(I started this blog years ago to share about my plant based lifestyle, but as I lost interest in blogging I’ve deleted those posts and only left this ex-SDA one. This is why the domain is off topic and irrelevant now.)
This post has been a long time coming. I’ve gone back and forth about whether or not to share my thoughts and experience with leaving the Seventh-day Adventist church, but every so often an old friend will find out I’m not SDA anymore and things tend to become awkward or uncomfortable. My decision to leave was nuanced and based on years of consideration so I decided it’s better to explain my perspective for those who are interested.
I was raised in the Seventh-day Adventist church. My mother took my sister and I to church, and my father is an agnostic Jew. My mother wouldn’t allow us to go to the synagogue with my grandparents in my early childhood which was really hurtful for them. It caused a lot of fighting and conflict. After my parents divorced my father took us on his Friday nights for the Erev Shabbat service with my grandfather who was still living at the time. My grandparents were founding members of their congregation, and I wish I had been allowed to explore and enjoy my Jewish heritage more growing up. If I could go back in time and it were up to me, I would have had a bat mitzvah like my grandparents hoped for. I’ve since taken an adult Jewish culture and religion class at a local Reform synagogue to learn more about my heritage and help rectify the loss.
I attended Seventh-day Adventist schools from kindergarten to 8th grade. I enjoyed friendships with many of my schoolmates and had some great and caring teachers, but I did tend to get into some trouble with my propensity to question authority and disrupt class by talking too much. (I’ve since been diagnosed with ADHD as an adult so that helped give some context to the behavior challenges I had at times in school. I found the book Scattered Minds by Gabor Mate to be very helpful in understanding what causes ADHD and how to cope.)
In the summers I went to SDA summer camp at Mt. Aetna in Hagerstown, MD every year from 7 to 15 years old. Mt. Aetna was my favorite place on earth when I was growing up. I understand now that it was a respite and haven from conflict at home. I will always cherish those fun and carefree times in my childhood. I’m grateful I also had the opportunity to work there for one summer in college. My cabin was right next to the stream. I loved laying on the bridge, listening to the water trickle below and the leaves swaying in the breeze. It was so incredibly peaceful. I’ll share a couple of photos:
In addition to SDA school and summer camp, I attended SDA church weekly growing up. During my most formative years (12-18), I had a really wonderful youth leader. He was one of those people who the kids knew genuinely cared and didn’t judge us regardless of what challenges we were going through in our teen years. I understand now that he was one of the crucial adults in my upbringing who displayed unconditional kind regard for me. There were some mix ups with the youth leadership at that church at one point and a lot of the kids went to other churches for a more stable program. This person stepped up and committed to always being there, whether one kid came to church or 15. And he did it for years and years. I think he’s still teaching there actually. God bless you E, if you ever read this! I pray God rewards you richly for your dedication. Thank you for your kindness.
So I had some special experiences through the church youth program doing fun things like going camping, having game nights and lock-ins, etc. I developed a personal relationship with God early in my childhood, and I know that connection was built within the context of the SDA church. It certainly wasn’t facilitated by my parents. I think clinging to religion early on gave me the structure and sense of purpose and value I was lacking within my family environment. I thought of God as a loving parent.
I went to public high school after being accepted into a science and technology magnet program. I struggled with adjusting to not being with the same 25 kids in every class, year after year like in SDA school. I didn’t really know how to make friends while having seven different classes a day and different kids in each of those classes, only to have them change each semester or year. High school was a challenging and sometimes lonely experience for me. I was unhappy enough that I ended up skipping my senior year and graduating early to speed up the timeline for going away to college. It’s common for kids growing up in religious and/or family trauma to want to rush through childhood and be out on their own as soon as possible.
I decided to go to an SDA school for college and chose Andrews University, another special place for me. I loved my time there, other than the cold climate from being located in Michigan! My living situation was peaceful for the first time in my life, there were hot prepared meals always available, and it was easy for me to make other SDA friends. Andrews University has a campus church called Pioneer Memorial. The pastor there at the time was Dwight Nelson. You could sense that his spiritual life was authentic and his love for people was genuine. I had many great professors and deans, and the university was very active in outreach in a local impoverished city, Benton Harbor, hosting all sorts of programs for the residents there. Andrews University made a positive difference in Benton Harbor. I believe faith was being acted out there.
