Forbearance and Unity

Ted Wilson Wrestles With the Unity Backlash from the Women's Ordination Vote

In the wake of the kerfuffle over the 2015 San Antonio General Conference and subsequent measures to "promote unity" by the General Conference administration, GC vice president Tom Lemon, chair of the Unity Oversight Committee, made remarks about the issue. Lemon spoke about the different entities he'd met with since the last Annual Council—in North America and elsewhere. In all these meetings, he said, he didn’t find "one person who gave any hint… [of] rebellion." The attitude was "we are children of God, and we are in this thing together…." "I heard an understanding of mission and commitment to mission that would warm your hearts." Lemon saw no evidence of the rebellion, which evidently GC president Ted Wilson fears. As a result, it appears that Lemon resigned as director of the church's Unity Committee apparently under duress, although any information as to why he resigned was not forthcoming. This sort of thing does not increase confidence in President Wilson out here in the hinterlands. His reelection to a third term in 2022 was unusual as GC presidents for generations have limited their terms to two, further creating concerns that the Wilson was setting up a dynasty in Silver Springs, especially those who remember how difficult it was to dislodge his father Neal Wilson. Messenger to Adventism, Ellen G White weighed in on the matter of controversial decisions being made at the GC in response to discontent in the field over the 1888 General Conference.

“In no conference should propositions be rushed through without time being taken by the brethren to weigh carefully all sides of the question. Because the president of a conference suggested certain plans, it has sometimes been considered unnecessary to consult the Lord about them. Thus propositions have been accepted that were not for the spiritual benefit of the believers and that involved far more than was apparent at the first casual consideration…. Many, very many matters have been taken up and carried by vote, that have involved far more than was anticipated and far more than those who voted would have been willing to assent to had they taken time to consider the question from all sides” ( EGW 9T, p. 278, italics supplied).

Unfortunately, what appears to be the defining issue of the present administration thus far has been the General Conference president’s failure to report the findings of the Theology of Ordination Study Committee (TOSC) to the 2015 General Conference Session after paying hundreds of thousands of dollars of tithe funds on the project that was to solve the issue once and for all. But the findings of the carefully selected committee were out of harmony with his ideas on the topic. A large majority of the Glacier View gathering of the best SDA theologians in the world had said that Scripture did not forbid the ordination of women. Wilson and those who supported him did not agree and Wilson did not allow the study report  to be presented at the San Antonio session before the divisive vote was taken. He failed to mention that a super majority (62 for and 32 opposed) of the TOSC and nearly all of the concurrent world division reports favored permitting divisions the option of ordaining women. One result has been ongoing turbulence in the denomination and the three-year search for the proper way to punish noncompliance. 

Ellen White noted that “the very beginning of the great apostasy was in seeking to supplement the authority of God with that of the church” (GC pp. 289-290).  We need to pray for our church, its General Conference president, and the members of the General Conference Executive Committee that they might think twice (or a dozen times) before voting into policy “laws” that will take all of us down a well-beaten historical road; a road that has always led Christianity to some very unchristian practices done in the name of Christ. Many incarnations of Christ's church have confused spiritual unity with ecclesiastical compliance. May God help His church!

Sister Ellen became troublesome to the GC following the 1888 General Conference and was invited to go to Australia for much of a decade. Mrs. White made the most of the "opportunity" and left the church administration to work out its issues with God's guidance. When she returned to America, she championed the creation of union conferences to decentralize church authority. She counseled that shifting decision-making authority further afield would make the work out in the field more effective and responsive to issues that sometimes occurred half a world away from Battle Creek, the GC headquarters at the time. The creation of union conferences helped loosen the authoritarian grip of the leadership. And once God burned down the press building in Battle Creek, the GC admin decided God was displeased. As a result the General Conference moved from what had become an Adventist quagmire to Silver Spring.

Recently, a new issue as flammable as the Righteousness by Faith controversy post 1888, has risen. Much heated rhetoric over women's ordination has been delivered from pulpits, discussed in the aisles of our churches after services, in church-sponsored conferences, over church potluck tables, and in magazines and publications approved, disapproved or tolerated by the General Conference. Prominent Adventist theologians have weighed in on both sides of the issue. Seemingly harsh actions that have been taken at the General Conference have troubled the saints in North America. Enforcement committees have been proposed by the GC Executive Committee that seem to have the power to disband whole unions or local conferences that do not hew to the theological positions of the General Conference executives. The GC position is that the matter was settled in San Antonio. Other SDA leaders have questioned the San Antonio actions as the product of a flawed and even manipulative process. Some folk charged with examining the issue, like Tom Lemon, have found themselves removed for not vigorously supporting decisions originating in Silver Springs.

We stand on the precipice of momentous events in Earth's history. Of course the devil is going to seek to divide us. We see it happening in the secular world as the political prophecies of Revelation are working themselves out on the nightly news. Is squabbling over issues of whether authority should reside in Silver Springs or in the congregations of the saints something inspired by God or by some force outside the church seeking to divide us when we should be working tirelessly side by side to reach the world. Should we be putting bureaucratic burdens upon the army of the Lord. Ought we instead to use every tool in our arsenal, every resource available to us to complete the Gospel commission? Certainly, establishing a veritable Adventist FBI to root out heresy as defined by church managers won't unite the church. A Unity Conference didn't do much to put the GCs fears to rest either.

Ellen White, during a similar upheaval in our history said, "The church may pass resolution upon resolution to put down all disagreement of opinions, but we cannot force the mind and the will, and thus root out disagreement. These resolutions may conceal the discord, but they cannot quench it and establish perfect agreement. Nothing can perfect unity in the church but the spirit of Christ-like forbearance” (EGW, Ms 24, 1892, italics supplied).

At a time, when we are currently the fastest growing denomination in the United States if not the world, it probably delights Satan to stir up division in our midst. Lucifer is a master at using authority to overturn our actual agreements among the brethren. Then he tries to convince us that we who run roughshod over our brethren are thereby more sanctified than those they suppress. My prayer is that we may resist the devil when it becomes evident that he is among us, that he may flee from us. In this way we may truly have Christian unity, not just submission to human authority. In God's church, it is He who is our Lord, who is our direct guide and savior.

© 2022 by Tom King

A Threefold Deception

The Devil's Divide and Conquer Strategy for Taking Down the SDA Church

Every issue of the Adventist Review of late seems to have an article about church unity lately. Either that or they are advertising another conference to talk about church unity. To an outside observer the Adventist church would appear to have a unity problem. Already observers in the religious community are gleefully predicting that Adventism will fracture into two or even three factions. I've heard numbers as high as five groups.

I'm not going to dignify that bit of wishful thinking with an answer. Are we having a unity problem. Well, duh!  What organization of people doesn't face "unity" problems. Adventism has had unity problems from it's founding. The church is, itself, and offshoot of the Millerite movement of the early 1800s. We fought to achieve unity through Bible study conferences and with the guidance of God's messenger throughout our formative years.

We faced our first unity crisis in the years between 1888 and 1903 when the message of righteousness by faith was emphasized at the 1888 General Conference. Ellen and James White supported the message as coming from God. Then GC president G.I. Butler, however, resisted the emphasis, believing that emphasizing the law was the correct approach to evangelism. He manipulated the 1888 conference so as to suppress the righteousness by faith message. Sister White was harsh in her criticism of the GC administration warning Butler and his successors against attempting to wield the power of kings and princes over the little flock.  The General Conference asked her to go to Australia as a missionary.

