Topic
Church Polity & Authority Who speaks for the church, and on what authority — General Conference sessions, the presidency, ordination, and the difference between the institution and the body.
Adventists have argued about authority since 1863: whether the General Conference is the voice of God, whether one man can hold the presidency, and what a vote at a session actually binds. These pieces answer that question from the periodicals rather than from preference.
Primary-source backing: 215,740 chunks contain the exact phrase 'general conference'; 15,507 'ordination' — exact phrase counts across 4,748,064 searchable chunks.
4 pieces on this topic, newest first.
Editorial · November 6, 2026
Fulcrum7's comment policy is eighteen numbered rules, seventeen of them prohibitions, and exactly one of them a claim on a commenter's real name. It has be
By The Editorial Board
Editorial · July 7, 2026
In 1895 Ellen White told a General Conference session not to put the presidency in one man’s hands. What that sentence does, and does not, establish.
By Dr. Miriam Sorensen
Scholarship · July 7, 2026
The claim that a member may redirect the tithe to channels he judges faithful — tested against what Adventist records say about who receives it.
By Dr. Elias Morton
Scholarship · July 7, 2026
A 1951 Review and Herald warning that the work “should not rest upon two or three men” — what the denomination’s own weekly said about authority.
By Dr. Elias Morton
Elsewhere in the archive
A response to Mass Illegal Migration and the Great Controversy at Fulcrum7. France is bracing for another weekend of riots. A recent Fulcrum7 essay opens there, with Islamic migrants and “far left agitators” in coalition and Italy, Belgium and Portugal behind them, and then climbs fast.
A response to Reject Ecumenism at Fulcrum7. In March 1958 a reader of the Review and Herald asked the editors why the words “For there are three that bear record in heaven” — the Trinitarian sentence at the center of 1 John 5:7 — had dropped out of the modern translations. The question carried its own answer: something was being taken away.
A response to Ugandan Gospel Singer Defends Her Seventh-day Adventist Faith at Fulcrum7. Gabie Ntaate beat six continental competitors for a Sauti Award, then took a Song of the Year in 2021. In most Christian music scenes that would settle whether she is, in the idiom, saved.
A response to Demonize the Brother; Dismiss the Documents; Responding to Religious Liberty TV at Fulcrum7. The denomination has spent a century telling itself it carries a message for the whole world. Signs of the Times said it in 1935: “It is the everlasting gospel that these three angels, or messengers, are to cause to be heard by every nation, kindred,…
In a place the essay does not visit, a child is eating. The food came through an agency founded by Seventh-day Adventists, and some of the money for it moved through the United Nations system. The child does not know this and does not care.
A response to OneVoice27, Two Streams! A recent Fulcrum7 essay proposes a test, and it is a clean one. Take the phrase “practicing the presence of God.” If those words mark a movement, if they are the fingerprint of a mystical stream that has crossed into the church, then the voice that uses them cannot be the voice of God.
A response to LLUH Women’s Spiritual Retreat Brings Mysticism to Attendees at Fulcrum7. A recent Fulcrum7 essay describes a Loma Linda University Health women’s retreat as an occasion of “not the mystery of God, but that of another spirit.” The retreat’s offense, on that telling, is its featured author, Ann Voskamp, a devotional writer described as a…
The Rise of Social Justice within Adventism (Part 1) at Fulcrum7. A counterfeit gospel arrives dressed as the genuine one. That is the whole logic of the warning in Galatians, and it is where the argument now circulating about social justice begins.
A response to A Religious Tsunami is Forming in America — Socialism (Fulcrum7, October 27, 2026). A religious tsunami is forming in America, the argument goes. Socialism is a synthetic faith that swaps the Creator for the collective and erases male and female, good and evil, and the Sabbath rest.
The Counterweight was founded on a simple conviction: the truth can handle scrutiny. Every factual claim made on this site is backed by verifiable sources. We cite specific publications, dates, and where possible page numbers.
Rebuilt from the record This essay first ran without its sources. Every historical claim below now cites the page it rests on. The woman beside me at the camp meeting in Ibadan had walked most of the morning to get there.
⚡ SATIRE — NOT REAL NEWS COLUMBIA, MD — A Keurig coffee machine was installed in the North American Division headquarters lobby on Monday, a development that eschatologically-attuned observers say confirms the long-anticipated Sunday Law will be enforced "within weeks, possibly days." "I saw it with my own eyes," said Harold Bickerson, 67, a self-appointed…
On page 12 of a 2002 number of the Journal of Asia Adventist Seminary, Ellen White recalls a moment when she refused to treat a handful of administrators as the church itself: "I have said that I could no longer regard the voice of the General Conference, represented by these few men, as the voice of God." The sentence would sit comfortably inside "Entropy…
A few readers have asked what this publication is and who we are. What We Are The Counterweight is a publication of Adventist historical review. We write for Adventists who are tired of being told what to think by people who won't show their work.
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