Why Our Prophecy Seminars Don't Work Anymore (Part 2)
Last week we established that the western world shifted from an essence-first container to an existence-first one.
The essence-first person asks: What has been determined about me? What's coming? Am I prepared?
For them, a predetermined future matters enormously because it tells them how to live in the present.
The existence-first person asks different questions: What am I going to do with the fact that I exist? What should I become? What kind of world should we build?
For them, the self is not something you discover. It is something you build.
And by extension, the future is not primarily something you uncover. It is likewise something you build.
This is one of the reasons why prophecy seminars don't pull the audiences they used to.
People in a secular container shaped by an “existence precedes essence” world simply aren't as interested in predictions about the end of time.
And we can see this in the way modern people engage with prediction itself.
A 2025 Pew Research Center study found while 30% of US adults report consulting astrology, tarot or fortune tellers, only 1% say they rely on them “a lot” when making major life decisions. And when Pew asked specifically about using fortune tellers, horoscopes or other methods to see the future, only 9% of Americans said they do so. Even among those that do, 20% see it more as entertainment or amusement than as something to take seriously.
Our prophetic message then — built around timelines, beasts, and the unsealing of future events — assumes that knowing what is coming is highly valuable to people.
But if the future is something you believe you are participating in creating, rather than something that has already been determined, that assumption doesn't land the way it once did.
The prophetic seminar says: Let me show you what is going to happen.
The existence-first person is asking: What am I going to do with the life I have? (Remember the answer to this question is provided in an essence-first world. But it is absent in an existence first one.)
And that means our prophetic message can feel perfectly designed for the essence-first anxiety and almost useless for the existence-first one.
It answers a question today’s seekers are not asking.
But this doesn't mean we give up on prophecy.
To the contrary, this shift forces us back to Scripture and toward a more holistic and meaningful understanding of prophecy that has been there all along.
Prophecy Was Never Primarily Prediction
In 2011, Duke University professor Anathea Portier-Young published Apocalypse Against Empire.[1] Her argument was simple and beautiful: the first Jewish apocalypses — including Daniel — functioned as literature of resistance to imperial domination.
You don’t have to agree with all of Young’s conclusions to embrace her overall proposition either. All you have to do is read the prophets.
Amos wasn't merely predicting the future. He was confronting the present. "You trample on the poor and force him to give you grain" — that's not eschatology. That's social critique. Isaiah 58 wasn't about end-time events. It was about the fast God actually wants: “loose the chains of injustice, set the oppressed free, share your food with the hungry.” Micah. Habakkuk. Joel. Nathan who confronted David over his abuse of imperial power to take another man’s wife. All of them confronted the conditions of the present in the name of a God who refuses to let unjust systems of power have the final word.
Prophecy, at its core, is protest.
It looks at the world as it is — the suffering, the injustice, the systems that crush the vulnerable — and says: this is not the way it's supposed to be. And it works against it.
Now don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying prophecy never reveals the future. I’m saying prophecy does more than simply reveal the future. It also protests the present. Like John the baptist, who announced the coming messiah and protested the abuses of the Herodian dynasty. Prophecy always does both.
What This Changes
If prophecy is not just prediction but also protest, then it has, within itself, the exact posture that we need to make prophecy relevant to an existence-first anxiety.
The existence-first person is asking: what should I do with the fact that I exist? What kind of world should we build? What am I responsible for?
And a prophetic community that is genuinely living its message answers: we are building a world that looks like the kingdom. We are refusing the logic of empire. We are sitting with the suffering, confronting the systems that perpetuate injustice, and embodying a different way of being human.
And this is exactly what the secular, existence-first generation is hungry for. Not information about what happens next. A community that is actually doing something about what's happening now.
Early Adventism Understood This
The first president of the General Conference, John Byington, ran a station of the Underground Railroad on his farm in New York — illegally transporting escaped slaves to Canada.[2] John Preston Kellogg harboured fugitives on his Michigan farm.[3] Ellen White wrote in 1859: "The law of our land requiring us to deliver a slave to his master, we are not to obey; and we must abide the consequences of violating this law."[4]
These weren't peripheral figures. They were the founders of our movement.
And these founders? Man, they were radical. They read Revelation 13 and identified America as the lamb-like beast — and then used that prophetic critique to name slavery as the dragon-spirit made flesh. J.N. Andrews wrote in 1857 that the institution of slavery most clearly reveals “the dragon spirit that dwells in the heart of this hypocritical nation."[4] A.T. Jones and Uriah Smith called resistance toward American imperialism "present truth" in the pages of the Review.[5] Prophecy wasn't a timeline they were waiting on. It was fuel for the present — exposing empire, naming injustice, and building a different kind of community in response.
They weren't merely preparing for the future. They were building a better world.
And then, somehow, the movement they founded just sort of forgot. Today, prophecy seminars focus mostly on predicting future events as they relate to religious interests like Sunday laws. Social and humanitatian interests are mostly gone. We have lost the vision of prophecy, not merely as prediction, but as protest.
The Reframe
The existence-first world is not asking what the future holds for America, or Catholicism, or Sunday laws. These topics are both foreign and unimportant to them.
But they are asking whether there is a community somewhere that sees what's wrong with the world and refuses to comply. That resists the systems that crush the vulnerable. That works for harmony and balance in our communities. That is building something worth being part of.
This doesn’t mean we abandon the predictive side of prophecy. It means we change the entry point from prediction to protest and inspire a new generation, not with slides and timelines, but with communities that actively work for peace and healing in our neighborhoods and world.
In part 3 we’ll look a little more at what it means to become that community once more.
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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Footnotes
[1] Anathea E. Portier-Young, Apocalypse Against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Eerdmans, 2011), p. xxii. The full argument — that Daniel and the earliest Jewish apocalypses were written as resistance literature against Hellenistic imperial rule — is developed across the book's three sections.
[2] John Byington's Underground Railroad station is documented in Brian Strayer, "John Byington's Radical Abolitionism," Adventist Peace Fellowship, 2015. adventistpeace.org
[3] John Preston Kellogg's use of his Michigan farm to shelter fugitive slaves is documented in the Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists. Michael W. Campbell, "Kellogg, John Preston (1807–1881)," Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists, published June 16, 2026. encyclopedia.adventist.org/article?id=8ION
[4] Ellen G. White, Testimonies for the Church, vol. 1 (1859). The full quote: "The law of our land requiring us to deliver a slave to his master, we are not to obey; and we must abide the consequences of violating this law. The slave is not the property of any man. God is his rightful master, and man has no right to take God's workmanship into his hands, and claim him as his own."
[5] John N. Andrews, "The Two-Horned Beast of Revelation XIII. Are the United States a Subject of Prophecy?" Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, March 19, 1857, Vol. 9, No. 20, p. 156. Cited and quoted in full in Trevor O'Reggio and Dojcin Zivadinovic, "The Connection Between Slavery and Prophecy as it Related to the American Nation in the Writings of the Adventist Pioneers During the Antebellum Period," History Research 2, no. 5 (May 2012): 316–331. digitalcommons.andrews.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=church-history-pubs
[6] A.T. Jones and Uriah Smith, "Present Truth," Review and Herald, May 16, 1899, Vol. 76, No. 20, p. 312. Cited and contextualised in Daniel A. Mora, "The Lamb Speaks Like a Dragon: Adventists, Imperialism, and Revelation 13 — Part 1," Adventist Today, August 31, 2026. atoday.org/the-lamb-speaks-like-a-dragon-adventists-imperialism-and-revelation-13-part-1/
