Richard Tinker on Leaving Adventism | 4

Nikki and Colleen chat with Richard Tinker of Life Assurance Ministries, and ask him how his early life as an observant Adventist led him to his greatest joy: working with this ministry and seeing people leave Adventism and be born again. Podcast was published October 16, 2019. Transcription by Gwen Billington.

 

Nikki:  Hello, and welcome to this episode of Former Adventist.  I’m Nikki Stevenson.

Colleen:  I’m Colleen Tinker.

Nikki:  And we’re so glad you joined us.  Today we have our first guest interview with Richard Tinker.

Colleen:  And he didn’t even bring coffee.  Coffee.

Richard:  I do have a glass of water.

Colleen:  Well, you too have the Health Message.  [Laughter.]

Nikki:  [Laughter.]  But before we get started, I just want to remind you that if you have any questions or comments or any topics you’d like us to discuss here on the podcast, you can email us at formeradventist@gmail.com.  So, Richard, we’d like for you to just start out by telling us why did you want Former Adventist, or LAM, to produce a podcast?

Richard:  I’d been looking at the trends among the younger former Adventists and Adventists, or even trends among just the younger crowd, which I’m not.  [Laughter.]  Don’t laugh so hard.

Colleen:  [Laughter.]  I can because I’m your wife.

Richard:  And I noticed that they’ve been moving towards podcasts, and we’ve had people ask for them, and they are a crowd that really needs to hear the truth about Adventism and also help in transitioning to true Christianity.

Colleen:  I think it’s worth mentioning – I’m not sure we did at the beginning – that Richard is the President of Life Assurance Ministries, and so we’re asking him these questions because sometimes our marching orders come from him.  I say that because I share an office with him.

Richard:  Not just an office.

Colleen:  [Laughter.]  Okay.  That’s true.  We have a whole house.  So, we’ve started this podcast, and you are our first guest, but I’d like you to tell us a little bit about your growing up, because I personally find your childhood to be significantly different from mine, even though we were both in very observant Adventist families from the same generation.  What stands out in your mind when you think of Adventism as a child?

Richard:  Well, I felt very fortunate to be raised Adventist, but I also noticed that amongst my peers at my Adventist grade school that our family was usually the most observant.  So when my friends or others in my class would be talking about the latest movie that they went to see, a good Adventist didn’t go to movies, and so I had nothing to say because we, of course, didn’t go.

Colleen:  Did you feel ostracized or marginalized a lot.

Richard:  Oh, yeah.  I was not the most popular kid in class.

Colleen:  And this is in Adventist school.

Richard:  Absolutely.

Colleen:  Well, I can ask this because I know your family.  Talk to us about the food growing up.

Richard:  It was very much in line with Adventist teaching, especially Ellen White’s teachings on nothing that’s spicy or –

Colleen:  Good.

Richard:  – good.  Yes.  [Laughter.]

Colleen:  [Laughter.]

Richard:  “Bland” I would say was the main word applied to everything.

Colleen:  [Laughter.]  When was the first time you ate ketchup?

Richard:  Actually, when my parents first got married and I was born, apparently they didn’t know about ketchup being wrong, so I had a small taste of ketchup that was in my subconscious as a very young boy.

Colleen:  [Laughter.]

Richard:  And I knew there was something good in a bottle like that, but I didn’t know what it was.  So when I went away to academy, boarding academy, and we had ketchup available, which meant that academy didn’t follow all the rules –

Colleen:  There you go.

Richard:  – I was very happy to be reintroduced to ketchup.

Colleen:  And what was that something good that it triggered in you?  Sweet?  I remember you telling me –

Richard:  Oh, it had lots of sugar in it.

Colleen:  [Laughter.]

Richard:  And, of course, I liked sugar, because that was another thing that my parents made sure I didn’t have much of.

Colleen:  Plus it had vinegar.

Richard:  Yes.  What could be better?  Vinegar and sugar.

Colleen:  [Laughter.]

Nikki:  Well, what I want to know is, so you had more of a conservative upbringing than the kids you were going to school with, not only away at boarding school, but when you were in elementary school; is that right?  So what did that bring up in you, to see that your family was keeping all of these rules, but there were so many Adventists who were not?

Richard:  It made me feel proud and like I was better than everybody else, and of course, that contributed to my not being popular.

