The “Shaking” Isn’t What You’ve Been Told It Is
by Loren Seibold | 13 June 2024 |
“It is my opinion that we are facing the shaking and sifting in the church right now. There are those who are drifting out of a clear understanding of who we are and what we believe. —Ted Wilson, Sermon to General Conference Excom, Oct. 7, 2023
What I am writing about here, I have written about before. But as a pastor, I can’t let it go.
I’d go so far as to say that the revival and misapplication of that single phrase from Ellen White, “the shaking,” is the most destructive thing that has yet come up in our church. I fear it is pushing tens of thousands out under the exit signs.
You may say that “the shaking” is not a new idea. It was mentioned by Ellen White a century ago. But the way it is now used is new. It has been turned from a description into a threat. It no longer sounds like something God will do, but something church leaders are eager to undertake.
To many of us it sounds like shaking the church has become an action plan: to provoke a crisis to fulfill the prophecy, so the rest—those who are sufficiently pure—can force Jesus to return and they can go on into the kingdom.
In my years in this church, I’ve seen individuals and families pushed out of their congregations for a variety of real or imagined trespasses. But this is the first time I’ve seen top church leaders suggesting Adventists are unwelcome in their own church.
Ellen White’s shaking
This, as Matthew Korpman showed in a piece in the Spring 2023 issue of Adventist Today, isn’t what Ellen White was talking about when she referenced the shaking of the church.
Unlike the current leaders’ contention that those who will be shaken out are the rebels, the uncommitted, the insufficiently conservative, Matthew shows that Ellen White saw the shaking as something more: the shaking of our institutional ego and no-longer-supportable teachings. I will quote Matthew Korpman at length here, and ask you to follow this link to read the entire piece.
She wrote in 1892 that “If the pillars of our faith will not stand the test of investigation, it is time that we knew it” (Gospel Workers, p.127). Using the imagery of a violent earthquake that shakes the foundations of faith itself—not only at the individual level, but also the institutional—she wrote: “If every idea we have entertained in doctrines is truth, will not the truth bear to be investigated? Will it totter and fall if criticized? If so, let it fall, the sooner the better. The spirit that would close the door to investigation of points of truth in a Christlike manner is not the Spirit from above (Letter to W. H. Healey, Dec. 9, 1888).
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This might happen, she suggests, when a fundamentalist or singular mentality forms, leading “ministers… [to] feel that they have some wonderful advanced ideas, and unless all receive these, they will be shaken out and a [new] people will arise to go forward and upward to the victory” (Letter to Edwin Jones, May 19, 1890). White notes that within this potential for an idolatry of the ego comes the ability to make an idolatry out of not only ourselves, but our very theological beliefs (Spirit of Prophecy, Vol. 4, p.399). She writes: “Away with this egotism” (Letter to Edwin Jones, May 19, 1890).
In that same letter discussing the shaking, she warns Edwin Jones in 1890 that anyone who claims that one must share all the same ideas as another, in order to be part of the church, is in fact working under the influence of the devil. She cautions against overemphasizing the time of trouble and a coming shaking of God’s people, directing ministers instead to stress only simple beliefs that are agreed upon, to encourage unity, and to allow people to respect their differences. She discourages strict orthodoxy and implores church members to “not become narrow… [but] let your mind broaden” (Review and Herald Extra, December 29, 1889, p.3).
Dividers in chief
From this evidence, Ellen White’s teaching is almost opposite of what is being invoked by church leaders right now as “the shaking.” Under the influence of the Last Generation Theology doctrine (the teaching that the whole church must be perfect for Jesus to return) our church leaders are now asking—even demanding—that the rest of us who don’t measure up to their standard should leave.
In this they have become opposers of historic Adventism. Ellen White attacked not doubters, but the institutional ego. Instead, a group of immovable old men insist upon remaining—in Elder Wilson’s case, for an unprecedented 15 years—while urging that others of us jump overboard.
I wish our leaders who so frequently mention “the shaking” would follow the counsel Ellen White gave to Edwin Jones:
Here is your danger. You will take passages in the Testimonies that speak of the shaking among God’s people, and you will talk of a coming out from this people, of a purer, holier people that will arise. Now all this pleases the enemy. We should not needlessly take a course that will make differences or create dissension.…This talking about divisions because all do not have the same ideas as present themselves to your mind, is not the work of God, but of the enemy. Talk the simple truths wherein you can agree. Talk of unity; do not become narrow and conceited; let your mind broaden.”
Wanted: men with courage
Many of the top General Conference workers are old, some well past retirement age. Surely some among them are aware of the damage done by the repeated invocation of “the shaking” as a way to shed people who disagree with them.
I wonder, though: are there any leaders with courage in that building? Professionally, a significant number of them have little to lose. Where are those who will stand up and say to Elder Wilson, “When you suggest that people be shaken out of the church because they don’t agree with you, you are weakening our church. You are urging thoughtful, committed Christians to leave, those who would be valuable for the kind of church we should be: a church that opens its doors to all who seek Jesus.”
The shaking out of those who don’t agree with the General Conference is our church’s most dangerous new development. Because according to Ellen White, the problem in our church is not the rebels and the free thinkers among us. The problem is not those of us who want a broader, more accepting church.
The problem is egotism in high places. The problem is opinionation backed up with stubborn authority. The problem is men who claim to be adhering to truth, but appear more devoted to the institution they lead than to Jesus Christ.
They have made the institution their idol, to recall Ellen White’s words, and now they ask the rest of us to get out of it and leave them to it. Should they be surprised if some do?
Postscript
I am often asked why, when I see this spirit in the church, I continue to call myself a Seventh-day Adventist.
The simplest answer is that this is the Christian family I was born into, and I refuse to be bullied out of it! Should I yield to these erroneous teachings, I acknowledge that the General Conference is in some sense “the church,” and that I and those like me are not. Biblically, spiritually, pastorally, that cannot be true.
I refuse to grant that authority to a few. “No one,” my late friend Fritz Guy once told me, “gets to tell me whether I am or am not a Seventh-day Adventist. That is between me and God.”
Loren Seibold is the Executive Editor of Adventist Today.
