Adventism in the Rear-View Mirror | 1

Colleen and Nikki explain in this first episode why they left Seventh-day Adventism and why they reach back to minister to those still in their former religion. Podcast was published October 8, 2019. Transcription by Gwen Billington.

 

Colleen:  Welcome to our very first Former Adventist podcast.  I’m Colleen Tinker.

Nikki:  And I’m Nikki Stevenson.

Colleen:  And I’m more excited than I can say to be actually chatting with my friend in this venue.  I’m going to start by telling who we are and who Life Assurance Ministries is.  Life Assurance Ministries is almost 20 years old.  It was founded originally by Dale Ratzlaff and a board.  Richard, my husband, and I were original board members for Life Assurance, and we exist to provide material for people who are questioning Adventism.  We have a magazine that comes out in print form twice a year; we have a weekly email with new blogs every week; we have a local weekly Bible study if you are in our area, in the Loma Linda area; and we also have yearly conferences, to which you are invited.  So, we are happy to announce that we are launching this podcast to reach an audience that might not be reached by our print and by our online articles.  We are going to be discussing living life after Adventism, and we are going to talk about common issues that we all have faced and face currently as we leave the subculture that defined us, as we seek to integrate into living and worshipping with the Body of Christ.

We are sitting for our first recording session today, and we plan to share our unique backgrounds in Adventism, which have been separated by generation, geography, and lifestyle, but underneath those differences, we both loved Adventism and shared a worldview that shaped our lives.  The purpose of our podcast is two-fold.  The first is we want to help former Adventists understand how to understand our own former religion that twisted Biblical truth and reality, and we want to provide support for each of you as you navigate learning to get along with, live with, study with the Body of Christ.  In addition, we desire, if it is God’s will, that both Adventists and Christians who have never been Adventist may hear our program and begin to see what lurks under the beautiful whitewashed public face of this religion, known for its hospitals and its health message; but this beautiful public face hides the fact that it teaches another gospel and a fallible Jesus.  We are committed to speaking truthfully about the religion we both once loved, because many of our loved ones are trapped inside a beautiful deception.  Our friends and families believe they are traveling a road that leads to God, but they don’t know that just out of their sight the bridge is out.  Instead of crossing into the Promised Land, they are doomed to fall into a chasm from which they cannot escape.  So we plan to release this podcast weekly.  Eventually, we may include call-ins from listeners, and in the meantime, you may submit your comments or questions that you’d like us to address by emailing us at formeradventist@gmail.com, and meanwhile, stay tuned.

Nikki:  And grab a cup of coffee and join us.

Colleen:  Because we don’t do anything without coffee here.

Nikki:  No, we don’t.

Colleen:  So, Nikki, why are you doing this podcast with me?

Nikki:  Well, you know, the best way I can answer that is to give a little bit of a background, and you know, I asked Carel yesterday, my husband, why he is a part of Life Assurance Ministries, and his answer summarizes so well what I want to share.  He said, “I was rescued from a very cleverly constructed cave of darkness.  When I emerged and saw glimmers of light and hope, I knew I wanted to do whatever I could to help others out of that darkness.”

Colleen:  Wow.

Nikki:  Yeah.  I felt like that summarized so well really where my heart is in this.

Colleen:  So, Carel is a board member for Life Assurance Ministries, and you are a columnist for the magazine.  What was your own background that led you to want to speak up and address our readers?  Your columns are powerful.  We have a lot of comments from readers.  Why do you want to do that?  Why do you want to talk to them?

Nikki:  Well, you know, once we leave Adventism, if we come to Christ, if we’re born again and the Word becomes our source for authority and reality, it seems to me that the Lord begins to open our eyes to the truth about our lives, about ourselves, obviously, as well as revealing Himself to us.  That process, coming out of something like Seventh-day Adventism, brings up stuff we didn’t even know we were carrying.

Colleen:  That’s so true.

Nikki:  And it can leave us feeling kind of terminally unique, hard to relate to Christians in the Body, hard to get anyone to really understand what we’re struggling with, and so those columns of the life after, I think my desire there is to help those on this path to know that they’re not alone and that the things that they face and that they’re walking through are being faced and walked through by so many other people.

Colleen:  Yes.  There’s that feeling of being terminally unique, and we’re not.

Nikki:  Right.

Colleen:  Okay.  So what was your —  you are younger than I am.  You have young children still at home.  I am a grandma.  But what was your unique background, because it was a little different from mine.  You weren’t raised in the same kind of Adventist family I was.  What about your background has brought you here?

