St. Louis GC Session 2025: Of Course, It’s About Vaccinations!
by Loren Seibold | 3 July 2025 |
All denominational meetings I’ve ever attended are a mishmash of three things.
First, there is the business—the hiring, the committees, the Church Manual changes, the policy updates.
Second, there are promotional items: that is, promoting things that the General Conference (GC) is doing to help us and resource us. These are mixed in to the agenda as though they are matters of business, even though they are actually advertisements—that is, they’re not asking anyone if they should do these things, just telling us that they have. (I’ve written here many times before that most of the resources that are promoted at these meetings never seem to penetrate the market in North America. I’m not sure if they are used elsewhere, but I’ve a sneaking suspicion that most of the stuff they work so hard to create ends up in the metaphorical dead letter office.)
Third, the spiritual aspect: singing and preaching and soft organ playing, and many, many prayers. (I call them “punctuation prayers”: prayers that have no actual purpose except to mark the beginning and the end of parts of the meeting.)
We kicked off the spiritual part with Mark Finley taking us through Acts. Mark is always a clear preacher. Yet I find it interesting that he doesn’t talk about God’s power in people’s lives, but God at work to make people make the church grow in order to get Jesus to come back sooner. I wonder: how does all of this sound to a person here who has cancer, or whose child is in trouble, or who is about to get deported, or is struggling with sin or discouragement? There is hope in the eschatology, I suppose, but it’s so much more about what we need to do, how much better we need to get, how much more we need to pray, in order to make God provide his blessings for us. It’s mostly about how we need to work to make our church grow the way the apostolic church grew in the first century.
(I feel I should apologize that sermons about evangelism and mission—though I trust the sermons are entirely sincere—don’t inspire me.)
The proceedings
I think there’s a lot of nonsense in here that I can skip right past. If you want to watch it, you will. Probably most of it didn’t matter much. Here are a few points that struck me.
There are about 2,800 delegates. Obviously, not every one made it, for all kinds of reasons. (One reason: thanks to Donald Trump, the embassies around the world cracked down on visas.) But here’s the kicker: the General Conference policy requires only 1/3 of the delegates to be present to have a quorum. That perhaps reflects how little it matters, other than for pro forma reasons, that the people actually show up. It would be much more efficient if only that 1/3 came.
There is often, at these meetings, a formal reading of certain fundamental beliefs. They start with FB#1:
“The Holy Scriptures are the supreme, authoritative, and the infallible revelation of His will. They are the standard of character, the test of experience, the definitive revealer of doctrines, and the trustworthy record of God’s acts in history.”
But that’s never enough. In every GC meeting I’ve ever attended, they always—always—read #18, to remind us that the Holy Scriptures really aren’t enough.
“The Scriptures testify that one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit is prophecy. This gift is an identifying mark of the remnant church and we believe it was manifested in the ministry of Ellen G. White. Her writings speak with prophetic authority and provide comfort, guidance, instruction, and correction to the church.”
After the reading of these two pieces, Elder Wilson, as he often does, joined them in marriage.
“We praise God for the Bible, God’s holy word. And at the same time, we are so grateful that God has endowed the Seventh-day Adventist Church in fulfillment of Revelation 12:17, indicating the testimony of Jesus Christ, fulfilled in Revelation 19:10, that the testimony of Jesus Christ is the spirit of prophecy, that we have a marvelous lesser light that leads us to the greater light.”
No one loves Ellen White like Ted Wilson, and it is astonishing to me how quickly he glides from the Bible to a full-throated panegyric of Ellen White. So thrilled was he to make this point that he promised every delegate their own personal copy of the compilation Last Day Events which, he admitted, they may already have. But no matter. You can’t have enough copies of the red books.
Things fall apart
I hesitate to descend into the lumpy phloem that began coming from the floor about this time. People started gumming about on the agenda, picking this bone or spitting out some stray bit of gristle they disliked. One woman from Australia wanted to completely redo the agenda so that there would be time to talk about the church’s subservience to the United Nations. I don’t even want to tell you how many layers of parliamentary mucus GC VP Artur Stele let accumulate on the upper lip of the meeting, before it became clear what the real agenda was: vaccinations! Of course. After a few people tried unsuccessfully to clear their ideological sinuses, a chap from Ohio, one Yuliyan Filipov, managed to blow forth his nose of concern—which was ultimately crafted into a motion.
“Mr. Chair, I move to add to the agenda a review and discussion of the 2015 general conference ADCOM statement encouraging immunization—specifically, the claim that Adventist health message is grounded in peer-review scientific literature in addition to the Bible and the writing of Ellen White. This assertion merits careful examination as it appears in conflict with the fundamental beliefs. Belief #22 affirms that the Adventist health message is a matter of doctrine. While the introduction of our fundamental beliefs clearly states, ‘Seventh-day Adventists accept the Bible as their only creed,’ a position that is further affirmed in belief #1. And then in belief #18, we affirm as the Spirit of Prophecy as a reference point for our beliefs. In light of all these principles, I respectfully urge that this issue be given a thoughtful and prayerful consideration. Otherwise, we are on our path to repeat history, and in particular I’m thinking about the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, who turned the tradition of people into holy tradition. Nowaday our society is turning to scientism as our human tradition. Let’s keep the Bible and the spirit of prophecy as a foundation of doctrine.”
