Jethro's Story: Jesus Is All That Matters

Labels are great for putting people into slots we can figure out. So, if you were going to label me I suppose you would have called me a “cultural Adventist.” I attended Pacific Union College and lived in the dorm. I went to chapel because I had to and to church because my friends were there. I used to smirk to myself when one of my buds would stand up at vespers and talk about faith. Back at the dorm, the only faith I saw him exercise was that the RA wouldn’t walk thru the door when we were drinking. Does that surprise you? Yeah, there is a lot of alcohol flowing in the rooms of Newton Hall. After all, we were in the heart of wine-country! Not something that is supposed to be revealed.

Most of our parents spent lots of money to send us to this “Christian college.” What I saw, however, was that they were really perpetuating a culture – their culture. Community had become the prize to guard and protect at any cost.

There was a fairly complex constellation of norms that composed our Seventh-day Adventist cult(ure)-following.  It was a given that certain mores were sacrosanct and untouchable. Other areas of conduct could be stretched to infinite proportions without calling into question our “belonging” in the group. I used to puzzle over those “sacred” cows: the Sabbath, the state of the dead, the privileged status of “The Church.” I knew that the official rules excluded alcohol, drugs, sex outside marriage, dancing, card-playing, theater-attendance, meat,  -  and required belief in Ellen White as prophet, belief in the investigative judgment, and the red books. But these had become soft rules whose boundaries were moved incessantly by the tides that flowed to varying marks from decade to decade. If you didn’t smack anyone in the face with your habits you could ignore most of the rules without too much boat-rocking. As long as you didn’t “leave the church” or “give up the Sabbath” you were a card-toting member for life.

By the time I hit college it was no longer politically correct to admit dependence on Ellen White for doctrinal derivation. My parents never read to us from her writings and our teachers always professed to refer only to the Bible when presenting religious instruction.  There was a disconnect between what we had come to believe and the origins from which those foundations sprang.  I felt that I didn’t know anything about Ellen White or the history of Adventism. Little did I know that the oddities of Adventist-past had all been inculcated into my beliefs without my even know where they had come from.  More disturbing, I thought that I had based whatever flimsy beliefs I did manage to hold onto firmly on the Bible.

After college I went on to medical school at Loma Linda University and encountered an SDA version of the emergent church movement. I will have to admit that many of us were deeply disturbed at first by the views of the religion department professors. One of the faculty members believes that God is not omniscient and really doesn’t know the future. He predicts it from His wealth of data from the past. He also teaches that the more sentient a creature, the more influence God can bring to bear on its choices. Humanity has the greatest vulnerability to His will while the weather or a rock has little to none.  One of the previous heads of the religion department at the local SDA college did not believe that Jesus was divine, nor that He was resurrected.

The left-over teachings from the Maxwellian era paved the way for the current slide into branch of emergent teaching that accepts every religion as equal. The embarrassment from the arrogance of the SDA remnant mentality became the seminal influence in maintaining the legitimacy of Adventism as a voice among many in the human dialogue. We have a place and a message (primarily the Sabbath rest) to share with others. Therefore, there is no reason to leave our community, since community is the highest good. Because all good things come from God (or so the theory goes) then we must learn from the good contained in Hinduism. Therefore, the sport’s center at Loma Linda University (the Drayson Center) offers classes on Yoga. We must also embrace the contribution to world peace offered by Buddhist meditation; therefore many participate in meditation for its own sake without having a focus on Jesus.

During a crisis in my life I realized that I had nothing whatsoever to hold onto. The intellectual machinations I had been given offered little comfort when my world came crashing down. It was then that God sent some Christians from a local Bible-based, Spirit-filled church in to deliver me from my empty religion.  It sent shock-waves thru my soul. My intellectual reconstructions of truth all unraveled, and I found myself bowing at the foot of the cross, weeping in heart-tearing brokenness. There was a cross; there IS a Savior who is the ONLY name, the only Way. He began to show Himself to me in living color. Jesus is all that matters. Community is a secondary blessing, not a primary goal to be sought after above the person of Jesus. I still appreciate the privileges of my background and many of the principles that it instilled in my value structure, but now, the gospel of Jesus Christ is the only light that guides my days and my nights. I walked – ran - toward Him and that journey led me away from the empty trappings of an empty community into the solid Truth whose glory stands alone: Jesus.