Then I came to the first point of conflict in my SDA faith. I came home from Andrews, high off of the experience I had there with the worship programs, service opportunities, and sense of community. I missed it all when I went home for the summer. I grew up just outside of Washington, DC in Maryland. I thought to myself that there was no reason similar outreach programs couldn’t be done to help impoverished residents in DC as were being done for those in Benton Harbor. I contacted an SDA church in DC to see if they had any community outreach programs. They didn’t, so I felt inspired to try to start one.
I had a friend from Andrews who lived in the same area. Together we partnered up with the church in DC. We decided to start the ministry by going door to door to the surrounding houses to offer to pray with people, modeled off of the way Andrews University Outreach was started in Benton Harbor. We made announcements at the DC church to invite members to join us. I made announcements at my childhood church as well. We were excited to get something started. I wanted to invite other SDA churches in the area to get involved too. The SDA world headquarters is in Silver Spring, MD so there are a lot of SDA churches in the area. I assembled information packets for around 30 nearby churches inviting them to join in for a widespread community outreach effort. And guess who paid for the postage for my packets? The youth leader from my childhood church. (Thank you again for being so supportive and encouraging!)
After all of our effort and preparation, we were really disappointed when not a single one of the 30 churches we contacted responded to the packets we sent out. At the DC host church, only one elder who I assume was assigned to supervise our activity there, participated in the outreach to their local neighbors. He didn’t participate for very long. I think once he felt confident we were representing his church in a respectable way, he left us to go out on our own. From my own home church, only my youth leader and eventually my mother volunteered with us. When we did go into the local neighborhood to offer to pray with people, many of the neighbors told us they’d lived next to that church for years and we were the first people to ever reach out to them.
Though disappointing, it was not surprising that there was essentially no interest in community outreach in any of those local SDA churches. The SDA denomination is declining in the United States for obvious reasons. You have to connect with new people to cultivate new membership. In my lived experience, most SDA church attendees are consumers who are only there for a sense of community or out of a sense of obligation, but not to contribute in any way.
It’s my understanding that there are 90 SDA churches within 30 miles of the world headquarters in Silver Spring, MD, but there isn’t a single coordinated community outreach effort that I ever found. Why not? There are so many suffering people in and around DC. The region has one of the worst crime rates in the United States. I believe the core issue is that most Seventh-day Adventists don’t care about evangelism, but isn’t evangelism the point of Christianity? Especially for a denomination that believes and teaches that their doctrines, like keeping the 7th day Sabbath, are salvational issues. It’s not hard to understand why such a high rate of young people are leaving the church when they try to reconcile what is being taught vs what is being acted out.
(DC row house)
I went back to Andrews University in the fall where things were great and moved on from the DC effort. The next summer I decided to work at Mt. Aetna Camp rather than live at home. When I left Andrews permanently, instead of living in Maryland I decided to move to Virginia to live closer to my then boyfriend (now husband). In the city where we lived there was only one SDA church. We tried it out, hoping to find something to get involved with like in college. Unfortunately there weren’t any outreach or young adult programs in place. The church had an older population, and it was very common for members of the congregation to sleep through the Divine service. I quickly began to feel like I was just going to church to “swipe my SDA card,” so to speak. I trailed off of going to church for the first time in my life. I felt guilty for not attending regularly but felt worse and more frustrated when I did go.
