Prologue: I'm a Seventh-day Adventist...kind of

I’m a Seventh-day Adventist… kind of.

I should say that I have always been a Seventh-day Adventist. Somewhere around 1985, one of my mother’s co-workers gave her a set of cassette tape recordings of sermons by an evangelist. They were from a seminar on the Book of Revelation from the theological point of view of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Something somewhere between the gravitas and urgency of his message and the warmth of the local Adventist community convicted my parents’ hearts that they had found the Truth. So, when I was two years old, they and a group of their friends and their children, some thirty-plus individuals, all officially joined the denomination together. My parents have been the very definition of Adventist dedication every day since.

My parents have always been the type of Christians… the type of humans I hoped to become. They are flawed, like anyone else, but even in their flaws, they are wonderful models of grace, love, and service. If you asked them what the catalyst was for fashioning their characters, I believe they would give large credit to the Jesus they found in the biblical teachings that the denomination is so committed to. In trying to model them, from a very young age, I committed too.

My parents were not dragging me along. It wasn’t their religion. It was mine. I was all in. I learned to read using the King James Version of the Bible. I’d recite my memory verses, holding it upside down at three years old, all tucked in for bed at night. I lived for Sabbath school, Pathfinders, and the Bible studies I was still too young for. I couldn’t wait to join the youth choir, become an usher, pianist, deacon, and elder. I longed for and prayed for “the call to ministry.” While I gave a couple of youth sermons in my day, no calling ever came. Still, in my bones…

I’m a Seventh-day Adventist… kind of.

Seventh-day Adventism is about much more than the day you go to church. “Keeping the Biblical Sabbath” is a big part of it, but Adventism encompasses how you dress, what you eat, what you listen to, what you celebrate, what you watch, read, and what you shouldn’t. It’s how you think, approach and evaluate relationships, and ultimately the mold used to form your mental image of God’s character. It is how you come to measure and define yourself and others. It’s how you define Christianity itself: the organization and your individual communities. 

Much more than a biblical interpretation, Adventism bills itself and its fundamental beliefs as the natural outcome of the correct biblical interpretation. The question posed within the Adventist community is not whether or not you “believe” in our dogma; but “have you grown to accept God’s Word and the pleading of the Holy Spirit, or have you chosen yourself?” Seventh-day Adventism presents an unabridged worldview from prehistory through ‘The End’ and back again. It is the worldview I was raised in.

Seventh-day Adventism is not simply my denomination of origin or my preferred flavor of Christianity. It is a fully saturating physical force; the underlying essence that ties all other things together. Adventism is gravitational. It affects you and the direction of your movements, whether you are thinking about it or not. Whether you are still committed to it or not.

It is not what I found; it is what I am founded upon. It is the only worldview I’ve ever known, trusted, or considered being close to true, and True with a capital ‘T.’ I don’t know how to be anything else. In fact, I was baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist Church on two separate occasions (something the church rarely does) for two separate reasons. Once, as an overly zealous, sabbath keeping child soldier, accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior, turning from my prepubescent sinful nature and introversion to go forward, witness, and finish the work. Then again, as a seasoned Adventist soon-to-be-wed postgraduate with several nagging spots and wrinkles, I was re-baptized, fully surrendering, not only for myself in light of my individual shortcomings, but as a renewed commitment in starting and heading a traditional Adventist family.

I’m a Seventh-day Adventist…kind of.

Though most recently, I found myself in fellowship with a fully affirming, egalitarian community that was born in a pub. A community pastored by an eclectic group including a multi-denominational Chaplain of charismatic Pentecostal lineage, a RHEMA Bible Church grad, a couple of true, boots-on-the-ground warriors for justice, and a recent doctoral recipient who performs at the occasional drag show. A community where there are more females in ‘leadership’ than males, and no one received an official reprimand from any organizing body for allowing that to happen. We used to meet at a comedy improv club with coffee and donuts in the foyer and communion every week with real wine and bread with yeast in the recipe. There were also grape juice and gluten-free options, and no baptismal requirement standing between you and the table. While fully virtual during the COVID-19 pandemic, we used whatever communion elements we had available in our homes. I started off making ‘unleavened’ bread from scratch with some Welch’s grape, but I’ve also used a Cheez-It and a tequila sunrise. All is sacred at The Table.

