This blog post was originally written for Spectrum Blog and posted on their site on July 16, 2010 here . Should the Seventh-day Adventist Church strive to remain unique and distinctive in its beliefs and practices? Is our uniqueness a virtue? My guess is that the majority of Adventists would answer those questions with a hearty, “yes.” In fact, many of our institutions and ministries use the importance of remaining unique to justify their existence, raise funds, and sell their products. In contrast to this, I would like to suggest that the desire to remain unique is, in fact, negatively affecting our faith and witness and should not be one of our goals. If you look up the definition of “unique,” you will find phrases such as “highly unusual or rare,” or “radically distinctive.” If this is what it means to be unique, the fact that we have so many unique doctrines simply means that we have not been effective enough in our witness. Instead of being a virtue, our uniquen