I Went Back. I Shouldn’t Have.
I attended a Seventh-Day Adventist church for a significant portion of my childhood and, for a much smaller portion of my adulthood, found myself there again.
For a while, I hesitated to write about some of the ways my views no longer seemed to align with the institution. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I have encountered enough testimonies from former members whose experiences left them with a lasting bitterness toward the church. I have seen stories shaped by shame, condemnation, control, and the feeling of having been made to question themselves in the name of faith. Those experiences are real, and I don't dismiss them even though mine may be slightly different.
I also never felt the need to take my own experience to the internet and make the institution the subject of my frustration. Whatever I was working through had little to do with publicly dissecting them and much more to do with understanding what was happening within me. My current journey is not about settling a score with a church I once attended. It is about following truth wherever it leads me, even when that truth forces me to reconsider things I once accepted without much question.
That is why I feel more comfortable saying some of this now.
Since the beginning of my Journey, I developed views that do not necessarily align with everything I was taught or with Seventh Day Adventists beliefs or practices. I don't say that as an indictment but honesty requires me to acknowledge where I actually am—and where I am not willing to pretend I am.
I returned to Seventh Day Adventism because I was afraid.
To put it simply.
And if you've been following along, you may remember my last post about feelings making poor leaders.
Well... here we are.
I had gone through some horrific experiences leading up to that decision. But even before I made any decision to return to a “church,” I was pursuing the Most High while simultaneously trying to make sense of what was happening to me. Somewhere in that process, fear began convincing me that perhaps the safest place I could be was church. And what felt safer than the church I already knew?
It was the institution I had been born into. My parents were of the faith. I was raised on its beliefs, its language, its traditions. In many ways, it was woven into the identity of the family I grew up in. I returned to what I knew because, at the time, familiarity felt like protection. I was trying to make sense of some horrific experiences, and I think a part of me believed that returning to something recognizable might give me somewhere to stand.
There was another layer to it, though. By then, I had already begun pursuing the Word for myself. I wasn't returning with the exact same level of understanding I had left with. I had questions. I had expectations. I had begun to see Scripture differently. I will get into those expectations later, because they became important.
What I did not fully consider was that I was no longer the person who had left.
As a child, I had never really been given the opportunity to choose any of this. I was born into it. I inherited the beliefs of my parents before I was old enough to examine them. I inherited the identity of the institution without understanding why they had that identity and where it came from. I knew what they believed because I had been taught what they believed, not because I had spent any meaningful amount of time searching the Scriptures and arriving at those convictions myself.
And I can say this now with the benefit of hindsight: for me, that made the institution a rather comfortable place for passivity. It was a safehouse for inherited belief.
I didn't have to search very deeply because the answers had already been supplied. I didn't have to wrestle with the text because there was already an interpretation waiting for me. I could belong without necessarily understanding. But that was not the person returning.
By the time I came back, I had begun to develop an entirely different relationship with the Word. Even now, I can scrub through Scripture, study a passage from every angle I can think of, and still walk away feeling like I know very little. And strangely enough, that realization has made me want to keep searching rather than settle.
The more I studied, the more I realized that I could no longer measure truth by familiarity. I had to measure it against the Word.
And that changed everything. Once I began looking at what I had inherited through the mirror of Scripture, some things became increasingly difficult to reconcile. Beliefs I had assumed came from the Word began to look less like conclusions drawn from Scripture and more like conclusions from somewhere else.
What that meant was returning to something familiar did not necessarily mean returning to something true and I was about to learn the difference.
The Truth Is Uncomfortable
Looking back, the tension was already there before I returned. That probably should have been my first telltale sign that I was jumping the gun.
I knew there were contradictions I couldn’t reconcile, a deep misalignment I couldn't ignore. I had already begun seeing things in the Word that challenged my inherited beliefs—and yet, I went back anyway. Fear had convinced me that returning to something familiar would somehow bring an end to everything I had been experiencing. I thought that perhaps if I got back into church, back into the environment I knew, back around people who shared the faith I had grown up with, things would settle down.
They didn't.
