Progressive Adventism

Interviewed by Zane Yi

Ron Pickell is currently senior pastor of the Berkeley Seventh-day Adventist Church, located six blocks from the campus of University of California at Berkeley. He is also the campus minister to the local chapter of Adventist Christian Fellowship (ACF) at Berkeley. In addition to these roles, he was recently appointed as the coordinator of the newly organized Adventist Christian Fellowship for the North-American Division of Seventh-day Adventists (acflink.org). Previous to pastoring the Berkeley church in 2001, Pickell served as the campus minister and director of Advent House, an Adventist ministry on the campus of University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 1985-2001. In 1990–2001 he also held the additional position of Campus Ministry Coordinator for the Georgia Cumberland Conference and gave leadership to ACF chapters on four other campuses throughout the conference. Pickell is a fourth-generation Adventist, a graduate of Southern Adventist University (B.A.) and Andrews University Theological Seminary (M.Div.) and pastored a two church district in the Carolinas briefly before entering campus ministry full-time. He is the proud husband of Carolyn Pickell, who he will have been married to for 30 years this coming December, and the father of three children—Ryan (23), Joel (21), and Emily (19). Ron enjoys, hiking, river-rafting, backpack, and playing his guitar; although lately, he’s had less time than he’d like to pursue them.

You grew up in the Adventist church and even went through the Adventist educational “system” for college. What got you interested in working with college students and more specifically on non-Adventist campuses?

Probably one of the important factors that shapes who I am and impacts the ministry I’m in is my own personal conversion experience. I grew up in the church, but I can’t really say that I had a real strong belief in God or a clear understanding of my relationship to God through Jesus Christ. I place my conversion at the age of 17, I was experimenting with the drug culture and no longer in an Adventist academy. (I was asked to leave.) I was at a period of my life where I was really searching, and did not have the kind of convictions I have today about faith and God and Jesus Christ. I really had a lot of doubts about religion in general. Some disappointing experiences I had while in academy had kind of soured me on religion and God. But, through a series of events I won’t go into here, I heard someone share their testimony. It was a presentation I could really relate to and for the first time in my life I heard something that clicked about the uniqueness of who Jesus is. Basically, this guy said that he had read through the gospel of John and finally in his second or third reading, it all began to make sense to him and he came to really identify with Jesus and see him as the Messiah. He got up from his bed and from a real intuitive kind of personal revelation made the statement to his friend, “This is true, because it’s true.”

His own conclusion was very compelling to me. It influenced me to go on my own search and I began to read the gospels for the first time. Although I felt confused and overwhelmed by the larger body truth in Adventist doctrine and even questioned God, I just seemed to identify much better with the person of Jesus Christ. Before this I had studied the Bible for texts to string together to defend a doctrine. I had never read the Bible through and up until this time hadn’t really made a distinction between Jesus and other Biblical characters! I knew Jesus died on the cross, but there were other characters like Daniel, and Isaiah that had things happen to them, too. For the first time, as I read the gospels, I began to identify specifically with the person of Jesus Christ—what he had done for me and the significance of his crucifixion, death and resurrection.

How did that identification with Jesus impact your life toward campus ministry?

When I began to understand the gospel and accepted Christ, it had a profound impact on my life. I think my biggest hang up with the Christian experience was victory over sin. I just couldn’t see how I could ever be a Christian, because I couldn’t see how I could ever give up things like profanity, the party scene and pornography. But the word of Christ to me was: “Come to me as you are.” Once I heard and understood that I didn’t have to and really couldn’t change, and that I could accept Christ and that he would take me as I was—all messed up, that’s when everything began to change. The partying I was involved with, friends, habits, it all began to change.

So the first thing I began to do was to share my experience with my friends. I tried to talk to them about how God had forgiven me and was working in my life. Then I kept thinking about my friends that I had left in academy that weren’t following Christ, who were now at Southern and needed Jesus in their life. So I moved up to Collegedale and started sharing Christ with my friends. I wasn’t a student at that time, and eventually felt like I had finished what I came to do there and I moved back to Florida.

A year later, I realized that this is what I wanted to do with my life. I felt like the greatest help I could be to someone was to help them experience what I had experienced—the gospel.

