Finally Forever Free in Jesus

Former general counsel for Loma Linda University Medical Center

BILL ZIPRICK

Come with me while I share the journey on which God took me when I came out from Adventism into the full glory of the freedom of the Gospel, and explore the path on which God faithfully led me.

I was a third generation Adventist, and my grandpa was a conference president and a preacher in Canada. I grew up mostly in the Loma Linda area. I was a junior deacon at the Loma Linda University Church by around age 14 and went through Adventist schools exclusively, all the way until law school, when I went to the University of California at Los Angeles. I married a beautiful Adventist lady, Sally. To her credit, she wasn’t quite as good an Adventist as I was, and she always had a little bit more trouble with the rules. For example, at boarding school she could never keep straight which days the sidewalks were for boys and which days they were for girls. She was always ending up on the wrong sidewalks at the wrong time.

After practicing law for a few years I became one of the west coast legal counsels for the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. A few years later that position evolved into our firm becoming general counsel for Loma Linda University Medical Center and the healthcare system at Loma Linda.

Culture shock

After a few more years, my wife and I moved about 45 minutes away from Loma Linda, and I commuted back and forth to work. We joined a small Adventist church in the area to which we moved, and we became actively involved teaching Sabbath School, serving on the finance committee and the church board, and holding various other responsibilities in our congregation. Up until that time, I had mostly lived my life in fairly large Adventist communities such as Loma Linda, La Sierra, Angwin (home of Pacific Union College), and Sacramento, where Adventism was pretty comfortable. In those places we had good preachers, schools, and social networking systems. I really hadn’t been stretched by the Lord very far at that time. I was, when I look back, still fairly spiritually immature. But then I went through an eye-opening culture shock going to a small Adventist Church, an experience which I’m convinced God allowed. I was introduced full-force to intense legalism and perfectionism and to what those can do to a church.

To illustrate what I mean, I share an example of some conversations I had with an individual who was a lightning rod at that church. He would tell me, in the context of quoting Ellen White, “Bill, if you’re a good Adventist, you will become perfect”.

I’d say, “Well, you know, I believe that over time we are going to become more spiritually mature and that we should hopefully have more fruit of the Spirit, but I’m fairly certain, in my own opinion, that we’re still going to have a sinful nature on this earth.”

He’d respond, “No, if you’re growing, you will become absolutely perfect in your conduct.”

As a result of such attitudes and other related things going on in that local church, we entered five years of firestorms. We endured some of the most mean-spirited things I had ever experienced in my life in a church congregation. There were angry full-church meetings, church board meetings that were just vicious, a church split, emergency conference meetings, a former pastor verbally ripping apart a present pastor, and a pastor going through a divorce. It was a brutal time.

Those years were spiritually and emotionally draining for my wife and me, and I know they were for others in the congregation as well. As a result of all that was happening, Sally and I just pulled back. We felt ourselves being spiritually crushed by what was going on, and we actually stopped going to church for many months. Over the course of those months, however, we could tell something was missing in our lives. We were missing the warmth and fellowship of worshiping with a congregation, but we knew we could not go back to that Adventist church. God was tugging us at that time—very quietly, but very surely.

Fearful experiments

I’d rarely been in a non-Adventist church, much less attended one on a regular basis. As the months of our isolation went on, however, Sally and I started to ask ourselves, “Should we give it a shot and try going to a non-Adventist church?” Even the thought of attending anywhere but an Adventist church was foreign to us. We knew that we couldn’t handle going on Sunday mornings to church; that step would just be too much like accepting the mark of the beast. We couldn’t take such a heavy risk. As a compromise, we looked around to find a church with a Saturday night service. At least that would be on the right day, we rationalized—maybe we could handle that. So we found a church and we went for a couple of months to the Saturday night service—and then they stopped the service. We looked again and found another church that had a Saturday night service; we went for a couple more months—and then they, too, stopped their Saturday night service. There was only one more church in town that had Saturday night services, but we agreed, “Okay, let’s try it.”

