Comments of the Week January 13-19
“Our hope is in Jesus Christ and not in this bunch of fellas!” —Jeremy Low on who controls Adventist Theology
Comments on Coffee Urn & Weak Sister, Church Worker Loss of Employment Protections, Genes & Genesis, and Broken Trust

EDITORIAL: The Coffee Urn & the Weak Sister
“We had permission from our pastor to serve coffee in our Sabbath School room a couple years back but never did because we knew ‘people’ would smell it and complain. Sometimes it’s imperative to make waves and sometimes it’s just too exhausting to fight against the Pharisees.
The ‘don’t cause anyone to stumble’ admonition and theme of my indoctrinated SDA childhood is really at its core an expectation that we sit in the dungeon of the Old Covenant works-based salvation with our church community and not tell anyone the life-changing secret that our chains are unlocked lest everyone jump up and dance out of dark and into the Light.
Unfortunately for the SDA church, there seems to be very little ‘Good News’ that we have to share with the world.
But by all means, come sit with us in the dungeon. It really is no wonder that our church is dying.”


The Ministerial Exception: How Church Workers Lost Legal Employment Protection
“Oh my……I think that anyone who is even considering becoming a pastor should read this article. I, for one, would NOT want to work for an institution like the one described above!!“
–Bobbie Stovall

Genes and Genesis: Are We Designed to Grow for Eternity?
“Questions about the nature of humanity, its original creation, its fall, questions about original sin, whether we are in God’s image, whether that image still stands in some tarnished form, what is natural, how the world will be created or healed again, the role of Adam in ruling and subduing the earth, the role of Jesus as the second and last Adam, and the question of God’s own power and plurality are all questions Christians have been discussing for two thousand years.
But the recent discovery of genes perhaps should lead us to re-ask some of those theological questions again. I agree the fact each of us is a sort of citizenry of trillions of cells, and sort of omnipotent in our own way, boggles the mind. And leads me to some other big questions too, including your thoughts on our growing in some way for eternity and infinitely.”
–Steve Ferguson

Who Controls Our Theological Narrative?
“Our hope is in Jesus Christ and not in this bunch of fellas!”
–Jeremy Low
“It is no secret that Institutional Adventism, like the little girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead, when ‘good’ is very, very good, and when it is bad it is horrid!
The bottom line problem expectation, as I have experienced it, is that its social provision of fellowship has all the attraction of exclusive first-class club membership, and at the same time, it governs with all the abusive control and coercive compliance of the Inquisition – with different tools – under an effective collective dictatorship.
(To get the benefits you have to submit to the loss of the self-management of your own life,
but if you want to retain your own freedom to think, believe, and profess or express yourself authentically, and still have the social benefits, then you have to change the institutional government.)
The only two ways of resolving this impossible dilemma of losing so much by either option – war with yourself or war with the institution – is to answer the question: ‘What does it profit a person if that person gains the whole world of benefits, and loses his own true self?’
(Some people try to have it both ways and try to retain themselves intact, by being a sort of ‘silent member’ and pretend it’s ok.)
The real spiritual issue that shreds one’s heart to bits in an experience of a kind of eschatological and devastating loss, is the belief that the institution is the CHURCH and so it is acting with the authority of GOD, so that its rejection is the final condemnation to separation from God.
This CLAIM TO BE THE CHURCH while acting the part of the Accuser is EVIL.
A simple solution would be to identify the SDA community as a club or a fellowship or an association, or even a Bible Study Group, but NOT the church.
(It might be possible for the SDA community to become one of the many denominations in the wider Christian community, without their similar exclusive barriers, of course, but it would first have to ‘lose its life in this world’ to find a true life in the equality of the body of Christ.)
Such potential it has, so wasted by having an ongoing WAR with both the world and its own non-compliant members as sinners, when it hugs to its heart the professed importance of entering into God’s REST.”
-Connie French

Broken Trust: My strange and disturbing summer at Adventist summer camp
“My heart breaks for you. And for all the others who have spoken and not been heard. Those who have not been believed. Those who are still dealing with trauma. There are far too many of us. You are in my prayers.“
–Patti Purdy Hansen Tompkins
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