Colleen and Nikki talk about the beginnings of Former Adventist Fellowship (FAF) and the annual Conference which is only weeks away. Podcast was published January 21, 2020. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Colleen: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: And you know what? We are, like, a month out from our FAF conference.
Nikki: I can’t wait.
Colleen: I can’t either. So we’ve decided this podcast to talk about FAF conferences and FAF and matters related to those because it’s the highlight of the year for us, and we want to kind of bring you all into this and understand why we’re so excited about it.
Nikki: It really is a wonderful weekend, and we know you can livestream, and that’s been such a wonderful feature, but it’s just not the same as attending.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: So we really want to talk about what happens at these conferences, how did they get started, and see if we can’t get you guys to plan on coming to one of them.
Colleen: Because it’s so much fun to meet you.
Nikki: And you know what? It really is a place where former Adventists and transitioning Adventists can come and interface not only with other former Adventists and good Bible teaching, but with Christians who’ve never been Adventist who have taken the time to understand –
Colleen: Oh, yes.
Nikki: – the world they came from and who can almost anticipate some of the questions and come alongside them as brothers in Christ, sisters in Christ who really care about their journey. It’s really a wonderful weekend.
Colleen: It is. That’s one of the things that has surprised me the most is the involvement of people who’ve never been Adventists.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: When this conference rolls around, I actually – every year people approach me, “How can I help?”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It’s fun.
Nikki: It really is, and it’s really fun to listen to them also at the end of the conference debrief –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – you know, about their experience. So, Colleen, will you just tell us how did FAF get started?
Colleen: Well, FAF got started right as we were coming out of Adventism, and we had joined our first Christian church, and we attended – Richard and I attended a class at the church on spiritual gifts. That was not the main point that came out of that class. The main point that came out of that class was that we both realized we had a feeling of conviction that we needed to provide some kind of support for people leaving Adventism. Because our church was in Redlands, very close to Loma Linda, there really already were a lot of former Adventists attending, sometimes incognito, sometimes just slipping in the back and slipping out, but we knew, based on our experience, that there needed to be some kind of Bible study and support, so we asked our pastor, Gary Inrig, if we could start a weekly Bible study, and they allowed us to do it. He took us on as a ministry under himself, and he let us do it. But that oversight of knowing we had a pastor we were accountable to, he would come and teach us if we needed help with certain topics, he protected us. I can think of events where he really did protect us from some potentially dangerous teachers who wanted to come and infiltrate our group. That whole experience of having this Bible study at a really solid evangelical church with exegetical teaching and a strong pastor, a strong Bible-teaching pastor, is what has shaped FAF.
Nikki: And can you tell us, how is FAF different from Life Assurance Ministries?
Colleen: Oh, good question. Former Adventist Fellowship, Richard and I were involved in establishing that at Trinity Church as a ministry of Trinity Church when we first joined in 1998. We were not solo founders of it. There was a group of former Adventists already here. One evening we met together before we had actually started our Bible studies and realized we had to come up with a new name. The church administration didn’t like having a ministry called “ex-Adventists,” and I understood that, we understood that. So we met together, and I’ll never forget it. We met in what was then the fireside room of the church, and we all were praying about what to do for a name. You know, a lot of people prayed that the Lord would lead us, that we would have the right name, and when we were done praying, Richard looked up and said, “I think we should call it ‘Former Adventist Fellowship.'” Well, none of us had had any idea of a name that sounded like that before. There were ex-Adventists, there were ex-Mormons, nobody had ever had a fellowship. And the whole group loved it. Gary was happy with that name, the church was happy with that name. That’s how it actually started. It started as a ministry of Trinity Church in the beginning. It wasn’t until almost two years later that Life Assurance Ministries was founded, and Life Assurance Ministries was founded and incorporated by Dale Ratzlaff in 2000, and he asked Richard and me to be on the board of the founding organization. So it was a completely separate thing. It was a stand-alone 501c3. FAF was never incorporated per se. It was a ministry of the church, the local church. But as the years went on and Richard and I were both involved in producing Proclamation! magazine, particularly Richard in the beginning, we were doing FAF Bible studies on the other hand, it became inevitable that there was a lot of overlap.
