When a colleague and I wrote and submitted to Adventist Today the piece entitled “A New Interpretation of the Little Horn of Daniel 7,” we knew that we might be seen (as Zechariah once said of Israel’s enemies) as poking God’s church in the eye. We weren’t exactly sure what shape the response would take—whether […]
By Loren Seibold | 10 December 2018 | Had someone 40 years ago assigned to me the part of futurist, near the top of the list of things I wouldn’t have predicted would be the widespread popularity of tattoos. In my youth, skin art was associated with roustabouts in dockside bars, not educated professionals in […]
Richard W. Coffen | 10 December 2018 | 11:45 a.m. Thursday, November 15—Long lines jutted from checkouts. I pulled in behind lane 9. Ahead stood a well-dressed, well-coifed lady. Well below the median age of 72.2[1] for us retirees in Green Valley! Ms. Anonymous placed a few items onto the conveyor belt—two boxed toys, Christmas […]
by Eugene Gerasimov | 9 December 2018 | There is a widely quoted statement by Karl Marx that “Religion is the opiate of the people.” We who love our faith will disagree that religion has a narcotic effect. But you should know that religion can be very dangerous. Serious faith is risky, like having a […]
By Kris Coffin Stevenson | 7 December 2018 | It was the children’s fault that my picture of God was ruined. If they hadn’t gotten their smeary fingers on it, it might have stayed exactly the way I envisioned it. And that would have been worse. All of this paradigm-shifting happened when I attended a […]
6 December 2018 | Glen Samuels, president of the West Jamaica Conference of the Adventist Church, recently appealed to the Jamaica Constabulary Force to avoid extrajudicial actions toward suspects that are ultimately freed by courts. According to the Jamaica Observer, Samuels was speaking last month at the first-ever Annual Security Forces and Youth Mentorship Prayer […]
by Reinder Bruinsma | 7 December 2018 | For a few weeks the supermarket close to the apartment building where we live is open on Sundays. Sunday shopping has long been a hotly debated issue in local politics. Until recently the influence of the religious parties was strong enough to frustrate the attempts by the […]
Richard W. Coffen | 4 December 2018 | Paul’s claim that during the Second Advent “God will bring with him” those “which sleep in Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 4:14) has been the proverbial fly in our state-of-the-dead doctrinal ointment. If we take the text just as it reads, then dead Christians are presently in heaven but […]
Dan Wysong was pastor of the Chico, California, Seventh-day Adventist Church, a 750-member congregation in the denomination’s Northern California Conference. Chico is a city of 93,000 about 100 miles north of Sacramento. There has been considerable controversy around this congregation’s accepting an LGBTQ person for baptism into church membership. Among the outcomes is that Wysong […]
“As the conversation about Women’s Ordination and Compliance reaches megaphone level, is there not a Holy Spirit prompting to take a step back and reflect, ‘Is this my church?’ Has it really come to a point where we feel the need to produce just another quick-fire video, to remind the viewer of what, by now, […]
by Alexander Samuel | 29 November 2018 | An Open Letter to Pastor Ted Wilson Dear Elder Wilson: I have heard that you will be going to India in June of 2019—not your first trip to India as a president of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventist Church. About 30 years ago, I saw your […]
26 November 2018 | A website with a “Statement of Harmony” certificate for congregations to sign on an “Affirmation Sabbath” has been circulated widely among Seventh-day Adventists. The date for Affirmation Sabbath is not given, nor are the creators of the website identified. However, another website, Ordination Truth, which opposes women’s ordination, has announced Affirmation Sabbaths […]
