An Old Complaint, Newly Filed

Rebuilt from the record This essay first ran without its sources. Every historical claim below now cites the page it rests on.

In the Review and Herald dated March 15, 1951, on page five, the denomination’s own weekly carried a warning: “The burden of the work in this broad field should not rest upon two or three men” (Review and Herald, 1951-03-15, p.5). The sentence came from no dissident’s pamphlet or reform tract. It came from the official paper of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, counselling against the concentration of administrative weight, seventy-five years before the church’s present organizational strain would be handed to a General Conference president as a recent development.

A recent Fulcrum7 essay argues that the denomination’s organizational trouble is a recent aberration, traceable to a handful of progressive actors and correctable through firmer presidential resolve. Its sincerity is not in question; its history is. What this novelty account treats as a departure is a recurring argument, pressed by the church’s own members and documented in its own press and its own doctoral scholarship for more than a century. The account is wrong not because it is uncharitable but because it is ahistorical.

The Line Between Faithful Members and Reformers Does Not Hold

The novelty account rests on a distinction between faithful members and the reformers it imagines as interlopers, and the distinction does not survive contact with the sources. James H. Stirling was a schoolteacher in South Lyon, Michigan, and in 2003 he wrote in Adventist Today that “the need for organizational reform in the Seventh-day Adventist Church has been a perennial concern for AT readers” (Adventist Today, 2003, p.21). Note the narrowing phrase, for it is the honest one: the concern was perennial for that magazine’s readers, a modest circle and not the denomination as a whole. The modesty of the sentence only strengthens the point it was drafted to make. Said without the vocabulary: when a lay schoolteacher with no office and no platform arrives at the same worry the church’s editors had already printed, the worry cannot have begun with him. He was restating a question the church’s own organs had been raising for generations.

They had been raising it in the paper that most embodies institutional Adventism, and the warning of 1951 was not isolated. Eleven years later the same weekly recorded that “counsel was given regarding a wider distribution of responsibility to avoid undue centralization” (Review and Herald, 1962-03-01, p.9). Two generations before the novelty account was written, the denomination’s flagship publication was pressing the very distribution of authority that the account treats as an import.

The Church’s Own Scholars Treat Reform as Theology

The more damaging fact is not that reform talk recurs. It is that the denomination’s own scholars have treated the reform of its structure as theology rather than administration, and as a settled feature of Adventist history rather than a foreign incursion. The Andrews University Seminary Doctoral Dissertation Series, published by the church’s flagship theological institution, locates the hinge in the reorganization of 1901 to 1903. The vocabulary is telling. The dissertation records that “by 1903 centralization was again being condemned by her” (Andrews University Seminary Doctoral Dissertation Series, 1989-09-01, p.215) — her being Ellen White, and the condemnation rendered in the phrase she made her own, “kingly power.”

That detail dismantles the premise. Set the two accounts side by side. The novelty account places the demand for shared authority among the church’s newcomers and critics; the dissertation places it in Ellen White’s own mouth, at the General Conference session of 1901. She did not discover a flaw in passing; she pressed the assembled leaders on “the things that should have been done years ago” (AU2017 - Plantak, Zorislav - Ethical Analysis Of Abuses Of Power In Christian Leadership, 2017, p.172). Reform, in other words, was overdue before the century was two years old. The defining Adventist argument against concentrated power was made from inside the tradition’s own prophetic inheritance, at its own General Conference, by a figure neither side in the present dispute would disown.

Unity Has Been Assumed Rather Than Defined

There remains the question the novelty account means to settle without asking: what unity actually means. Here the denomination’s scholars are not the account’s enemy; they are its evidence, if it would only use them. In 2017 Spectrum observed that “most of the discussion fails to even define what is meant by unity and simply assumes that everyone is agreed about what it means” (Spectrum, 2017, p.82). The sentence describes the genre.

Whether a given writer equates unity with compliance is, I should be plain, an inference about intent, and it is an inference I make rather than one the text makes for me. What the text does establish is the definitional failure that makes the inference worth drawing. Follow that failure to its end and you reach a committee room where no one objects, everyone assumes the others are persuaded, and the minutes record a consensus that nobody actually reached. A denomination that cannot say what unity means will repeatedly mistake silence for agreement, and agreement for faithfulness. That is not a new problem but the structural corollary of the old one, and it is what the 1951 warning, the 1962 counsel, and the 1901 session were each trying, in their several idioms, to solve.

Where the Account Is Right, and Why Resolve Is Still the Wrong Remedy

The account is not wrong about everything. It is right that the denomination has an organizational problem, right that the problem is serious, and right that a concerned member may address a president directly; the impulse is, in its way, admirable. It is even right, in a backhanded sense, about the remedy, for firmer resolve is the opposite of what a century of Adventist self-criticism has prescribed. The tradition’s own answer to concentrated power has never been a stronger hand at the center. It has been a wider distribution of responsibility, a phrase the denomination’s weekly printed in 1962 and has spent the generations since relearning at intervals.

The failure is not that someone addressed the president. It is that the address carried a history shaped to flatter the present. How a global church governs itself is not a recent aberration to be corrected by resolve; it is a perennial argument, and the church’s own press and scholars have been making it for more than a century. Anyone who wants to join that argument is welcome to it. He should simply know he is not the first to have filed this complaint, and that the denomination’s own pages got there long before his letter did.

— Dr. Elias Morton, Editor-in-Chief