The Michigan Conference committee has asked Jay Gallimore to come out of retirement and be interim pastor at Village Church. He has accepted the position, as the letter below indicates.
Observations & Commentary
The Michigan Conference has experienced a 3+million dollar shortfall since 2024, and their tithe receipts continue to drop. These numbers are available on the NAD website.
In the aftermath of banning Conrad Vine, and firing Ron Kelly as senior pastor of the Village Church, the Michigan Conference has appointed two successive interim pastors to ‘man the ship’ at Village: Taariq Patel and Daniel Gordon. Apparently neither one was a good fit in this situation, and have moved on.
In a situation where constituent trust has been deeply damaged (like what has happened in MISDA) it takes time to rebuild. It appears that asking the previous conference president to come in and help fix what was broken is an effort to start rebuilding trust. I’m fairly certain that Jay Gallimore would not have handled the situation in Michigan like the current administration did (applying blunt force trauma to one of the most dynamic churches in Adventism). We’ll see how it goes.
As someone who attended the Village Church numerous times, my firsthand opinion is very positive of them. Under Ron Kelly and the board of elder’s leadership, Village church was a dynamic model of what every Adventist church should be like. They were very mission-minded, organizing regular trips to El Salvador involving youth, they had a school, they held regular meetings on biblical sexuality, pushing back against the broken worldview of western culture. They championed—to the encouragement of thousands (if not millions) around the world—religious liberty and freedom of conscience during a time when SDA hierarchy almost universally genuflected towards government mandates, shutdowns, and experimental big pharma. The Village Church held regular meetings on Daniel 11, inviting and allowing different viewpoints to be heard in a respectable format. Big positives. They also had a burden for medical missionary work, purchasing a local building for just that purpose.
And the conference came in and ‘broke’ all that. I still can’t quite get my head around it.
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