Church Authority

I'm preaching this coming Sabbath on Acts 3 and 4. It's the story of Peter and John healing the lame man at the Beautiful Gate, their subsequent arrest and eventual arraignment before the Sanhedrin.

I love Peter's speech to the assembly: What? Do you really think it's better to obey you than God?  I cannot help speaking what i have seen and heard.

Peter and the other believers operated out of a life-changing experience. The church officials operated out of a concern to preserve the status quo. This is the eternal struggle of the church. The conservatives want to preserve all the good stuff that is the heritage from the church's past. The crazies want to honor the new thing God is doing.

It is our heritage (history, traditions) that sets us up for receiving God's new work. The new work always threatens the structures that were erected on the basis of God's past work.

This is the lens through which I view the current conservative/liberal struggle in the Adventist Church. I am unabashedly a liberal. But I acknowledge that my liberal views are a direct outgrowth my conservative Adventist heritage. (And I do not mean my views as a reaction against that heritage.) I could not have arrived at the views I have without that conservative heritage. I refuse to belief that that heritage should be preserved unchanged over time. That would be analogous to fossilizing a living organism. Fossils are cool. Living, changing organisms are cooler.



The current president of the General Conference tirelessly advocates one book above all others, The Great Controversy. It is our prophet's panoramic survey of Christianity from day one to the end of time. In this book every hero is a heretic. Every effort by the church to defend orthodoxy is shown to be wrong-headed opposition to truth. The heretics turn out to be right. So when the church president anathematizes people whose faithfulness to God causes them to diverge from "historic" or "General Conference" Adventism, he becomes another unwitting (and unfavorable) example of the central theme of his favorite book.