Nikki: It’s interesting that you have such a detailed story about how you got your name because we’ve gotten a lot of pushback from people, haven’t we, over the years for the name.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And, in fact, some pressure over at the first church where it was established to have the name changed.
Colleen: Yes. It was within the first year after we started our Bible studies, and we were advertising in the local papers and, you know, by word of mouth and different ways. The long story made shorter is that we found out that there were two administrators, one from Loma Linda University Church and one from Loma Linda University Medical Center, who had sent word through a Trinity member who worked for Loma Linda, and this had gotten to one of the pastoral staff, and Loma Linda was unofficially but very decidedly asking Trinity Church to ask us to change our name because “Former Adventist Fellowship” was too offensive to them. And the upshot of it was we did not change our name because, as Gary said, if you don’t call it Former Adventist Fellowship, how will anybody know what it is?
Nikki: Right.
Colleen: So the name stayed.
Nikki: Okay, so then how did you guys decide to do a conference?
Colleen: As I’ve said before – I think it was in our first podcast – Richard decided in 1999 that we needed some kind of online support. The Internet was still fairly new, social media was not yet known, but chat rooms and forums were becoming a thing on the Internet, and we knew how alone we had felt as we had studied out of Adventism, so we had been enjoying our weekly Bible studies so much, there was so much fellowship, so much doctrinal unpacking that was going on, Richard said, “We need an online presence that is like a virtual extension of our weekly Bible study.” After we had been doing online forum discussions for maybe five years, some of the members of the forum began to say, “We need to get together. We need to have some way to meet each other,” and that’s normal, you know? You get to know people online and you don’t completely know who they are, and there’s this desire to meet other people that share your experience.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: They were actually starting to make some kind of preliminary plans: Where would they meet? What would they do? And I realized as I was reading these discussions that they were really kind of planning a social weekend. You know, where could they meet and just kind of swap stories and go out to eat. I realized, especially after doing the moderating for all of those years at that point, we needed a weekend that was structured that would actually be helpful as we walked through this transition, and I understood from our experience with the Former Adventist Fellowship Bible studies that we needed it to be biblically based –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – because we all need our heads unpacked. So that was when I talked to Richard, and he said, “Let’s do it.” And he took charge, and we went to the church, and the church agreed to host, to offer us a room, because we were members, and FAF was a ministry of the church. The first one happened in 2006, and it was a way to make people connect, but it was our way of saying, “We have to meet, but we also have to stay rooted in Scripture. We have to have this organization, this meeting, be rooted in reality or it could be more destructive than helpful in the long run.” And it’s been a yearly thing ever since, with occasional second ones in Michigan.
Nikki: Okay, other than the venue changes – because I know we now have had some venue changes, the various speakers, you guys have brought in a lot of different apologists –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – who don’t have any experience inside Adventism but who’ve come – what ways has the conference morphed? How has it changed and evolved over time?
Colleen: When we first started, we met from Friday night through Saturday night and invited everyone to stay for church. A few years in, Richard said to me, “I really believe we need to offer an extra day. If people are going to travel this far, they need to have something to show for it. It needs to be worth their time.” And he said, “I think we can get a lot more content in and give them more time.” So we moved to two days, and I don’t remember the year we did that.
Nikki: It was after I came. It’s been since – I think it might have been 2011 or ’12 that you guys started that.