Nikki:  [Laughter.]

Colleen:  [Laughter.]  It now comes out.  Okay, so you’ve also told me about living in a community with a lot of Catholics.  Tell me about Sabbath mornings.

Richard:  We lived in East San Jose.  There was a big Catholic church, and it was just a few blocks away from our house, so there were a lot of Catholics in our neighborhood.  Of course, I had been taught that Catholics were the ones who were going to go after us in the end times and kill us, so the walk from our back door back to our garage to get in the car to go to church was the scariest part of my Saturday experience, because the backyards all lined up, with very short fences, so the kids and parents and stuff were usually out by that time Saturday morning, and so they could look right down across all the backyards and see us going to church all dressed up.  It scared me, because I thought, “They’re just keeping track, and someday they’re going to come after us.”

Nikki:  Okay, so you’ve had all of these experiences that sound off-putting; right?  Now, when I left, a lot of people would begin to say, “You left ’cause you had bad experiences, you didn’t actually know what Adventism taught.  You’re just responding and reacting to these embarrassing things or things you didn’t like about Adventism.”  And we all know there were plenty of those.  But how well did you know Adventism?

Richard:  I think I knew Adventism really well, because I was raised in an observant home, I went to Adventist grade school, I went to Adventist boarding academy, went to Adventist college –

Colleen:  And you took it seriously.

Richard.  Yeah, I did.  Because the end of the world was near, and I needed to take it seriously, and I remember my senior – I think it was my senior Bible test was for me to write from memory all the Adventist doctrines and all the supporting texts that proved that they were right.  So that was a huge memory project for a year.  So I knew the doctrines, I knew all the Bible support for them, so I thought I was home free, I thought.  I understood them, I knew where to look to support them.

Colleen:  And even though here you are not an Adventist anymore, you weren’t doubting them then at that point.

Richard:  Mostly I wasn’t.  There were little rumblings that I think that were starting by then that there might be some issues with the investigative judgment doctrine, but for the most part I was pretty sure.

Colleen:  So you memorized that timeline, that 2300-day timeline –

Richard:  Oh, absolutely.

Colleen:  – and the diagram of the sanctuary.

Richard:  Oh, absolutely.

Colleen:  Yeah.

Nikki:  Wow.  So while you were in it, you didn’t feel hurt by anyone; you didn’t have any kind of resentment of your religious upbringing.

Richard:  I used to recite to myself how fortunate I was.  I was born in this wonderful Adventist family in California, in the US, didn’t ever starve.  Here I was an Adventist, and with all these wonderful privileges.  I thought, “I couldn’t be better off.”

Colleen:  What was the first thing that caused you to seriously put a crack in your Adventist worldview?

Richard:  When I got to college and there definitely was a thing starting about the investigative judgment.  Desmond Ford came from Australia and came to the college I was going to, and he started preaching once in a while.

Colleen:  That was at PUC.

Richard:  Yeah, at Pacific Union College in Angwin, Northern California, and I used to see him walking home during lunch hour.  I would be sitting with my girlfriend eating lunch in this field right across from the college, in my car, and he would come walking right by my car, and I would feel so much anger toward him because he was wrecking my church.  He was calling into question things that I wanted to believe were true.

Nikki:  Would you have been able to – did you understand his message when he was there?  Did you feel like he was putting out some legitimate arguments or were you not really paying attention and just kind of feeling defensive for your religion?

Richard:  That’s a good question.  I thought I was paying attention, but probably more on the defensive side.

Nikki:  Okay.

Richard:  I studied more later.  In fact, back then I would just pass it off as if it was a problem with just definitions.  He really wasn’t calling into question as much as he thought he was, because he was just redefining stuff.

Nikki:  Hmm.

Colleen:  Yes.  So when did you start realizing that there was something seriously wrong you couldn’t ignore?  What was it that started you down that path?

Richard:  You know, looking back right now, it’s hard to remember a certain point.  It seems like there were lots of little points.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  What would you say were the major things that you remember being truly motivating?

Richard:  Way back in the 1980s, while I worked at the Quiet Hour in Redlands, I saw a book, and I don’t even know who wrote the book now, but this big book was donated to the ministry.  This was an Adventist ministry, and people would often donate things to help support the ministry, but this was a book that the Quiet Hour wanted to get rid of.  I think they put it in a throw-away pile.

