From the President’s Pen

When did it dawn on us? It was in the fall of 2020 during the height of COVID-19, when life almost seemed to come to a grinding halt. Gary Moyer, Rick Russell, Chad Grundy, and I met at my house as God’s called leaders for the Carolina Conference to strategically plan the priorities for the next quinquennial term. As we were sitting in the stillness of my screened-in porch on that crisp October morning, we spent time in earnest prayer for God’s direction and discernment to guide our thoughts. It was then that we received the divine insight: How can we focus on discipleship as the companion to our efforts in evangelism?

Among the most familiar passages of scripture are the words of Jesus as recorded in Matthew 28:18-20: “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (NKJV).

Since the last quinquennial Carolina Conference Constituency Session in August 2022, the Conference has actively encouraged and funded the distribution and use of The Discipleship Handbook in small groups across all 187 churches and companies throughout North and South Carolina. We have also provided our pastors with Tara Vincross’s excellent book Deep Calling. More recently this year, we’ve provided pastors and their churches with a newly published book by AdventSource entitled My Church Family. These resources have been shared with the prayer-filled hope of following Jesus’s final directive on earth to “Go” and to “make disciples.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

There are some men who stand out to me as hallmark champions of faith. One of them was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Born in 1906 into a well-educated family, Bonhoeffer was academically brilliant from the start. He earned a doctorate in theology by age 21. He was a German pastor, theologian, and sadly, he was eventually a martyr. When Adolf Hitler came to power, Bonhoeffer quickly opposed the regime. He openly criticized Hitler as an evil leader for the Nazi movement when most were silent, calling him the “misleader.” Eventually, he became involved with a resistance group that plotted against Hitler. This was controversial because it went beyond preaching—it meant complicity in plans to remove him from political power, even supporting an attempt to assassinate Hitler. He was arrested in 1943 and imprisoned for two years. In April 1945, just weeks before the war ended, Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging at Flossenbürg concentration camp. He was just 39.

He is remembered as someone who insisted that faith and ethics couldn’t be separated from real-world courage. His life gives credence to the statement made by Tertullian, a North African Christian writer from Carthage (around the late second to early third century): “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Ellen White paraphrased this same quote in Chapter 2 of The Great Controversy.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a number of books that focused on an abiding and faithful walk with Christ. One of those books, written in 1933, was entitled The Cost of Discipleship.

One of the key elements that I gleaned from reading this book was his contrast of cheap grace versus costly grace. He criticizes what he calls cheap grace—the idea that forgiveness is automatic, requiring nothing of us, justifying sin without transformation. Costly grace, in contrast, is the gift of God that calls for a changed life, even sacrifice. It’s grace that actually costs us something because it cost God everything.

It’s sobering to remember that Bonhoeffer himself lived what he wrote. Though The Cost of Discipleship was not written as a political manifesto, the book’s seriousness about obedience carried an obvious weight in his context of the emerging Nazi regime in Germany. For Bonhoeffer, following Christ was inseparable from resisting evil in real life. He believed comfortable Christianity had become complicit by compromising with injustice.

As we near the soon return of Jesus Christ, as Seventh-day Adventist Christians, I believe we need to embrace Bonhoeffer’s call to radical discipleship, where he takes Jesus’s words of “Follow Me” literally. In our contemporary culture and a lifestyle characterized by overbooked calendars, there is a part of us that desires spirituality without disruption. In The Cost of Discipleship, he insists that discipleship isn’t some form of abstract belief. Rather, it’s obedience—leaving our nets behind, taking up the cross, and walking in step with Jesus—fulfilling the Gospel commission to make disciples by teaching them to observe all things that Jesus has commanded us. While Bonhoeffer’s personal context led him into moral and civic dilemmas, our focus is not on political resistance, but on Christ-centered obedience that transforms hearts, communities, and lives for the kingdom.

As we continue our journey of faithful discipleship, may we sing the words of that well-known hymn with heartfelt sincerity, conviction, and commitment:

All to Jesus I surrender, All to Him I freely give; I will ever love and trust Him, In His presence daily live. Refrain: I surrender all, I surrender all, All to Thee, my blessed Savior, I surrender all.

Your servant leader,

Leslie Louis

Carolina Conference President