The community was not built around any visions, dates, wars, physical structures, days, times, types, or the end. It exists in the ever-present now and the simple concept that the Table of Christ is open to all; even if ‘Christ’ isn’t your thing. Regardless of background or individual specifics, dogma, baggage, interpretive choices, prophetesses or compunctions, who are any of us to determine the guest list to Someone else’s table? It is a community where all are defined by a collective “usness” in direct opposition to the very idea of a “themness.” There is no required “system of beliefs” or a stated set other than the Apostle’s Creed, which honestly, I don’t think any of us fully ascribe to. That’s ok. There’s no claim to being “right” or “the remnant” or anything special outside of being a community that isn’t trying to be special. It isn’t trying to be anything other than organic grace, love, and service. It feels familiar. It feels a little like home.

I’m a Seventh-day Adventist…kind of.

I’m one who no longer believes the Bible can nor should be broken up into a hierarchy of truths that one climbs by way of increasing knowledge, commitment, and Spirit. I do not see a cypher to be decoded to ensure my place in an afterlife, but a window into a mystery I will wrestle with throughout this one. I’m an ‘Adventist’ who believes Scripture can speak to humanity today, but not one who thinks the letters within were written with the intention to do so. I believe the wisdom of Scripture is timeless, as opposed to being time-specific or dependent. While the genre of prophecy may remain continually relevant societally, it is now hard to accept that major portions of it should be contextually or temporally detached from the times in which they were written, particularly just to fit whatever current circumstances I see myself in.

I am an Adventist who thinks the prophetic math pointing toward our modern day is too exclusive a lens for viewing books like Daniel and Revelation and greatly diminishes, not only the expansiveness of their applicational wisdom today, but their importance to the original communities that produced and promulgated them. One who doesn’t think Inspiration needed to wait for a European king to translate some Greek into English in the 1600s, for the full truth to become discoverable by Americans in the 1800s. I now know the marks of colonization when I see them.

I’m an ‘Adventist’ who understands that every generation of Christians has expressed some belief that they were in the “last days,” and the warnings they left behind were to the people immediately around them. Just like Adventism’s founders weren’t considering their words needing to extend to today. So, I’m not looking forward to a grand conspiracy as I believe “the beast power” is a timeless political commentary that is and always has been applicable at any place or point where the spiritual is co-opted by those in power, for power. It’s not coming. It has been here. It exists anywhere gospel, government, and greed become intertwined - not in a singular future worldwide climactic event, yet to occur. I am an ‘Adventist’ who has grown tired of sitting back hypocritically, waiting on ‘Papal Rome’ to re-awaken while our own government has behaved exceedingly beastly toward so many images of God for quite some time now. From its inception, in fact. The parallels aren’t so much prophetic as evidence of human patterns. Same misconceptions; different millennia.

This is a long way of saying that I’m an ‘Adventist’ who no longer believes anything particularly interesting or relevant occurred on October 22, 1844, other than a Great Disappointment. A devastating, collective, existential crisis all but crushed a very earnest group of believers, leaving them in desperate need of unique purpose and meaning in their lives… and in that moment. What they found inside this hopelessness was a new revelation. A new interpretation of Scripture and a new character of God. A new truth about the Everlasting Gospel that no one had ever heard of before, and no scholar had ever taught. A new test and final warning for the rest of Christianity, which this band of last-day believers had come out of and had been ridiculed by when Christ failed to return when they predicted. Other Christians whom the founders viewed as being closed off to repentance and Spirit for denying their message of Christ’s return, even though He didn’t. Other Christians we view as again at risk of a closing door of mercy if they don’t listen to us now.

I’m a Seventh-day Adventist…kind of.

