Adventist Review Podcasts

Robbie Bergen grew up a staunch atheist in Brisbane, Australia, convinced that people of faith were foolish. Today he's vice president of Hope Channel. In this conversation with Shawn Boonstra, Robbie shares the three defining moments of 2001 that unraveled his certainty: a figure in a nightclub mirror, a roadside lightning storm and the thought "If there is a God, you're lost," and the morning of September 11. That led him to read the world's religious books, test the Bible's claims, and land in the book of Daniel. From unScripted, the Adventist Review video podcast.

Is Christianity a "white man's religion"? Is Adventism an American church? Dr. Jongimpi Papu, editor of Ministry magazine and Associate Ministerial Secretary at the General Conference, grew up in South Africa and says there's truth in the charge, and a lot of misrepresentation too. Shawn Boonstra and Dr. Papu discuss what missionaries carried along with the gospel: wool suits in tropical heat, hymns that don't translate, and a worldview that left no room for the spirit world. Plus: why every people pictures Jesus as one of their own. From unScripted, the Adventist Review video podcast.

Shawn Boonstra grew up in a strict Dutch Calvinist church in Canada. Sikhu grew up in a young, busy Adventist church in Zimbabwe. Both moved to America, and both noticed how different church looks here. In this unScripted conversation, they compare notes on megachurches, church shopping, segregated congregations, the prosperity gospel, and whether church is starting to feel more like a show than worship. They also ask if business and politics have quietly merged with the church, and what Adventists make of that. From unScripted, the Adventist Review video podcast.

As Christ grows greater in our minds, we lose our need to be authorities over what others think and do.

The deepening awareness that we have been wrong more than we have been right—that we are only now approaching the starting point of faith—creates a gentle tolerance for those now camped where we once stopped, or mired in the stuff from which Christ freed us. We learn to smile at vehemence and vitriol, remembering how frequently we used them for bad causes or when we were still unsure.

Grace makes us gracious to the ungraceful, for we see ourselves in them. We remember that their faults are just as pardonable as ours, and no more dangerous.

The fellowship of the forgiven is as vast as the grace that makes it possible.

So stay in grace. -Bill Knott

What does a pastor actually do all week? Shawn Boonstra and Justin Kim, Adventist Review editors with about forty years of clergy life between them, pull back the veil for Pastor Appreciation Month. Shawn shares his early years: five churches, long highway drives, and a night in a baptistery with no budget for a motel. They talk about why pastors don't have magic bullets, what Ephesians 4 says the job is, how a consumer-church mindset piles on expectations, and where your tithe actually goes. Honest and often funny. From unScripted, the Adventist Review video podcast.

So you’ve lived a good life, a moral life, a life of treating others as you wish you would be treated. You pay your taxes when they’re due. You let the elderly go first. You rescue fledglings fallen from the nest. Your colleagues count on you for steady work. Your dog adores you.

Does all of this not matter when it comes to final reckonings? Is God not suitably impressed with upright choices we’ve made—with gifts we’ve given to the poor, with candles lit, with self-denying sacrifice? Surely, righteous deeds must tip the scales in our favor.

Such thinking is both fully natural and painfully mistaken—not because God fails to notice, but because He has provided a better and more perfect way to bring us to His heart. The Bible is emphatic: “Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are justified by His grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus” (Rom 3:23-25). The Father has appointed a Saviour whose perfect life and sacrificial death isn’t sullied by our habits of accounting or self-congratulation. “He will judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with His truth” (Psa 96:13).

We’ll never earn God’s gift of grace. But in His name—and for His fame—we’ll move the world with kindness.

So stay in grace. -Bill Knott

What happens when the rules you were given for purity don't match the life you end up living? Beth Hill grew up inside purity culture's strict guidelines for dress, dating, and desire, and in this Lifestyle column she traces how those rules shaped her sense of self, her marriage, and even her faith in God. Some of it was good. Some of it, she came to realize, went further than Scripture ever did. Beth Thomas joins her to unpack what purity culture got wrong, what it's cost a generation now raising kids of their own, and what a healthier, more biblical picture of purity actually looks like. Listen to the full article and decide for yourself.

What does a 380-year-old fight over censorship have to do with the Seventh-day Adventist Church? In 1644, the poet John Milton published a furious defense of free speech — and Shawn Boonstra suggests it may have quietly helped set the stage for a movement that wouldn't emerge for another two centuries. From book burnings to Bible societies, this Perspectives column traces a trail of "coincidences" that looks suspiciously like design. Was it chance, or the finger of God nudging history forward without violating human free will? Listen to the full article and decide for yourself.

Did the Adventist Church invent the investigative judgment to cover for a failed prediction in 1844? Shawn Boonstra and Justin Kim open the September and October issues of Adventist Review and take on the heavenly sanctuary head-on. They ask why Jesus ascended, whether he entered the Most Holy Place at the ascension or in 1844, what Hebrews' two veils and one Greek word have to do with it, and why Daniel 7 ends with a verdict. Justin explains why he used to fear the judgment, and why he now finds it good news. From unScripted, the Adventist Review video podcast.

Drive in snow and overcorrect one way, and you'll end up in the ditch on the other side. Theologian John Peckham argues the same danger lurks around one of Christianity's most contested ideas: sola scriptura. Push too hard toward reading the Bible in total isolation, and you land in one ditch. Push too hard toward letting community or tradition control what Scripture means, and you land in the other. So where's the road between them — and how did Jesus himself model staying on it? Listen to the full article to find out.