One point is clear throughout history. Theological disaster almost never appears out of thin air.
Trouble seems to build and build and disaster is somehow averted again and again but anyone with eyes can see that time is running out. Time is nearly out for the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
I’m going to speak plainly here, and not concern myself with anyone else’s opinion. It’s been my observation as I study the war of WO in Adventism that much of it is fueled by man-centered schemes and flesh-driven promotion. It is a war over God’s foundational gender distinctions. The aggressors who promote the war by rebelling against organizational decisions have no sympathy for or patience with those who resist them. Some of you have been caught in the crossfire. And after getting weary of the fight over years you found yourself no longer able to understand your place in this movement.
1970’s
Liberal Adventism emerged in the 1970’s as churches and pastors aligned with the liberal wing of our institutions. While some of these individuals self-identified as moderates they were in fact liberals bringing the world into the church. This began to bring about an identity crisis in Adventism. We weren’t quite so sure who we were anymore, especially in North America.
1980’s
The identity crisis of the North American Division (NAD) was evident from the 1980’s. So was the fact that the WO and LGBTQ lifeless revolution would be the fuse that would detonate the North American SDA Church and its Adventist identity.
1990’s
Throughout the 90’s many church congregations and Conferences began to associate themselves with the NAD rather than the world wide Seventh-day Adventist church. They were birds of a feather, drawn together by a desire to change (liberalize) the church.
Many of these individuals disagreed with the Adventist Church’s twin decisions to not ordain women as pastors, not realizing that the rise of the neo-pagan sacred feminine in our culture was influencing and motivating the desire for WO in the church. In turn, many congregations were often divided internally over the same conflict. Twenty-five years later, the entire Seventh-day Adventist Church is now in sharp divide, with the NAD standing as the voice and home of progressive political Adventism, contrasted with conservative and committed Adventism around the world.
Back in the 1990’s, most of our church did not want to fight. Though some were veterans of it, and still licking their wounds after GC Session in Utrecht and outright rebellion in the church, they longed for a place where there could be meaningful biblical worship. They longed for relevant important instruction from the Bible, not yielding to the trend of our times. And they found their place in conservative biblical Adventism.
As these two groups in the Church continued to polarize, each group has moved through history according to their chosen trajectories. They have grown steadily apart. The Adventist Church, under the watchcare of Elder Ted Wilson since 2010 solidified its conservative convictions and commitments, while a younger generation of leaders emerged in the NAD — a generation that did not long for a return to the Adventism of the past, but identified with a far more liberal vision of theology and moral issues.
A majority of our schools and Universities serving the SDA Church joined the WO revolution long ago, and their graduates began demanding that the Church join as well. Then came the wider LGBTQ revolution, the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015, and the open floodgates of moral revolution. More conservative forces in the Church will refuse to join the revolution, but others, mostly younger, now see the current SDA policy of biblical marriage as morally wrong and oppressive. Many Adventists (Batchelor, Bacchiocchi and Mervyn Maxwell) warned that the gender experimentations of WO would pilot the church to the gender and sexual deviations of LGBTQ. They were scornfully derided.
These changes have happened over the course of a generation. Over these 25 years, Adventist life has produced far fewer leaders and people who could be described as conservative Adventists, and far more who could be described as something like mainline political and social justice devotees. Meanwhile, the older biblically conservative Adventist leaders, interestingly enough–are aging out.
Most of the seminaries and divinity schools serving the SDA Church joined the LGBTQ revolution, first by demanding tolerance and then accommodating GLSEN organizations on all Adventist campuses. From these academic centers, graduates have been demanding that the Adventist Church join the LGBTQ revolution. Not to be outdone, Adventist Healthcare also joined the LBGTQ affirming wave, first because they believed it was good for business and second because of increasing worldliness within those institutions.
Guided by our neo-pagan culture and influenced by our academic and health institutions, NAD leadership has become an uneasy coalition of progressives and political liberals--lifeless passengers on the train of Cultural Marxism, Wokeness and Leftism. Most of these clergy and leaders are products of the new quasi-Adventist education, where righteousness is exchanged for relevance.
Around the edges of liberal Adventism, some churches have called for LGBTQ membership and some have accepted gay & lesbian couples as members. Caitlyn is not only coming—to quote Leslie Pollard, he/she/it is here already.
While such departures from Scripture have alienated more conservative churches and members, the majority of concerned members look for help where no help is apparently coming – to the GC.