I want to take a moment to explain to anyone reading this who is unfamiliar with the SDA church that the SDA community is very cultural. They are very proud of their doctrinal beliefs and typically lead with those. I personally did some Bible work, going door to door offering Bible studies, in high school using the Amazing Facts study guides, which focus heavily on the SDA church’s interpretation of end time prophesy. I would arrange studies with people who were already Christian to argue with them about doctrine and try to convert them to Adventism. Looking back now, I’m really embarrassed that I ever used my time that way. It’s commonly taught and believed within the SDA church that only SDA Christians (those who practice SDA doctrines) will receive salvation. This belief is one of several that make other denominations or people in general believe the SDA church is culty, very similar to Mormans or Jehovah’s Witness. I always struggled with the teaching that someone had to be SDA, or even Christian, to avoid hell. My Jewish grandfather grew up in Salem, Massachusetts and was the victim of rampant, violent anti-Semitism. I could never believe that he would really go to hell for not accepting the religion of his abusers.
Most of the SDA churches I’ve attended in my life are very conservative. Jewelry is discouraged, sometimes makeup is too, and tattoos and piercings are often considered a salvational issue – like they teach that you’ll actually go to hell for getting piercings or tattoos. A lot of SDA pastors don’t even wear wedding rings. They believe it’s vain or materialistic. Few SDAs seem to have an issue with wearing expensive clothing, driving an expensive car, or living in a large house though. It’s always interesting to hear where the line of judgment begins and ends for different people. In most SDA churches I’ve attended women are encouraged to wear skirts or dresses to church rather than pants. Some SDA churches only allow the piano or organ to be played in church, while others think acoustic guitar is okay but nothing electric and definitely not drums. Some SDA congregations are more liberal and will have a full praise band, but they are uncommon in my experience.
The main practice that SDA’s are known for is keeping the Jewish, or 7th day Sabbath, hence the name Seventh-day Adventist. The way people choose to observe Sabbath varies from family to family. Some don’t believe in frequenting businesses on Sabbath because it requires other people to work, while others don’t mind. A family I grew up around wouldn’t allow their children to play on the playground on Sabbath. I’m not sure why. I wasn’t allowed to swim in a swimming pool on Sabbath “because it’s man made,” but if we were at the beach then it was fine to swim in the ocean because it’s a natural body of water. There are lots of peculiar rules and practices within the denomination.
Even though I’m not SDA anymore, I do still like to observe the Sabbath as a day of rest. Maybe I still have some fondness for it because of my Jewish heritage. I look forward to it coming and enjoy the break from work. My husband and I typically use it as designated family time. We spend time outdoors, catch up on rest, etc. Longevity studies have shown Sabbath-keepers are proven to live longer. Everyone needs rest. I enjoy Sabbath, but as with sex or anything else intended to be enjoyable, I think strict religious practices spoil it.
So as you may have gathered, there was a big difference between my experience at Andrews University and normal life at home. I think it’s pretty common across the board that young people aren’t really valued in SDA environments outside of school settings. The older, more conservative members create environments so strict, religious, and insular that they drive young people away. The last I read, somewhere around 70% of American SDA young adults leave the church. Something has to change if the denomination wants to continue to exist here.
To continue with my story, I really felt the void of not attending church regularly. I still wanted the sense of community and a place to volunteer. My boyfriend and I heard a buzz about a local non-denominational church so we decided to check it out. This was my first experience ever seeking a church home outside of the Adventist church. I was really nervous about it, a likely symptom of breaking away from a cultish religion. Being terrified to leave is quite a red flag. The non-denominational church met at a local high school. Dress was casual. The pastor preached in jeans. He explained it was because he didn’t want a person who had never been to church before to feel like they wouldn’t fit in if they didn’t have dress clothes. There was a greeter at the entrance with exposed tattoo sleeves up both of his arms. I’d never seen a church like it before. There was a full band for praise and worship, and the first message we heard there was about the importance of giving.
The pastor at the non denominational church preached a sermon on honoring God with our finances, and at the end of the service ushers passed out envelopes to every person in the audience. Each envelope had $10, $20, $50, $100, $500, or $1,000 cash in it! The pastor explained he didn’t want to just preach to us about the importance of giving. He wanted to show us what a blessing it is to be generous without having to use our own money. He challenged the audience to use the money we were given to go into the community and bless someone with it. Then we were supposed to report back to a blog they had set up to share our experiences. I was floored. Everything about this was mind-blowing to me.
