How to Share Ellen White with a Digitally Native, AI Immersed Generation
I have been in pastoral ministry in one of the most secular countries on earth for over a decade.
In that time I have worked with young people, secular seekers, post-church wanderers, and everyone in between. I have run Bible studies, led small groups, done one on one discipleship, planted a church, and built an online ministry that reaches thousands of people every month.
And in all of that time, across all of those contexts, I can count on one hand the number of young people I have met who actually read Ellen White.
Of course, I don’t expect the secular seekers to do so. But even inside the church, younger generations just don’t seem to really have much interest in reading her.
Now let me be clear about what I’m saying or not saying.
I’m not saying young people hate her or are anti-Ellen White. That’s something that was more common with previous generations. And it’s not what I’ve observed in my years in ministry.
Instead, what I have seen is neither love nor hate, positivity nor negativity. This generation isn’t rejecting Ellen White because they read Dale Ratzlaf or Walter Rea. The truth is, they don’t know who those guys are either. They are simply entirely removed from the whole discussion.
In other words, they aren’t really rejecting Ellen White per-se. They are more just not really engaging the entire topic to begin with. They come to church. They might hear her quoted here and there. They say “cool” and they move on.
And while I don’t have all the answers here are three reasons why I think this is happening:
1. The language barrier
I know, I know — anytime you mention the language barrier a whole tsunami of ultra conservatives start to cry foul. So let me be clear about something: If this is a topic that you, as an SDA, like to engage with a “we are right, the youth are wrong, they need to get in line” attitude, then please do yourself a favor and skip this series. Because I’m not in that team. And I have zero interest in even arguing about it.
I’m writing for the leaders and parents who value the ministry of EGW, and want their young people to connect with her, and are willing to listen, adapt, learn, contextualize, and wrestle with the hard questions humbly. If thats you, read on.
Now back to my main point. I’m not saying that young people aren’t smart enough to read EGW. Or that they don’t have the patience to explore profound ideas. To the contrary, I see young people reading dense philosophy, complex science, long form journalism, and 1000 page fantasy novels. In fact, many of the young people I have worked with are way more educated than I am. So thats not it.
The problem with younger generations connecting with Ellen White's writing isn't that it's too hard. It's that its too distant. Reading her is a bit like reading Abraham Lincoln's diary. You can understand the words. But the prose style, the cadence, the cultural assumptions nested in every paragraph, all of these belong to a world where peoples entire communication style was totally different from today. And when something feels that foreign, it's hard to feel like its relevant to your lived experience in the here and now.
2. The topics feel irrelevant
Intimately connected to the first point is this second point. And while the first point deals with writing style, this second one deals with the actual anxieties and desires being explored in Ellen White’s writings.
Ellen White wrote about the issues of her generation. That's not a criticism. That's what every good communicator does. She addressed the theological controversies of her day, the social anxieties of her context, the questions that were keeping her audience up at night. And most of those questions were religious in nature, cultivated in a world that had no internet, very little multiculturalism, and in which premodern assumptions like “essense precedes existence” and “truth is found in religion” were assumed in nearly every sphere of life.
That world no longer exists.
Today's young people inhabit a world in which all of those assumptions have been dismantled by modernism, existentialism, postmodernism and metamodernism. And now, we are gliding into a posthuman landscape in which young people find themselves lying awake thinking about AI and what it means for their jobs and their identity. They're anxious about an increasingly unstable economy and whether they will ever own a home. They're navigating questions about gender and sexuality that their grandparents never had language for. They inhabit a dual-dimensional existence in which they alternate non-rhythmically between physical reality and the digital realm. Some of them are genuinely unsettled by the mainstreaming of the UAP conversation and what it might mean for how we understand our place in the universe and what it means to be human.
Ellen White doesn't address any of these things. And of course, how could she? They didn’t exist in her time. Instead she addresses sabbath to sunday, the sanctuary, the great controversy between Christ and Satan etc. And she does so in the language and framework of 19th century American Protestantism.
All of that is good. All of it has value. But it doesn't scratch where today's young people itch. And when something doesn't scratch where you itch, you put it down.
3. Religious trauma
If you grew up in a fundamentalist, super conservative SDA church like mine then you know what its like to grow up in an environment where Ellen White is weaponized to shame, control, and coerce conscience.
Now the young people I have interacted with over the last decade don’t know anything about that. Most of them anyways. And that’s mostly because their parents had so much EGW crammed down their throats, and experienced so much trauma as a result, that they simply chose to raise their kids without all that mess.
And so new generations are raised without the trauma, but also without the lady. They learn to express their Adventism in ways that simply don’t include her.
Now before I go any further, two quick things.
First — I said earlier that this blog series isn’t for angry folk who just want to attack young people for their disinterest in EGW. And thats true. But there’s another group this series isn’t for: the critics.
If you're getting ready to jump into the comment section with all your anti EGW stuff let me save you the time. I'm a millennial. A big part of what exhausted my generation about religion was the endless recycling of old fundamentalist arguments from both those who were obsessed with worshipping EGW and those who were obsessed with hating her. I'm not interested in that conversation here.
Again, this series is for people who value her writings and want to figure out how to pass that value on to the next generation.
Second — for those who do value her writings and actually want to pass them onto the next generation, I have some bad news.
The three reasons I've outlined above are real. But they're not the whole picture. The reason young people struggle to connect with Ellen White today is more complex than what I've shared in this intro. There's something else going on underneath the surface that I think explains a lot. And it has everything to do with existing in the digitally native, AI immersed world of today.
We'll get into that next week.
For now — do these three observations resonate with you? Have you seen the same things? Or do you think I'm missing something?
Drop it in the comments.