It's interesting that Sister White prayed about the call and never could get an answer from God one way or another. Despite her age, she accepted the call and wound up spending nearly a decade in the land down under, far from the General Conference and it's operations much to their relief. But when she returned, she returned in full voice. At the 1903 General Conference she came out in support of creating Union Conference as a way to decentralize church authority. At one point in the lead up to the conference she publicly stated that she no longer had confidence that the General Conference spoke as the voice of God to the church.

The measure carried in 1903 and the GC administration was placed in a much less powerful position. The new principle from 1903 on was "unity in diversity" and authority was distributed to the unions that had belonged to the GC administration.  The GC has long been uncomfortable operating in that fashion and has steadily attempted to regain some of it's power over the past century. Since the Union Conferences were responsible to the local conferences, the GC created divisions which report to the GC. The GC Working Policy attempted to restore power to Silver Springs. In the San Antonio Conference we saw a repeat of the 1888 General Conference with the proceedings being manipulated to achieve an outcome with which the GC administration was comfortable. More authority was transferred back to the GC. Since San Antonio, we've had a Unity Conference at which retired SDA historian George Knight delivered his memorable paper on church authority and which closed with the issue of unity still not resolved to GC president Ted Wilson's satisfaction. More unity meetings have followed to little effect.

The Devil has initiated a three prong attack on the church designed to divide the faithful.

1. The Orthodox SDA Position - This group opposes women's ordination and firmly believes the position is Biblical.

2. The Liberal SDA Position - This group thinks the last three SDA Bible Conferences on women's ordination were correct and that women's ordination is not against the teaching of the Bible.

3. The GC Administration Position - This group sees the needs to centralize authority in the General Conference administration in order to maintain church unity.
 
There is a way to bring the church back to a powerful unity in diversity as was intended and approved by the 1903 GC and Ellen White. 

1.  We need to return authority to local churches, local conferences and union conferences. This will give the church body greater flexibility to address both problems and opportunities. Centralized authority creates an organization that is easier to behead. We are approaching a time when the church will need to be able to operate without a General Conference administration. We need to learn how to do that.

2.  We should redefine the role of the pastor. In the early church, pastors were local elders, chosen by the church and responsible for teaching and with deacons and elders whose job it was to take care of their little flocks.  We call our pastors "elders" for a reason. They might be lay pastors trained to handle administrative issues and to care for their congregations. This can even be a job done by a team of local members. In fact, if you want a fully engaged congregation, what better way than to leave them in charge of their own affairs.

3. We should use our trained ministers the way the apostles were used in the beginning. They should travel and preach and train the local church pastoral teachers. They might cover a large area of churches and provide guidance and expertise. Our ministers spend too much time sitting in on board meetings and handling the payment of the electric bills.

We need to restructure our system to promote greater autonomy, not less. If a local church wants a woman pastor/teacher, let them choose one. The traveling ministers can travel to churches and preach the word. Let the local pastor/teacher act as administrator. Actually, that could be the job of the head elder. Let our ministers train them in their duties and support them when they need it.

We are to be evangelizing the world in these last days, not squabbling among ourselves about who is permitted to do what. Let God call those to ministry, to deaconship, to church elder, church secretary, music ministry, or youth ministry who He wants to call.

We should be looking to God to lead our local congregations anyway instead of relying on a new pastor every five years. We need to be planting churches and engaging new generations of young people in the ministry of the church. Instead of settled pastors, why not visiting apostles and strong local congregations.

Some worry that local churches with too much authority to care for themselves, might go off the rails. That's when the minister/apostles could step in and provide guidance. Then, when the threefold union is fully accomplished and the church faces persecution, our strong independent churches will be ready to survive, even as authorities seek to take our larger church organization down.

Our leaders will have to trust that God will take care of his church and protect her from evil. It's tempting to think that you personally are holding the church together if you're one of the top guys. We had a prominent church leader throw a temper tantrum in the hall, when he was replaced about thirty years ago. He loudly complained about the church's disloyalty and predicted that things would fall apart without him. He even acted like a recent US president and immediately began to undermine his successor. It was an unworthy exhibition and one I'm sure Sister White would have had a stern message for that leader.

It takes courage for leaders who have worked their way to the top for years to let go of their new-found power and trust the members. Unity through diversity frightens people who believe in strong central authority. They forget that we do have a strong central authority. God our Father is the head of the church. Everyone else serves the church. We need to give up our kings and princes and return to the simpler style of governance that God keeps showing to us - in early Israel and in the early Christian Church.

© 2018 by Tom King


Reference:

https://atoday.org/its-time-to-change-the-rules-averting-a-fall-council-disaster-over-womens-ordination/

A Knight Takes a Stand

Retired SDA historian, George Knight is on the hot seat. some of the Adventist Book Centers have even considered removing his books from their shelves as a result of remarks he made at a recent "Unity Conference" in London where division leaders gathered to discuss the ramifications of recent moves to consolidate power by the GC and threats to close certain troublesome divisions who were not properly submitting to the authority of the GC administration. Knight asked how the Seventh-day Adventist Church went from disdaining church organization in its earliest days to becoming one of the most highly organized churches in Christian history. And HE SAID IT OUT LOUD!

It was an interesting meeting to say the least. Knight's talk title was “Catholic or Adventist: The Ongoing Struggle Over Authority + 9.5 Theses.” George is safely retired so I suppose he felt he was in a position to say such things. That he did so casts in sharp relief the trouble brewing between Silver Springs and the world church. The Spectrum article is worth reading as is the text of Knight's talk which is linked therein.

I've had similar concerns about church leadership since the 2010 GC. After that there was a spate of calls for unity and sermons on unity. Why was the church in 2010 suddenly needing to be reminded that we should be united? George Knight seems to have spoken about something unpleasant and did so out loud. The GC may not be able to forgive him.

GC President Ted Wilson's father, Neal, was unhappy at being removed from office in 1990 (witnesses say he threw a fit out in the hall). Four years before Wilson, in a letter to the Unions and Conferences had made it clear that he considered the General Conference was the “highest authority in the church”. This went against the decentralization of church authority that had happened in 1902. After he "retired", he was part of, if not leader of, a group who seemed intent on overthrowing the next president and offered himself as replacement when they were successful. Since then there has been a controversy bubbling around Wilson ever since. There was even a public prayer I heard one pastor give at the 2010 GC where he said, not everybody was happy with or agreed with what they had done, but called for God to bring us together in unity. It's not an exact quote but it was the gist of it. I heard rumors that a group had worked behind the scenes to get Ted, son of Neal, nominated to the presidency. Since then there has been a steady stream of articles and sermons and pleas for unity in our SDA magazines. The San Antonio GC was even more divisive and the ordination of women vote seemed to be more of a power grab than a theological issue. After all two Bible conferences sponsored by the GC had failed to find women's ordination against scriptural authority. What the measure voted on in San Antonio actually did was pull back authority from the Division to the GC - authority that had been transferred to them in 1903 at a GC that Ellen White said that angels had walked the aisles during that decision. She warned, if you remember that the GC administrators should not exercise what she called "kingly powers".