Colleen:  They would get things from estates.

Richard:  Yeah.

Colleen:  Yeah.

Richard:  And it was a book on what was wrong with Adventism, and so I looked through it, and it was very convincing, but I didn’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about that then, and so I put it away.  In fact, I threw it away and decided I would have to deal with those issues someday in the future.

Colleen:  Now, that was in the ’80s; right?

Richard:  Yeah.

Colleen:  Dale Ratzlaff was also your Mom’s first cousin, and you knew him.  Wasn’t it also in the ’80s when he sent you the manuscript of his first book?

Richard:  Yes.  A box came in the mail, and it was loose-leaf papers of his Sabbath in Crisis manuscript, and I looked at it, I just kind of glanced at it, and I thought, “Augh.”  We saw him as the black sheep in our family.  He had left Adventism, and so I just looked it over a little bit, and I thought, “Oh, how awful!”  And I threw it away.  And I sure wish I had that now.

Colleen:  Oh, my.

Nikki:  So why did he send that to you?

Richard:  I found out later that he and his wife Carolyn were praying for me and my wife that we would leave Adventism, we would see the truth, because they had.  So that was part of their – in their praying for us, they sent that box to me, hoping that I would read it and see the truth.

Nikki:  Wow.

Colleen:  Do you think he sent it to other of the family?

Richard:  I don’t know.  We should probably ask him, huh?

Colleen:  Boy, in God’s sovereignty.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Richard:  Yeah.

Colleen:  That’s interesting.

Nikki:  That’s incredible.

Colleen:  So what finally turned the corner in your head and launched you down the path where you knew you were eventually going to leave?

Richard:  There was this thing called SDAnet that I started reading, and it was an email discussion list amongst mostly Adventists, a few people who had left Adventism.  They would deal with some of the hard questions in Adventism, and one guy that was on there was named Rolaant McKenzie, and he had such clear answers, biblical answers to the problems in Adventism, and I enjoyed reading him, and I found out he had left Adventism.  That stuck with me, because I finally had found somebody that could articulate good biblical reasons why Adventism was wrong.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  I remember that time well.  You would come home, and you’d say, “You have to read this.  You have to read this,” and it was shocking and amazing and actually kind of exciting, because it was truthful.

Richard:  Yeah.

Nikki:  Did any of that bring back to mind what you walked through at PUC or Dale’s book?

Richard:  Yeah, sure.  Any questions I had had in my past, these were – they were being answered finally, and it really opened the door for me when Dale sent me his two books that he finally had published, his Sabbath book and another book –

Colleen:  The Cultic Doctrine of Seventh-day Adventists.

Richard:  Yes, The Cultic Doctrine of Seventh-day Adventists.  And so we read those books.

Colleen:  In the mid-’90s.

Richard:  Yeah.  In fact, when I started reading Cultic Doctrine, I don’t think I stopped.  I think –

Colleen:  No, you didn’t.  I remember.  [Laughter.]

Richard:  I read, like, right through the night.

Colleen:  Um-hmm.

Nikki:  Wow.

Richard:  And that book dealt with Ellen White and her false teachings, how they did not line up with the Bible, especially having to do with the investigative judgment, and so once I understood how wrong Ellen White was, then I could deal with the Sabbath and how Ellen White’s support of the Sabbath, of course, couldn’t be trusted, and the biblical support for Sabbath-keeping in the New Covenant just isn’t there.  So those two books really did it for me.  By the time I was done reading Sabbath in Crisis – now it’s called Sabbath in Christ – I was pretty sure that I would have to leave Adventism someday.

Nikki:  Now, I have to ask, not many people, when they begin to leave Adventism, have the support of their spouse.  So it sounds like you were kind of the first one to start looking at this and bringing stuff home to Colleen.  What was that like for you?

Richard:  I really didn’t have much fear that she wouldn’t follow what I was bringing home.  She seemed to be right with me, so we would talk about it –

Colleen:  I was.

Richard:  – and she would agree with what I was saying, so –

Colleen:  I could see the problems.

Richard:  Yeah.  So it really wasn’t a struggle at all, there wasn’t much fear in that.  I know there’s – we have other people we know that left without their spouse, and it’s really hard.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Richard:  And I’m very fortunate.