I’m one who no longer believes in any particularly special authority exhibited by Ellen G. White that should elevate her opinions over anyone else’s. Nor can any authority save her from needing to be fully contextualized in her time and location. I wouldn’t proclaim to discredit her accounts of having visions, but I at least think there should be a separation between what she believed was shown to her and what she believed about what she saw. I’m an ‘Adventist’ who freely acknowledges and respects her authorial output, and finds value in some of her insights, but also one who finds much of her writing, and particularly the authority given to it as a whole, to be dangerous and a not-so-subtle form of idolatry. One who struggles mightily with the fact that much of her writing, including portions attributed to her visions and things she was “shown” by the Lord, appears to be plagiarized. Whole concepts, paragraphs, lines of thought, were lifted, often verbatim, from sources no one within Adventism considers “inspired,” yet placed in print under her name, and all associated connotation, without credit or reference. This is not to mention the psychology involved in being a disfigured twin, left uneducated because of a traumatic brain injury that might play into both the reliability of her visions and the value she may have derived from her status as God’s Messenger.

I’m an ‘Adventist’ who finds it suspiciously convenient that Ms. White’s doctrinally dispositive visions came as confirmation for theories she and other founders already believed as opposed to being new revelations. Consequently, I am an ‘Adventist’ who now finds the “purely scriptural” foundation for and divine ramifications of the Investigative Judgment/Sanctuary Doctrine (Adventism’s crowning unique theological teaching) to be based on a mass of untenable assumptions that have been extended to the brink of being blasphemous. As any theory tied to time, the message becomes increasingly more irrelevant and nonsensical as more time passes. I’m a Seventh-day Adventist who wholly disagrees with the character of God this particular teaching presents (the teaching at its core, not the way we’ve massaged it over the past 170-something years of church existence). One who disagrees with the earned grace of perfectionism that Adventist orthodoxy describes and asks us to ascribe to (again, at its core, not the way we’ve massaged it.) A God who can only save a perfected remnant of believers saves no one at all. I’m a Seventh-day Adventist who believes “God,” whatever It is, is bigger and better than the Adventism I’m accustomed to perceiving It through.

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The problem with this self-description is that the things I do or don’t do, believe or don’t believe, are the exact things that make a person a ‘Seventh-day Adventist.’ I’ve described myself as a paradox. My inherited faith is at odds with my consciousness; my worldview conflicts with my compass. Not believing in gravity does not lessen its pull. Therein lies the dilemma. Actually no, that is not the dilemma. I could have lived in a confused state, convinced myself I was being deluded by the enemy and dismissed my concerns. Prayed them away, as it were… I tried it… In truth, the dilemma arose when I learned that for as long as there have been Seventh-day Adventists, there have always been swaths of its membership and scholarship that have been quite vocal about not believing in any of that stuff either and for many of the same reasons I struggle with. Whether it were individuals like A.E. Ballenger and D.M. Canright in the founding days of the church, to Desmond Ford and Walter Rea a century later in the 1970s and 80s, right as my family came along, my…“delusions,” my questions, my concerns were neither unique nor innovative. 

They were not the product of an impenitent spirit or a disconnected prayer life. 

This was not the predicted result of my thoughts and decisions grieving the Holy Spirit. 

This was not the result of falling away but of attempting to dive in. 

This was the natural result of what my ministers had always instructed: “Don’t take my word for it; look into this for yourself.”

In all honesty, I’m embarrassed to have been in my thirties before allowing myself to feel a sense of questioning. It was not allowed by the authorities to whom I had submitted. Ellen White, church founder, wrote of people who doubt her work:

I was taught that questioning these fundamental aspects of the Adventist denomination is essentially tantamount to blaspheming the Holy Spirit. The great divine hand of the Creator that guided the little band of believers into Truth. It is unpardonable. Most members would not voice these concerns publicly. I’ve been dancing around these issues with those closest to me for nearly a decade. I’ve started enough arguments that my stance should be pretty clear by now, but honestly, it’s still my dirty little open secret. It has taken years of processing, study, and an immense toll on my psyche to finally admit and utter these words, but they are my reality.

I’m a Seventh-day Adventist…kind of, yet I’m no Seventh-day Adventist at all.

So how did I get here?