When I was at Southern I helped start a ministry on Friday evenings—a kind of alternative to the college vespers program at the church that grew from 5 or so people to between 150-200. People were sharing testimonies of what God was doing in their lives. It was an amazing thing. So that is something I’ve always been passionate about—being involved in the process of others coming to know Christ. I know that the young adult/college years of a person’s life are very important. People are thinking about their lives and making very important decisions. Being involved in the Friday evening meetings at Southern helped me realize that is the kind of ministry I wanted to continue to be involved in.

In my senior year at Southern, I was asked to be the assistant to the chaplain. I really enjoyed working with college age people, but after this experience, I realized I was more interested in working with outsiders, not necessarily working with Adventists or an Adventist-institution; I wanted to see how the Christian message could compete in the world of ideas on the public campus.

After graduating, I did an internship and then went on to seminary. There I learned of an opportunity of fulfilling a quarter in practical ministry and worked out a program with an Adventist group doing campus ministry in Southern California. These guys, originally were on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ. So Carolyn and I took a quarter off and spent it working with them. They had four different Bible study groups meeting in various homes and had a worship service once a month for all four groups; they had Adventists, and mostly non-Adventist students they had made connections with on local campuses around the Los Angeles area. I did a training program with them; going out on the Southern California beaches and having conversations with people and sharing the gospel with them and also on some of the campuses. By the end of the summer, we invited all the people we had met to a party. Then Paul, the director, made an invention for people to accept Christ and ten to 15 people responded! Man, that was incredible and it made a huge impact on me. Some of the people I had worked with made a decision to follow Christ that night.

This sounds exciting! It sounds as if people were converting to Christianity. But were they eventually connected to the Adventist church?

The people responsible for this ministry were Adventist and in the context of the weekly Bible studies, questions would come up, and were dealt with from an Adventist perspective. These guys were also connected to a local church that supported what they were doing. It’s important when doing campus ministry that there be a local church that understands what you are doing and is in partnership with you.

Describe your transition. You started pastoring local churches. What were your first years like in ministry in a non-Adventist setting?

It might not have been as difficult for me because I attended public school most of my life until I went to academy for a couple years. I actually graduated from a public high school in their night school program.

I remember in the August of 1985, we were driving our moving van, still not having bought a house, and mistakenly I took the wrong exit and ended up driving our moving truck with car in tow right down Cumberland Avenue, the main highway that runs through Knoxville and through the University of Tennessee (UT) campus, which happened to be the first week, the day before classes started; students were everywhere! We had to stop, and Carolyn said to me, “What have we done? What are you going to do here?” I think her actual words were, “Who do you think you are, the apostle Paul?”

So yeah, the first year or two was really challenging. It was different from Southern California, where we didn’t have a student center. There, it was more of a local church outreach. At UT we had a house that needed a lot of repair. There were students already living there and it wasn’t the best situation; they were mainly there for the cheap rent. I had to adjust to the campus and figure out how to develop a ministry to such a huge campus. I also had to deal with the students who were already there, who weren’t used to having a director and were treating the place like an Adventist frat house with parties and everything. They were not excited about my leadership and they weren’t into the mission of the center, and so there were many conflicts. We ended up having to start things afresh; it was a real challenging time.

What are some important lessons you’ve learned about life, ministry, Adventism, along the way, that you might not have picked up in a traditional ministry setting.

Oh my . . . .

Just share one or two.

One day I was doing a prayer walk around the campus of UT with some of the other campus ministers. One was more conservative and rather fundamentalistic, and the other was from a more mainline liberal church. The conservative guy was praying for the sin and the secularity of the campus and for people to repent and accept Christ (which I am sure many needed to do). The other guy, however, was seeing God all throughout the campus and praising God for the institution, the talented students, etc. It was almost two totally different perspectives!

Anyway, it was here I began to realize even more that I didn’t bring God to the campus; God preceded me and was already there working long before I arrived. I didn’t so much bring God to the campus as meet him there.

I guess I would say that I had grown up in Adventism with a kind of Platonic/dualistic view of the world: there are places God is and places he isn’t. You know, there are politics in the church that are not necessarily godly, things going on that are not godly, but at the same time there are godly things found in a “secular” environment. The lines that we tend to draw between secular and non-secular are not necessarily that clean or precise.

