At the Caribou Campmeeting in Maine, Conrad Vine gave four presentations on liberty and freedom of conscience.
In one of his presentations, he outlined the way that the General Conference sided with the government (Biden) mandates during Covid. This move hurt a lot of Seventh-day Adventist people who chose natural immunity over the jab. These individuals were fired or forced to resign their jobs because of a 2015 ADCOM Statement which said (claiming to speak for all church members) that Seventh-day Adventists were in agreement with vaccines.
Conrad cited an individual case from Australia where a healthy young man was forced to take the jab or lose his job. He was paralyzed by the Covid vaccine. Vine suggested that IF something like what happened with Covid were to happen again, Adventists had four options to choose from.
Do nothing
Pray for the leaders
If the GC overrides the conscience of members and supports autocratic mandates again, establish a parachurch movement to channel tithe to faithful conferences.
During the final crisis of conscience, we will be in house (or underground) churches.
The Michigan Conference just decided to prohibit Vine from speaking in their pulpits. Here’s the letter, from Jim Micheff:
Observations
If it appears that these conference entities all learned conflict management from the same source, it’s because they did. They seem to prefer marginalization over honest dialogue and solutions.
We are in a weird time where individuals in our universities and progressive pulpits around the western world can promote LGBTQ, DEI, CRT, BLM, and WO rebellion freely, and nothing is done about it. You can hold almost any unorthodox position. But if one person suggests a parachurch or home church solution if the GC were to align with future hostile government mandates, swift justice must be brought to bear on the scoundrel (1 Timothy 6:10).
In the last ten days, there have been at least 43 videos on YouTube discussing Conrad Vine’s presentation and the efforts of a few Adventist entities to cancel him. There have been 700,000 hits on these YouTube videos alone, and they have been supportive of Conrad Vine at a rate of 90%. That is parsecs larger than 25,000 SDA people who signed a petition requesting that the GC correct the exclusionary 2015 Vax Statement. This thing is not going away, in fact it is gaining tremendous momentum.
This issue could have been ameliorated by a demonstration of compassion or an apology from the GC towards people who were hurt by their exclusionary 2015 Vax Statement (that was weaponized against them in 2021) and subsequent pro-mandate 2021 Affirmation Statement.
Out of all the events which have transpired over this Covid kerfuffle (and the GC’s mishandling of it) the one thing that has appalled me the most, is the absolute lack of compassion from the GC towards those whose lives were wounded by them.
And it is appalling.
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Those with questions or concerns can contact Jim Micheff at jmicheff@misda.org.
