** ON THE FAMOUS INFAMOUS QUESTION CREATED BY THE GC**
OK, let’s take a look on what really happened at SA 2015. Here is the famous infamous question again:
"After your prayerful study on ordination from the Bible, the writings of Ellen G. White, and the reports of the study commissions, and; after your careful consideration of what is best for the church and the fulfillment of its mission, is it acceptable for division executive committees, as they may deem it appropriate in their territories, to make provision for the ordination of women to the gospel ministry? Yes or No.”
How many delegates could actually have provided an affidavit that they “prayerful(ly) study(ed) on ordination from the Bible, the writings of Ellen G. White, and the reports of the study commissions” themselves? Would they have been able to report how many hours their “study” took? Just wondering how much educated they were on the issue…
“…to make provision for the ordination of women…” Just notice please how misleading and intentionally confusing is this little sentence. Does it mean that the GC was asking only about ordination of women, not of men? Why not? If the ordination issue is managed EXCLUSIVELY by the Unions, why did the GC want a vote on a right for the Divisions to have the right to legislate only on the ordination of women?
It’s obvious from what we read that the GC had an undeniable intention to confuse the delegates and use the opportunity to take from the Unions a right that belongs ONLY to the Unions. The Divisions are actually the GC; the Division Presidents are GC Vice-Presidents. SO, if the GC could have a YES vote on the issue, the whole thing would have been in TW’s hands since he is the real President of the Divisions.
So, what happened then that it didn’t pass? Simple: The GC, in its ill intentioned attempt to ravish the Unions’ rights, ended up confusing the delegates who, in total ignorance, thought that they were voting Y/N on WO in itself.
I wouldn’t be surprised if what happened was actually a Divine intervention, “a la Babel tower,” and those poor delegates just did what God wanted, and not what TW wanted.
Conclusion: NO, the Divisions (aka GC) do NOT have the right to make decisions on ANY ordination . This right keeps belonging to the UNIONS alone. The GC has to back off and eat it up!!! Or, they may come up with a “coup d’etat,” which is apparently exactly what they have been attempting to do, and are now planning to do it by force.
Good Luck GC!!! Pursue this malignant plan and YOU will successfully SPLIT THE CHURCH!
acutally, Bill, i don’t think that even if you had 75% attendance that you would see the increase in the Tithe! Tithing is something that satan does not want even the most pious to do because to tithe one’s money, acknoledges that GOD is the owner of all not us.
To ‘speculate’ can mean, simply, to keep one’s eyes open – past, present and future.
Those SDAs who attacked merely ‘Spiritual Formation’ and ‘Eastern Religion’ as being the ‘Omega of Apostasy’ clearly did not ‘speculate’ thoroughly enough.
As Torkelsen sees, “The whole Great Controversy story, from beginning to end, has its focus on the question of authority and governance.” And, there are only 2 sides in this controversy. But, when one of those sides is not above presenting itself, “. . . in the clothing of a shining angel.” (‘Lucifer’, the fallen), it is dangerous to assume that the same side will not also stoop to presenting itself in a wide, comprehensive array of disguises.
In the 2012 All-American movie, and modern parable, Promised Land, with Matt Damon, Frances McDormand and John Krasinski this lie-selling technique is very well illustrated. The characters played by Matt and Frances are working hard to obtain natural gas ‘fracking’ rights from a small community of failing farmers for their corporate employers, only to discover that the leader ( played by John) of the most successful anti-fracking environmentalist group opposing them, is also employed by their, same, corporate employers.