At first when we began visiting, we would just slip into the services and leave immediately afterward. We hardly talked to anybody. I remember feeling so strange being in another church’s sanctuary. We were amazed, however, that the people were so friendly, and there was a Christian warmth to the church. We were listening carefully to the sermons, suspicious of what we might hear, but they were very Biblical, and when the pastors gave us Scriptural references, we’d go check them out when we got home—and they were right out of the Bible. I know that biblical accuracy is something that a person should expect from a Christian pastor, but trusting these people was still a struggle for us because these preachers weren’t part of the “remnant”.

How would these church experiments work out, we wondered? It was during this time of searching that we started to read the Bible more, without Ellen White’s interpretation. We actually bought some non-Adventist Bible commentaries and started using them, and we found them very helpful.

There was one sermon in particular that got our attention. It was on the book of Daniel, the first in the hard-core Adventist “Daniel and Revelation” duo on which Adventists pin their unique doctrines: the investigative judgment and the great controversy. When Sally and I heard Daniel was the topic, we thought, “This should be interesting.” We were on high alert.

I well remember the words of the preacher. He got up and said, “I want you to know that I have studied this extensively. I’m going to give it my best shot, and I think this is Biblical. But I’m not going to tell you that my understanding is the end all and be all. I want you to go study the Scriptures yourself.” Sally and I instantly looked at each other; that comment was so different from what we were used to hearing. As we talked about it later, we were both astonished by that evening. We were so used to Adventist pastors and teachers presenting Daniel and Revelation with a “Here is the interpretation, and this is what you need to take from this study” attitude. To actually have a pastor say, “I think this is really good stuff, and I want you to go study more”, was one of the most defining moments for us on our journey.

Institutional conflicts

God being God, He was not content just to hit us with one barrel of his shotgun. He knew that I was kind of stubborn and needed an extra push—which He provided. I was still representing the Adventist Church’s health care system at Loma Linda with my law firm. A significant part of my work was advising the board of trustees. The makeup of the board of trustees involved the highest level of the general conference (G.C.) of the Adventist Church. Our firm worked with the president, with other G.C. officers, and with division, union, and conference officers. It’s a big group of people, and I worked extensively with them for almost two decades.

I had a lot of fascinating experiences during those years that led me to a few observations. My first observation concerns the doctrine of the “remnant” in the Adventist Church, a belief which basically states that Seventh-day Adventists are God’s one true remnant church of Bible prophecy. Implicit in this doctrine is the belief that Adventists have the truth, and no one else does. I saw that belief was a trap at times for church leaders, because it became very hard for them ever to admit mistakes or to acknowledge they were wrong. If a person did admit to being wrong, and if that person were the head of the “remnant”, well—such a situation would detract from the whole aura of the remnant. After all, if you’ve got the truth, how can you be wrong?

Another observation I had is that in the Adventist Church there is a very strong hierarchy from the top down. The inner workings of the church are highly political, probably far more than what most people understand. What the top officials say, is what goes. Pastors and employees are very much expected to follow the company line. This expectation is not that surprising in light of the history of the Adventist church. When one goes back and reads through the testimonies of Ellen White, a woman whom we all know was fairly significant in the founding of the church, on many occasions when people disagreed with her, they got a pretty good roasting. At the highest and deepest levels of the church, therefore, I experienced this tradition: if the leadership was speaking, it was law.

I always thought that the similarities between Catholicism and Adventism with regard to their top-down power structures as well as other traditions including extra-Biblical authority, were somewhat ironic because, as an Adventist, I had always heard about the problems with Catholicism’s hierarchy and about Ellen White’s extra-biblical prophecy that we would be persecuted some day because of Sunday laws supposedly to be masterminded by the extra-biblical authority, the pope.

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Because of my close interactions with the church hierarchy, when I hear the stories of people like Dale Ratzlaff, Mark Martin, Richard Tinker, and Greg Taylor, they really ring with authenticity for me as they resonate with my own experiences with Adventist church leadership.

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As a result of my experiences with the hierarchy of the Adventist church, one of my other observations was that independent thought was not encouraged. In fact, if a person truly had a lot of independent thought, that made him or her dangerous. Because of my close interactions with the church hierarchy, when I hear the stories of people like Dale Ratzlaff, Mark Martin, Richard Tinker, and Greg Taylor, they really ring with authenticity for me as they resonate with my own experiences with Adventist church leadership.

