Thank You For the Podcast—You GET IT!
Guys. I tune in all the time and have probably for the last year or so. I am sort of glad that I am new to the channel “Former Adventist” because I have so much to catch up on, and you guys just GET IT.
I am in my 30s and became an Adventist after growing up evangelical, meeting a friend in high school who was/is a Seventh-day Adventist. I thought he was strange in that he didn’t have pepperoni pizza, and we were heavily involved with music as teenagers, but he could never join us for shows or studio work Friday nights—which was prime time for music.
So I would sort-of prod him here and there, and we’d have spirited debates a lot. To my dismay, I just didn’t have enough theological background or debate experience to hold my own like I wanted to. As you know, (and now I know too), Adventists are primed from childhood to debate things like the Sabbath doctrine and to uphold Ellen White and the “most holy place” doctrine, and so forth. I was in over my head at the time and just thought, man, if I am so wrong about this, what else could I be wrong about?
I started sneaking to church with my friend who would regularly go to the Adventist church with his family on Saturdays and also to Friday night vespers. I told my mom that I was hanging with my friend, which was sort-of true. But I was going truly to experience their church.
I started sneaking to church with my friend who would regularly go to the Adventist church with his family on Saturdays and also to Friday night vespers. I told my mom that I was hanging with my friend, which was sort-of true. But I was going truly to experience their church.
So look— I came in through their Daniel and Revelation seminar. So I came in HOT. I received binders and charts and books, and I dived into them. I am naturally studious and was overwhelmed with how much I didn’t know. I was about 16 at the time.
I snuck my Revelation seminar binder, my new hymnal to learn all the a capella songs I never sang before, my Desire of Ages (which I read within the first week of receiving it) and my new Great Controversy book— as well as my Doug bachelor DVD (haha)—in my nylon book bag. My mom found it cleaning my room, and I got in so much trouble, I’ll never forget.
She told me Adventism was a cult and then alerted my Sunday church. They were all praying for me, but I knew they didn’t really care for me much. They thought I was just a rebellious teenager—which in part, may have had something to do with my energetic conversion. But I was curious. I really wanted to learn about the Bible, and they (the Adventists) seemed to have it all figured out.
My Sunday pastor made me sort of a spectacle, which I didn’t appreciate. People were whispering about me there. How I had been given over to Satan—and all that. You know how it can be—haha. The pastor even gave me the Kingdom of the Cults book to read and started preaching on Adventism specifically, emphasizing that we aren’t under the law.
I was really turned off by that. I felt like everyone knew my business and didn’t speak to me about it personally, and it felt very showy—you know. So, to fast forward, my mother and sole caretaker passed away when I was 17, about a year later. I had been learning about soul sleep, and it eased my mind during a very difficult time. To this day, I don’t think I ever properly grieved my mother. Anyway.
I left my home town at age 17, moved to another city where I live now, and actually gravitated to the Adventist church like never before. I was reading a bunch of books and even connected with the local Adventist church where I later got baptized at age 19.
I brought my wife into the church which I considered my crowning achievement, if you can call it that. She was from the Sunday church I sort of got kicked out of years before. We met at age 5, and we grew up there. We started dating at 14 and became engaged by 21, but as you know, she had to become an Adventist first. So I made converting her my mission.
I would try to discourage her from jewelry, to “improve” her dressing style, and really projected my own insecurities onto her through the lens of “Jesus wants it”. She later stated she even felt like she stood out in the church because other girls were fully covered head to toe in long dresses, no make up, hair natural, the whole nine yards.
This lifestyle was very foreign to her and to me, but she adapted, 100% for me. I hate that I took so much away from her in that time and in the years to come.
She later got baptized, and we got married as Adventists. We became very instrumental in the church. She and I did the kids ‘stories; she would do Vacation Bible School stuff; I would teach the kids’ baptism classes. I would preach, she would stay in the mothers’ room with our babies at the time. It was the perfect Adventist life.
Unfortunately I suppose, having kids really made us re-evaluate our lives. We started really wondering what it was that we were teaching our daughters and what kind of people we wanted them to become. I know that you guys are still Christians but not Adventists. Our deconstruction lead us to the total opposite end where we don’t hold to any particular faith. We are open to a god if a god wants to reveal himself to us, but we have deconstructed so much, we aren’t even positive there is a god anymore.