This same pattern of controlling both the problem and the solution is very apparently now again being employed by ‘Lucifer Inc.’ – with fatal results for all not willing to ‘speculate’, to ‘see’ – in the SDA corporation known as the ‘GC’. Some might wrongly give credit for such a two-headed, double-minded scheme of governing masses of people to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but he was apparently apprenticed to the master-deceiver, the fallen ‘Lucifer’:
Ellen, chapter one, PP, Why Was Sin Permitted ?:
“Taking advantage of the loving, loyal trust reposed in him by the holy beings under his command, he had so artfully instilled into their minds his own distrust and discontent that his agency was not discerned. Lucifer had presented the purposes of God in a false light–misconstruing and distorting them to excite dissent and dissatisfaction. He cunningly drew his hearers on to give utterance to their feelings; then these expressions were repeated by him when it would serve his purpose, as evidence that the angels were not fully in harmony with the government of God. While claiming for himself perfect loyalty to God, he urged that changes in the order and laws of heaven were necessary for the stability of the divine government. Thus while working to excite opposition to the law of God and to instill his own discontent into the minds of the angels under him, he was ostensibly seeking to remove dissatisfaction and to reconcile disaffected angels to the order of heaven. While secretly fomenting discord and rebellion, he with consummate craft caused it to appear as his sole purpose to promote loyalty and to preserve harmony and peace.” {PP 38.2}
This is why it is both so enlightening and disturbing to see both ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ SDAs now falling for the same ‘Luciferian’, duplicitous trickery. The conservatives, in lashing out against the ‘Omega’ as they see it, have left themselves wide open to embracing the over-reactive power grab now being made by the ‘GC’ in order to preserve the ‘purity’ of Adventism . . . while the liberals are just as able to point the ‘Omega’ finger at the ultra-conservative SDA over-reactions now robbing SDAs of that ‘freedom of conscience’ that alone enables us to properly ‘keep’ the law of God . . . a free-for-all brawl not unlike the situation in the days before the U.S. Civil War.
In those days, neither the South, nor the North, was getting poor from ‘King Cotton’. Yet they both dared to point the accusing finger at the other extremity, and this with the encouragement of the same, plotting, ‘Luciferian’ ‘secret societies’ that still exist in the United States and the rest of the World today. Especially wherever a hierarchy exists – healthcare, education, government . . . . (I’d say ‘religion’, too, but the SDA religion’s God-Family is ‘One’, while the SDA religion’s ‘family’ has degraded into a hierarchy of many levels, not ‘one’. I wouldn’t want to blame ‘God’ for SDA religious degradation.)
And, that same duplicitous, profit-at-any-cost-to-simple-decency spirit still thrived in the U.S., even as the Civil War was dying. Hundreds of released Union soldier prisoners of war, heading home from the South, died after the overcrowded Mississippi steamboat Sultana exploded in the aftermath of a cruel and greedy business deal, resulting in “. . . the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history.”:
So, I’ll walk home, thank-you ! The only safety I see in SDA circles these days is in solitude – just me, and my Creators – my ‘Authors’ – and Their government, ‘within me’:
“Neither shall they say, Lo here! (conservatives) or, lo there! (liberals) for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”
~ Jesus, found quoted in Luke 17:21
So is lack of attendance testimony to Satan’s victory or God’s failure, Dan?
Or is congregational attendance an indicator of something else in play today?
What if attendance is a human measure of our response to Jesus ‘new commandment’ that we love one another ‘as I have loved you.’? What if attendance is the measure of our sense of Jesus’s love for us, as abstract as that may feel. And if current attendance is a remnant of the obligated, as described by the Third of the Three Angels of Revelation 14, then the saints are elsewhere on Sabbath mornings.
So maybe the non-attenders are where to look for the saints of Revelation 14. They are, it seems, those who live beyond the call of obligation. And if so, we do well re-consider the Third Angel’s call as being directed to the attendees, our way if you will, rather than toward the non-attendee’s.
In any event, the Three Angels’ message as an evangelistic tool, at least as we have defined it, has obviously been fully amortized long ago here in the proverbial West, as confirmed by pathetic attendance and zero growth. And the canaries in Seventh-day Adventism’s evangelistic mine are dying worldwide now, as the collapse of denominational growth proves. The facts are blatant. In 2002, just 16 years ago, based on average church growth between 1980 and 2001, the denomination projected 52 million members by 2025, just six years from now. At current rates we are not likely to reach 25 million members without claiming eternal membership for those who die as members—which the official denominational statistician has publically acknowledged is already widely practiced culturally around the world.
Is our interpretation of the Three Angels’ message, rather than the scripture, that is at fault? Maybe, as Eve reported, we have too been beguiled. After all, until the Three Angels arrive, we are all prophesied to be collectively Babylonian according to the simple reading of the Second Angel’s testimony. Maybe we are merely awaiting the events of Revelation 14 and if so, this is what waiting feels and looks like corporately. What if taking heart is a personal congregational-level experience, rather than a corporate proclamation? For sure, it seems, Ichabod describes Babylon at the corporate level.
Meanwhile next month, our GC leadership is bearded up and dressing in mid-19th Century suits for the Annual Council event to be moved from Maryland to historic Battle Creek. We are corporately truly beguiled to believe there is any residual glory to be reclaimed in old Battle Creek, it would seem.