See if you can figure it out better than I could. I have no idea how the Catholic Church or the Eastern Orthodox Church come into this, nor why “scientism” is evil.
Personally, I think science is pretty damn cool, and I find it not in the least threatening to my faith. But that’s just me.
Ted Wilson is my hero
After tromping about in this goo for awhile, finally one clear voice came to the podium: Elder Ted Wilson. I’ll grab as much of this as I can—do read it—and perhaps it will rehabilitate him a bit in your mind a bit, as it did for me.
“The statement and the way the the amendment to the motion has been phrased would indicate that this is a highly misinformed view—[it] insinuates that the General Conference has now put science above or equal to the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy. I have to tell you that is unequivocally
false. We have never done that.
“In fact, let me read to you the actual statement. … ‘The Seventh-day Adventist Church places strong emphasis on health and well-being. The Adventist health emphasis is based on the Bible, the inspired writings of church co-founder Ellen G. White.’ It goes on to say, ‘And is informed by peer-reviewed scientific health literature.’ In no way does the Seventh-day Adventist Church put scientific information, peer-reviewed scientific information above the Bible or the Spirit of Prophecy or even equal to those. Absolutely not.”
Really, how uninformed can you be, to suppose that Ted Wilson (TW) would allow any authority to be above Ellen White?
“Now in that statement in 2015 approximately three or four times we implied that this was your choice. We advocated vaccinations. Many of us
cannot travel around the world without vaccinations. Typhoid, cholera, yellow fever, whatever it might be. We simply reaffirmed in 2021 that the recommendations about vaccinations were in order.
Tell it like it is, Ted:
“You know, unfortunately, some people have badly misled others to say that the church mandated that you had to have a vaccination. Completely false. All of these were simply recommendations. You can choose it or not. In the reaffirmation statement in 2021, 16 times in the document, it says it’s your choice. Unfortunately, many people have twisted the wording, twisted the intent. … I’ll read it to you—capital letters, all capital letters. ‘THE DECISION TO BE IMMUNIZED OR NOT IS THE CHOICE OF EACH INDIVIDUAL AND SHOULD BE TAKEN IN CONSULTATION WITH ONE’S HEALTH CARE PROVIDER. PERSONAL RESEARCH IS IMPORTANT. WE ULTIMATELY RELY ON FOLLOWING BIBLICAL HEALTH PRACTICES AND THE SPIRIT OF PROPHECY AND FOLLOWING GOD’S LEADING IN OUR LIVES WHICH WILL BRING US PEACE AND ASSURANCE IN OUR DECISION MAKING.’
I’m not sure what biblical health practices are, actually, or why they would preclude vaccinations. I love scientific health care, and would choose it above biblical cures like praying for the mentally ill, touching the hem of a rabbi’s garment, or anointing people with olive oil. But that’s just me. Going on:
“Unfortunately, people like to twist and misuse anything you say.… In fact, for some of you here today, what is being presented may be news to you because you haven’t even thought about it. My brothers and sisters, I would urge us not to be involved in conspiracy approaches even to the point [that] it’s almost unbelievable, that somehow the General Conference and the world church is receiving instructions and is under the thumb or the direction of the United Nations. That to me is complete fallacy. We have no instructions from the United Nations. We have no directives. We have nothing. We are not in contact with the United Nations except we have a representative that works with other non-government organizations to help in humanitarian areas to help in health challenges to help in religious liberty aspects.
“So, my brothers and sisters, I think the record needed to be shared and set straight. We sympathize with those who have concerns, and you have the right to your opinion. But it is a very small minority of people within the two 23-plus million church members who have continued to agitate about erroneous and misleading information.”
C’mon, folks. Give him credit where it’s due. Thus the amendment to discuss vaccines was defeated.
Addendum: this morning TW said that in fact the wrong statement had been on the website, and it was no wonder people were confused. You would think that would have been discovered before this, but TW isn’t omniscient.
Just a bit more:
The last important item of the day was to approve the nominating committee. I tried to catch all 277 members, but they ran it by too fast. Not that that will matter much to any of you, because you’ve got to know that 277 members is way too many for any useful work on any nominating committee. And remember: no résumés, no interviews, just praying and letting the Holy Spirit lead.
Because the Holy Spirit doesn’t like information.
One brief thing: some chap, whose name I didn’t catch, managed to make it to the microphone to make this motion: that the General Conference adopt an upper age limit for people in the General Conference, and all the other levels: division, union conference, and local conference.
Best idea of the day.
He was ignored.
More tomorrow.
Loren Seibold is the executive e⊄ditor of Adventist Today.