Colleen:  It was a gift from God.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  Because we never fought each other about the truth of what we were discovering.

Richard:  We might have had disagreements over other things, like the cloud.

Colleen:  I did tell you the little black cloud the size of a man’s hand was not in the Bible, and you –

Nikki:  [Laughter.]

Richard:  I thought it was.

Colleen:  Yeah; right.  [Laughter.]

Richard:  And I just couldn’t find it, could I?

Colleen:  So tell us about when we finally left.  We left in the late ’90s, and what do you remember about that time?

Richard:  Even up to leaving, we had decided we would try to change Adventism, so we were involved in teaching a Sabbath school class at Loma Linda University Church.  I think for a while it was a pretty big class

Colleen:  Um-hmm.

Richard:  And then, as we became more and more biblically focused and less and less –

Colleen:  Philosophically.

Richard:  Or following the quarterly –

Colleen:  Right.

Richard:  – the Bible study guide, people stopped coming.

Colleen:  It was a little shocking.

Richard:  And finally, we had this one old guy – of course, who am I –

Colleen:  [Laughter.]

Richard:  – why am I talking about old?  [Laughter.]

Nikki:  [Laughter.]

Colleen:  Right.

Richard:  Anyway, this was one guy, he was still coming, and one Sabbath we went to teach the class, and he didn’t show up.  And that was it.  We locked the door on – I think that was the library in Griggs Hall School of Religion building was where we were meeting.

Colleen:  Um-hmm.  How ironic.

Richard:  We locked the door and said, “That’s it,” and we walked off campus, and that was our last time of going to church, or going Sabbath morning.

Nikki:  Wow.

Colleen:  Yeah.  So then we wrote a letter, a very brief letter, and asked for our membership to be removed, and I only say this because people sometimes say, “Well, should I remove my membership or just disappear?”  For us, it was important because we had come to believe that Adventism was a false gospel, so we really wanted to make it clear, and we wanted to articulate that we were leaving, and we wanted to be acknowledged for leaving.

Richard:  Yeah, we wrote a brief letter.  At the time, our oldest son was also a member.  He had been baptized, so we had the three of our names on it.

Colleen:  And our signatures.

Richard:  And just saying that we wanted our names removed from the membership list.  We got a letter back from the – what was it? – the membership committee or something like that saying they had complied with our wishes.

Colleen:  Right.

Richard:  William Loveless, the senior pastor at the time, took us out to lunch, and he wanted to chat with us about why we were leaving, so we had been working pretty closely with him in the PR area, and several times during that lunch he wanted to say something in argument to what we were saying, but his counseling background prevented him, and he would kind of relax and let us say our piece, and then he said, “Thank you.”

Colleen:  And it was interesting, because he ended our time together by saying, “Well, I’m fine with your leaving, as long as I know you’re not angry.”

Nikki:  Of course.

Richard:  And truly, we weren’t.

Colleen:  No.

Richard:  We’ve been told many times since then that we were hurt, angry.  We’ve had people apologize for how the church treated us, because obviously something bad must have happened in the church for us to leave.  And no, church was good.

Colleen:  We loved Adventism.

Richard:  Yeah.

Nikki:  So in one of our previous episodes, we talked about grieving, and clearly there was no anger before you left, but what happened after you left Adventism?  What were the next steps in this process out?  You’d made your decision, you wrote your letter.  I understand you took a road trip to visit that black sheep cousin.  [Laughter.]

Richard:  [Laughter.]

Colleen:  [Laughter.]

Nikki:  So what next?

Richard:   After you leave, that’s when it gets hard.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  Um-hmm.

Richard:  You face losing lots of things:  friends, people you work with because your job is threatened – I worked for the University – and then all the accusations of why you left start coming, so that’s the hard part.  It’s not the stuff that happens as you’re studying towards leaving, it’s what happens afterwards.  And yes, you go through grief, all the stages of grief, including anger, including wanting your tithe back.

Nikki:  [Laughter.]

Colleen:  [Laughter.]  That’s what I remember you saying.  “I’m just going to get that tithe back,” because you paid double tithe.

Richard:  As I said, I was brought up in a good Adventist family.

Colleen:  Yes.  Well, fast forward.  You became the President of Life Assurance Ministries in 2006, or was it – you were fired in 2006, but you became President of the ministry in 2005.  So at this point, why have you committed your life to this ministry?

