HOME / PROCLAMATION! MAGAZINE / 2014 / SPRING / FORMER ADVENTIST CONFERENCE
The ninth annual Former Adventist Fellowship weekend conference at Trinity Church in Redlands, California, convened on Valentine’s Day with a welcome from Trinity’s pastor of community Steve Springsted and worship led by Jonathan Winn with Roy Tinker. The opening talk by keynote speaker Gary Inrig was entitled “The Promise of the New Covenant” and showed how, through Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, God progressively revealed that He would eventually establish a new, unconditional covenant that would supersede the Mosaic covenant. It would involve a suffering Servant, and it would include gentiles.
The next three of Gary’s sessions were entitled “The Glory of the New Covenant”, “The Paradox of the New Covenant”, and “The Center of the New Covenant”. His teaching was profound and powerful as he opened Scripture and shared how the reality of the New Covenant was comforting and strengthening him right then as he walked through his daughter’s suffering from glioblastoma multiform, a particularly aggressive brain tumor.
New speaker from CFAR
Tim Martin from The Centers For Apologetics Research (CFAR) joined our conference for the first time this year. He delivered the Friday night talk, “Adventism: Roots, Shoots, and Those In Cahoots”, at our open-to-the-public session. He shared his research of the adventist Millerite movement and showed how it branched into two main divisions: the Sunday and the Sabbatarian branches. Each of these two divisions spawned many shoots and offshoots. The largest Sunday shoot is the Jehovah’s Witness organization, and the largest Sabbatarian shoot is the Seventh-day Adventist organization. Many smaller offshoots have proliferated over the past 150-plus years, but in spite of their differences, all of these groups, both Sunday-keeping and Sabbatarian, share the same roots and the focus on Jesus’ second coming.
Central to all of these, Tim said, is their common revised definition of the gospel: “The Lord is coming; pack your bags!” Additionally, common throughout both the Sunday and Sabbatarian shoots are the beliefs in conditional immortality, no hell, a strong Arian or semi-Arian tendency, and a love of conferences and the publishing of books and periodicals, among other things. All of these groups, Tim clarified, are correctly classified as “adventists” because they all share the Millerite root and continue to have an eschatological focus that causes their members to “get ready” and even, in some cases, to set new dates for Christ’s return.
Tim also gave the Saturday morning devotional message as well as a breakout session entitled “The Word-Faith Movement”. This session was particularly powerful and clarifying as he explained that this movement depends on its definition of “faith”. While most evangelical Christians understand “faith” to be about confidence in God, the often-unspoken but clear meaning of “faith” within the Word-Faith movement has three elements. First, one must believe in spite of the evidence (for example: believe you’re healed in spite of the evidence, or believe you’re a millionaire in spite of the evidence). Second, belief plus words equals power to produce results. In other words, spiritual power is released in words. Joyce Meyer, for example, says that “Words are containers for power.” The belief of this movement is that our prayers give God permission to exercise His power in given situations.
Finally, in this movement “faith” is sometimes called “positive confession” or “the power of the tongue (or of words)”. The definition of “faith”, therefore, is what drives and sustains this movement. If this definition is wrong, however, the movement completely fails.
The principle that drives this movement is the same as “the law of attraction” behind the popular 2006 book called The Secret by Rhonda Byrne and popularized by Oprah Winfrey. This principle of “positive thinking” is pagan; it is the same as magic.
More gospel-grounding
Dale Ratzlaff presented a general session examining the Messianic Hebrew Roots movement as contrasted with the finished work of the new covenant. Colleen Tinker talked about how to become anchored to truth through contextual, inductive Bible study in order to protect ourselves from subtle pulls toward gospel deviations as we orient ourselves in the sometimes confusing sea of evangelical Christianity after we leave Adventism. Carolyn Macomber encouraged us through the story of Daniel and his three friends to trust God. His faithfulness and His promises fulfilled in Jesus protect us as we walk away from the Adventism that used to be all we knew and choose to follow Him.
Paul Carden, executive director of CFAR, presented a short talk entitled “Visions and Vanity” at the Friday evening meeting. He compared the visionary revelation of Hiram Edson and the supposed movement of Christ into the Most Holy Place after Jesus failed to come on October 22, 1844, with the 1913 vision of Pentecostal John Schaepe that revealed to him that the true baptism was in the name of Christ only, not in the names of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This revelation caught the attention of Australian Pentecostal minister Frank Ewart who championed this idea—known as “Jesus Only” or the “Oneness” doctrine, and he launched the “Oneness Pentecostal” movement that tore the Assemblies of God apart. Paul stressed that we are to test the spirits, never believing simply because someone claims their ideas are revealed directly from God.
Breakout sessions during the weekend were conducted by Dale Ratzlaff, Jim Valentine, Martin Carey, and Tim Martin. Lisa Winn, Mary Seeley Stockler, and Charles Cochran shared their faith stories, and Carel and Nicole Stevenson oversaw time for conversation and debriefing with the teens who attended.
Jon Rittenhouse spoke about our New Covenant security on Saturday afternoon before we enjoyed a meal of tri-tip catered by local steakhouse Mill Creek Cattle Company. Finally, Gary led us in communion, and we closed the last day of meetings with a time of praising God for His mercy and faithfulness.
Attendees hailed from Ontario and Manitoba, Canada, and from Florida, Ohio, Arkansas, Kentucky, Texas, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and California.
Comments from attendees included, “I have been fed; I will attend again.” “I am SO happy to be here; I have so much to learn.” “Thank you for the songs; they ministered to me.” “I have felt alone; it’s wonderful to be with others who understand.”
We are grateful to Trinity Church for hosting the conference, and we extend thanks to Pastor Steve Springsted and to his assistant Ann Mixon for their help with hospitality and facilities. We also thank the volunteers who prepared and served us snacks and meals throughout the weekend under the leadership of LynnRae and Doug Dupree and Thais Kanold. Many thanks also to Kit Satre for providing the clubhouse at her housing complex for our Sunday lunch. We are grateful to Cheryl Granger for centerpieces and decorations, to Paul Mirra for doing the lighting, and to Nathanael Tinker for designing the worship and announcement slides. Finally, we thank our entire local FAF group for helping to set up, organize, transport, prepare, and pray for every detail of the weekend.
We praise God for a powerful, worshipful weekend filled with truth from His word and encouragement from one another. †
Copyright 2014 Life Assurance Ministries, Inc., Camp Verde, Arizona, USA. All rights reserved. Revised May 6, 2014. Contact email: proclamation@gmail.com
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VOLUME 15, ISSUE 1
