Elder Conrad Vine, as president of Adventist Frontier Missions, has been a delegate-at-large to previous General Conference sessions. Last month, he was informed that he would not be a delegate to this year’s GC session.
Why? No explanation was given, but it evidently was related to his protest of the GC Administrative Committee’s (ADCOM) support of vaccine mandates, in his very widely listened-to sermon, “An Appeal to the Adventist Nobility.”
The church posted a response to Elder Vine’s appeal, in which they claimed that ADCOM’s October 25, 2021 “reaffirmation” statement on vaccines supports freedom of conscience. But Elder Vine notes that so long as the offending language quoted below remains in the church’s official statement, that statement will continue to be used against Seventh-day Adventist members who conscientiously object to being forced to receive the Covid-19 vaccines:
“The Seventh-day Adventist Church, in consultation with the Health Ministries and Public Affairs and Religious Liberty departments of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, is convinced that the vaccination programs that are generally being carried out are important for the safety and health of our members and the larger community. Therefore, claims of religious liberty are not used appropriately in objecting to government mandates or employer programs designed to protect the health and safety of their communities.”
Obviously, any claim that ADCOM supports the freedom of conscience of Adventist believers is absurd unless and until that language is excised from the ADCOM statement. Better yet, all such statements should be withdrawn and de-published.
UPDATE 6/6/22: We have now uploaded the full 36 minute video. Previously, we just had the first 10 minutes as a placeholder. In this video, Elder Vine goes into some detail as to how the ADCOM statement is hurting church members and interfering with evangelism and accessions into the SDA Church. Elder Vine describes how, after the ADCOM statement was published, and because of it, one Irish convert requested to baptized into Christ rather than into the SDA Church.