Richard:  Why not?  I mean, the joy and happiness and the security of knowing the true Jesus, knowing that I am securely saved, knowing all the things about who my Father is in heaven that I didn’t know as an Adventist – why wouldn’t I want to help other people that I care about find what I found?

Colleen:  Yeah, I totally agree with that.  What has surprised you the most about Adventism as you look back at it?

Richard:  When I was an Adventist, or even as we were transitioning out, it seemed like there were a few problems, but it wasn’t that bad, but now that we’ve been out for, what, 20 years?

Colleen:  Um-hmm.

Richard:  Adventism really seems like a dark place, a place of not just a few mistakes in teachings, but a place where they’re teaching really bad heresy that is very hurtful and really contributes to most people that leave Adventism becoming completely anti-religious, pagans, they’re not about to become a Christian.

Colleen:  So, what is the safeguard against that?  Why is it so important for you that people who leave Adventism embrace Christianity?  What does it give that unbelief doesn’t give?

Richard:  True hope.  We had, “I hope so” in Adventism; but true Christianity, trusting the true Lord Jesus, is true hope.  Trust me, it’s a good thing.  [Laughter.]

Nikki:  [Laughter.]

Colleen:  [Laughter.]  Yes.  As the President of Life Assurance Ministries, what is your desire for this ministry?  I realize this podcast is only one little piece of what the ministry is doing.  What is your hope, what is your desire for this ministry?

Richard:  It’s probably best summed up in our ministry’s Mission Statement.  Our mission is “To proclaim the good news of the New Covenant gospel of grace in Christ and to combat the errors of legalism and false religion.”

Colleen:  What is your personal greatest joy in doing this work?

Richard:  Every time I see somebody become born again.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  One of the things that we have done for the last 20 years is a weekly Bible study on Friday nights for people questioning and leaving Adventism.  That has been a source of a great deal of joy as we’ve watched people come to know Jesus.

Nikki:  And if you’re local, join us.

Colleen:  And also, if you’re not local, we have an annual conference.  We’re starting to plan it already.  Richard has created the flyers, and some of you may have even seen them already.  Do you want to tell us just a little bit about what the conference will be about this year?  It’s going to be February 14-16.  Spend your Valentine’s Day with us in Loma Linda.  Tell us a little about this conference.

Richard:  The title is “The New Lawgiver: Jesus.”  Adventism is so focused on the lawgiver of Moses on Mt. Sinai, the 10 Commandments.  The Bible teaches that Jesus is our new Lawgiver.  He established the New Covenant in his blood, and through that New Covenant, he becomes our Lawgiver.  We don’t look to the Old Covenant.  That’s all done and fulfilled in Jesus, and so we are going to be talking about the ramifications of that truth.

Colleen:  Awesome.  If you had any last word that you wanted to say to any potential Adventist who might hear this podcast, what would you say to them, Richard?

Richard:  I would say the gospel.  The gospel is summed up in a very short statement by Paul:  Jesus died, He was buried, He was resurrected on the third day for our sins, and that’s the gospel.  The gospel isn’t what you eat; the gospel isn’t what day you go to church on; the gospel isn’t all manner of things that Adventism tries to make you think it is – the Health Message – it’s simply the Lord Jesus and what He’s completed; and that completion of His work on the cross means that if you trust Him, you repent and trust Him alone for the forgiveness of your sins, you have security in Him.  Your sins are totally forgiven, every one from all your whole past, clear through your whole future, every sin is taken care of.  You never have to fear a judgment, because you’ve passed from judgment.  There is no judgment for a believer for your sins.  The sins are taken care of.  That is really good news.  That’s why the early church called it “good news,” the gospel, because it truly is.  And the gospel that Adventism teaches is truly bad news.  They put you under bondage.  They put you under so many doubts and fears, things you have to do, that it’s truly bad.

Colleen:  Thank you so much, Richard, for joining us.

Nikki:  Yes, thank you, Richard.

Richard:  You’re welcome.  It was great being here.

Colleen:  Again, if anyone has comments, questions, or subjects you’d like to hear us discuss, you can email us at formeradventist@gmail.com.  Thank you both, Nikki and Richard, and thanks all of you listening for joining us for this podcast, and we will see you again next week. †