Leaving Adventism is leaving more than a church; it is leaving one’s identity. We can expect to experience all the stages of grief associated with great loss: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance. The gospel is our strength and our comfort as we navigate these tumultuous waters. Podcast was published October 8, 2019. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Colleen: So, when people say that we formers are bitter and angry – “Oh, you left because you were hurt or somebody made you angry. You just have an axe to grind.” – I see that in a completely different way now.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: And what I’m seeing is that when we leave, we actually do go through the stages of grief –
Nikki: Absolutely.
Colleen: – of any significant loss in a life. And the stages of grief, we don’t all go through all of them at the same time or in sequence. Sometimes we have more than one at a time, but in essence, they’re composed of these five elements: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then finally acceptance. Now, do you remember going through any denial at any point in your discovery of Adventism?
Nikki: Sure. Yeah. I think that the stronger the language became as I was figuring out what Adventism was, when I would look at the word “cult” –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – or, you know, even like our blog – or, I’m sorry, our podcast on mind control, I mean, those are strong words –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – and it was, “Oh, you’re going too far, this is going too far, it’s not that bad.”
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: “You know, they’re just confused. It’s just legalism.” That would be probably what I remember the most about denial, because some of it really is just undeniable.
Colleen: Yes. And I think my initial denial also consisted of having actually several opposing views in my head at once. I think my very earliest denial was that I actually grew up suspecting that the investigative judgment might not be in the Bible. I couldn’t find clear texts, my parents couldn’t explain it, my mother actually admitted she didn’t quite believe the investigative judgment, but I still believed Ellen White must be a prophet, so I held all of this cognitive dissonance in my head and thought, “I don’t have to let go of anything like this. I don’t have to believe it all. I can be a good, happy, participating Adventist and have these internal differences.
Nikki: Um-hmm. I think a lot of Adventists live that way.
Colleen: I believe they do.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: But when I finally started seeing that there was distinct Biblical evidence against Adventist doctrine, I did feel some anger.
Nikki: Yes! Yeah, me too.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: Yes. In fact, I remember the first time my eyes were opened. I was reading Galatians. Carel and the kids were still sleeping, and so I had some time there to be alone, and when he came out – it was a Saturday, actually, and he came out into the living room –
Colleen: Sabbath; right?
Nikki: Yes, it was. Well, and that was part of why I was reading my Bible. We weren’t going to church, Abbie was a baby, and I thought, “Well, I need to go read the Bible,” and I’d pray, “God, it’s the Sabbath, and I know You’re more present today than any other day –
Colleen: Oh, yes.
Nikki: – because I’d been taught that. “Show me what I need to know,” and I did the random flip the Bible open thing; right? And it opened up to Galatians.
Colleen: Oh, my.
Nikki: Yeah. I remember feeling frustrated. I didn’t understand why He would want me to read Galatians. But I read it, and I saw it for the first time.
Colleen: Wow.
Nikki: And Carel came out, and he saw me crying. I was just crying. And he said, “What’s going on?” And the first thing out of my mouth was, “They lied to us.” It was horrifying. Definitely that first stage of anger. It was clear that this was not just a mistake, this was carefully done.
Colleen: You know, this morning I asked two other people about their experience with anger when they left Adventism, and I have permission from Steve Pitcher, who writes for Proclamation!, to share his particular experience with anger. He was very clear when I asked him if he felt anger when he was discovering the truth about Adventism. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I was so angry” at a couple of Adventist pastors in his home church. One of them actually had the brazenness to say to Steve, “Oh, I’m a former Adventist. I don’t believe this. I don’t believe that. I believe in the gospel,” but yet, as Steve said, that pastor died recently a loyal, on-the-payroll Adventist. He said, “I was so angry at them for their misrepresentation.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And I asked Richard about his experience with anger, and he has often said the most obvious one was he went through a phase of saying, “I just want to get back all the tithe I paid.” (Laughter.)
Nikki: (Laughter.)
Colleen: But he said this morning that he really did experience anger when he was still working at Loma Linda University. Before he was fired, they knew he was a former. He had been very open about it. And he knew they were wanting him gone, and they were actually adjusting his title and his position at work and giving him work conditions that were almost untenable for a while, and he said, “They were not being direct, but I knew what they were doing, and the way they were treating me at work made me really angry.” Now, that wasn’t – it didn’t change how he worked, it didn’t change his determination to stay and let the Lord make the timing His, but he said, “I did feel anger during that time because I knew what they were doing was because I had left Adventism.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: “And I knew it was a conflict. Adventism wasn’t true.” The third stage, which, in my experience, I see these are very overlapping. I don’t see them as sequential, but bargaining. And I know that for me the bargaining went on for a while. I believed I could stay Adventist and make a difference from the inside. “Oh, I know the gospel. I can teach the Sabbath school class,” because Richard and I were teaching a Sabbath school class, “and we can make a difference, and we can teach the gospel, and we can help Adventists understand what the truth is, and we can promote it, and we can change Adventism from the inside.” I thought for a while that was possible. What about you?