This raises the question, can the Adventist Church survive a dual morality (hermeneutic)? One side questions the trustworthiness of Scripture regarding male/female role distinctions. From this side, flowing from Pandora’s open box, the pink river of WO is transitioning to a rainbow river of sexual deviancy. On the other side, biblical Adventism clings to the authority of Scripture and its definition of leadership and sexuality.
In spite of what compromising leaders may say, these two moralities--contradictory by definition--cannot coexist within one structure.
An Opportunity Missed
The church failed in 1974-1990 to draw a clear line of biblical male leadership as given to us in the Bible. It's hard to see how the SDA Church can survive with such a house divided and such an incoherent policy where females can be pastors but not ordained, and homosexuals can hold church membership as long as they don’t engage in homosexual sin (who will monitor that?).
We've seen the same pattern throughout mainline liberal Protestantism. The moral revolutionaries push and push until the denominational middle gives way or dies out. This drama is playing out a bit later on the stage of the SDA Church but its end is clear enough. This is the inevitable result of the abandonment of the full truthfulness and authority of Scripture, and God’s foundational distinctions. Once the truthfulness and trustworthiness of the Bible are abandoned, theological revisionism is inevitable.
This is also the logical consequence of adopting a hermeneutic that allows for the service of women as pastors. For many SDA members and congregations that was the key issue of frustration at the 1990 and 1995 GC Sessions. The same negotiation and “reinterpretation” of the biblical text that allows for the service of women pastors will logically lead to the acceptance of the LGBT revolution. How can it not? Individuals and congregations may refuse to take this step, but they feel trapped in an organization that has surrendered the only binding argument that would offer an objective truth claim. Eventually, the revolutionaries will win, and they know it. Clearly, some now are unwilling to wait, and with each unauthorized female ordination, the approaching footfalls of LGBTQ ordination grow louder.
Finally, this is what happens when love of the world trumps biblical authority. The moral revolution was only possible because of the great and unsustainable shift to personal autonomy in the larger culture. The NAD WO Agenda was birthed in a rejection of stricter doctrinal requirements within the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and one of their cherished principles is congregational/divisional autonomy at the expense of unity.
Interestingly, the limits of divisional autonomy as a central doctrine are becoming clear as the NAD transitions from WO to LGBTQ. One way or another the upcoming final three years of Ted Wilson’s presidential tenure will be historic.
For Seventh-day Adventists, this capitulation to culture as it is known should serve as yet another reminder of what becomes inevitable once the full authority and truthfulness of the Bible are abandoned. There is nothing to celebrate here … only sadness.
Many of you determined you would find a church that wasn’t divided by the WO war. A place that upholds God’s complementary distinctions as a commitment to divine truth, not as something to fight about. But those places were in short supply, and many of you turned to the internet to find the fellowship of biblical commitment. You showed up at Fulcrum7 and became part of a family.
Those who stand firmly in favor of WO kick biblical role distinctions in the teeth. And they label longstanding principles that are found in the Scriptures as woefully irrelevant. Out of date, and if you still embrace them you are known to them as a dinosaur.
A friend in an Adventist church recently said he could longer continue to worship there because the men were mostly passive, and the women mostly aggressive after being given the reins of leadership in that church. The roles of leadership were reversed.
Another friend said there are only five churches in their area and most of them are led by dominant women and liberal elders.
In too many churches depth is not a concern, only the superficial. In-depth instruction, solid biblical exposition from the Scriptures—there’s no place for it.
Now there are little sermonettes, which in my opinion are for Christianettes. As a result you grow about 2” deep and 12 miles wide.
What is Needed?
We need to return to the teaching of the Scriptures. Many of you drive by progressive churches on Sabbath in search of a church that is free from the war. A church where serious biblical exposition is the norm and your children are taught, instructed, encouraged and deepened, and where bigger is not always better.
We must dismantle the Union status of all rebellious Unions, beginning with the Columbia and Pacific Unions.
We need to rescind female pastors and void the unbiblical ordinations of all women in the SDA church. Then we can formulate a new balance of faith, one more faithful to Scripture.
SDA colleges should have a group of students on campus who are available to help other students resolve LGBTQ and moral sin issues. Once a quarter, students should be treated to a testimony of someone who got free from moral failure or gender confusion. Testimonies are the animating lifeblood of Christian encouragement (Revelation 12:11).
Reduce the number of church employees on executive committees, including ADCOM and the GCEXCOMM.
Our church and schools should issue a statement that we are a Christian organization and derive our beliefs from the Word of God.
As Christians we must remember that our existence makes sense only as a protest and an alternative to the dominant culture of the world.
Insert your own idea how to make Adventism great again in the comment section below . . .
Walk with the King and be a blessing!
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