Before the Analysis

There is a hospital in Tavares, Florida — AdventHealth Waterman — that has served the people of Lake County for generations. Many in our community, including those close to the author, have received excellent care there. The physicians are skilled, the staff is kind, and the institution is genuine in its commitment to the people it serves. The Seventh-day Adventist tradition that built and sustains that hospital deserves respect for exactly what it has produced in community service.

This document is not an attack on that service. It is not written from contempt toward the tradition, and it is not written to disparage the individual believers inside it. Many people within the Seventh-day Adventist Church know Jesus Christ. They love Him. They serve their neighbors faithfully. They carry genuine faith. That matters and this document will say so plainly.

But the obligation of honest discipleship requires that we examine what a tradition teaches — not what it does in the community, but what framework it hands to the person who receives it. If that framework closes the door on something essential, the people inside it deserve to know. If the prophetic foundation on which the tradition was built fails the tests Scripture gives us for testing prophets, that failure cannot be kept quiet out of politeness.

The investigation that produced this document began with a YouTube video. A well-produced presentation, drawing on accurate founding-era American history, arguing correctly that Christian nationalism is incompatible with the Jesus who refused the earthly throne. The analysis in that video tracked with concerns this project shares. But underneath the accurate historical material, something else was happening. The presenter was drawing on sources he did not name. The conclusions he was reaching were pre-loaded by a framework he was not disclosing. And the formation his audience was receiving — the posture, the fears, the sense of insider prophetic knowledge — was not the formation that John 15 produces.

Following that trail back to its source produced this assessment. It is offered plainly, charitably, and without apology for what it finds.