Nikki:  Yeah.  Well, I came from a broken home, so I experienced very different kinds of Adventism, very different kinds of home life.  As an Adventist, I desperately wanted to know God.  No matter how many good choices I made in my effort to draw near to Him, though, I never seemed to get any closer to knowing Him.  As a child, I experienced a wide variety of both home and Adventist environments.  There was very little I could rely on.  There was a lot of change in my life.  I believe I lived in 22 homes, went to 14 schools.  Only a few of them were Adventist schools.

Colleen:  Wow.

Nikki:  So, I can’t necessarily relate to other formers who had the, you know, 12 years and academy, and then I did go to an Adventist university, but I didn’t actually have very deep roots in my lifestyle within Adventism, but I did travel enough that I saw so many different kinds of Adventist — I don’t know — manifestations, I want to say.

Colleen:  That’s a good word.

Nikki:  Because it is practiced differently, Loma Linda Southern California Adventism different from North California Adventism, and I spent a lot of my life in New England.  And so I saw it practiced differently, but the core, the foundation, and the trajectory, they were the same across the board.

Colleen:  That’s very interesting.  Not everybody has seen that.

Nikki:  Right!  And so the most consistent thing in my life really was Adventism.  So my Dad, he and his wife, they lived kind of in the upper socioeconomic group within Adventism.  They were influential in their church, from a medical family, and their life looked really put together.  And growing up in my Mother’s home, she was non-practicing when I was growing up with her.  She had been raised Adventist, her family is Adventist, four generations, five for me.  But we didn’t practice it, and she spent a lot of her life masking her pain through some poor choices, and it brought a lot of chaos to my life, so for me, when I looked at Adventism, I saw stability.

Colleen:  That makes sense.

Nikki:  And it became something that I wanted to strive for, and when I became an adult, that’s what I did.  I worked very hard to learn how to keep the Sabbath, I participated in leading the youth at our local church, eventually my husband and I were elders in the local church.  I felt like I had a clean slate and I could really strive after this.  But even then, I never felt like my big questions about God were ever answered.  They are answered in Scripture, I know that now.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  But as an Adventist, I couldn’t find the answers, and when I would ask questions, so often I would get vague responses like, “Oh, you just need to have faith.”

Colleen:  That drove me crazy too.

Nikki:  Yeah.  That doesn’t give hope.

Colleen:  No.

Nikki:  It creates anxiety.  How do you muster up faith in something you don’t understand?

Colleen:  I could never figure it out.

Nikki:  Yeah.  It just didn’t work for me.  So it was 10 years inside, really striving to practice Adventism, before I really understood that the system, the Adventist system, was a greater obstacle to knowing God than the sum of all of my poor choices and traumatic experiences combined.

Colleen:  That is an amazing realization.

Nikki:  It was heartbreaking.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  It was devastating.  The group of people who I believed were going to help me know who God was and know how to serve Him and how to love Him, it was the very system that was destroying that for me.

Colleen:  Wow.  That’s amazing.  So how long ago did you and your husband leave Adventism?

Nikki:  We left in 2010, so it will be 10 years actually in February, because it was after the conference that we formally were – we were done.  So, it’s been 10 years, and in that time, I have loved learning about God, learning His attributes, learning who He is, and it has shaped everything about life.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  About how I engage with the world and understand reality is knowing God.  And so I guess the reason that I do this is because I want to help deconstruct that system that is keeping people from knowing the truth about God, because that’s the most important thing they’re going to do in their life is to know Him.

Colleen:  So true.  That is an amazing thing.  Thank you for sharing your story.  I know it’s not always easy to share the story of one’s past, but it’s important because it’s my belief that there are more Adventists who have trauma and shame about their pasts than people know when they sit next to each other in the pews in church.

Nikki:  Right.  So tell us, Colleen, why do you do this?  Why have you given your life to this ministry?