Colleen: Um-hmm. So we’ve gone to starting on Friday morning, moving through the weekend, and ending with our lunch after church on Sunday. That’s been one of the big changes. Another thing that has happened gradually is that in 2007 we met Paul Carden at the Centers for Apologetics Research. He has become a regular speaker at our conferences. He has never been Adventist, and he has experience internationally with the cults infiltrating, and he equips the church in various countries, and they routinely deal with Adventists, especially in Africa, even in South America. So he has become somewhat of an expert in Adventism. He speaks regularly at our conference, and he also has introduced us to some of the other apologists that we have had that didn’t know anything about Adventism. That’s been an interesting thing because just the knowledge of Adventism has been kind of moving out into Christianity –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – because of these contacts. Another deliberate change has been making sure that the content is partially taught by people who have never been Adventist. I remember when Richard said, “People who’ve been Adventists who leave need to begin integrating with the body of Christ, and they need to hear the Bible taught by people who understand the Bible without the Adventist skew in their heads first.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: People who leave Adventism definitely need to talk with one another. We absolutely have to unpack the doctrines and our experiences too. So that is a consistent part of the conference, but we started using our pastor, who is truly a world-class Bible teacher, Gary Inrig, for more and more of the sessions, probably in the mid-2010s, sometime after you started coming in 2010. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: So that has been a shift, and it continues. The reason is not that we are not going to talk about Adventism, but we are going to expose former Adventists to Bible teaching that doesn’t have a skew, and then also let them compare that, what the doctrines actually sounded like as we continue to unpack those and explain how the Bible corrects our thinking.
Nikki: You know, I remember one of my favorites was when Gary taught on Daniel, and just going in, it was like, “Daniel, oh!” You know, I wasn’t sure how we were going to do a whole conference on Daniel, but sitting there and listening to him teach something completely different from what I ever thought Daniel taught.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: Something so easy to understand, so clear –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – and then having it come from a pastor who understands enough about our background to know where he needs to unpack the things.
Colleen: Yes. And he does do that.
Nikki: Yeah, and he did that. And that was really helpful because I’ve got to say, between that and then we had a women’s Bible study where we did Daniel.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: I don’t think I ever would have gone to the book of Daniel and wanted to learn it –
Colleen: No, I wouldn’t either.
Nikki: – without having been taught by people who knew it. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] Absolutely. I have a friend, a former Adventist friend who years ago, after she left, she went to a women’s Bible study that was studying Daniel, and she became physically ill in the first class. She called me in some distress and said, “I can’t do it. I can’t do this class. It’s making me physically ill.” And I realized that is a pretty common reaction.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: When we did that women’s Bible study on Daniel, we had several former Adventists in our small group, and they were – you talk PTSD, it was like a PTSD reaction to try to open that book and make it make sense.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And I remember our dear friend Cheryl Granger – she’s one of the LAM board members – she had that typical PTSD reaction, but you know what she did? I’ll never forget it. She came to class one evening, and she said, “I have been copying the book of Daniel, and I have found it strangely comforting.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And I brought that up to her just a week ago, and she said, “It’s true. It was a very wonderful experience.” It’s not at all like what we were taught. And usually former Adventists would have a much harder time teaching that book because we’re still figuring out how to make those words make sense with what we used to believe, what’s true, what’s not, and hearing Gary teach through that book or any other good Christian Bible teacher, it’s amazing.
Nikki: And there’s a lot of history in the book of Daniel that I would have never thought to connect to the book of Daniel on my own. That was incredible, and it’s true, there are a lot of triggers in the places where we were spiritually abused –
Colleen: Totally.
Nikki: – inside of a false system. I don’t want to veer too far from the conference, but this is somewhat related. Another piece to that has been the Christian hymns.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: There are some former Adventists who just can’t do it. And I remember when you guys decided to include more hymns at the conference.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: People actually did react to that.
Colleen: They did.
Nikki: Some quite triggered negatively.
Colleen: Um-hmm. Yes.
Nikki: And over time, some of those same people, they have come back and thanked you guys for doing that.
Colleen: Absolutely. I don’t remember how many years ago it was, but it was several, when Richard said to me, “We have to start having our FAF members sing hymns.” We always end our Friday night Bible studies by singing a hymn or singing a song, often something that we’ll sing at church the next weekend, but whatever. And he started deliberately introducing hymns for us to sing on Friday nights, and I do remember some pushback at first, and he said, “You know what? Just like we’ve had to relearn the Bible, we have to relearn the hymns, and we have to re-contextualize them” –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – “we’re not in a cult anymore, and these hymns are rich with truth, and we have to sing them with our new understanding of who Jesus is.” And it’s been an ongoing thing that he has very softly and deliberately done. He has kind of insisted that we do it, in spite of the resistance, and it has been a powerful experience.
Nikki: It really has, and we’ve seen things in those hymns that we didn’t necessarily see before –
Colleen: Totally.