I've watched with dismay as my church has leaned suspiciously toward Babylon in the political maneuvering behind the scenes that took place. I loved Elder Folkenberg and Jan Paulsen as GC presidents but both continued the process of gathering authority to the GC administration. Within these centralizing forces we find the Wilsons supporting the centralizing authority, but jockeying for the place at the top of the administration.  I remember after the 2010 GC, when Ted Wilson was elected, we almost immediately began to hear sermons that my pastor appeared uncomfortable giving in which the chains of authority were discussed and exhortations to members that they should obey pastors, and then conference presidents and division presidents etc. up the chain of authority. Then the editor of the Review wrote an editorial, talking about marginalizing independent ministries on the heels of Amazing Facts being kicked out of Florida Conference, and a Texas Conf. President banning a former (and very good in my opinion) Texas Conf. President from Texas pulpits with a mass email, well something seems wrong. And at its core, the dispute seems to be not about Biblical truth, but about church authority.

Hamlet said the believed something was rotten in the state of Denmark. While not exactly rotten, something feels wrong in my beloved church and that feeling is coming from above. I hate to say it, and nothing will drive me from this church. I am a loyal Adventist always, but Christ is my authority. Him I obey. With every human being, however, it's conditional by a long shot.

I think our church is under a stealthy attack from within. I think Satan would try to convince us to conform to the world more in order to bring in new members. That's where the Roman church went wrong and we should beware. Some change is good. Some not so good. We are students of the whole Bible. I've been studying scripture for my entire 45 years as a Christian. When you spend that much time with the Word you train your internal radar to sense if something is wrong. "If we do these things in the green wood," says Shakespeare, "What will happen in the dry?" When we face an external assault, can we survive if we are crumbling at the core?

I hope the church can work it out. I am kind of rooting for the divisions on this one, though. I think Ted and company overstepped on the ordination issue and it feels like power is being shifted in the wrong direction at this stage of the game. As the church begins to face opposition from the one world church movement, it will become imperative that we shift power and decision making farther afield. A church in which power and decision-making is scattered across the world as the creation of Divisions was intended to do, is harder to kill than one where power is strongly centralized where the head can be lopped off and the whole organization killed in one fell swoop.

We should be planning for the final stages of the work and be drawing more on local energies, skills, ideas and strengths to spread the world to every kindred, tongue and people.  As I've said too many times to count, the church is not a museum for saints, it's a hospital for sinners. If you don't see sin in the church it's because you ain't lookin'. The best we can do is try to use Biblical principles to heal the rifts that arise within the fabric of the church. Power does not corrupt absolutely, but it certainly attracts the corruptible. And to those for whom power is attractive, the temptation to exercise it can be overwhelming. That's why I believe in keeping centralized power away from our leadership and spread it about. Return the power to the people as much as possible and let the "leadership" serve rather than command.

This is just my opinion. I am no prophet nor do I pretend to be one. As a simple Christian man, I serve Christ in any case. The Christian church has a short hierarchy or should have. Our shepherds serve the flock, not the other way round. At least that's how Jesus explained it to me.

© 2017 by Tom King

 READ GEORGE KNIGHTS POWERFUL MESSAGE: HERE

Two More Articles on Unity in AW This Month

Got my copy of Adventist World today. It contained two more articles on church "unity" and "authority" of the leadership today. It saddens me that leadership feels it needs to remind us that they are in charge. 

The decision on women's ordination, unpopular in many parts of Adventism, that was made at last GC was made. End of story till next time. I know of no great wave of people storming out of the churches over it. I know of no mass renunciation of memberships. It seems we got through it and got on with it, save for a few vocal critics, whom AW editor Bill Knott has suggested in one editorial that we marginalize.

I fail to see the good in beating the proverbial dead horse. Flogging the issue does more harm than good, I think. If they want us to get on with the true mission of the church, should not the leadership be the first ones to do so. I mean they are supposed to be leading after all. Hanging back at HQ telling us we have to follow their seems to send the wrong message, not to mention that it's counterproductive.

If you read the New Testament carefully, you will see that even some of the original church "leaders" had disagreements among themselves. Paul thought James and the other Jewish Christian leaders emphasized works too much. James seemed to think Paul was a little loosey-goosey on the subject of works. Peter, meanwhile, thought Paul was a little too deep in his writing for general consumption. John, on the other hand, simply loved his Lord and it was he who turned the focus back to Christ and His promise to return. So, by example of the original leaders of the Christian church, we may not all agree on the finer points of theology, but we can disagree and still be one in Jesus.

I love my church but I think Satan is stirring up trouble amongst us. I'm sure he would prefer we were divided over some side issue rather than united in the work of saving souls.  And just observing from the sidelines, I think Old Scratch seems to be working with some success in keeping people on both sides of the aisle stirred up and at loggerheads over this whole thing.

And why would he not be stirring up the ideological purity debate? It's working so well in Washington DC. I sometimes wonder whether the folks at Silver Springs have absorbed some of the same contentious spirit leaking out of nearby DC.

Christ is our king. It seems to me that it should be a very short chain of command linking believers to their Lord. I figure if we serve him first and foremost, the rest of it will take care of itself. If we are focused on Christ and His soon coming, instead of who has authority over what, that we could finish up our business here on Earth and go on home.

© 2017 by Tom King

Church Unity - A Time for the Men of God to Lead the Way

John the Baptist - Troublemaker

It is a tough time to have opinions here at the end of the world. It seems that you can't believe anything without 40 or 50 people doing a Youtube video that says you're crazy or malicious or even downright evil. I looked up "Seventh Day Adventist" this morning and the ones that were against us outnumbered the ones for us by far better than 2 to 1 against.

Many of these videos were by former pastors or independent pastors attacking the church for one perceived sin or another. I've been critical of a few moves by church leaders in the past in my own blogs and comments, so I can't righteously cast the first stone.

The Psalmist (133) says, "Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!" There are preachers among us who say this means we should all sit down and shut up and do what the church leadership tells us to do no matter what. But while Scripture praises the beauty of unity among God's people, it also bids God's servants to tell the truth for "The Truth shall set you free." Just as many of us interpret that to mean we should speak out loudly and firmly against what we believe are the sins of those who claim to be of the body of Christ.

Myself, I have come to believe that the church can have differences of opinion and still remain unified in loving service to Christ. Sadly, not everyone believe that works. There are those who believe that all must believe exactly the same things across the board or be purged from the church.

If you look at the history of the Adventist church however, you'll find that we've always had differences of opinion; sometimes strident disagreements as a matter of fact. Despite these, the church still stands. There has always been disagreement in the church over doctrine and details of Christian life - women's ordination, drums in the church, the sanctuary, righteousness by faith and the Shut Door vs. the Open Door doctrines to name a few.  We've always worked it out.

Before Christ came the first time, the children of God had descended into nitpicking and to the development of rigid interpretations of laws and customs related to everything from how far you could walk on the Sabbath to whether or not there would be life after death for anyone. There were Pharisees and Saducees duking it out in loud debates within the Sanhedrin and the synagogues.

Today we have offshoot ministries, lapsed Adventists and angry fundamentalists blasting us and sniping at each other on the Internet. We even had a prominent SDA evangelist recently banned from holding an evangelist series in a North American Conference because he was considered too polarizing to be allowed to hold an evangelistic series in that Conference.

As the signs more than ever point toward Christ's soon coming, the spirit of dissent and disunity spreads among human beings like a pestilence. More than ever before, people are divided on every possible point of belief, whether it be on politics, religion, custom, tradition and even on subjects as basic as diet and sex.