But my decision certainly pleased a lot of people. Everyone was happy. Excited. Warm. Welcoming. There were celebrations. There were hugs. There were words about how good it was to have me back. I remember hearing, “Your dad would be so proud.”
And for a moment, perhaps that warmth made me feel as though I had made the right decision. But that warmth would not last. Not because I returned looking for trouble. I didn't. I returned looking for safety. But I also returned with a Bible, with questions, and with a willingness to actually examine what I had once simply accepted.
And the more I studied, the louder the discrepancies became.
I became increasingly unwilling to accept something simply because a minister repeated it from the pulpit or because an entire congregation seemed to agree with it. I had reached a point where I needed to know: Where is this in the Word?
That question changed the atmosphere. The warmth gradually became something else. What had initially felt welcoming began to reveal an undertone of pride and defensiveness whenever beliefs were challenged against Scripture. And it did not happen all at once. There wasn't some dramatic moment where everyone suddenly became hostile. It was more subtle than that. Little by little, I began noticing what happened when questions were asked. What happened when assumptions were challenged. What happened when I refused to accept something simply because it had always been taught that way.
The more I studied, the less satisfied I became with the sermons.
They carried emotional weight. They could move people.
But I kept leaving with the same question:
Where is the truth?
Very rarely did I hear anything that caused me to search the Scriptures differently. There was no new depth to uncover, no uncomfortable question that forced me back into the Word. More often than not, I was hearing the same sermons I remembered hearing as a child.
That realization was almost surreal.
The words would come so familiarly that they seemed to pull me backward in time. I could almost see myself again as a child, sitting in Sabbath services, hearing the same conclusions, the same interpretations, the same familiar phrases.
Except I wasn't a child anymore. I was listening differently. And eventually I had to ask myself whether there was actually any seeking happening at all—or whether they had simply become very good at holding tightly to what we had already decided was true.
There is a passage where the Messiah says:
“Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the reign of Elohim as a little child shall certainly not enter into it.”
I always understood the childlike quality in that passage to speak of humility and trust. But I began thinking about something else: children are also learners. They ask questions. They explore. They don't come into the world knowing everything. They are constantly discovering, constantly asking, constantly returning to the person they trust for understanding.
That is very different from assuming we already know.
And a lot of what I was witnessing—in individual interactions and in the collective thinking of the group—did not resemble that kind of humility to me. It seemed more like an unwillingness to examine what had already been established.
The irony was not lost on me.
I had returned because I was afraid, believing I needed the safety of something familiar. But the very familiarity I had run back to was beginning to expose something I had never really confronted before: how much of my faith had been inherited rather than investigated.
I began challenging beliefs I had once accepted largely because I had grown up around them. And this wasn't rebellion for rebellion's sake. It was the natural consequence of finally taking responsibility for what I believed. I also began noticing something else in the teachings—the influence of Greek philosophical thought seemed, to me, increasingly apparent in places where I expected to find the Word itself. The framework being presented sometimes seemed to owe more to philosophical assumptions developed outside the Hebrew Scriptures than to the actual context in which the Scriptures were written.
That, of course, opens an entirely different conversation—one I will have to get into another time.
Because once I began asking “What does the Word actually say?” I realized I had inherited far more than I had ever taken the time to examine.
The Gatekeepers
The strangest part of this journey has been the number of encounters I have had with the gatekeepers of this faith. At times, it felt as though I had more run-ins with gatekeepers than I had prayers offered for—or with—me and, more importantly, my family while we were under heavy affliction. I had more difficult encounters with members of the institution than I did with people who did not believe at all.
It sounds almost humorous when I write it now. It wasn't always humorous to experience.
Most of those interactions were disheartening. I would repeatedly find myself asking, How did I even end up here? I had people question whether I was truly being led by the Spirit. I was told that some of the choices I was making meant I was denying “Christ.” Conversations like these did not produce clarity in me. They produced frustration, and at times, anger. But eventually, those interactions began teaching me something.
What we believe eventually reveals itself in how we behave.
I could listen to someone explain righteousness and still observe how they treated people. I could hear repeated appeals to truth while watching defensiveness rise the moment that truth itself was examined.