ACF has just now become a formally organized entity in North America. Other churches have had a presence on campuses for years. What’s taken the Adventist church so long to get organized?

Well, the Adventist church has had a presence on many campuses and for many years in other parts of the world like the continent of—Africa, South America, and other places where we don’t have many of our own Adventist schools; there students do not have any other choice but to use the educational institutions that are provided by the state. We’ve had a presence on those campuses for a long time. It’s only in North America where we are so behind. I personally feel the main thing that has prevented us from having an outreach to public campuses is the huge commitment we have to our schools.

The emphasis in North America is to encourage Adventist students to attend our own colleges and universities and since we have so many schools, this is where our focus has been. Over the last 30 years, we’ve had more and more of our Adventist students beginning to attend non Adventist schools but, we have maintained a kind of denominational blindness to them as well as the some 15 million non-Adventist students in the estimated 4,500 institutions of higher education outside of the Adventist educational system.

Do you have any statistics on this trend?

It’s estimated that 60-70% of college age Adventists students are not attending Adventist colleges and universities.

Won’t supporting a ministry like ACF encourage Adventist kids further to no longer attend Adventist schools?

I really don’t know the answer to that. There are many reasons that kids don’t go to an Adventist school. The degree they want to pursue, for example my son, is not offered at an Adventist school. It may be because they are pursuing a graduate degree that is not offered. A lot of times, it is just convenient. They can go to a school near home. Of course there is the cost factor. It is simply a lot cheaper to go to a state/pubic school over a private school.

Will the presence of an ACF chapter on a campus encourage them to go to that school? Unless we build dorms, I don’t know that it will. We are not saying at ACF that students should not go to Adventist schools. ACF will always be supportive of the Adventist educational system and has sometimes been a good bridge for Adventist students back into the Adventist school system; what we are saying is that we know that there are students attending non-Adventist college and university campuses and we think they need and deserve Christian ministry and resources just as much if not more than those within our Adventist schools.

And of course ACF is not just interested in ministering just to Adventist students, but the general student population. We believe that the Adventist church has a message for college students no matter what campus they find themselves on.

What the difference/relationship between ACF and other campus ministry organizations that already exist in our church—for example, C.A.M.P.U.S. on the University of Michigan campus led by Samuel Pipim?

This is a good question. Well, the first time I met Sam Pipim and learned about their organization C.A.M.P.U.S. was at a campus ministry retreat/conference in the Carolina Conference. We had what was called a SHINE conference in 1998 at UNC [University of North Carolina] Chapel Hill; John VanEyk and I worked on putting this thing together. We invited anyone to come. Samuel came and I met a group of students from the campus that were working from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. At this time, anyone doing ministry on campuses were together trying to share resources and ideas. The next time I saw him was at Berkeley 2000, which our students out here had put together (This was before I came as pastor of the Berkeley church and chaplain of the ACF group at UC Berkeley). It was meant to be a world-wide campus ministry conference. At that event, several of us worked together to put together the Berkeley Resolution. We all recognized the need for an official campus ministry organization in the church. The main thing we asked for in this document was that campus ministry would operate officially under the auspices of the North-American Division. Years before the GC had started a group called AMICus (Adventist Ministry to College and University Students) that was sponsored by the Education department, Dr. Humberto Rasi, the then Director, and I helped organized this group. I always thought what Dr. Rasi had organized at the GC level, we needed at the NAD. So, every time we would meet, at whatever kind of gathering there was, we’d have discussions about what was needed to develop a national organization. At Berkeley 2000 we made a proposal to take it to the NAD.

The next thing I heard, a few years later, was that Samuel Pipim had enlarged his campus ministry efforts in Michigan and had developed his own training program with a much larger agenda. I really can’t speak for all they do, or what their training program is all about. All I know is that at one time we were all together in developing resources that were intended to benefit any and all those doing campus ministry. It may be that Samuel got tired of waiting for official organization and started doing his own thing. We have never really discussed the history together.

Our relationship with CAMPUS and with Samuel Pipim is that denominationally and officially we view CAMPUS as a Michigan conference initiative. We are aware of what they are doing and congratulate them with their success. And that is great, but ACF/NAD is the official campus organization for the NAD. CAMPUS is a local conference program. So what they do there, we view as one of the campus ministry organizations that are out there trying to reach students, in the Adventist church, one of many and ACF is the umbrella organization that networks all of those various ministries together.

