Why Our Prophecy Seminars Don't Work Anymore (It's Not What You Think)
There is a reason why our prophetic message struggles to land with secular people. And that reason has almost nothing to do with the content of the message itself. It has to do with the psychological container the listener is operating from.
And if we don't understand that container, we will keep preaching to an anxiety that most of our neighbours no longer have.
The Old Container
For most of Western history, a person's essence was determined before they arrived.
Here’s what I mean in plain english:
If you were born into a peasant family in medieval Europe, your social status was not something you chose. It was assigned. Your economic class, your vocation, your social role, your marriage prospects — all of it was more or less settled before you took your first breath. You were born into a world that had already decided what you were.
And this wasn't limited to the poor. The nobleman's son didn't get to wake up one morning and decide he wanted to be a blacksmith. His essence — his identity, his purpose, his obligations — was tethered to a family name, a lineage, a crest. You didn't build your identity. You received it.
In philosophical terms, this is what I mean when I say that essence preceded existence.
There was an assumed nature — a template — that came before you were born. You didn't invent what it meant to be you once you came into the world. The world, the church, the social order, and God himself had already defined what and who you were. Your job was simply to live inside that definition.
For most people, this worked. Yes, it was a deeply oppressive and unfair system. But it provided something we no longer have: a container. A framework within which the big questions of life had already been answered. What am I? A human being created by God. Who am I? An aristocrat, a nobleman, a peasant. Why am I here? To fulfil a socially ordered purpose.
These weren't questions you had to agonise over. The answers were already there when you were born.
How the Container Broke
The first crack didn't come from philosophy. It came from plague.
In the mid-14th century, the Black Death swept through Europe and killed roughly a third of the population. With a third of the labour force dead, the survivors suddenly had something they had never had before: leverage.
Peasants could negotiate wages. They could leave their lord's land. They could refuse terms that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier.
The feudal system — the social architecture that had kept the essence-first container intact for centuries — didn't collapse overnight. But it started leaking. And once people discovered that their station in life was not immovable, the old container never fully sealed again.
The Enlightenment widened the crack. Science could explain more and more about how the universe worked without telling anyone what their existence was for. You could map the mechanics of nature without establishing meaning. And that gap — between explanation and meaning — would only widen.
The Industrial Revolution blew it wider still. Industrialisation didn't just change economies. It uprooted entire populations from the communities and traditions through which they had understood themselves for centuries. Millions of people were suddenly living in anonymous cities, working in factories, navigating bureaucratic systems that didn't know their name. The village, the parish, the intergenerational household — the structures that had carried identity for most of human history — were dissolving. The individual was increasingly left to navigate a gigantic, impersonal machine.
Then came Kierkegaard.
Writing in the 1840s, he was one of the first thinkers to turn the philosophical spotlight directly onto the individual existing person.
His question wasn't "What is humanity?"
His question was far more uncomfortable: What does it mean for me — this particular person, in this particular moment — to actually live? To choose? To suffer? To become myself?
Kierkegaard understood the self not as something you simply receive but as something you must achieve.
Nietzsche came next.
His famous proclamation that "God is dead" is one of the most misunderstood sentences in the history of philosophy.
Nietzsche wasn't announcing his personal atheism. He was diagnosing a cultural catastrophe. Christianity had supplied Europe with its ultimate explanation of what a human being is, why morality exists, why suffering matters, what good and evil mean, and what happens after death. So what happens when Europeans stop believing that framework? You don't merely lose a religious belief. You lose the entire metaphysical structure that told you what you are. Nietzsche saw nihilism coming. Not as a philosophy people would consciously adopt, but as the inevitable atmosphere of a civilisation that had pulled out its own foundations and hadn't replaced them with anything.
Then came chaos.
World War I shattered the confidence of European modernity. The continent entered the 20th century with enormous faith in progress. And then it industrialised slaughter. Millions dead in trenches, mowed down by machine guns, choked by chemical weapons. The assumption that modernity meant progress became very difficult to maintain after that.
Then World War II.
If the first war cracked European confidence, the second one buried it.
Two world wars. Fascism. Nazism. Genocide. Hiroshima.
The collapse of every authority structure that had told Europeans who they were and what the world was for. The questions that philosophers had been discussing in lecture halls became brutally concrete. What if there is no cosmic guarantee that good will triumph? What if God doesn't intervene? What if there is no predetermined meaning?
It was in this context — 1940s France, in the rubble of occupation — that existentialism exploded from a philosophical movement into a cultural revolution. And Jean-Paul Sartre named the fundamental shift in western culture when he wrote,
“Existence precedes essence.”
Here is the shift:
In the old world, your essence preceded your existence. When you were born, who and what you were was already decided.
Essence first. You exist second. And your role in life is to live inside the essense assigned before you were born.
Social status. Family name. Gender roles. All predetermined.
In the new world, however, existence precedes essense.
In other words, you don't first discover what you essentially are and then act accordingly.
You exist first. And through your actions you become who you want to be.
There is no blueprint. There is no predetermined human essence waiting to be discovered.
You exist first, and only afterward, through your decisions, do you define yourself.
Sartre didn’t invent this. He merely codified it. He put into language a phenomenon that had been centuries in the making, from the Black Death to the collapse of the Axis powers. As all these grand shifts occured in the world, the west had undergone a massive shift. Essence no longer preceded existence. Existence now preceded essense. And that shift changed everything.
The Container We All Live In Now
Most people you meet at the shops, at work, at your kid's school — they have never read Sartre. They couldn't define existentialism if you asked them.
But they live inside it. They breathe it. It is the water they swim in.
When a young person says "I need to find myself" — that's existentialism.
When someone says "I'm creating my own path" — that's existentialism.
When a friend says "I don't believe in organised religion but I'm spiritual" — they are navigating a world in which no pre-existing framework has the authority to define them.
When someone pushes back against labels, resists categories, insists on self-definition — that is not rebellion. That is a person doing exactly what their cultural operating system has taught them to do. An operating system that says something like: the self is not a predetermined essense you discover. It is an identity you engineer.
And I want you to see why this matters so much for Adventists.
In an essence-first world, a prophet is the most important person in the room. If things are determined before you arrive — if history has a script, if God has a blueprint — then the person who can read that script is performing an invaluable service. Show me what's coming. Show me where I fit. The prophetic map doesn't just inform. It relieves the deepest anxiety a person has. Don't worry. Here is the plan. Here is where history is going. Here is your place in it.
But in an existence-first world, unsealing the end of time just isn't interesting. It isn't appealing. Why would it be? If the self is engineered and not discovered, then likewise the future is something you create rather than something you unseal. In that context the offer to show you what's been predicted so you know it ahead of time doesn't scratch where you itch. It answers a question you were never asking.
So where does this leave us?
More on that next week.
If this kind of conversation interests you — how do we take the truths we carry and communicate them in ways that actually connect with the secular, post-church world — join the Mission Collective.
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