Colleen:  Well, my husband and I left – Richard and I left Adventism formally about 20 years ago.  When we left, we really did feel terminally unique.  There were no support groups, there were no online forums.  There was Dale, Dale Ratzlaff, who was my husband’s first cousin once removed.  So Richard knew him and had actually considered him the black sheep in the family until we began to realize there was something wrong, Adventism did not provide us with the answers we needed to live.  I think the thing that tipped both of us to the point where we realized we had to figure out what was going on with Adventism was that we each went through a divorce in the ’80s, and that left us with all kinds of unanswered questions, and what on earth did I do with that shame as an Adventist.  I had been raised by a very observant and socially appropriate mother, who carefully taught me as a little Adventist girl that divorcees were dangerous, that they were going to set their sights on other women’s husbands and they were to be untrusted, and I believed that that was how people would see me.  So I had suddenly gone from being a respectable elder in an Adventist church to being a divorced woman who was probably going to be considered dangerous, and I had no idea how to put my life back together.  After Richard and I were married, we realized that we needed answers from the Bible.  Somehow, we both knew the Bible was supposed to provide our answers, and as we started discovering that the Bible, read in context, did not teach what the proof texts taught, we began to think, you know, we might actually have to leave this organization, and Dale Ratzlaff was significant in that, because we heard him in the ’90s at a seminar at an Adventist Forum meeting in San Diego, where he explained the difference between the Old Covenant the New Covenant.  Now, as an Adventist, I had been carefully taught there was only one Covenant, there were just different expressions of the same Covenant, but Dale showed us from the Bible how the Old Covenant was constructed and made between Israel and God and the New Covenant was kept, not between man and God, but between the Father and the Son as our substitute.  It was an overwhelming moment, and it was after that that both Richard and I knew we were on a road that was going to lead us out of Adventism.  It was several years before we actually made the move, but we were so alone in that.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  We didn’t have anyone to talk to except each other.  The Lord was gracious in leading us out together, because many couples don’t leave together.

Nikki:  Right.

Colleen:  We knew then that we had to provide some kind of support for people who are questioning and leaving Adventism.  We knew they needed answers, we knew they need to understand the religion they were in, we knew there were reasons why Adventists feel confused and hopeless, why they die badly, why they have fear, why they have terminal anxiety, many of them.  And we knew that the Bible actually did provide those answers, because we saw how the gospel changed us.  So, that was what led us to begin an online forum, formeradventist.com, in 1999, and to begin the weekly Bible study that we still conduct, and to be part of Proclamation! Magazine when Dale founded it in 2000.  So, this podcast is an extension of what we have dedicated our lives to with Life Assurance Ministries.  People who leave and question Adventism need to have answers, and they need to have answers from the Bible, because too many people leave Adventism and go into agnosticism and atheism.  It’s built into the system.  If you leave what you believe is the truth, then where do you go?  And too many Adventists go into nothingness.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  And their anxiety is never resolved, but there is reality and truth in the Lord Jesus and in His unerring Word.

Nikki:  May I just ask a question about that?

Colleen:  Of course.

Nikki:  When you guys decided you were going to take this ministry up, did you have a big picture in your head or was it just a series of doing the next process?

Colleen:  It was a series.  It was no big picture.  It was the next thing, the next thing.  It was very clear.  It was like – it was like conviction in Richard in 1999 that we needed to go online.  The internet was still fairly new, and he knew we needed a support group for Adventists, so he began the Forum.  Then when Dale suggested the magazine, it was a great idea, and we were happy to agree to be signing members of the board.  Richard volunteered to design his magazine for him.  It was that important to us, and at first it was every other month.  And then the next thing that happened was in the year 2004, when Dale wanted to step back a little bit, and he asked me to edit the magazine.  That was a new thought.  I was teaching full-time, so it became clear to me as I prayed — for a month [laughter] – that the Lord would provide, and it was clear that this was where He was directing us to go.  And the next big hurdle, which we had a sense was coming but didn’t know for sure when or how, was in 2006, when Richard was fired from his job at Loma Linda School of Dentistry as the Director of Educational Support Services, and he was fired for cause.  He was fired because of his work with Life Assurance and Former Adventist.  The Lord provided and allowed for the board to take him on as well.  So it has always been a step, it has always been one thing at a time.  There has never been a big picture.

Nikki:  And this ministry really was sort of born either in the early years or just before the internet blew up.

Colleen:  That’s true.

Nikki:  So you have had an ever-changing audience, in a way.

Colleen:  That’s true.

Nikki:  And you have had generations now coming through.

Colleen:  That’s true.

Nikki:  This podcast is almost, you know, the next step in seeking to reach that next generation of listeners, readers –

Colleen:  It’s true.  It appears that podcasts are a growing phenomenon, oddly enough among the millennials.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  We were talking with our younger son and his wife recently about podcasts, and they sent us links to the podcasts they listen to.  They sent us, like, maybe 10 podcasts that they listen to, and you know, I haven’t done podcasts that much, but I listened to them, but it does seem to be the next thing, and I think it is, like you say, a whole new audience.