I know to this end, you (reading) and I have gone different paths, but it is healing in a sense to see how other people have been affected by Adventism and how it can even damage the essence of your connection with God to begin with.
My wife and I were very busy in our church when we were growing up. My mother even worked for our Sunday church as the clerk/cleaner and made sure all the needs were tended to. She was also a singer on the praise team, and I played drums. We were there all the time. For practice, for prayer service, Bible study, women’s meetings, VBS, Sunday after Sunday. Morning service and evening service.
I took that involvement with me to my Adventist experience. I became very involved. My whole life was being an Adventist. I didn’t go to college because I was so sure Jesus would come before I would become anything. I was 18 when I made that decision. I’m in my 30s now.
We have never voted for an election because we were taught Jesus doesn’t want us involved with politics. I quoted Ellen White with the best of them. I had the Daniel statue charts. I had a History of Redemption Bible with eight Adventist books bound at the back after the 66 book canon and even tried signing up for classes at an Adventist university. I was denied because of money— haha. But I was serious.
So hearing your podcast discussions really make me feel heard and understood. Maybe I’m still healing. Maybe things will change someday, and I don’t know yet if or how they will. But I know enough to know that a lot can change you— quickly.
I still have fears sometimes, you know? Like any talk of AI or wars make me wonder if this is when a Sunday law comes in. I wonder if probation is closed, if there is even such a thing. I wonder if I am doing a disservice to my children. I wonder if I was made to bring my wife to the truth and lead her in and out.
But currently I am unbothered by those things. Currently I am doing my best for my wife and family and even trying to begin college in my 30s—haha. What a missed opportunity, I tell you. I can’t let the fears and what-ifs dictate my life like they once did because more than ten years passed, and I don’t have anything to show for them.
I know you can relate. Anyway. Thanks for reading. Thanks for the podcast. I am always tuning in, and though our outcomes are different, I think we are alike in that we are both former Adventists. Thank you for making that bridge where I feel seen and can see others that have experienced what I have.
—VIA EMAIL
Response:
Thank you so much for writing. I feel for you; I understand the disillusionment, the anger and regret, the shame and fear, the haunting questions without clear answers, the doubts. I understand your going forward to take hold of what you rejected because the cult convinced you there was no point to your life besides doing what it told you to do.
Our ministry founder Dale Ratzlaff used to say that Adventism has atheism built into its doctrinal structure; Adventists are taught to believe that Adventism is the only true church—but if Adventism proves to be wrong, the person is left believing that there is no understanding of God that is really true. They have been taught that Adventism is the only religion that adheres to Scripture and explains the God of Scripture—but when that understanding of God fails, people are left believing they can’t go to any other source or church to learn about God because those other sources are already discredited in their minds. The “god” they believed in failed them—there is no other method to know God that they can trust.
Adventism has betrayed the trust of so many of its members. When people like you and me finally realize that Adventism is a deception, the betrayal is beyond words. It shatters one’s entire worldview and obscures the way forward.
I am so glad.that you are listening to the podcast. There really is a way to unpack the twisted worldview that we had, and there really is a way to understand the underlying agenda and methods of indoctrination that we experienced. I want to say this: Adventism is a counterfeit of Christianity. It is hard at first to understand how God might have allowed us to be deceived into such a perfect counterfeit of reality. I have had to deal with this question. How could God—if there is a God—have allowed us to be so twisted and deceived? How could He have let us go so far into such darkness?
This is what I have learned—and continue to understand at deeper levels. I did not know as an Adventist (I was born into it) that all humanity is born dead in sin, unable to please or even to seek God on our own. I simply didn’t know that fact. I was taught that I had the capacity to please God if I would just buckle down and grit my teeth and OBEY! Yet you know the outcome of that: obedience never seemed to bring me closer to God—and I couldn’t consistently obey, no matter how hard I tried. My thoughts and my emotions would rebel internally, and I would try and pray to have a good attitude and to be obedient. It was a helpless and hopeless pursuit, and I became more and more compulsive, frantic, worried, and self-critical.