It is time for the men of God to arise and stand together; to unite and lead our families to heaven. It is time we put away the kinds of nit-picking, strivings about fine points of theology. Jesus sliced through the tangled web of human practices heaped upon the Law of God, reducing all the law and prophets to two principles. Love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself. "Upon these," Jesus said, "Hang all the law and the prophets."

The simplicity of the Gospel is what will bring us unity. Religious bullying and condemnation are the devils tools and must be laid down by the Children of God. We may disagree. We may engage in discussions over out differences, but they must not divide us. Angels will not stand at the gates of heaven to kick out those who guessed wrong on the Feast Days or the Sanctuary Doctrine. God will judge. We must not for by the same standard by which we judge others, we ourselves will be judged.

Me, I hope God will go easy on me, so I try to keep my judging of others to a bare minimum and focus on Christ, the power and source of our salvation.


© 2016 by Tom King

The Seeds of Change

Deborah - ordained of God

Since the big "high level" GC meeting on October 6, I've been getting a confusing flood of "updates" from the GC and the North American Division seeking to clarify what actually happened at the meeting. According to the Adventist Review, "...officers of the Seventh-day Adventist Church voted on Oct. 6 for a document detailing actions to be taken in response to certain entities of the world church that are not in compliance with an action voted on by more than 2,000 representatives of the 19.5 million-member denomination at its most recent General Conference Session held in San Antonio, Texas from July 2-11, 2015."

The San Antonio vote, despite many efforts to either explain or obscure what happened in San Antonio, was not a vote to end women's ordination. It was a vote about who has the power to decide whether or not to ordain women. The vote took back power from the divisions ceded to them at a 1903 general conference where power was decentralized away from the church - a move Ellen White, who attended the conference, approved. Rather than voting down women's ordination - a tricky proposition given that opinions on the subject are sharply divided among SDA theologians and previous study committees that have found no objection to ordination of women - the GC in 2015 merely got itself made "the Decider."

Ultimately the issue comes down to who ways whether we can ordain women as pastors or not. GC says, that's us. The divisions, at least some of them, beg to differ. Over here in the Washington Conference and in both West Coast divisions, sentiment has come down rather firmly on the side of women's ordination. Women have been ordained pretty widely in this and other divisions, particularly in the North American Division. Now the GC says they can't do that. Heretofore, such decisions were firmly in the hands of the division and local conferences. Now it's not.

Daniel Jackson, NAD president keeps reassuring us that nothing is wrong and that we all need to be unified and that everything is okay. Obviously everything is not okay, especially if the GC forces division and conference leaders out of office and demotes or removes women pastor's already installed. A guy I knew back in college, Randy Roberts, who pastors the LaSierra College church, recently made an impassioned pro-women's ordination speech at a meeting of concerned division leaders. His motion at that particular conference probably seemed "rebellious" to come folk. It was not. It mostly reaffirmed the shared beliefs of an apparent majority of pastors in the division.

With all of the controversy over this issue, NAD staff probably need to keep looking for less inflammatory words than "rebellion" to describe the resolve on the part of some conferences to ordain who they please. 

Two things trouble me.  First the words "high-level" to describe the October 6 GC committee that decided how to handle the non-compliant divisions. I've never found the authoritarian approach to religious organization to be good for the church. To be honest, I think the headship doctrine of strict levels of authority based upon church rank and gender are not very representative of the structure of the relationship God seeks to have with his people. It's Calvinist in its origins and unprecedented in Adventist theology prior to Samuel Bacchiochi's return from earning advanced theology degrees in Vatican schools. This is not to say old Sam turned Catholic on us, but his writings took a turn for the more restrictive in many ways. I lost more than one friend that left the church after reading Bacchiochi, looking for a path to God that was a little more arduous than the then prevalent 'righteousness by faith" path.

The second thing that troubles me is the seeming intent by some in our GC leadership to return Adventism to "the way it was".  I remember how the church once was when I was a child. It was authoritarian, legalistic and more than a bit grim and it nearly scared me away. I fortunately met Christ thanks to an HMS Richards Sr. protoge' who taught us about righteousness by faith. I met Christ as He is - a loving God whose love awakens in us love and obedience and who saves us by his Grace. That was a new version of Christ in my church. Prior to that, evangelists just hammered us about our clothes, our diet and our behavior as though somehow we could grit our teeth and that would get us through to Paradise. Combined with vivid pictures of the last days and the time of trouble, that formed the old time Adventism of the day, I had a completely wrong picture of God and kept me more out of the church than in.

In a recent speech, Ted Wilson called for members to "“... lay aside our personal opinions for the good of the body of Christ, and that we will, together, march forward to the kingdom of God." The calls for submission have become almost daily lately as the GC seeks to enforce its will on "noncompliant" Adventist believers.  I think this is a bad thing. I am not good at marching. I'm more of a wanderer. Sheep are like that. We need a shepherd, not a drill-master.

The thing that has made our church strong over the decades is a willingness to look at Scripture as our spiritual source. We also have the prophetic gift to help us form our belief system. We've got 28 fundamental beliefs and membership in the church requires we adhere to those. God only gave us ten, so I think we've probably got those covered. A difference of opinion over a relatively unimportant point of doctrine should probably not be characterized as a rebellion.

Progressive revelation has played an important role in the development of the Seventh-day Adventist church. Ellen White commented that ""There are mines of truth yet to be discovered by the earnest seeker."  She believed that capital "T" Truth was an advancing truth. We can clearly see this with respect to the issue of monogamous marriage which was tolerated in ancient times, but became a clearly accepted doctrine by Christ's time. Slavery, which was accepted as a fixture of life, even into New Testament times, is clearly not something God approves of.  In Scripture were the seeds of the end of slavery.

The Biblical roots of our Constitution, injected into that document the seeds of the end of slavery in the United States. We learn slowly, we human beings do, but God has promises in Isaiah 54:13 that he will be our teacher and our children's teacher. The reason that slavery, polygamy, stoning, the divine right of kings and other ideas became repugnant to us is because the seed of that repugnance is buried in the pages of Scripture, planted there in Eden, watered at Sinai and grown to fruition on the tree on Calvary.

Because we are a people who believe in "Thus saith the Lord" some would have it that there must always be one firm and exact way of looking at things and no other. Had our forefathers adopted that attitude, we'd all still be Catholics. The great reformers like Luther, Zwingli, Wesley and Calvin mined great truths from Scripture. Some of them they got right. Some they got wrong. Others they overlooked altogether to be discovered later by other searchers.

Our responsibility as a church is to be God's Earthly MASH unit. We are the front-line aid station for a wounded and suffering world. Our job is to take in the lost and sick and injured, not to focus on ways to exclude and marginalize others. Adventism has been able to absorb debate over issues over the years. Within the church you'll find everything from feast day keeping legalism to vegetarians waiting for the coming of the Lord to people with more liberal ideas about love and forgiveness and Grace.

The point of unity for the Christian church is, of course, Christ. Are we going to turn the focus away from Christ over whether or not to pay women pastors the same as we pay men, which is a lot of it if you really want to get right down to it?

I really liked the Norwegian church's response to the GC vote on ordination. All their male ministers turned in their ordination credentials and the conference's pastors, male and female, instantly became equal as commissioned pastors. It was a courageous act on the part of the men and it left the GC without any real leg to stand on since the GC staked the issue on ordination and not on whether women should be silent in church.