I’ll share a story that happened many years ago to illustrate my point. There were some controversial issues that I and the board of trustees were dealing with. Our law firm had to give difficult but firm legal opinions on a particular issue. I was in a very intense, three-hour meeting one day with three of the top church leaders, defending the legal position we had taken. One of the key leaders turned to me about halfway through the meeting and said, “Bill, if you were a pastor and you had given me that opinion, I would have been very, very disappointed with you.”

I responded, “But I’m not a pastor, I’m a lawyer, and you pay me to defend the institutions.” I knew what he had meant by his comment, as I knew the individual fairly well, and what he was saying was that if I had been a pastor, it would have been unacceptable for me to express such an independent opinion to him or to other church brethren.

Eventually, after almost 20 years of my working with the church brethren, that professional relationship came to an end. During those final years, however, God had been opening my eyes. Through the experiences that God allowed my wife and me to have at the local church level coupled with the opportunity to see things at the highest church level, and through Bible study and the work of the Holy Spirit, God had fully awakened me and made it clear that it was really time to leave the Adventist church.

My resignation

It wasn’t until recently that I formally tendered my resignation to the Adventist church. I would like to share just a few excerpts from my resignation letter:

Through this lengthy and often times painful but enlightening process, I came to a number of conclusions, which include but are not limited to, the following:

• If I am saved solely through my faith and trust in Jesus Christ who died to pay the price for my sins (as the Bible so clearly states repeatedly), then “keeping the Sabbath”, which is such a preeminent doctrine of the SDA Church, cannot save me. If it could, I would be able to save myself through my works, and the Scriptures are so clear that that is not possible. In turn, there is nothing in Scripture which identifies the Sabbath as the “Seal Of God”, but in contrast it is clear that the sealing of the Holy Spirit is based upon an individual’s absolute loyalty to God.
• I have come to realize that any denomination which holds that an individual is a prophet (outside of the prophets clearly revealed in Scripture) and accordingly gives the belief/writings of that individual equal weight (or in some cases, higher weight) than the Bible, is a cult. The SDA Church has clearly done that with Ellen White, and as difficult as it was for me to admit it, without realizing it, I had been a member of a cult for many years. God is so clear in his Holy Scriptures that the Holy Scriptures stand alone as the Word from God, and that any claim that someone is a prophet who can infallibly interpret Scriptures for others is nothing more than an absolutely false claim.
• The Investigative Judgment, supposedly one of the pillars of the SDA Church, is not supportable when you carefully study the Scriptures in their entirety. It is a horrendous doctrine which robs the genuine believer of any assurance of salvation. It is a work-based doctrine and leads to constant questioning whether an individual has been “good enough” to survive the judgment. In contrast, the Scriptures are so clear that God wants us to be absolutely certain, as Paul repeatedly stated, that our salvation is sure and cannot be lost.
• The claim of the SDA Church that it is the “remnant” cannot be found or supported by any objective reading of the Holy Scriptures. I have come to see how exclusive and arrogant that claim is, and how demeaning it is to the body of Christ to take the position that only through the SDA Church can an individual be saved.

I am also convinced that many in the leadership of the SDA Church are fully aware of these and many other problems, but that it is not “convenient” to face the truth and follow God’s leadings, regardless of the consequences. I shall continue to pray for the SDA Church and its members, which include many family and friends, that someday there will be a full awakening to the truth, as revealed in God’s Scriptures.

Some months ago God led my family and me to move to Washington and guided us, as we looked at many churches, to a wonderful Christian congregation in northern Spokane, Crossover Community Church. He has brought me into the full freedom of the gospel and the absolute assurance that I am saved, that I have been sealed by the Holy Spirit. And no one, no demon, no person, no false doctrine, and no legalism, can separate me from the love, the eternal love, of my Savior and God. †

—Republished from Proclamation!, May/June 2008.

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William (Bill) F. Ziprick was raised as an active third generation Adventist in Loma Linda, California. He received his business degree from Pacific Union College and his law degree from UCLA. He is presently C.E.O. of Ephesians Equity Group, LLC, which relocated from southern California to Spokane, Washington, just a few months ago. Bill’s journey out of Adventism began in the mid-90s, as God led him and his wife through a series of events which awakened them to the full truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ.