Adventists Question My Faith

LIVING BY THE SPIRIT WITH PHILEMON OMWEGA ARONI | Proclamation! Contributor |

On Friday, August 17, at 4 o’clock I received a team of three Seventh-day Adventist pastors in my house. According to their leader, the local Adventist church pastor, they had paid me a courtesy call to ask me to reconsider my decision to leave the Seventh-day Adventist Church and to go back. After an hour’s discussion in which they fielded questions to me, one of them, a doctor of divinity from Andrews University, held them back with the following remark: “This gentleman has both the logic and the Scriptures in his grasp; and like Paul, his arguments are well-grounded. All we can do is to give him time to see if it is God who called him to his mission.” With this remark they ended their brief encounter with me and rushed back to the local church to welcome the Sabbath.

What I wonder is how they are going to try to ascertain that indeed it is God who called me!

A week before this encounter, I had visited an old friend, a Seventh-day Adventist pastor who has been living in America for about 6 years until three weeks ago when he came back to Kenya. While he was in the USA, I had informed him that I had left Adventism, so he was eager to meet me for an explanation as to why I left. Because he had been very instrumental in my enrolling in college for ministerial training, I felt I owed him an explanation. Five minutes into our discussion he made the following remark: “Your departure from Adventism is not a new thing. Many have left, but they either become failures in life or they rejoin the church with lots of regrets.” 

Interestingly, he was not the first one to tell me these things. The strange thing to me is that every Adventist, both clergy and ordinary members, who encounter a person who has left Adventism has the same reaction.

Having been an Adventist myself for more than 27 years, I know very well where their reaction is based: it is based on the Adventist misguided and ill-advised notion of REMNANCY. Adventists are steeped deeply in the belief that they are the only true church of God on earth. They are made to believe that leaving the Seventh-day Adventist church is equivalent to rebelling against God and forfeiting eternal life altogether. What I don’t understand is why even those who hold very big academic titles in Adventism don’t seem to be capable of seeing through this theological deception.

For both the team that visited me in my house and my good friend whom I visited in his house, my answer is very simple: the proof of my divine call does not lie in an illustrious, vibrant life or ministry. If it did, I should already be enrolled in the local Adventist church’s baptismal class by now because I am simply struggling in both ministry and life. I have no monthly salary, no medical coverage, and no education allowance for my kids or car loan facilities as do my friends in Adventism. But I have what the absence of all the above facilities cannot take away from me: I have the assurance of eternal life and the peace which comes from knowing that God is my Father now, through Jesus Christ, my Savior. This confidence 27 years of Seventh-day Adventism could not give me. The fear I grew up knowing in Adventism of going through the investigative judgment in which I would face an all-knowing God with all my history before me was crippling. But when I met Christ while undergoing training for ministry, 27 years of fear and a crushing burden of history were all lifted from my shoulders, and I was set free. I am now so free and rejoicing daily in the love of God. I cannot exchange my present joy and peace with any of the above delicacies of Seventh-day Adventism. This is where my divine call is based, and it is where it can be proved by any and all doubting Thomases. †

---

Philemon Aroni and his wife Margaret live in Nyanza, Kenya, with their daughters Esther and Sarah. He enrolled in Bugema Adventist University in Uganda in 2000 to train as a pastor. Following his graduation in 2003, however, he left Adventism because he discovered the problems with the denomination’s “distinctive” doctrines and its faulty hermeneutics. Today he directs One Flock Ministries, Kenya, under the leadership of Pastor Greg Taylor. [2007]

—Republished from Proclamation!, September/October, 2007.