptured.

For all the saints who from their labors rest,
Who Thee by faith before the world confessed,
Thy name, O Jesus, be forever blessed.
Alleluia, alleluia. . . .

O may Thy soldiers, faithful, true and bold,
Fight as the saints who nobly fought of old,
And win with them the victor’s crown of gold.
Alleluia, alleluia. . . .

When the organ modulated up for the last verse, the thrill was tainted with a premonition of regret for the approaching end of the song.

From earth’s wide bounds, from ocean’s farthest coast,
Through gates of pearl streams in the countless host,
Singing to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
Alleluia, alleluia.

SMC was the very embodiment of classic, conservative Adventism. Self-confident, happily sectarian, aggressively forward-looking. Our college was preparing young people to stand for truth through the final crisis in earth’s history, a crisis that was just around the corner. The “Advent message,” as we referred to the teachings of our church, was the absolutely indispensable information people needed to survive the end time with their minds and characters intact. No other Christian church or group had the requisite understanding of the Bible. We were the one true church, the Remnant Church of Bible prophecy. Other churches were, at best, Christian wannabees. We were the real thing.

But this hymn, “For All the Saints,” raised funny questions about the neat division of the world into Adventists and everybody else. The “saints” celebrated in this song were not Adventists, they were Catholics, Ethiopian Copts, Baptists, Abligensees and Lutherans. They included people like Francis of Assisi, Bernard of Clairvaux and John Huss. The hymn celebrated the Waldensees of the southern Alps who resisted Roman Catholic hegemony and the Lollards who lived the principles of Jesus within the Catholic Church in England.

This enthralling music celebrated not the “perfect Adventists” of the end of time but the millions of believers who had honored Jesus in worship and service across two millenia–nameless disciples who, in the name of Christ, had housed lepers, fought slavery, rescued foundlings, copied Bibles, sung hymns and given themselves to martyrdom. Adventist glory came not from our distinctiveness in the Christian family but from our inclusion in it.

Sitting there in a church dedicated to the Adventist vision of "uniqueness" I experienced more strongly than ever before a sense of connection with "all the saints."