Farewell Maranatha
Today for the final time I read the daily meditation from the devotional, Maranatha. For a variety of reasons this daily devotional, first published in 1944, ceased publication. Today’s devotional by Robert Price challenged me to a deeper surrender regarding the use of my time on Sundays. “How,” I asked myself, “will I become more intentional to dedicated this day of the week to personal worship, cultivating my relationship to God and others, and rest physically?”
After many years of receiving a daily challenge to personal holiness through Maranatha I will need to turn to other avenues to cultivate my conscious contact with God. Since the announcement earlier this year, I have known this day was coming and have taken steps to replace this as a tool for spiritual growth. I will utilize the one-year volume but will miss the fresh quarterly articles. To lose this daily companion is cause for reflection on the passing of this publication.
Why else besides personal spiritual development do I feel sadness at the demise of this publication. My appreciation of our denominational publishing heritage contributes to my feeling. When Maranatha commenced publications the Advent Christian Denomination had four weekly periodicals, a monthly missions magazine, and a monthly children’s education paper. The devotional magazine added an additional dimension for Advent Christians. Since then, we have consolidated all our periodicals into one quarterly magazine. I feel a deep sense of loss that our denomination birthed by a publication blitz has so contracted its publications to, in comparison, a negligible influence.
I understand this change is as essentially cultural. Society as a whole has moved away from print as the medium of communication, news, entertainment, and intellectual discussion. Today we prefer visual media, blogs, podcasts, Instagram, and tweets. Yet, these forms of communication seem more impersonal than publications. Writing for print requires deep thought, revision, and layout. Much of that is lost in the modern infatuation with instant communication.
Within the denomination I see a trend toward using these mediums primarily for weighty theological issues and for attempts to persuade others to a specific position or action. With the loss of Maranatha how will we personalize our faith, listen to God’s word divide our thoughts and intents, and light the path in which we should live?
Both sadness over the loss of our heritage of publications and of cultivating personal holiness contribute to my dismay over this development. I also feel we have lost a connection with our leaders. Early its publication denominational leaders of publications, Christian Education, missionaries, youth ministries, leading pastors, and at the two colleges all contributed to the magazine. The years saw this expectation diminish and we no longer expected these leaders to contribute. With the closure of our training institutions and the ending of sending North American missionaries the pool of leaders diminished. Sadly, do did the overall quality of the writing.
Besides the denominations diminished leadership pool and our heritage of publications and holiness, I have another personal regret over the cessation of publications. For the last thirty years I have lived in Illinois where the saturation of Advent Christians is far more sparce than where I grew up in New England. Today the closest Advent Christian church is fifty miles away, as is the closest Advent Christian pastor. So, when my issue of Maranatha arrived, the first thing I did was to flip through the pages and see who wrote the devotionals. This helped me connect with many whom I have known over the years and provided a one-sided conversation where I listened for what God whispered in their ears when they meditated on the assigned passage. In this way the devotional became my primary connection with the denomination as a whole. Now my sense of isolation grows and that forces me to be more creative in connecting with the denomination.
Do I wish we as a people could maintain Maranatha? Yes. Do I accept the decision of the leadership to make this difficult decision in light of denominational trends? Of, course. I hope, though, that this provides a stimulus many of us to become more intentional in cultivating our relationship to God and impel us to meditate on God’s Word with the intention to do God’s will as He illumines our minds and hearts.