For context, SDA churches are organized into conferences who report to divisions who I assume then are accountable to the world headquarters. Either way, the tithe money churches collect goes back to a conference while the offering stays in the local church. The SDA world church does support some great causes like disaster relief, an extensive network of hospitals, schools, etc. so I guess it’s up to personal opinion which system of money disbursement is better. I personally prefer the idea of an independent, non-denominational church that is able to keep it’s funds locally to use as they deem best, with a strong system of accountability in place of course. Otherwise you have the typical situation within SDA churches where they struggle to even pay their utilities because they’re sending the vast majority of their money back to the conference. It’s very common for SDA churches to post their budget deficit in the weekly bulletin. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that operated in a budget surplus.
So the non-denominational church used their offering for the month to give back to the congregation to bless others with. The extra giving made such an impact in the local community the local newspaper wrote about it. We continued to attend this church semi-regularly, but we always felt uneasy about it. I had a lot of backlash from my mother about “leaving the SDA church,” even though I explained the reasons behind it. She warned me I was in danger of hell because I’d turned away from Adventism. My boyfriend and I became engaged during this time period, and my mother and I didn’t speak for six months of my engagement because of fighting over this issue. I did almost all of my wedding planning and appointments alone. It was really hurtful at the time.
Not long after getting married my husband and I moved about 30 miles north to live closer to DC again. Our home buying process took longer than expected and we had to bounce around with family in MD while waiting to close on our house in Northern VA. While staying in MD we ran into some old SDA schoolmates of mine, and they invited me to their church. We visited and actually really liked it. The church was very friendly and caring, the atmosphere was pretty non-judgmental and open, and they were organizing events to connect with the local community. It was just what we’d been hoping for in an SDA church. We enjoyed it so much that we drove an hour each way (without traffic) after moving into our house to still attend. We commuted there for a year before the drive became too much for us. In the summer the traffic was so bad, some weeks it took us 3 hours to get home. We did make some really kind friends there, were very involved in volunteering, and were really sad to have to start over trying to find another church family. We didn’t have much of a choice though and decided to visit the closest SDA church to us.
After our experience with the non-denominational church and now the only healthy, active SDA church I’d ever been to outside of Andrews, we grew to look for two qualities in a church community: an outward focus and an environment where a new person could attend and feel comfortable. The church closest to where we lived did not have those qualities. They didn’t really have outreach opportunities at all. We stayed for a potluck lunch one week and a member told us that while the sermons were always boring, there were some nice people to make friends with so they kept going. I don’t want to judge anyone who is trying to serve God in their career as a pastor. I will say though that it isn’t hard to tell the difference between a message that inspires people to action and growth in their lives versus one that may have filtered it’s way back into the sermon circuit this year. At the SDA church closest to our home, we actually heard a particular sermon once right after we moved there and then coincidentally heard it preached again when we visited them about a year later to give them another try. I am being 100% honest.
(Me hearing the same sermon again before pulling a sneak out move.)
We tried one last SDA church that was about 40 minutes away from us in VA and found they had some inspiring sermons and a friendly atmosphere. There still weren’t really any outreach opportunities in place and nothing going on for our age group, but we liked the pastor and decided to try to make it work. We filled out connection cards several times requesting information on opportunities to serve at the church and were never contacted so we approached the pastor for guidance. He connected us with another young couple who were re-launching the church’s monthly potluck lunch that had fizzled out in previous years. We started volunteering with them but wanted to have more of a sense of community, so we got the idea to launch a group for post collegiate young adults.
To make this very long story a little bit shorter, I’ll say in just a few words that no one after my husband and I committed to help with the potlucks. We and the leading couple weren’t enough to organize, serve, and clean up lunch for 70+ people. Not only did no one else commit to helping, but previous potluck team volunteers would come behind us and “fix” things when we weren’t looking. They didn’t like the way we arranged the tables, or the napkins, or the dishes on the tables, etc. They wouldn’t help on a volunteer rotation, but they would correct the “wrong” way we were doing things behind our backs. It was almost comical.
