Why Nobody Wants to Hear What We Believe About Death (p1)

Some years ago I was invited to a Bible study with a secular seeker who our church’s head elder was connecting with.

I don’t remember his name but he had a super cute cat. That and, he was genuinely interested. He was asking real questions and engaging with the content of the study guides really well.

Until we got to the topic of death.

Now the topic for that night wasn’t death. It was something else. But as soon as he asked a question about death, the elder was prepared. She calmly but confidently pivoted to his question and did exactly what every trained Adventist evangelist was taught to do. She explained that the dead are unconscious. They don't know anything. They can't communicate with the living. And the reason this matters is because in the last days, demons will impersonate dead loved ones to deceive people. So knowing this truth protects you from being fooled by spiritualism.

Now let me be clear. This guy didn’t have a theology of death. He wasn’t trying to argue for one view over another. He was a secular seeker who had no religious background or ideology to defend.

And yet, he completely checked out.

I watched it happen in real time. His eyes glazed over. His body language shifted. The conversation limped along for another twenty minutes and then we left. He never invited us back.

I wish I could say that was the only experience I had like this. But it happened again years later.

This time the seeker was a former drug dealer who had spent most of his life running with bikie gangs. Now in his fifties he was searching for answers to questions that haunted him. Deep, existential type stuff. We were studying together and the elder with me went into the same explanation. “The dead are unconscious. Spiritualism is dangerous. Ghosts are bad.”

And I saw it happen again. The guy zoned out. I had to scramble to reframe the entire discussion just to keep him in the room.

That’s when it hit me: we keep teaching this doctrine all wrong…

Allow me to explain. Adventism’s classical approach to the doctrine of death was made for a particular time and place. You have to go back to 1840s and 1850s America. Back then, spiritualism was all the rage in the U.S. You had your mediums as household names and séances for the whole family to enjoy. The Fox sisters were at the heart of a country’s fixation on talking to those who’ve passed on. Folks were legitimately worried about being haunted by some spirit, and that is exactly where the Adventist position on the dead came in to answer.

"The dead don't know anything. They can't talk to you. Whatever you're hearing at that séance, it's not your grandmother."

And in that moment, for that culture, with those anxieties… that approach connected. It spoke exactly to what people were already thinking and worrying about.

But that was 170 years ago.

The West in 2026 is not the America of 1850. Secularism has replaced spiritualism as the dominant cultural framework. Most people under 40 have never been to a séance, never consulted a medium, and atheism, evolution, naturalism etc. means most emerging generations have never worried for a single second about whether a demon was impersonating their dead uncle. That anxiety simply doesn't exist for the vast majority of the people we're trying to reach.

Now I need to pause here because I can hear some of you saying, “yes it does! It’s everywhere!”

To which I would say. No. It’s not.

Does spiritualism still exist? Sure. Psychics, mediums, new age channelling — it's out there. I'm not pretending it vanished. But it's niche. It's not the cultural force it was in the 19th century. And building our entire approach to the doctrine of death around that one angle leaves us with almost nothing to say to the people sitting across from us in 2026.

But there’s something else about this approach that bothers me even more than how outdated it is.

It’s that the entire thing is framed in fear. As such, this doctrine emerges as more of a “warning” than a “healing teaching.” Watch out for demonic deception, be on guard against spiritualism, this truth is your shield against being fooled. This is reactionary theology. Defensive dogma. A doctrine whose primary job is to protect you from something scary. It has no imagination. No creativity. No enthusiasm. No beauty to offer the world. As such, it attracts people who are obsessed with sensationalism and conspiracies while saying nothing to a world drowning in meaninglessness.

In short… If all we've got is "the dead are unconscious and demons might try to trick you" — we've got nothing to say to the post-church world we are currently inhabiting. We've brought an outdated theological factsheet from the 1800’s to the meaning crisis of 2026. And the person drowning in sorrow and meaninglessness doesn't need a factsheet. They need hope. Real, tangible, heavy-enough-to-hold-onto hope.

I believe this doctrine has that hope. I believe the Adventist understanding of death… that it's a sleep, that resurrection is coming, that the separation is temporary… is one of the most beautiful and radical truths in all of Scripture.

But we've buried it. We've buried it under 170 years of anti-spiritualism rhetoric and turned one of the most hopeful doctrines in the Bible into a nothing more than a clickbait headline.

So over the next four articles I'm going to explore what this doctrine looks like when we aim it at the anxieties people actually carry today. Grief. Mortality. The terror of non-existence. Existential anxiety. Fear of extinction. The question of what makes a human life valuable in a silicon world that's trying to upload consciousness and replicate our dead loved ones using AI.

Because the truth hasn't changed. But the world hearing it has. And this doctrine has far more to say than we've been letting it.

But before we go there, I want to hear from you. When you think about the Adventist teaching on death, what comes to mind? A doctrine that speaks to where people are today? Or a doctrine we present in outdated ways?

Drop a comment below!