Ellen White, in responding to an earlier church crisis counseled strongly that the church's leadership should not attempt to exercise what she called "kingly power".  It would do our leaders well to remember that. In the meantime, whatever I believe I am not in rebellion against my church nor will I leave it. As Morris Venden once pointed out, you can't change the church from outside the church.

Men do have a leadership role which I believe is a God-given trait that goes with being men. That said, remember what God did when men wouldn't step up and do the job. Deborah led the Israelite armies when Barak proved too chicken to go on his own. God even used a woman to knock off the enemy general.  A couple of men turned down the prophetic gift prior to Ellen White's taking it up.  So female leadership is not unheard of in the Bible.

Perhaps we should call what the pastors of Norway did and the men like Randy Roberts who are risking their careers over the issue, not "rebellion", but "resistance".  We are a fellowship after all and not a dictatorship. Seeking change is not rebellion. No one I know wants to break up the church. The truth will set you free and, as a whole string of dictators over the centuries have learned, you cannot rule a free people. The chain of command in the Christian church is short.  There's you and then there's God. That's pretty much it for the chain.

While we might disagree with our leaders on issues of conscience, as I have in the past, that does not mean I will leave the church in any way other than feet first in a pine box. As one church deacon told one of our church's self-declared "leaders" when he tried to move a Filipino family out of "his" pew, "Brothers, nobody owns a pew in this church. They all belong to God!" My church belongs to Jesus. He lets anybody be in it that wants to be in it and lets anyone out who wants to be out. The only one we need to absolutely obey is God and even He, as perfect as He is, is pretty good about forgiving us when we mess up. Perhaps in return, we should go easy on our leaders and our leaders should go a little easier on those they are responsible for. After all, like us, they're only human.

© 2016 by Tom King

Up and Out: The Effect of Knowing God

To become one with our Father in Heaven is to be drawn beyond ourselves; beyond our little worlds into an unimaginable cosmic vastness that we cannot fully comprehend. We stand in the presence of God with our mouths hanging open and our eyes spinning in wonderment. If this isn't your reaction to fellowship with God, you might want to check again to see who it is you are actually worshiping.

To seek to comprehend God is to reach beyond your own experience. It is to step away from the very time in which you live and the culture in which you grew up. If you stick stubbornly to any Earthly thing, be it a school of philosophy, a political party, your upbringing, or even your Christian denomination without shining the light of God's presence upon it, you risk creating a false god for yourself.

My field in school was English and I looked at the various schools of literary thought, from classical to neo-classical, to modernist, to post-modernist, romantic to realist and soon discovered that each school wears blinders that shut out anything that does not support the particular canon of that particular literary school.  Tell a post-modernist that life has any meaning whatever and they will scoff at you, unable to entertain such a thought. To the post-modernist, stuff happens. That's it. I found the literary schools restrictive. I find the Christian school of thought liberating.

The atheist must believe that 80% of the world are deluded fools and totally wrong. As a Christian I can believe that everyone in the world owns a piece of the truth. I may believe that Christians have more of the truth, but I am not required to think everyone else is stupid, insane or willfully deluded in order to believe in Christ. It's a relief not to have to disprove everything that someone who disagrees with me says. It's nice not to have to circle the troops like Custer and defend my little hilltop. As a Christian, I occupy the entirety of time and space and thought. I don't have to build wall. Walls only get in the way and I don't believe God wants me to keep people out.

Even in our own church, we see time and again, little sub-sects of Adventism creating their own minor deities, as pernicious as statues of saints in cathedrals, standing between the worshipper and God, as though God might need such things in order to understand save his children. Those idols might be healthy things like veganism. I once knew an Adventist mom who, like the Pharisee praying on the street corner, once proclaimed that she was a "Vegetarian waiting for the coming of the Lord."

New SDA pseudo-prophets set themselves up as conduits between God and mere mortals. The David Koreshes, Benjamin Rodins, Robert Brimsmeads, et al will insist on carving out their own little temples in which they are right and everyone else is wrong. You can imagine them standing before the judgment seat insisting, "But God, I healed the sick, I preached to thousands, I built schools and churches and put my name on them on little gold plaques. I had the best doctrine of anybody!" 

The thing is, if you worship your own little ideals in your own little temples in your own little private circles, you cannot truly know the God who inhabits the cosmos, transcending anything you can imagine in your tiny little circumscribed reality. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is a God that you almost have to go outside to worship in order to get the full effect of the breath-taking reality of Him. His love draws you out and up, not down and in. You see two kinds of churches in the world. 

1.  There are churches that build walls around themselves. The protect their sacred relics and their sacred doctrines and they worry about keeping members in and strangers out. They thrive on ritual and self-righteousness. Their churches are museums for well-polished saints.
2. There are churches that don't build walls and don't just open their doors. They go out into their communities. They run schools, build hospitals, mission stations, new churches and minister to the poor, the sick, the hungry, the homeless and the disabled. They do as Christ did and go among the thieves, prostitutes, tax-collectors, crippled, blind and mentally ill and they help bring them healing. They bring them into their churches, their homes and their hearts.

I am proud to be a Seventh-day Adventist. First off, we are not, by nature, an insular people. My church runs the second largest parochial schools system in the world and our students score consistently high against students from the public school system, despite our funding being so much less. We run a huge hospital system doing pioneering work in many fields. SDA doctors are some of the leading physicians and surgeons in the world. Our mission work dwarfs that of almost every other denomination in size, scope and organization. Our medical missionaries bring healing and help to some of the most isolated places on Earth. We have dozens of media ministries bringing light and comfort to millions. We are in every sense of the world, a world church.

This happened, I believe, because in the beginning, our founders approached God with a teachable spirit, willing to let God draw us up and out and beyond ourselves and the cultural, political and social mores of the time. We could not remain closeted in our churches once we had looked up and found that God was so much more than we had at first thought. We had to share His love. We had no other choice if we were to remain within the light of His glory and grace.

In these last days, the devil, our adversary, will come among us like a wolf among sheep, seeking to scatter the flock, to isolate and destroy us piecemeal. So before we get our heads down on some point of doctrine or some personality issue, let us look up and see if God approves of what we are doing.If what we are doing involves breaking the church apart with "foolish genealogies and strivings about the law," perhaps we are busily setting up a false idol and not worshiping the God of Heaven at all. I can tell you this. If you are pushing people out of the church or walling off your own little segment of true believers, you are probably not working for who you think you are working for.

If you seek God by searching for Him with all your heart and soul and mind and body, you WILL be drawn up and out of yourself. You won't be able to help it. If you listen, if you behold God and embrace the infinite reality of Him, you will be changed and you will need no walls to protect you from the world. You will embrace humanity just as Christ did and you will love them all, be sympathetic to them all and find joy in serving your fellow human beings. God will replace your stony heart with a heart of flesh and grant you a place in his eternal universe.

Just saying.

Tom King
© 2016 by Tom King

Do Christians Use Magic Words?

When Simon Magus came offering to buy the secrets of the
Apostle Paul's "magic", Paul turned him away.

I've seen a troubling trend in Christendom which has sadly begun to drift over into Seventh-day Adventist circles. Someone posted one of those large sized memes on Facebook the other day that claimed that the letter J was only 600 years old, so Jesus couldn't actually be the "Name above all names."

I've seen this kind of thing before. These guys seize upon some obscure legal point and wrap themselves up in it like a cloak. I had a friend who once told me she was a "vegetarian waiting for the coming of the Lord," as if being a vegetarian was what qualified her for translation. We've seen all sorts of fanaticism rise up in and around the great Advent movement. We've seen false prophets like David Koresh (aka Vernon Howell III), prey upon weak and mentally ill members of our congregations and gather followers to themselves based on little more than some obscure twisted point of theology.

These individuals always have some bit of religious practice or some greater "understanding" of scripture that places their followers above ordinary struggling Christians. They adopt such practices as writing G-d, when they mean to say God. I don't know about you, but seeing GD like that without the "O" always reminds me of a curse word that it took me two years to get out of my head after I worked on a Brown & Root construction crew. It's not helpful at all in making me feel holier to leave out letters in the names of the Almighty.

I think Jesus is smart enough to know who we are talking to when we call him Jesus. If you want to call him Yeshua or whatever obscure Hebrew-sounding name you think is the correct one, that's fine. But to make it a point of salvation is, I believe, to cast stumbling stones in the path of the saints. Besides, the sound of the letter J is NOT 600 years old. It may not have been written as a "J" like we recognize it, but in languages like Latin as in English, many letters can have more than one sound. In English a C can sound like and S or a K, for instance and the letter U was written as a V in Latin for a long time. The J sound is far, far older than that and without sound recordings from two or three millenia ago, you can't be sure anyway. The pronunciation of many ancient languages has been lost long ago. 

This quibbling about the name of Jesus and associated phrases is pretty much the sort of legalistic clap trap many fanatics soothe themselves with, believing they are somehow better than their fellow Christians because they use the right name for Yeshua. They treat the name of Christ as if it were some sort of magic word by which God is forced to do things for you. In other words, if I ask in the name of Yeshua, God has to do it, but if I ask in Jesus' name He doesn't? 

That's little more than a Christianized form of witchcraft. I once had a Church of Christ pastor tell me that my baptism was "no good" because I was baptized in the name of "The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit" instead of Pastor Thurber using the magical phrase "In Jesus name." I asked the gentleman if he really believed that God was too stupid to figure out who His Son was. We serve a loving merciful God, not some superior sort of sorcerer. Jesus accepted those who came to Him wherever they were and with whatever burdens they carried. He never asked a single sinner to say any special sequence of magic words before he healed them. Often Jesus healed people before he asked them to repent.

This is, of course, one man's opinion, but it is based on a lifetime of study and prayer and walking with Christ (which is Greek, not Hebrew I realize, but again, I think Jesus is quite intelligent enough to figure out that I am talking about Him). Jesus asked sinners to confess and let go of their sins and He put no other burden upon them, save to walk with Him and that's really not hard to do at all. All you have to do is spend time with Jesus instead of looking around for all sorts of obscure "rules for proper holiness" that you can come up with to make yourself feel more secure and to elevate your brand of religion above that of others.

This practice reminds me of those martial arts guys who constantly brag about how "My Karate is better than your Karate!" Jesus (or whatever makes you feel superior to call Him), wasn't a sensei. He was a savior. In the Old Testament, we are sternly warned against practicing witchcraft and magic. God gave us the gift of language that we might communicate with each other and understand what God is trying to teach us. Language is not a magic wand and should NEVER be used as one.

We had a bout of something a few years back called the ABC's of prayer which, while based on Scripture, was taken almost into the realm of magic by some practitioners.  While it is true that God always answers prayers, to demand that He answer them in precisely the way we want Him to, based on the strength of our "faith" and the quoting of the words of Biblical promises, strikes me as dangerously close to practicing a form of conjuring. A dear friend of mine was convinced that if he asked, believed and claimed healing from his bipolar disorder, that God would have to heal him. He stopped taking his meds and a few months later was unable to continue preaching and after several years of bizarre behavior, he put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his toe. So much for God having to do what you tell Him to.

While it might be exciting to think we could have that sort of power to heal and move mountains, that is a power that belongs to God alone and to attempt to bend the Almighty to our will is a dangerous business. The story of Hezekiah is instructive here. God told Hezekiah he was going to die and to prepare himself. Hezekiah prayed and prayed that God would give him a longer life. God chose to relent and gave Hezekiah 15 extra years, during which time he had a son, Mannaseh, the only king of Judah judged to be as bad as the Israelite King Ahab. Had Hezekiah submitted to God, how much better would it have been for Judah not to have had that terrible king? 

Does God heal people?  Yes, unequivocally. Does He heal on demand?  Absolutely not. God is able to look down the corridors of time and see what the impact of every action will be. He knew Hezekiah would have a very bad son who would be king. He showed us the folly of demanding things go our way by granting Hezekiah's request. King David also prayed for the healing of his son, but when the son died, David got up and accepted God's will. David's willingness to accept God's reproval and his guidance was why he was called a "man after God's own heart".

 
Trying to force God to do what you think is best is always a bad idea. It is far, far better to pray and then wait for and accept God's answer.  In the same way, it's better to spend your time and energy trying to emulate Jesus than trying to find the right words to manipulate Him.  What was it Solomon said?

Vanity of vanity, all is vanity. We are vain creatures who tend to believe that we know best about things. But, in the end, we are neither wise enough, nor prescient enough to demand things of God. We cannot, as God does, see what will come of doing what we desire. Christianity has no room for Christian sorcerers who by using the right combination of words can, like Harry Potter, make things happen the way they want them to. It just doesn't work that way.

© 2016 by Tom King

Where In Scripture Does It Say, "Thou Shalt Choose the Lesser of Two Evils"

Elijah hiding out, having said some things to the king he didn't like.

I'm in a lot of trouble with my Adventist readers. As a blogger, I regularly touch the third rail of Adventism - politics. I can't tell you how many times I've been counseled to keep quiet about politics and, if I'm talking to a certain group of Adventists, to both be quiet and vote Democrat!

As anyone who reads my stuff knows, I'm a died in the wool Christian conservative, a strict constitutionalist and firm believer in small decentralized government. I've been told we are not to have an opinion about those kinds of things, but given how close politics comes to being religion it's a difficult thing to do, especially when politics is so apt to use religion as a vote-getting tool.

Jesus very clearly said to, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's."  It should be noted that of the 12 men he told that to, one committed suicide, 10 were executed by governments and the only one to die a natural death was banished, given hard labor and boiled in oil first.  As Christians, we don't so much attack governments as they attack us. It's an old story.

Sometime add up how many prophets were killed by Israelite kings in the Old Testament. And despite this they kept on delivering messages to the kings that they didn't want to hear. The prophet Nathan was lucky that King David feared God because one of David's soldiers was ready to lop off his head when he delivered his message.

And remember what Samuel warned the Children of Israel about when they wanted a king like everyone else. People tell me we should just be quiet and God will put in the leader he wants. At this point I remind them that God gave Israel a king even though He didn't want them to have one. And the Israelite kings did every bad thing that Samuel said they would; everything God through his prophets said would happen did.  Yet, God gave them kings. GOD WAS TEACHING WHEN HE DID IT.

I find that, as a Christian, inaction is not appropriate, especially when I live in a nation that God specifically gave us as a refuge of religious freedom; a nation of the people, by the people and for the people. Since our government derives it's power, authority and very existence from the will of the people, then when we are counseled to "render unto Caesar", we are, in effect, being told in America to "render" unto ourselves for we are Caesar - the source of power. That said, the political choices we as Americans have are not either/or. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

If we hand over the reins of power to government in some misguided attempt to gain safety, security or the chance to "win", then we are, I believe, doing something God would disapprove of. I'm from Texas. I admit it, so I think of things in a Texan context. I also grew up in an Adventist ghetto where we rolled up the sidewalks on Friday evening. I have seen what can happen when people take a stand. The boys at the Alamo, as a Trump supporter reminded me, lost that fight. He suggested that losing was the worst thing. This guy could not have been from Texas. The stand at the Alamo bought time for the Texican Army to get itself together and get to San Jacinto where they handily whipped Santa Anna. So the Alamo fight, by pinning Santa Anna's army for 18 days, won the war even though they lost the battle.

When I lived in Keene, we were sent a mule-headed wild man of a pastor named Ron Halvorsen. In my home town the good old boy network had it's roots deep in everything that went on in the town and we were slowly dying. Our kids were leaving. Church was as dry as the Hills of Gilboa. Ron came to town and planted the flag of truth. They fought him tooth and nail, but prayer meeting exploded from 45 people in the Youth Chapel to 12 to 1500 in a jammed sanctuary with another 100 or so kids in their own Wednesday service in the family center. When Ron left the good old boys celebrated. But the damage had been done and they never managed to get back their power. Ron Halvorsen stood for the truth and won, whatever the leadership thought. A lot of us are still in the church because of people like Ron and other brave workers for the Lord. These brave men and women gave us choices we could, in good conscience make. Many of these choices were not comfortable or easy, but they were right and set up against the "go along to get along" path that others were offering, these choices were the only ones we could in good conscience make.

C.S. Lewis pointed out once that “He (the devil) always sends errors into the world in pairs--pairs of opposites... He relies on your extra dislike of one to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.” Lewis foresaw the rise of political forces in the world which would attempt to manipulate people; to bend them to the will of their masters. He recognized who was behind such false choices and clearly warned us that such choices would be presented to us in order to maneuver us into a trap. He was right.

It appears that we really don't have a viable candidate running for president this fall. We are told that we must choose one or the other for fear the worst one will be, well, worse. I am a Christian and as an Adventist, the most stubborn sort of Christian, I do not accept the idea that I must choose between two evils. I can't find a passage in Scripture that ever recommends such a course. We Adventists have stood against the tide of Christendom throughout our more than a century and a half history. Many of our fellow Christians dismiss us a a dangerous cult because we won't back down and join the herd. We don't choose one evil or the other. We choose the truth, even though few religious leaders want that choice to even be on the table.

So I suppose being a Texan and a stubborn Adventist, it might be a little easier for me to just vote, "NO" in November. I'm used to "losing". But, sometimes you do what is right because it is right and winning or losing doesn't come into the calculation. When it all comes down to it, Jesus is coming soon. He is the only one who's approval I wish to win. Heaven is the only reward I want. Eternal life is the only victory worth having. 

© 2016 by Tom King

Follow Your Leader? Sorry, I Already Have One.

And I'm not sorry at all....

Politics and religion often overlap because it is hard to believe something as fervently as Christians do and to avoid getting crosswise of your country's political leadership. It has always been so. After all, most of them believe they should be worshipped and find those who love and serve Christ to be troublesome at best and a downright threat to their power at worst.

The is nothing worse to a human leader than followers who won't follow and subjects who won't bow down. A few wise leaders do understand the power of a free citizenry, but not terribly many. God blessed our nation with a surprisingly large group of leaders who did, though most saw the folly of entrusting your liberties to princes, kings, emperors and potentates in the light cast upon the subject by England's insane King George III. In America, it was churches where the Revolution began and was fomented. Followers of Christ didn't think they needed any other King. After all most of the colonials had come to America to escape persecution by kings and nobles they disagreed with.

America has had a good run as protector of its citizens' rights and liberties. Two hundred forty years is not bad for a country. It took Rome a lot less than that before it gave up its Republican system of government in exchange for the empty promises of a smooth-talking "leader".

It's always amazing in history when perfectly sensible people like the Israelites, who had witnessed time and again God's deliverance under the government that God Himself had set up over His people, choose to put tyrants over themselves. They, like almost every group of humans who drift toward trusting in themselves, demanded a stronger king.  Samuel warned them (I Samuel 8:10-22)

• ¹⁰ So Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking for a king from him. ¹¹ He said, “These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. ¹² And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. ¹³ He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. ¹⁴ He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. ¹⁵ He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. ¹⁶ He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men^[a] and your donkeys, and put them to his work. ¹⁷ He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. ¹⁸ And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”

When our current presidential election cycle began I had some hope. There were many candidates I could vote for, even including a Seventh Day Adventist who actually seemed to have a shot at winning the thing. I was thinking, maybe God was going to give us a brief respite to finish the work before Babylon rises up, wrecks the world and then falls. Instead, we wound up with two candidates so desperately slimy and evil that most Christians are revolted and the prospect of voting for either one. My favorite candidate even went over to the dark side and endorsed the strip club owner in the race, claiming he was at least  better than the socialist that was running.

The lesser of two evils, my friend, is still evil and electing someone evil to the most power office in the world is never, ever a good idea.  In discussing the situation with other Christians at the weekly food bank, my cab driver and a couple of folks I struck a conversation with at Walmart this afternoon, we have pretty much decided that the people of America have chosen the path to destruction and that Jesus must be loading up the bus to come and get us.

Jesus said in Mark 13: 28-30

• "28Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its branches become tender and sprout leaves, you know that summer is near. 29In the same way, when you see these things happening, you know that He is near, right at the door. 30Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened.…"

I don't know about you, but I'm seeing stuff happening that the evangelists who evangelistic meetings at my church and at camp meeting told us would happen at the end of time. In less than twenty years, we've seen the last three Popes call for (in order), Sunday laws (John Paul), a world government with teeth (Benedict) and an end to "Luther's protest" and reunification of the Protestant churches and Roman Catholicism into a universal church (Frances). We've witnessed a former Israeli prime minister inviting the Pope to head an organization called "United Religions", a quasi-governmental parallel to the United Nations for the world's churches. We've witnessed the Pope speaking before Congress and president after president making the pilgrimage to the Vatican to kiss the Pope's ring.

Kids, it's a comin' just like the preachers have been trying to tell us it was. So this election cycle, I'm voting none of the above. I may write someone in, but I won't be voting for either of the two corrupt servants with whom Satan has presented us.  If you'll notice that the countries that commit the most evil in this world like to have meaningless elections where there is no real choice at all, only illusory ones.

It's time to dust off your study Bibles and prepare to stand in the breach with your swords. It will take courage. Some of the brightest lights of the church will go out. We know this. It's heart-breaking when it happens, but there's a reason we Christians don't have to worry about leaders.

We don't need anyone's "great" human leader to fight our battles for us or to tell us what to do - we already have one and He has already one our battle for us. There's nothing they can do to us for Christ sends us angels to stand beside us and every time one does, the first thing he says to us is, "Fear Not!"

So I am not afraid. And that's a message we should be preaching to anyone who will listen.

