Are Adventists Racists?

My Daughter (top left) with some of her Adventist Youth Group

Once in a while some well-meaning college student (usually white but not always), raises the charge that the SDA church is racist. They're often already on their way out of the church for other reasons (dress, diet, the Sabbath cramps their style, someone's bony finger, etc.), but on their way out they fire a Parthian shot at the Region Conferences. Region Conferences are a remnant of the Jim Crow South at a time when mixed congregations could find their churches burned down around them by the Klan. It seemed safer to give our black members their own churches. After all, there were a lot of black SDAs in the South since one of the first mission fields Adventist saturated was the antebellum South. We got into a lot of trouble for it. We were teaching black children to read and training black teachers and nurses and Nathan Bedford Forrest and his ilk didn't like it.

So, I'd like to 'splain about Region Conferences as best as I know what happened!  Now, I know I'm going to probably get hammered here but here goes. I grew up in the South in the 60s and early 70s. I went to schools with kids of all races, many from the far side of the world. I went to college in my home town. My former college president at Southwestern Adventist University, the inimitable Leroy Leiske, had come from a conference president's job in one of the Southern Conferences. While there he attempted to integrate the administration. Sadly, there was some serious racial discomfort among the white brethren with that idea back then. The Klan was still active then and the SDA church was already in enough trouble with its Bible Belt neighbors. The powers that be feared change. Months into his administration, Elder Leiske got run off for his hiring policies. He then came to Texas to become president of what was then Southwestern Union College. He wasn't an academic. He was a reformer and Texas was apparently ready for some reformation. And even if they weren't, Uncle Leroy was bringing it. In just a few years he almost seamlessly integrated the school. Because the denominations only predominantly black school, Oakwood, was far off in the deep South, Leiske convinced some brave black students to give Southwestern a try. He recruited quite a few black, Asian and Hispanic students and I don't remember any real racial problems on campus. No riots. No cross-burnings. A friend of mine who was half black and half white told me he felt like he didn't quite fit in either the white or black groups on campus, but that was more an artifact of unfamiliarity than of any overt racism. And he was the perfect guy to cross the racial divide, since white, black and Hispanic girls all thought he was awfully handsome. There may have been some hard core racism, but if so I never heard about it and would have been against it if I had.  Much more I remember the student body in general embraced the new students.

Several times in Texas it was proposed that the Region Conference be blended into the Texas Conference. The conference already had a group of Hispanic churches within the Texas Conference and specific conference secretaries who were designated to care for the Hispanic churches. The Region Conferences, however, have resisted blending with the regular conferences, largely for cultural reasons. Also, there was some feeling that blacks, especially during the Civil Rights movement, might lose some control over their churches. Since then blacks have moved freely between black churches and white churches. Whites often attend black churches and lots of Adventist couples intermarry now that racism has let up so much in the South.

When I went to school back then in the late 60s and 70s bunches of us used to go to the black churches pretty regularly - easier to stay awake if you'd been in the middle of mid-terms and not been getting much sleep. We were welcomed in black churches when we came to visit. They used to tease us white kids about not expecting to get out of service at noon. And black people were welcomed in the so-called "white" churches. I'm sure there were some jerks in the white congregations, but mostly there was love. I know a pastor who was a neighbor of mine who had serious racial prejudice all of his life. He lost his minister's license in part because of it. He lived in Keene and ever once in a while, if a black minister preached in the Keene Church pulpit, he would pop up in some meeting to express his outrage. There were always plenty of people of all colors, including me, who stood up and told him he was out of line. Ex-Voice of Prophecy Quartet member John Thurber fully integrated his Adventist Youth in Action teams and nobody said a word. If they did they were marginalized pretty quickly by the rest of us..

Today in the Texas Conference there are Hispanic Adventist Churches, Black Adventist Churches and "Regular" Adventist Churches. I haven't seen a "White" SDA church in 40 years. My 2 home churches in Tyler and Keene are veritable rainbows when you look out across the congregations. The college draws kids from every corner of the Earth to Keene and I grew up in the 60s not knowing how to be racist. My grandmother used to make little comments, but my sister and I didn't let her get away with it. Even she opened up to the idea that black people were okay. As a nurse she had many black co-workers she was friendly with despite her firm non-Adventist racist upbringing.

In Tyler, we had some white people but they were becoming a minority. We had a whole lot of Filipinos, black people, Hispanic folk, and Asians. The rest of us were mutts of one sort or another. We Adventists have astonishingly little racism in our blood, even in the South. It didn't last long when openly challenged. We know better. We were brought up better than that. We sang "Red and Yellow, Black and White" we sang every Sabbath in Kindergarten and Cradle Roll and we believed it. Anything else was a shock to us as we grew up.

As a people, we Adventists flock to do mission work. My Uncle ran mission schools in Hawaii and Thailand for most of his career. I went to SWAU with some of his former students. We watch mission updates every month showing work we are doing in every corner of the work.Retired missionaries occupy honored seats in most of our North American churches, a living witness against racism. Church boards usually look quite colorful. In Tyler we had a black church, a Hispanic church and the Tyler church which took in the overflow from both of our sister churches and folk from cultures not covered by either. Our Hispanic churches are about language mostly. Our Black churches are mostly about culture and worship style. Racism has nothing to do with it. That Jim Crow influenced generation is long gone. It's so rare to find an SDA racist that we tend to swarm them like a righteously indignant flock of Guinea Hens on a rattlesnake.

My church is not in the least racist. It's against everything that we are as a people who expect the soon coming of Christ.

© 2018 by Tom King

Debating the Sabbath - Doug and Steve Go At It Politely!

On March 30, Amazing Facts hosted a debate about the Sabbath between Pastor Doug Batchelor and Pastor Steve Gregg, a radio pastor there in California. Adventists used to do this kind of thing a lot back in the late 19th century. It usually didn't result in a lot of conversion since the sides were pretty well drawn among the audiences who showed up for those things. Eventually, SDA ministers gave up doing it, because, though they buried their opponents in scripture, not a lot of hearts seemed to respond to seeing their preacher suffer a theological beat-down. I was curious as to how Pastor Doug was going to handle the debate format.

We watched the debate twice yesterday. My wife had no trouble understanding what Pastor Doug presented, but she got really lost listening to Pastor Gregg. Was he really saying there is no law for "New Testament" Christians, only what they feel the law is in their hearts? She had to listen to it twice and still couldn't follow the intricacies of his argument. I generally find that subtlety of argument is not a common feature of Scripture. Stuff tends to be pretty plain and straightforward. The prophet Habakkuk (Hab. 2:2) was told by God to "Write the vision, and make it plain on tablets, that he who runs may read it." In other words, simple enough for a billboard. While I do enjoy deep theology, at the same time I find it difficult to accept the kind of theological gymnastics that results in it being okay for us to not be "these are they who keep the commandments and have the faith of Jesus," but to just decide whether or not I can skip over commandments I don't care for.

Pastor Gregg pointed out that the ten commandments weren't exactly original and that some version of the law had been enacted by Hammurabi and other ancient rulers.  Pastor Steve seemed that this somehow made the ten commandments less an eternal law and more of a temporary thing God laid on the Jews for a while. The fact that Hammurabi or other ancients were aware of some of the other commandments doesn't mean the ten on stone were derivative.

Of course people were aware of the laws of God prior to Mt. Sinai. We are built as human beings to know that we should not steal, lie, kill or be greedy. It's that God-shaped hole in us that keeps man trying to fill it with gods of His own making. Even the first four commandments can be found in religions pre-dating Sinai, though some of them are arguably much more severe in the penalty phase than the Exodus version. Lately in our culture, we've been trying to shove gods who look like us into that empty space. Many even try to fill that God-shaped hole with themselves. "I am god!" is even used in some of the more ineffective forms of psychotherapy.

Pastor Gregg's concept of the new covenant seems like part and parcel of the original deception in Eden - that our souls are immortal and if we know about good and evil, that's all we need to become little gods ourselves. It follows then that we can make up our own laws if there is no law except some nebulous personal extrapolation of "treat others the way you want to be treated." Reminds me of the 60s when the theme was "If it feels good, do it!"

The law, someone has said, is a teacher. Do we kill the teacher and put the children in charge of the classroom? Pastor Gregg also conflates the law of Moses and the Ten Commandments with the covenants old and new. The covenants were a separate thing from the law. The old covenant was the agreement between the Israelites and God where they agreed to obey the law in their own strength. That covenant was proposed by Israel, not by God. Even then, God meant for them to be bound by the new covenant which was basically, trust me and I will help you obey the law through My strength. The new covenant is restated repeatedly in the Old Testament, but it took Jesus' sacrifice to seal it with his people. It took the death of the Son of God for us to believe what God was offering to us.

I don't believe in magic - that God waves a wand and suddenly we know right from wrong and can think to change times and laws based on our own feelings. People aren't made like that. I do believe in the supernatural - God above nature, outside of time and space and encompassing our physical universe and existence. I believe a relationship with the creator of the universe will change our hearts. It works because we are connected to Him who is beyond nature who draws us upward to Himself. We're just now in the past few decades learning how the human mind works. New therapy techniques look more and more like the kind of things Christians have been doing for two millenia in order to have peace within and to become better people. Jesus, because He is the Creator, understood how our minds work and how to build his church so that what we do helps us become one with the Father and suited to live forever without messing up the universe again.

The law is a critical part of that sanctification process. The ten commandments obviously were in effect prior to Mt. Sinai and remind us of what should have been had we not rebelled in Eden. The Mosaic Law pointed forward to Christ in every detail of its services. When Christ came, he brought us back to the original natural law of God as spelled out in the commandments.

When John said "These are they who keep the commandments," he could have meant no other commandments than the Decalogue, that was written on stone. What is different now is that God has written those commandments upon our hearts this time. We must agree to the terms of the New Covenant in order for that to happen. God says he changes not. I seriously doubt He is going to revise his commandments or revoke them.

Doing away with the Law would seem to me a surrender to Satan's original proposal - that there be no law and everyone gets to be a god and decide for himself what laws to obey. I do not hold to that. And as this philosophy takes hold and the Christian world comes together around the idea that we can change the law and our behavior to suit our own feelings, I aim to misbehave. Already in Europe you can be fined and/or jailed for mowing your grass on Sunday or washing your car. The Protestant churches are beginning to run home to Rome. Meanwhile an "I'm okay/you're okay" theology is gaining ground, while the spiritualists and earth worshippers are infiltrating every corner of our culture and religion.

Do you see it coming?

© 2018 by Tom King