Nikki: – because we weren’t aware of it or because it just wasn’t there, someone removed it. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] That is also true.
Nikki: Yes.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: Okay, so you did mention the conference in Michigan. How did that happen? How did that come about?
Colleen: The conference in Michigan first came about when Carolyn Macomber, who used to write a column for Proclamation! – she has since become very busy with her counseling career – but she was a member of the church that Phil Bubar was pastoring, it was the church called The Chapel in St. Joseph, and she spoke often with Phil Bubar, and Phil had had experiences with Adventists in a previous pastorate in Pennsylvania. So he already had some awareness of the problems and some, like, passionate zeal to make sure that Adventists were able to know the gospel and that they didn’t deceive people around them. And Phil is in a unique position because he’s pastoring this church just, like, 20 miles from Andrews University. He has members in his church who have Adventist doctors, much like we do here in California, play instruments in the Andrews orchestra, stuff like that. So between the two of them, they decided that they needed to have some way to address not only the Adventists that might be around, but they needed to have us help their church understand what Adventism was. So that’s how that started, and we’ve had several conferences there. The Chapel is always incredibly gracious and incredibly behind this ministry.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It’s been like a second church home, in a sense.
Nikki: Yeah, yeah. My family had the opportunity to go a couple years ago with you guys, and it was overwhelming, the loving welcome –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – and the very genuine concern –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – for their members and for us and for our ministry. It was just – yeah, it felt like home.
Colleen: It did. And they do all the footwork. We come out with the program and the speakers, and sometimes we’ve even asked some of their pastors to teach.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: But they do the footwork. They prepare the rooms, they help us – some of the church members have even opened their homes to some of us sometimes. And they provide the food. The hospitality is overwhelming, and that’s one of the ways that it’s an indication to us of how committed they are to helping their members know and to protecting their members from Adventism.
Nikki: Yeah. There is a commitment that lasts after –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – the group leaves and goes back to California. They’re still there caring about these people.
Colleen: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Nikki: And bringing people out of Adventism.
Colleen: Yes. Um-hmm.
Nikki: If listeners here were to hear this, and they were to ask, “How do I get a conference at my church?” What would need to be in place for that to happen?
Colleen: There’s a couple things I want to say about that. Over the years, we’ve actually had several people write us and ask us how they can either do a conference or have a local FAF ministry, and I want to say this, it’s been of utmost importance that these things always occur under the umbrella of a really sound Bible-teaching church.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: I didn’t understand all of this at the beginning. I really believe that the Lord led us to where we were with a pastor like Gary Inrig, who could be a solid resource and a protection, both, you know, a doctrinal protection, a spiritual protection over us when we were a young group. We did not know how many odd things would happen when you have an FAF. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: Now, think about it. A lot of you listening, probably most, have been Adventist. Think about every kind of fringy sort of person comes out when they hear for the first time that there is a group for former Adventists, and it’s hard to explain but maybe not surprising.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: So it happens, kind of takes us by surprise. That’s why it’s really important to have it at a church. So when you have a conference for a Former Adventist Fellowship conference, you will have people who are Adventists who come to see what’s going on, you will have people who are questioning Adventism, as well as some who are completely out. After the conference leaves, where will those people go? What if they’re really convicted that they need to start attending church? Where will they go? If you don’t have a good church to introduce them to, they will be floundering and lost in the shuffle.
Nikki: What has been the most surprising aspect? Because I know there are a lot of surprises and a lot of wonderful things about it. What has been the most surprising aspect of having these conferences for you?
Colleen: Oh, this sounds like of funny, but one of the most surprising is that after doing this since 2006, I’m not tired of it.
Nikki: [Laughter.] Um-hmm.
Colleen: Every year is new. Every year is exciting, and it is unbelievable to watch people, watch the veil fall away as they hear the gospel taught and as they hear the Bible taught clearly. And to see them so on fire for the gospel and realizing that they’re free in Christ, nothing compares to that.
Nikki: No, nothing.
Colleen: That is so exciting.
Nikki: [Laughter.] Yeah, it’s I think one of the best parts of the whole weekend.
Colleen: It is.