What is the 5 year vision of ACF?

Basically ACF is a networking and resourcing organization for groups that are trying to have an outreach on their local college or university campus. There are three main goals explicitly stated in our constitution: first, to empower local ACF chapters, churches, and sponsors through pastoral support, professional training, and access to resources; secondly, we want to engage students in the mission of the church, through relational evangelism, and Christ-like student fellowships; third, we want to build Christian fellowship chapters on public campuses that honor God and nurture the spiritual lives of students in North America.

That is our vision. I think we are still working on a five year plan. Our new and larger ACF Advisory recently met at the end of January to do some strategic planning. A couple of great intentions that came out of that is to encourage local unions and conferences to host at least one campus ministry event each year for the students on non-Adventist campuses in their area. Another is to host a division-wide campus ministry conference in 2010. We also want to help support the planting of three new campus churches in or around a large college campus in the next few years.

What are some of the immediate/significant challenges you foresee in reaching these goals?

Well, first off I think there is the challenge of locating and contacting our students that are already on these campuses.
Second, another major challenge is educating and leading the larger church to see the need to minister to this specific group and accept the responsibility to direct resources to reach out to those campuses. And third, is building the infrastructure of ministry resources to really be able to help those students that want to live out their Christian faith on a non-Adventist campus and be a witness there.

How do you and will you juggle your responsibilities as a pastor of a local church and as director of a nation-wide ministry?

Well, this first year, we’ve all been going back to school, learning about how much work there is to do in launching a ministry like this. We are all starting to make contact with the real numbers. It’s become this elephantine task. I don’t think there were many of us who fully realized how monumental a task this is.

So you’re not working alone?

I work closely with an advisory committee, comprised of many other dedicated practitioners and church leaders from all over North America, and we’re wanting to bring many others along.

This year is a learning year for all of us about just how all this will work…I am relying heavily on the Advisory committee and people are stepping up. There is no way I can do this on my own. I have what some would already consider two full-time responsibilities as the senior pastor of a local congregation and the campus minister of our college group at one of the largest and more prestigious college campuses in the U.S. I think eventually I’m going to have a full-time associate here or at least a taskforce worker that will take up the responsibilities of the local ACF chapter in order for me to devote myself more to the national level; it is only a matter of time. I hope eventually we’ll be able to add a full-time staff person here. According to our constitution and by-laws, the ACF coordinator will always have to be a practitioner on a public campus.

I really can’t stress how important my wife has been in the whole process. She has always supported the calling I have had to campus ministry. She has helped faithfully and tirelessly to provide food and hospitality right alongside me to students over the years. Our marriage has been a real important witness to students about the relationship that a Christian couple can have with each other. My kids have been an important and active part of this witness as well.

Your children are all college-age now. What’s it like being a dad to college students and not just a campus minister to them?

You know, I used to wonder if I would still be in campus ministry when my kids became this age. To be honest, it’s been difficult. I used to think that I’d be ready for it because I had worked with college students for so long. But when it’s your own kids—it’s a whole new perspective. Watching them fall in love, struggle with faith, with life . . . but at the same time it’s not. I’ve been there before. There is one thing I’ve picked up from my own kids that’s helped me understand college students in general. Kids are having a much more difficult time dealing with graduation. They are having a more difficult time choosing a major. And also, there is an increased amount of stress to make the grade. And I’ve seen the issues in my own kids and this helps in dealing with a student that you love and have a great relationship with; personal issues like these take on a deeper significance.

How much longer do you think you’ll be doing campus ministry?

You know, I was just thinking about that. I’ve got a long history, but everyone wonders how long they can continue to be relevant and really involved at a grass roots level. I have a hard time imagining not being involved with university students. I was actually thinking that there is coming a time when I can’t do this anymore and I was really sad about that. I don’t know . . . I don’t have a real good answer for that. I wish I could live a lot longer so I could do what I’m doing forever.

Zane Yi is pursuing a Ph.D. degree in philosophy at Fordham University in New York City. He is a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary and Southern Adventist University. He worked with and succeeded Ron Pickell at the Adventist campus ministry on the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 2001-2003.

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