“BUT ADVENTISTS ARE SUCH NICE PEOPLE”

By Colleen Tinker

It was Sunday, almost time for lunch. Members of our local Former Adventist Fellowship Bible study were arriving for our weekly meal together. Sunday lunches were high points of the week; we would talk about what we had learned during that day’s sermon and discuss questions that inevitably came up as we grappled with the swift adjustments to our former Adventist worldview. 

One family who had been coming a few months arrived. They had just had their membership interview with an elder prior to becoming members of their new “Sunday church”, but they seemed shocked rather than pleased. Finally able to unload their reactions, they began to tell us what had happened.

“When the elder asked us to tell our story of being saved,” the husband began, “we explained that we had been Adventists, but that we had finally understood the gospel and left our former religion.” 

“Then the elder looked at us,” the wife continued, “and he asked us, ’Well, why did you leave?’”

Stunned, the couple hardly knew what to say. That were so excited to be alive in Christ, to know they were saved, and to realize that the Lord had rescued them from terrible darkness, and the elder’s push-back intimidated them. 

“He had studied at Loma Linda,” they explained, “and he believed Adventists were Christians. He couldn’t figure out why we thought we had to leave!”

That elder’s reaction is common. Because Adventists have perfected their “Christian vocabulary”, the average believer usually thinks Adventists may know Jesus and just be off about the Sabbath. Even if they know that Adventism teaches some heterodoxical beliefs, many Christians believe that Adventists are changing, or they think there are certain branches of Adventism that understand the gospel and have left their historic heresies. Besides, as we hear so often, “They are such NICE people!”

Why do we expose them?

The fact is that many Adventists do not really know what their organization officially believes, either. They believe that they can pick and choose which aspects of traditional Adventism they will embrace, somewhat like a potluck, but they all retain a certain foundational grid through which they understand reality. 

They all believe (unless they were raised Christian and converted without really understanding) that humans have no immaterial spirit. This belief changes EVERYTHING including the definition of sin, of salvation, of death, and of the nature of Christ. 

Further, they all believe that Jesus could have failed. He could have sinned, and He could have failed to carry out His death and resurrection. Doug Batchelor has stated that, if he failed, the Trinity would have been torn apart and the universe plunged into chaos. This “possibility” is what Adventists all believe. Jesus was fallible, had “no advantage” that we don’t have, and showed us that we can keep the law perfectly in the same way He did: by praying and depending on the Holy Spirit. 

Thirdly, Adventists all believe the Sabbath is eternal and is “holy time”. The arguments about the covenants leave them essentially unmoved because their proof-texting has given them supposedly air-tight support for believing that God created Sabbath from the beginning, and even God Himself will observe the Sabbath in eternity with the saved. 

Fourth, Adventists all believe that Ellen White is significant in some way. They may believe she is a prophet or a godly woman who gave spiritual advice to a floundering organization in its beginning years; they may believe she is a great devotional writer; they may believe that God used her even though she was flawed. They may even say she was “not a prophet” and see her as a somewhat embarrassing “great aunt” that the family knows is eccentric but whom they still honor. What they will NOT say is that she is a false prophet. Simply saying she is “not a prophet”, however, does not make her spiritually dangerous. They will not admit she WAS a prophet: a false one. 

Finally, Adventists all believe that Satan is the scapegoat on whom Jesus will place the sins of the saved after the investigative judgment concludes, and Satan will “cleanse heaven” by carrying those sins away to the lake of fire. In other words (and they adamantly refuse to state this fact, but the reality of their soteriology makes this unavoidable) Satan is the final sin-bearer. Jesus’ blood defiles heaven by transferring sins there while awaiting “processing” in the investigative judgment, but Satan cleanses heaven by carrying away those sins that have been confessed and being punished for them. 

Not all individual Adventists understand the implications of their beliefs, but these five things are the structure of Adventism, and all Adventists believe them. They may talk a good talk and sound oh-so-Christian, but under the hood they do not believe the biblical gospel. Former Adventists are passionate about these things because we KNOW these facts are true, and we KNOW that Christians do not understand the deep and depressing bondage in which Adventists live. 

We were not hurt. We were deceived, and when the Lord opened our eyes and revealed Himself and the truth, the horror of Adventism began to make sense: it is darkness and is from the father of lies. I can only pray that Christians truly are willing to understand that Adventism is a dark cult that does not teach the gospel. 

Former Adventists are not bitterly reacting to an organization that hurt them nor being disloyal to a system that has a few wrong ideas. In fact, Adventists are taught to misrepresent themselves to Christians exactly for the purpose of proselytizing. We ALL learned not to reveal what we really believed to Christians. We ALL learned the public arguments to defend our beliefs and to sound “biblical”. We do not “have an axe to grind”.

We know those nice people, and we pray for the Lord to reveal reality and truth to those who interact with them. †

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Colleen Tinker

Colleen Tinker, the editor of Proclamation! magazine, and her husband Richard left Adventism in 1998 with their two sons, Roy and Nathanael, who were in grades six and ten. They have co-led the Former Adventist Fellowship since 1999. Colleen, a graduate of Walla Walla University, is a former high school English teacher and also the former managing editor of Adventist Today magazine. Colleen became the stepmother of Roy and Nathanael in 1989, and in 2008 she adopted them. Romans 8:15-17 has assumed new depth and significance for her and Richard since she and her sons chose to claim each other legally and permanently. She and Richard share an office and a commitment to sharing the gospel of the true Jesus with all of those seeking a way out of the bondage of the false gospel of Adventism.

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