Nikki: Well, I just want to say, I have heard a lot of people say that, actually, and I know some people will even use our Sabbath school commentaries and teach and try to change it from the inside.
Colleen: Yes, that’s true.
Nikki: And very often they leave, they end up leaving. You know, I’m not sure how long my bargaining stage lasted. I had the privilege of coming out of Adventism while your ministry was in full swing.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And so I wasn’t on my own charting a course like you and Richard were in a lot of ways.
Colleen: Um-hmm; right.
Nikki: So when I left, I definitely had a period of wondering, “How am I going to continue to be Adventist while knowing what I know now?” It was something that I thought a lot about for a few weeks. (Laughter.)
Colleen: Yes. Uh-huh. (Laughter.)
Nikki: Because I got to go to the Former Adventist Fellowship Conference.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And that year it was – well, I believe it was the Lighthouse one. Was that “Choose Whom You Will Serve?” I’m not sure, but it was a call to choose –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – a call to make a choice, and beginning with Mark Martin giving his talk – this was in 2010, you can find it online –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – on the Clear Word.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And watching him throw that book on the stage.
Colleen: I’ll never forget that.
Nikki: I mean, he called the organization to integrity.
Colleen: Yes, he did.
Nikki: He called us, everyone sitting in the room, to integrity.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: And just going all the way through that weekend, all of the different testimonies, the talks, John Rittenhouse talking about the security of the believer, ending with Gary’s sermon on the Five False Gospels that he outlined, it became very clear to me. During that weekend, I had many moments of thinking about this, almost as if I could see two paths out in front of me.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And there definitely was that temptation, “Well, I can take this, and I can tell them,” but it was put before me as an impossible thing to do.
Colleen: Oh, yes.
Nikki: It just – I had to choose.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: So I did; so I chose. But I did experience some of that bargaining in my head, “How can I do both?”
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: Well, I couldn’t.
Colleen: But it’s a normal stage. And one that I remember particularly — probably my temperament lent me to this one a little more than the anger one perhaps — but the depression phase, I definitely remember the depression. And it was when I realized that we had to leave. Richard and I had talked, and he had made it very clear he couldn’t stay, and I knew he was right. And I remember so distinctly one evening standing at the window in our dining room looking out and feeling like I was going through a divorce. I felt like I was losing myself. I realized I was more Adventist than I was American. I was more Adventist than I was a woman. I was Adventist. And who was I if not Adventist? And losing that identity, I felt like I was losing myself. I was incredibly depressed. I felt like I was – everything I knew was gone, except I also knew I couldn’t not leave, because I wouldn’t be true to Jesus.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: I couldn’t say no to Jesus.
Nikki: There was no other choice.
Colleen: No. And I remember sitting at the piano. Richard was saying good night to the boys, and I was just – I was just weeping, actually, and I was playing that old Shaker melody, “Simple Gifts” and wasn’t really thinking, I was just sort of playing randomly by ear, and the words to the song, which – they’re not terribly profound words, but they started going through my head, and it was a profound moment for me, because the words were: “‘Tis a gift to be simple, ’tis a gift to be free, ’tis a gift to come down where we ought to be, and when we find ourselves in that place just right, it will be in the valley of love and delight.” And then the chorus was: “When true simplicity is gained, to bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed, to turn.” And this is where it really hit me, “to turn, turn will be our delight, ’til by turning, turning we come round right.” And the Lord used that. It wasn’t – like I said, it’s not a profound lyric, they’re not profound lyrics, they’re not doctrinally rich hymns, words of a hymn, but the Lord used that, and I realized that what was happening to me in losing all of this and turning away from what I knew to something that I didn’t know, except I knew who Jesus was – finally; I knew that the turning was His doing. He was turning me, and He was going to plant me in that valley of love and delight.
Nikki: Uh-hmm.
Colleen: And I didn’t know what that would look like, but I knew I had to trust Him and that this was His doing.
Nikki: Would you say that that was your moment of acceptance in the stages of grief?
Colleen: I think it actually was, probably. I hadn’t thought of it that way before. But I realized after that night – this was a very shocking thing to realize, because as an Adventist I always heard, “Come out of the world, come out of the world and serve the Lord.” You know, we have to come out of the world. And I realized that Adventism was the world from which the Lord was calling me to come.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It was not of Him.
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: It was something that was a deception.