Nikki:  And wouldn’t you say too that Adventism, it’s different inside each generation.  You know, we’ve talked a lot about how we’ve experienced Adventism differently, and yet there still seems to be this bottom line consistent – I don’t know what to call it.

Colleen:  It’s a worldview.

Nikki:  Yeah.

Colleen:  It’s a worldview, and it doesn’t matter what generation an Adventist is, whether an Adventist is progressive, whether an Adventist is historic, whether they go to school at Weimar or Uchee Pines or whether they are in public school, and you know, in a liberal Adventist church, there is still a worldview that is consistent, and Adventism, as you describe so well, clearly offers that stability and that sense of right, being right, that is a thing to attain to.

Nikki:  Yes, and a community.

Colleen:  Oh my, yes.

Nikki:  You can kind of pick your own flavor.

Colleen:  Oh, yes.

Nikki:  But it’s still an Adventist community, which is really hard to leave.

Colleen:  It’s disorienting.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  You lose, kind of, everything.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  And at first you don’t think you will, you know.  Your Adventist family and friends are still your Adventist family and friends, and it’s shocking when you start realizing that they talk to you less and less.

Nikki:  Oh, I was sure they would want to know what I knew.  I was sure they would want to understand the gospel the way I did, that they would want to – I mean, we would go to non-Adventist Women of Faith events together where they would hear other Christians speak, and I had this new information about what they were speaking about, and I thought they’d want to know what I knew, and I was very surprised by the kickback that I got.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  One of the comments that I remember very clearly from one of my sisters is, “Why are you a part of this Former Adventist?  You don’t see former Baptist or former Lutheran support groups.  Why are you doing a Former Adventist support group?”  And I was so really early in leaving and not sure how to navigate those conversations.  I wish I knew then what I do now.  I think I could have done a better job answering that, but that seems to be what we hear a lot in this ministry.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  “Why are you doing this?”

Colleen:  Yes.  And not just from Adventists.  I hear it from Christians too.

Nikki:  Yeah.

Colleen:  I remember being at a women’s retreat many years ago now, but it was a Christian women’s retreat after we had joined a Christian church, and interestingly, I still remember the woman who asked me the question I am going to tell you.  She was the mother of one of my students that I was teaching, a student that I liked very much, who is actually one of my son’s best friends to this day, and she looked at me outside our meeting room at the women’s retreat and said, “You don’t hear about former Baptists,” and this was a woman who had spent her life in missions.  “You don’t hear about former Baptists.  Why are you doing Former Adventists?’  And I looked at her, and I was much younger out of Adventism then, but suddenly I knew what the answer was.  I said, “Baptists all believe in the gospel of the Bible, and they believe in Jesus, who has a finished work.  Adventists have a different gospel and a different belief about the atonement and a different Jesus, and because of that, everything about the religion, no matter what the words are, is a deception.  It’s not the same.  It’s not founded in Christianity.”

Nikki:  And so really there are two audiences here.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  We have our Adventists or former Adventists, and then we have the Christians who have been so deceived by the system that they don’t understand.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  And you know what?  I don’t blame them.

Colleen:  I don’t either.

Nikki:  Even the great Walter Martin couldn’t see through.

Colleen:  That’s true.

Nikki:  I mean, it’s so cleverly constructed.

Colleen:  Like Carel said, a cleverly constructed cave of darkness.

Nikki:  Yeah.

Colleen:  Yes.  And Adventists intuitively know that they are uncertain.  They are fearful.  They believe they have truth, but they are afraid to die, and they don’t know if they can be saved.  They hope they will be saved.

Nikki:  Yes.

Colleen:  The Bible is clear that we can know.

Nikki:  Yes.  And it’s not arrogant to know, because it’s based on Christ and His work.

Colleen:  So, Nikki, how do you know that you’re saved?  What has saved you and how do you know it’s true?

Nikki:  Well, the Lord Jesus did it.  He completed the work.  There’s nothing left for me to do, it’s based completely on His righteousness.  And so, my only work was to repent and to place my faith in Him and to acknowledge that He is the Lord of my life.  And the salvation, that was handled, that was done at the cross, and actually at the resurrection, when God accepted that sacrifice on my behalf.  And so, you know, for me to entertain any ideas of uncertainty about salvation is almost to question the sufficiency of Christ.

Colleen:  Yes, I agree.

Nikki:  I think that people like to pose that kind of it’s humble to think, “Oh, I’m not sure if I’m saved.”  Actually, it’s really offensive to God, I would imagine.

Colleen:  Oh, I think so.