© by Tom King

Shoot Your Own Side First - Finding My Favorite "Lost" Song

Forty years ago on a quiet Sabbath afternoon, I was hanging out with a college friend, Bow Walker in my hometown of Keene, Texas.  Bow put on a reel to reel tape of Christian folk music he'd collected. We were listening to the usual collection of spirituals, old gospel tunes on six string guitar and other folksy religious music, when Bow said, "Listen to this. You'll like it."

The singer had a resonant bass voice and a nice guitar style, but I'm a word guy and it was the lyrics that caught my attention.  The song was about soldiers gearing up to go into battle - kind of an unusual metaphor, although I was a big fan of Onward Christian Soldiers and The Captain Calls for You when I was a Primary and Junior.

But the song wasn't some martial call to Christian arms. It was satire. In this song, the sergeants were quite well versed in Scripture, upright and chaste, but as the troops were preparing to advance upon the enemy, the sergeants gave the battle cry.....

"Shoot Your Own Side First!"

If you read much of my stuff or actually know me, you probably realize I have what people in authority think of as "issues" with authority. Not in a big way, mind you, but I do tend to be at all times cognizant of the fact that my leaders do put on their underpants one leg at a time. As such, I am not over-awed by authority, which probably accounts for my checkered career as a church school teacher.  At any rate, this song really appealed to me, having grown up in and SDA college town and encountered spiritual bullies, holier-than-thou gossips and the full range of barons of private religious fiefdoms throughout my formative years.

After I heard it, I looked everywhere for the song. Bow wasn't sure what album it was from, his having copied a copy of a pirated tape to obtain the song. All I could remember of the song was that bit from the chorus about the sergeants giving the battle cry.  Had I been able to find the song, I would certainly have learned the chords and introduced it to every youth group, summer camp and sabbath school I came in contact with.

More than likely, the disappearance of this excellent song/parable is due, less to the popularity of the song than it is to the discomfort it no doubt gave to the legions of SDA deacons, elders, and local church good old boy networks it lampooned.  More than one creative artist of my generation got the old lecture about the dangers of encouraging the arrogance of youth, including me and one of the members of "Take 3", and SDA singing group that was pretty much run out of the church as heathen rock n' roll dope-fiends (they sounded a lot like Peter, Paul & Mary).  Even The Wedgewood Trio took a beating from the church's sergeants back then - so bad that the president of Loma Linda University eventually apologize 30 years later for his letter to his fellow college presidents urging that they be banned from SDA college campuses for their use of electrified stringed instruments and banjos for sacred music. Elder HMS Richards Sr., meanwhile, took The Wedgewood Trio on tour with his evangelistic crusades and Del Delker sang with them.  Both were roundly criticized for doing so, but Richards obvious success with the Voice of Prophecy radio broadcast, made the immune to the finger-pointers and they survived, although the Wedgwood Trio did not, disbanding in the mid 70s.

It says something about the character of that generation of creative young people that most of us remained in the church despite the fall of some of the leading lights of the righteousness by faith revival of the 60s and 70s. I rather think that by enduring persecution from our own church and hanging tough, we were being prepared by God for the persecution we will receive at the end of time when we ourselves will be the old graybeards (in my case literally) of the church. 

Let us hope we do better than our elders did. Let us hope we change the battle cry from "Shoot Your Own side first!" to "Lift your own side up!" so that our church doesn't wither as it had begun to do before brave men and women sounded the call to faith in the grace of God and the righteousness of Christ.

Here's what Jim looked like in his folk-singer days back
in 1976 when he made this album.

In the meantime, I've found the album and the artist who sang that wonderful song.  He is Jim Ayars. You may recall his name as a longtime member of the King's Herald Quartet. I imagine he was a perfect fit, given HMS Richards' independent style and self-assured brand of Adventism that focused on soul-winning rather than ivory-tower building. Ayars is now a pastor in Southern California and I found that he has a Facebook page and has for years been friends with people I know, including Steve Darmody, Jaime Jorge, Mike Tucker, Gerry Chudleigh and even a kid I taught in Primary at Tyler.  All these years, I've been looking for that song and the singer was right out there in plain sight.

I've done Google searches for five years without luck and then, suddenly this morning, there were three references to this song at the top of my Google Search.

I was sorely disappointed that this lovely tune was not available for download anywhere, nor could I even find it for sale in its original 12" vinyl. Jim has a deep rumbly bass voice, so it's not your usual folk music album. Some of the song titles are intriguing. Once, I had Ayars' name, however, I found the lyrics to the song in comment in a discussion on the Women's Ordination issue.  A commenter called "Billie" said, "There's a song that fits so well... one that I've been resisting quoting even in part.... but ... just can't resist any longer...  The name is "Shoot your own side first".... the lyrics were written by C. Mervyn Maxwell at the height of the seminary purge of the 1960's... and sung as a folk song by Jim Ayers...  It goes like this..."

Shoot Your Own Side First
by C. Mervyn Maxwell

• Our young recruits came marching by
  So proud they almost burst.
  Our Sergeants raised the battle cry
  "Shoot your own side first".

• The battle smoke crimped every nose
  Our men were wracked with thirst,
  But thru the ranks the watchword rose
  "Shoot your own side first".

• The foreign ranks came marching hot--
  Our soldiers feared the worst,
  But in their panic they ne'er forgot to
  "Shoot your own side first".

• The bullets whirred! The cannon roared!
  Our men were doubly cursed!
  Upon us two times death was poured--
  "Shoot your own side first".

• Our men fell wounded, maimed, and dead,
  In bright red gore immersed,
  But never blame the foreign lead--
  "Shoot your own side first".

• "Help! Help!" The dying soldier cried.
  Stop!" The private cursed.
  But in our ranks holes opened wide--
  "Shoot your own side first".

• 'Tis Christian, man, to notice sin
  and twice so if thou durst.
  Behold! The fault lies with thy kin, so
  "Shoot your own side first".

• The enemy would worship God,
  In scripture be well versed.
  They'd never sin if we were good, so
  "Shoot your own side first".

•  "Shoot your own side... ... first".

Jim Ayars in his current pastoral incarnation.

Now that I've got the lyrics, I'll look for the chords and a copy of Jim's wonderful version of it. This song needs to be sung in churches and seminary, colleges and youth groups across the land as a warning. I'm not surprised that Maxwell wrote it. He was a bit of a thorn-in-the-side to the sergeants himself back in the day. Maxwell was an SDA historian and, himself, involved in some of the disputation over theology that took place in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Some of it got rather brutal, but in checking out Maxwell's history, he seems to have managed to avoid setting fire to himself throughout the conflict. 

The song was evidently popular around the SDA seminary at Andrews in the late 60s. It's not surprising, however, that it didn't make it into "Advent Youth Sing" when Adventist youth music was canonized back in 1977. The song would have taken a rather advanced level of sophistication to see the value in this satirical gem.  

Whatever happens, the song is going into my personal Songleader's Songbook as soon as I figure out the chords. If you'd like a copy, click on the link above to download a PDF copy. This songlist of mine is not for sale or reproduction, but is for personal use only - learning to play it, sing it, etc..

If any of you know the chords to Shoot Your Own Side First, please send them to me. In the meantime, I'll be searching my limited musical memory for the nearest approximation I can muster.  Also, if you have any other such songs you'd like to share with all of us, please add them to the comments below and thank you in advance. We SDA songleaders have to stick together.


© 2016 by Tom King