As far as the young adult group went, no one expressed interest in it so I just cancelled the event I had organized. So, discouraged in serving within the church, with no outreach opportunities in place, and with no interest from others in developing a sense of community for our age group, one final thing solidified our decision to leave after eight months of trying to make that church our home. Though we did respect the pastor and his family, the last sermon series we attended was on the “chiastic” structure of the book of Ruth. For those unfamiliar, a chiasm is a form of poetry. The book of Ruth is written in a poetic format, and there was a *four* week sermon series during the main church service analyzing that structure. I can understand doing this as a small group study for Biblical scholars, but it was for the main church service for four weeks. My husband and I asked each other if there was any way we could bring a person who had never been to church before and have them find value in a sermon like that, and our honest answer was no.
We really did try to stick it out with the SDA church from a place of familiarity and religious shame, not really even evaluating issues we might have had with doctrine. It was a big decision to leave after being told continuously we would go to hell for it. After being separated from the religion for some time now, there are many doctrinal issues that affirmed our decision to leave. The bottom line for us is that we only want to be a part of a spiritual community that makes the world a better place. After deciding to leave that SDA church, we visited another non-denominational church near our house. It felt just like the first non-denominational church we had attended. This one even had a Saturday service so we could still attend church on Sabbath. We really enjoyed it. The pastors there were actually friends with the pastor from the first non-denominational church, interestingly. We jumped on board with volunteering, got involved in small groups for a sense of community, and overall felt like our void had been filled.
There were so many outreach opportunities at the new church you couldn’t possibly do them all – a backpack drive for low income students, a food drive for the local food bank, a mobile meal packing event with an organization called Feed My Starving Children that sends meals to food insecure children all over the world, etc. We joined a team to help raise funds for a well in Uganda. The church had a Celebrate Recovery program for people struggling with addiction. Only in non-denominational churches had I ever heard of providing resources for people struggling with addiction. You mean to tell me people in church have real problems, and the church can have supportive resources in place to actually help them? This was mind blowing to me at the time. There was so much growth in that church they were struggling to keep up with it. That’s what we wanted to be a part of. We wanted to make a positive difference.
(Photo of an FMSC mobile meal packing event)
We recently moved from Virginia to Texas for warm weather and some healthy distance from family. We were sad to leave our church in VA. We really loved it. Just for old time’s sake we tried a local SDA church here, and this time we felt like the outsiders. People were kind enough, but it was a traditional SDA church as described above. If Pioneer Memorial Church (the Andrews University campus church) was located where I live, I may never have thought of leaving the SDA denomination. People usually have to have a good reason to question and then uproot themselves from the belief system they were raised in.
I do still appreciate Pastor Dwight’s ministry. I actually visited a friend at Andrews in April and was so pleased to hear him preach a sermon about some current issues the campus is going through regarding their homosexual student population feeling unwelcome and unsupported. I don’t want to go too much into it, but the basic message of the sermon was, you who are without “sin” can cast the first stone. Christians would benefit so much from focusing on their own personal growth and spiritual development rather than obsessing over the personal lives of other people. The Bible says the world will recognize authentic Christians by their love for people, not their doctrine, judgment or shaming. If there is no love, there is no authentic spiritual experience. Thanks for your time in reading this.
*Update: After approximately 85% of white Evangelical Christians voted for Trump, I no longer feel comfortable associating with organized Christianity. If that’s what Christian values are, the religion is certainly not for me. I am most at home now at my local Unitarian Universalist congregation. I feel they best align with my current values and beliefs while providing a safe spiritual community to connect with.
On my journey of spiritual exploration, I read a book called Journey of Souls by Dr. Michael Newton. It answered all of my big questions about life, death, and spirituality in a way that gives me peace, and I highly recommend it. I also highly recommend the book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker for anyone who is trying to heal from ongoing religious or family trauma. I know it’s common in the SDA church to discourage the study of psychology, but healing resources do exist. If no one has told you before that healing is possible and you can be free, please let me be the first. We are meant to be loved for who we are, not for what we do to try to prove our goodness or worth to others, or for what religion we practice.
An Ex Seventh-day Adventist 