And I began paying attention to the fruit. Not just the fruit I could see in the other person, but the fruit the conversation was producing in me.
Was I being drawn toward humility, patience and a deeper desire to seek the Father?
Or was I leaving the conversation angry, defensive, prideful, and determined to prove someone wrong?
What happens when the message and the messenger begin telling two different stories?
Peter writes:
“Likewise you younger ones, subject yourselves to your elders. And all of you gird yourselves with humility towards one another, for Elohim resists the proud, but gives favour to the humble.”
Humility became one of the clearest things I began looking for.
Unfortunately, many of these conversations seemed to produce the opposite. There was often more interest in proving that what I was saying was wrong than in genuinely examining the Scriptures together. I heard things like, “You're going to have to convince me.” The conversation became a debate, and the debate itself sometimes seemed to feed an ego rather than a sincere desire to understand.
There was always another passage to send me.
Another “Let me show you.”
Another flood of Scriptures I had already read, as though the number of verses presented would somehow settle the question. But my concern was never whether someone could find a verse. My concern was whether we were actually willing to study it out.
Paul's warning came to mind:
“But keep away from foolish questions, and genealogies, and strife and quarrels about the Torah, for they are unprofitable and useless.”
At times, it felt as though there was more interest in getting me to see things the way they saw them than there was in approaching the Scriptures humbly enough to reconsider what either of us thought we knew. And that was heavy.
There were other experiences that happened before I ever reached this point.
Some were subtle.
Moments of condemnation or guilt disguised as spiritual concern. Sermons would contain remarks about not judging people by their appearance, followed by very specific attention being drawn to things like tattoos. During some of the most difficult experiences of my life, I was even told that I should anoint my tattoos with oil.
Perhaps the intention was innocent. But good intentions do not automatically make something spiritually sound.
What ALWAYS troubled me was the fruit.
I began to notice how easily certain conversations created a sense of separation—an unspoken suggestion that certain outward characteristics placed a person further from holiness than everyone else.
Yet Paul writes:
“There is, then, now no condemnation to those who are in Messiah יהושע...”
— Romans 8:1, TS2009
And then there were the conversations about what people wore.
The whispers.
The turned-up faces.
The quiet judgments.
Some of those conversations eventually found their way into sermons.
And I began to realize that this wasn't simply about individual people having opinions. There was a culture forming around those opinions—a collective way of thinking that seemed increasingly difficult for me to reconcile with the humility I was finding in Scripture.
The more I studied, the more difficult it became for me to participate in something I could no longer affirm with a clear conscience. Eventually, this led me to formally renounce the vows I had taken. One of them, in particular, forced me to confront the question:
“Do you accept and believe that the Seventh-day Adventist Church is the remnant church of Bible prophecy?”
I could no longer answer that question simply because I had once been taught to. If I was going to affirm something that significant, I needed to be able to find it in the Word.
And this is where my understanding of the word remnant began to matter.
Scripture does not describe the preserved people of Elohim merely by giving them a denominational label. It gives them characteristics.
Zephaniah speaks of a remnant that is meek and humble, one that trusts in the name of the Most High and does not practice unrighteousness or deceit.
Micah describes the remnant of Jacob as being among the peoples like dew from the Most High—something that does not depend upon human approval or wait upon the sons of men.
And when the Messiah walked among His people, He spoke specifically of the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
He said:
“I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
Matthew 9:36 describes Him looking upon the crowds and being moved with compassion because they were “weary and scattered, like sheep having no shepherd.”
And when He sent His disciples out, He instructed them to go first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
Exactly who those lost sheep are is a conversation for another post.
I'm not interested in forcing an interpretation into the text simply because it fits a theological framework I have already accepted. What the Word actually says is where I intend to begin—and, ultimately, where I intend to remain.
Because if I have learned anything through this journey, it is that belonging to a religious institution cannot be the destination of seeking the Father.
If the search ends with validation rather than truth, what exactly were we seeking?
Are you seeking the Father—or you seeking a place where what you already believe will be validated?
Finding a church is not necessarily the same thing as finding Truth.