What I realize now is that I was, as Paul so well explains in Ephesians 2:1–3, literally spiritually dead by nature. How COULD I please God?! You and I and every other human are in the same boat: we are born dead spiritually. Because we had no spiritual discernment but because we had very real needs to be accepted and to belong to a group that approved of us and promised us a good life, we were deceived by a very good deception. We thought we believed the Bible. We thought we knew what God wanted, but we were taught by false teachers—and we did not have the spiritual discernment to understand that we were misled.
And here is where God really reveals Himself. He knew us and saw us. He saw you stuck in the hamster wheel of Adventism that kept you compulsively trying to be good, to do right, to raise your girls right, to get your wife to be good and right. He saw you, and He saw your wife and girls—and He helped you see that Adventism was wrong. You didn’t just come up with this realization on your own; look how many millions of Adventists remain Adventist all their lives, blindly defending their worldview and their prophetess and their health message. But the Lord is the One who opened your eyes to see that what you were believing was inconsistent and wrong.
I believe that God is not done revealing Himself to you. He takes responsibility for us, and He takes responsibility for revealing Himself to humanity. I just want to reassure you that God actually IS real, and He is the reason you are out of Adventism. He has also given us something that is unique in the world: the Bible. It is the one tangible revelation of God’s will that is consistent over millennia and never changes. Evil organizations like Adventism have taken God’s revelation of Himself and have extracted passages from here and there, juxtaposing texts and words in ways the Bible does not juxtapose them—and they create new and false doctrines while claiming to get their ideas from God.
I cannot convince you to believe Scripture, but because I have walked this road out of Adventism and understand the incredible anger and disillusionment and loss of leaving that religion, I can say this: the ONE thing that has slowly but surely and consistently rewired my brain and has given me an understanding of the world around me is persistently studying the Bible in context. Hebrews 4:12, 13 states that God’s word is living and active, and I cannot explain HOW this is true except that it is a gift from God. It truly is alive, and it literally changes our perspective, rewiring our worldview and planting us in truth and reality.
I believe that part of God’s rescue of you has been directing you to the podcast so that you can KNOW you are not alone, you are not crazy, and Adventism has done “this” to millions of others as well. He has led you to a place where you can hear reality compared to what we believed inside the web of Adventism.
I want to give you a suggestion based on my own experience of being completely shaped by the Adventist worldview and coming to know that it is false. Here’s my “assignment” to you. Get a notebook, and begin, literally, to copy the book of John into that notebook. Go slowly; do a few verses a day, and notice the details: verb tenses, prepositions, context, who’s speaking to whom—and literally write the words of Scripture into that notebook. Write on one side of the page, and on the opposite page jot down observations, questions, or notes to yourself as you read. Sometimes you might even want to look up a marginal reference to a word or phrase (if you have those in your Bible), but even this isn’t necessary unless you want to look and compare. Primarily just slowly copy the words and ask the Lord to teach you what He knows He wants you to understand. Allow the words to say exactly what they say. Don’t try to explain them away or make metaphors of them. Read the Bible using the normal rules of grammar, vocabulary, and context—just like a normal book. It is not a puzzle to figure out; it is a book that says what God intends it to say. Sometimes a passage may seem hard to understand; when that happens, ask God to show you what is real and true—but know that the Bible means what it says, and you can trust the words. As you finish copying one book, move on to another: Galatians, Hebrews, Romans, etc.
Also, I suggest that you and your wife begin reading together every day from the Bible. You don’t have to take a long time; perhaps just read a chapter at a time and talk about it, going through one book at a time. Try reading through Galatians together, or Ephesians, or Colossians, or Hebrews. I believe that reading together will help you both to discover together what God wants you to know, and it will bond you in a profound way.
I also want to invite the two of you to join us, if you can, for our weekly FAF Bible study at 7:00 PM Pacific Time. If you wish to join, just write to this address and request a Zoom link.
Please feel free to email anytime I thank God that He has guided you out of that Adventist cult, and I pray that He will show you who He is and bring you into the astonishing fellowship of knowing Jesus as your true Savior. †
Write to: LifeAssuranceMinistries@gmail.com
- Adventists Don’t Need a Prophet (Q4 L1) - September 24, 2026
- We Got Mail - September 24, 2026
- False Trinity of Adventism (Q3 L13) - September 17, 2026