Living God’s Future Now

At the 2025 GYC-Europe convention Adventist Review held a writing contest. Attendees were invited to answer this question: “How can the Adventist message be more relevant in the European post-Christian context?” Word count was limited to 500, and no use of artificial intelligence (AI) was permitted. Review editors assessed the submissions and selected this article as the winner.—Editors.

In European metropolitan spaces young urban professionals are shaped to become entrepreneurs of the self. They are constantly pushing, climbing, and accumulating status and symbolic capital through algorithm-driven lifestyles. In this digitally saturated world ruled by capital, the challenge for Adventism is not simply to speak prophetically, but to embody a consecrated stamina: a holy endurance to resist the relentless demands of our profit-driven culture, and enact the apocalyptic hope at the heart of our faith. Only if we retrieve our radical roots and live God’s future now can we faithfully bear witness to His coming kingdom in ways that answer the spiritual and ethical hunger of our fractured present.

From Abstraction Into Embodiment

Europe is littered with the dry bones of a fallen Christendom, the shattered remnants of empire and religion devoid of Spirit. In the valley of our post-Christian age, Adventism will fulfill its prophetic commission only if it lets the breath of God put flesh on its prophetic bones. We must rise from abstraction into embodiment, and practice our fundamental beliefs as a living, communal witness. Our metamodern sensibility oscillates between irony and sincerity, embracing complexity and paradox. In this context our communities become pertinent as relational spaces of shared meaning. By valuing depth, plurality, and communal engagement, we counter the famine of fellowship in our neoliberal, individualist era.

In this digitally saturated world ruled by capital, the challenge for Adventism is not simply to speak prophetically, but to embody a consecrated stamina: a holy endurance to resist the relentless demands of our profit-driven culture, and enact the apocalyptic hope at the heart of our faith.

So can Adventism come alive in post-Christian Europe? Yes—if we connect the liberative core of the Sabbath, the sanctuary, and the Second Coming to the longings and struggles of our catastrophic age. If we deepen our commitment to the Lord of the Sabbath and our communities by practicing rest as resistance, incarnating jubilee principles of economic justice. If our churches will offer sanctuary to the weary, bearing witness to the scandal of the cross and our High Priest, who vindicates the wretched of the earth from His heavenly temple. Our beastly world order presents itself as without alternative, like the Babylon of old. But expecting the imminent return of Christ means living in the reality that the established order is about to be abolished.

Prefigurations of God’s Kingdom

The early Adventists’ expectation of Christ’s return was the eschatological oxygen that fueled their radical abolitionism. Remembering our roots, we could be actively involved in community legal aid, tenant rights advocacy, environmental justice initiatives, fair employment campaigns, food co-ops, and migrant support. These are not merely ministries, but prefigurations of God’s kingdom: living as if the new creation has already begun, even in small, fragile ways.

We need an Adventism that can critically grapple with the European imagination, a cultural psyche that carries the weight of millennia. A biblical faith that speaks to symbolism and myth, memory and trauma, philosophical rigor and theological aesthetics in the art cafés of Barcelona, activist hubs of Berlin, and storytelling places of Amsterdam. When the prophetic bones of Adventism are revived on this war-torn, post-colonial soil, contemporary Europeans may, by God’s grace, catch a glimpse of the cross of Christ as the blazing beauty of apocalypse. Another world is possible, because it is about to come.