Nikki: That’s interesting. When I was at that conference that first year, the thought that kept going through my head, and I wasn’t a big, you know, Daniel and Revelation Seminar kind of Adventist, but the thought I kept having was, “Come out of her My people,” and I remember thinking during the conference, “Wait a minute, that was written to Christians. That’s a call for His people to come out of the institutions of the world,” and here Adventism was being laid out before me as an institution of the world. That was a shock.
Colleen: So, acceptance. Do you think, Nikki, that a person can really leave Adventism and find acceptance of that loss apart from the gospel?
Nikki: This is a tricky one. I think what I’m seeing is that the people who leave Adventism and go into agnosticism or become just flat-out atheist, they tend to cycle a lot through the anger.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: They spend a lot of time with the anger, and some of them even – I don’t know, some of them even seem to be depressed still. They just seem to keep going through that. I know for me, I think I accepted it when I accepted the gospel, but I have to say, that didn’t end the sadness and the heartache and the – because the stages of grief you can go through, you know, out of order.
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: And so I think I really did accept that Adventism was what I found out it was, that I had to leave, but then there are so many layers. As Kelsie Petersen, one of the bloggers, writes, it’s like peeling an onion, and as those layers come off, I revisit – I honestly revisit some of the anger, but it’s in the context of learning the truth about God and learning the gospel deeper and new truths about, I don’t know, Scripture. Every time I learn something new about God, I remember what I used to believe.
Colleen: Yes, yes.
Nikki: And that will take me back to just, “How could they do this? How could they take this truth away from so many people,” and so I definitely revisit that stuff, but it’s because of the gospel that I have been able to accept the reality of the situation and to come to live in reality. So those who don’t quite get there –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – I think – actually, I think that in some ways they’re programmed by Adventism to land where they’re landing, but I’m not sure that they can ever come to that full acceptance.
Colleen: I actually agree with you, and I believe that underlying all of this is the false definition of Jesus that Adventists have. They don’t understand that He is infallible. He is omnipresent, even though He has a body. He has all the attributes of God. He is Almighty God, and His atonement is finished. And when we believe in Him, as he said to Nicodemus, we are born again, we must be born again. And as Ephesians 1:13 and 14 says, when we have believed, He seals us with the Holy Spirit of promise, guaranteeing what is to come. We’re given a new identity when we believe in Jesus. We’re given a new spiritual life. We’re actually brought to life and given a new spirit and a new heart. And it’s because we have a new identity that we can leave that identity that completely defined us.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: If we don’t have a new identity based in something real, not just a figment of our old imagining, how can we find peace? But when we have Jesus, even if we lose everything, we have an identity that’s eternal, and He assures us of that because He gives us His Spirit.
Nikki: And I think that it’s important to say, this business of us having an axe to grind and being disgruntled, I need to say that I was not disgruntled before I left Adventism. I loved Adventism.
Colleen: I did too.
Nikki: That’s why I was weeping on the couch.
Colleen: Exactly. I loved it.
Nikki: I was not looking for a way out.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: If anything, I wanted, “Okay, give me something to say here,” to Dale’s book or to help me.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: You know, I even remember going to pastors and asking them questions, and they couldn’t give me answers.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: They would discredit – they’d try to discredit people and, you know, give kind of vague, I don’t know, clichés, I guess.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: I was not disgruntled. I was not disgruntled inside. So when I left Adventism and started to see the truth, and then I would want others to hear that truth, it was then that I was called bitter, disgruntled, and having an axe to grind. I don’t have an axe to grind. I have a gospel to share.
Colleen: Yes, a Jesus that I know.
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: That can be the new identity for everyone who places their faith in Him. It’s an identity we can’t lose once we have it.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: We’ve said a lot about this, haven’t we? The process of grief, the process of having come out of mind control inside of Adventism and discovering what is real from the Scriptures. As we close this podcast, I would just like to say this to anybody who is listening: If you haven’t placed your faith in Jesus – you may have already decided Adventism is untenable or you may still be Adventist, but if you haven’t placed your faith in Jesus and his finished work of death, burial, and resurrection, paying fully for our sins, reconciling us to God, I just urge you to do so. And I just want to leave you with one little assignment, read the book of Galatians – and it’s a short book – read it every day for a month, and ask God to teach you what He already knows He wants you to learn. It won’t take long to read, but it could be an amazing eye-opener, and I would say at this point that everything that I have gone through in having been Adventist, having left, having lost, and having come to know Jesus has been worth it.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: I was never disgruntled as an Adventist, I loved my Adventism, but I actually love Jesus more.
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: If you have questions, comments, or want more information, you can email us at formeradventist@gmail.com. Thank you again, Nikki, for doing this with me.
Nikki: Thank you, Colleen.
Colleen: We’ll see you all next week. †
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