Nikki: What would you say, then, are some standout moments? You’ve been doing this for a long time now.
Colleen: Um-hmm. Well, there are some really funny ones, and there are some really amazing ones. I remember one year a young man who had been pretty resistant – his wife had grown up Christian and had married him not understanding that Adventism was so different from Christianity, and she had been trying to get him to come to FAF, and he finally came to the weekend, and when he heard John Rittenhouse speak on the security of the believer, something happened in him, and the following Sunday at lunch after church, we came home from church to find him up in our mulberry tree. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: And this was a very, you know, professional man. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: Excited and born again and so excited to have discovered the gospel. That was a standout.
Nikki: [Laughter.] What about some of the standout teaching moments?
Colleen: Oh, my. I remember one in an early conference where Elizabeth Inrig was teaching on how to study the Bible, and somebody asked her, “How can we know that the Bible is truly God’s Word and inerrant? How can we know it’s totally reliable?” And she had an answer that has helped me so much. She said, “Just as there was a hypostatic union of God and man in the Lord Jesus, a hypostatic union which we cannot explain but which we know is true, the same is true of Scripture. God wrote His Word using human authors and in a way we can’t explain but which is actually true, that is God’s Word, given to us through the medium of human writers, but it is His, and we can’t tease apart the men and God in this product. This is God’s Word, and it’s how He gave it to us.” That’s helped me a lot.
Nikki: That’s incredible.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: So we’ve had a lot of people writing in with concern since hearing the news about Dale.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: What might you say to encourage them?
Colleen: Well, I can say this first of all, we love Dale. All of us love Dale.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: We all think of him, in a way, as our spiritual father because of the seminal work he’s done in studying the New Covenant. That will never, ever not be true, but I also can say this, Dale stepped back from leading the ministry in 2005, and I don’t think even most people understand that, because he speaks, he writes, but the actual nuts and bolts of the leading of the ministry has been Richard’s job since 2005, and he is kind of a background guy, but he is a gifted administrator and a visionary, and he lives and breathes his commitment to this ministry. This is his purpose in life, and the things that have happened over the last 15 years, the expansion into the blogs, the podcast, the weekly emails, these things have all been his idea, to be honest, and Dale has been supportive. He is still a member of the board. There is so much – I have to say that LAM board meetings are the most amazing things. They are like times of worship where we’re planning how to share the gospel with people that we know don’t understand it. They’re wonderful events, but I can tell you that the ministry is safe. It’s not going anywhere, and it’s being led carefully, faithfully, and shepherded well, and that will continue.
Nikki: So the message really is: Don’t worry –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – just pray for Dale. We’re all praying for Dale.
Colleen: Yes. And pray for the board of LAM.
Nikki: And it’s important too, I think, for people to remember God’s sovereignty in all of this.
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: He uses people, He gives people work to do, but it’s ultimately His ministry and His plan –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – and His future, really, is what He’s determined for us is where we’ll end up.
Colleen: Yes. We could never have imagined doing this. This is something the Lord opened up in front of all of us who are involved. It wasn’t something we planned or looked for or tried to invent. This is His work. So, Nikki, when you think back on the weekends, what are some highlights for you?
Nikki: Well, you know, usually I think about my very first time attending one of these conferences. That was in 2010. I remember walking in with Carel and feeling very nervous.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: What are we going to? Is this just going to be a bunch of angry people complaining about Adventism? And you know, I have to say, I have experienced angry people complaining about Adventism in Adventism –
Colleen: Absolutely.
Nikki: – as an Adventist. And even in some – I almost said Sunday school – Sabbath school groups. You know, people complaining about the way things are done and a lot of inner fighting, and so I think I had assumed that the people who gather at these meetings were a lot like those people –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – and walking in and seeing that it was not that at all. In fact, it was worship.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: We began with worship.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And the joy on the faces of the people who were there, just the love in the room, it was very surprising to me. And that night Mark Martin, Pastor Mark Martin, spoke about the Clear Word. It’s online. If you guys haven’t seen it, go watch it.
Colleen: 2010.
