An Unbiased View of California's Liberal Adventism

The article below was posted as a comment on the uber-liberal Spectrum website by an anonymous person under the name "City Lights." It was so eloquent and true that I felt it should be shared.

While my post was tongue-in-cheek, I have no doubt that Ted Wilson's strategy will likely be to get the most conservative men into top positions in the whole of California eventually. The little pockets of conservatism they now have are not enough to stem the tide of liberalism there, so it behooves them, if they want to execute a calculated takeover of the whole state, to install men who will set the stage for an eventual purge of what many conservatives in the church consider the tarnishing black spot of the NAD.

I am not conservative by any stretch of the imagination and I abhor purges, but I also hold a lot of the constituency (of the SCC mostly) responsible for the mess we are in right now, for continually testing the boundaries and limits of Adventism. Do you think it is just coincidence that Dale Ratzlaff and Colleen Tinker's Former Adventist ministry is located in California? Of course not. It's the hub of disenfranchised Adventists and the pickings couldn't be better for them anywhere else. Larry Kirkpatrick apparently couldn't handle it anymore and promptly fled CA.

Pushing incessantly for years on the women's ordination issue, going ahead with WO in defiance of GC policy, Hyveth Williams peeving off the conservatives at every opportunity during her tenure as pastor with her controversial sermons, teaching theistic evolution in the colleges, being the epicenter of Moral Influence Theory and God-Does-Not-Kill theology, openly drinking wine and coffee, pushing for acceptance of gay marriage, openly attending and proudly endorsing movies, relegating EGW to devotional writer and nothing more, going out to eat on Sabbaths, featuring Desmond Ford as a speaker in many churches....

And you think this is going to do anything but infuriate and fuel the anger of fundamentalist SDA's? It's tantamount to thumbing the nose at the right wing of the church and it's needlessly antagonistic. Does one prance through a pride of lions with raw meat in hand and then feign surprise when the lions awake and attack?

Remember Union President Tom Mostert's editorial in the Pacific Union Recorder entitled 0+0+0+0=0 where he bemoaned the state of California Adventism just before his retirement?

That was just one of the rumbles heard in the past about lax California Adventism. It was a foreshadowing of things to come. It's almost as if Mostert was issuing a cry of help in 2007 which echoed down the tunnels of time into the future where Ted Wilson would hear and respond with aplomb in 2010.

Even notorious California SDA liberal Steve Daily finally wrote an open letter which was posted on on Educate Truth pleading with West Coast constituents to cease and desist inflaming and stirring up the witch hunt crowd, specifically calling out the La Sierra bio professors as the prime offenders at the moment.

Being immersed in the laid-back California style environment has apparently caused many West Coast Adventists to forget that while they are contentedly indulging in their own Liberal SDA Disneyworld, there is a massive segment of fire-breathing, EGW-venerating, hard-core conservative SDA's out there in the NAD they are miffing off who are losing their minds and just foaming at the mouth for the California cleanse that is sure to come eventually. California liberals poke and provoke the slumbering beast and rouse it to its full fury time and again, and such can only end very badly.

It's one thing to privately, in one's own personal life, live out the Adventism one chooses...but if you are out there for all the church to see, read and hear, stirring the pot - can you honestly act surprised when the backlash arrives in full-force?

I would again, with Pastor Daily, like to plead for California liberal Adventists to tone it down and scale it back, as I agree with you guys more often than not on a lot of issues - but I fear it may well be too late. The conservatives are making it increasingly clear that enough is enough and already we see the forces mounting as they push, pressure and lobby the GC to deal with the liberal West Coast situation once and for all.

Because, you see, Ted's in the house now and you can bet the farm he has his sights set on that segment of the NAD for a good 'ole fashioned purge. It's coming and I don't think even moderate and reasonable Dan Jackson will be able to stop it or hold it back for long. Liberal Adventists claim they just want to 'live and let live' and that they don't want to go to war with the right wing. But war is coming, whether they want it or not, and their brazen flaunting of liberal Adventism is primarily what is to blame for the marshaling of forces we are now seeing with the likes of Hold Them Accountable, GYC and Educate Truth.

The unfortunate thing is, liberal Adventism has shot itself in the foot. The writing was on the wall a long time ago, it was just a matter of getting the right man into power.

Posted by: City Lights (not verified) 12 August 2010 at 6:20