Nikki:  Because it’s questioning the perfection of Christ and what He did.

Colleen:  That’s true.  In fact, Paul puts it so clearly.  We are supposed to know that we’re saved, and we’re supposed to be able to rest in that.  Romans 8 says it so well.  This has come to be one of my favorite passages as a former Adventist.  It’s Romans 8:15-17.  “For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading again to fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons, by which we cry out Abba!  Father!  The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs also: heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him.”  So it’s not even just a mental trick to say, well, I’ve believed so I must be saved.  He gives us His Spirit when we trust him.

Nikki:  Um-hmm.

Colleen:  And brings our spirit to life, like Jesus explained to Nicodemus.  So, when He tells us that we’re His adopted children and He has made us not just sons and daughters, but heirs with Christ, that’s the eternal God Himself indwelling us and convicting us of that reality, and we can trust it.

Nikki:  And He changes absolutely everything, because my entire goal in Adventism was to get saved, to do whatever I could during my lifetime to make sure that I was with Jesus one day.

Colleen:  Me too!

Nikki:  And now as a Christian, that’s settled, that’s done, and my entire purpose has changed, and it is completely about glorifying Christ and growing in Him and doing the work that He prepared for me, which as you said a few minutes ago, sometimes only comes one step at a time.

Colleen:  Exactly.

Nikki:  We don’t always get the full picture right up front.

Colleen:  No.  I’ve had to give up my control.  [Laughter.]

Nikki:  Yes, that’s been hard.

Colleen:  [Laughter]  Very hard!  I’m a control girl.

Nikki:  There again, that’s where the attributes of God are so helpful, understanding that He is sovereign, and you know, what I would love to be able to go back and tell my sister, you know, when answering that question, is that all those other Christian churches, they don’t believe that they’re the remnant church.

Colleen:  No, they don’t.

Nikki:  They don’t believe they’re the one, and I was taught that as an Adventist, oh, they all believe that they’re the one.  No, they don’t.  You know who does?  The Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormons, the Adventists.

Colleen:  Yes, that’s so true.

Nikki:  The non-Christian denominations.

Colleen:  We were actually lied to, if I may use that word.

Nikki:  Yeah.

Colleen:  Christians do not see reality as Adventists see reality, and we were told they do.

Nikki:  I actually was surprised to learn how differently Christians believe from Adventists.  I thought I understood everything they did, I just had the Sabbath.

Colleen:  Same here.

Nikki:  And I knew a little bit about the end-time stuff, you know, and a little bit of pre-Creation history that they didn’t quite get yet.

Colleen:  Sure.  Michael the Archangel.

Nikki:  Right.  But everything else was basically the same.  I mean, that’s really what I thought.  They kept Sunday.

Colleen:  Right.  That’s what I thought.

Nikki:  And God was the same.  Realizing that the Trinity is so different from the Godhead of Adventism was a shock to me.

Colleen:  Oh my me too.

Nikki:  And knowing now what I know about God, I think for me the attribute of God that has shifted my thinking the most has been His attribute of simplicity.

Colleen:  Yes.

Nikki:  Which is, it’s not something I’m great at teaching, but the way I understand it is that you cannot take any attribute from any Person of the Trinity and still have God.

Colleen:  So when Adventists tell us that Jesus is no longer omnipresent because He has a body, they have split an attribute of God away from God the Son, so the Adventist Jesus is actually not the God of the Bible.

Nikki:  Right.

Colleen:  He is an invented Jesus.

Nikki:  Which fits with their Arian roots.

Colleen:  Exactly.  And it fits with their belief that God subjects Himself to human free will, that the ultimate value in the universe is the free will of the creature, and God will limit His own power to honor their free will.  Well, He does give us choice.  He does give us the command to believe, but He is sovereign over us.  We don’t carry the last word about our own lives, He does.

Nikki:  I’m so glad.

Colleen:  It’s such a relief.  Well, let’s give them one more time where they can contact us for questions.

Nikki:  Okay.

Colleen:  Or for resources.  You can email us questions or things that you want to comment on or things you would like us to talk about to formeradventist@gmail.com.  You can also go online to the website proclamationmagazine.com, and you will find there our blog site, you will find a way to subscribe for our weekly emails, and also a link to our online copies of every issue of Proclamation! Magazine that has ever been published.  Thank you for being with us in this first podcast.  We look forward to talking with you again, and Nikki, it’s just a delight to do this with you.

Nikki:  So fun.  Thank you, Colleen.

Colleen:  All right.  Talk to you all later. †