Nikki: 2010, Friday night. And I will never, ever forget – I can almost still hear it in my mind when I think about it – that moment when he threw the Clear Word on the stage, down on the ground. He’d worked himself up. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: He had been sharing what the Bible says compared to what the Clear Word said and how it just completely undid the true nature of God, and it was heresy.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And he got so upset. He threw that Bible on the stage, it was a raised podium, and it echoed through the whole room, and it made me jump.
Colleen: The whole room jumped.
Nikki: But it was a powerful moment, it was a very powerful moment, and I left that night thinking, “This is important. This is a big moment.”
Colleen: Yes. I remember that too. I had the same reaction. I remember feeling almost like tingles went up my back, and I knew he had spoken the truth, and I was so thankful he had done it so powerfully.
Nikki: So it was at the conference in 2017, and I have to confess, I don’t remember the topic of that particular talk, but Pastor Gary had just shared a little bit about his daughter, who had passed away, and he was talking about how believers go immediately to be with the Lord.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And I will never forget him leaning over the podium, leaning into the congregation with emotion and almost righteous indignation, and he pounded on that podium, and he said, “You are not your body!”
Colleen: Oh, I remember that!
Nikki: And I just immediately started crying, and I felt convicted that my struggle to understand that I had a spirit that survived death and hanging on to that struggle and, I don’t know, doubting, for me, that was sin.
Colleen: Oh, interesting.
Nikki: I needed to repent because Scripture says something else.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And I just felt very convicted by his statement, and I realized that lie from hell –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – was something that I was playing with in my head every time I had doubt.
Colleen: Wow.
Nikki: And I needed to repent, and I needed to submit to what Scripture said. So that was a big moment for me. That wasn’t all that long ago. I mean, I believed Scripture –
Colleen: I know.
Nikki: – but you know, we can easily have these doubts that float around, and we’re not even paying attention to them.
Colleen: Yes, and isn’t it so amazing that when the armor of God is mentioned – Ephesians 6 is a classic passage, and there are others as well, 1 Thessalonians has it – that the helmet of salvation is named, the fact that we are saved that protects our heads from our own doubts.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: The Holy Spirit doesn’t leave us in that darkness.
Nikki: Yeah. Yeah, and it’s trusting Scripture.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And that resolves that. So that was one of those big standout teaching moments for me, yeah.
Colleen: Wow.
Nikki: And then, you know, like you said, seeing people begin to understand the gospel. I think of Sharon, who I believe is going to be at this conference next month –
Colleen: Yes, uh-huh.
Nikki: – and she came to faith listening to Revelation –
Colleen: I know. [Laughter.]
Nikki: – [laughter] a talk on Revelation, and just seeing her change. You know, she had been attending the Bible studies on Friday night and asking her questions, but after that conference, she was a different person, altogether new.
Colleen: It’s such an – it’s so exciting. There’s nothing that compares to seeing people discover the gospel and trust Jesus.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: So, Nikki, what would you say to all of those listening right now about the conference?
Nikki: Oh, you have to come. You have to come. It’s a lot like a family reunion.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: I don’t know, it’s exciting to me. It’s like Christmas. [Laughter.]
Colleen: I know. [Laughter.]
Nikki: Come and be prepared to submit your mind to Scripture. There are a lot of challenging things that you face, you know, when you begin to unpack your previous worldview, but come and know that the Bible is trustworthy and that this is a group of people who loves the Lord and loves His Word and who longs to serve you and to know you, and there are so many things – there are so many things that happen when you’re actually at the conference that you can’t experience online.
Colleen: True. That’s true.
Nikki: So be sure you come.
Colleen: I second that. If you want to register, you can go to proclamationmagazine.com, and there will be a link there. You can register for the conference. You can write to us, ideas, reactions, comments, at formeradventist@gmail.com. If you want to donate to Life Assurance Ministries, if you want to donate to help support the conference, to support transportation or scholarships or for just donating to the ministry, again, proclamationmagazine.com, and you can donate there. I hope to see some of you at the conference. I hope that this has been encouraging to you. It’s been so much fun to reflect on our shared past with this whole ministry, Nikki. We’re just praying that God will prepare the hearts of those who need to be here and that He’ll open the way for them to come, and we hope that that includes you. †
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