Why do we act like a cult?

Aren’t we just normal Christians?

I grew up very active within my church and I was always excited to participate in “Outreach”. Usually that consisted of passing out flyers, knocking on doors, and going out in the community trying to get “Bible study leads”. Or in other words proselytize the SDA message. People would ask me at their doors who I was and what I believed and I would very confidently answer, “I am a Seventh-Day Adventist Christian.”. That answer was usually met with either raised eyebrows or a skeptical side eye or a mixture of both. Why though? I understood that people might not be familiar with an SDA but everyone knows what a Christian is right? It wasn’t until I got to Bible college that I first heard about the accusations thrown towards the Adventist church. Many leaders and prominent people outside of the SDA church accused us of not being Christians but actually members of a sinister cult. Followers of the prophetess and not followers of Jesus. Or even that the Jesus we claimed to worship was different than the real Jesus Christ of the Bible.

I have spent years defending my church against such attacks. Always claiming I was just a Christian like everyone else. I believe in “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so” is what I would say. But after several more years within the church, working with church leadership and seeing things a little more “behind the scenes” per se I wonder now. Why are we so cultish? Now me even asking that may offend some and it might stir in you the same visceral reaction that it did in me. But I really do have to ask it, hear me out please.

This is the church I love so much, and to me it looks like a normal Christian church, albeit a little on the conservative side. But when people walk in for the first time do they also believe it is a “normal Christian” church? I can’t help but try to experience everything from a visitors perspective on any given sabbath and wonder, how is it that we come across? I know every church is different in little ways but overall what is ( as a member of Gen Z would say ) the “vibe” that we give off?

We have so much within our church that is truly our own. Our own books, songs, food, lingo, dress styles, worship, jokes, even our own prophet. We get so used to being around our own people and using the language we are all familiar with that I fear we may have grown very far removed from the basics of Christianity. Now most of the arguments of people claiming we are a cult aim at our doctrines. I do not want to dig into any of that because if you are reading this I can safely assume that you agree with me that SDA doctrine is Bible based. So why else do we come across as “cultish”?

Walter martin in the 70s described SDAs as being not part of a cult but definitely cultish in behavior. So is this something we can change or is just a part of who we are as church? I do not know for sure but my guess is that we can do a lot more than we are to help our case. The most important thing that matters is Jesus right? A belief in the Bible as the word of God right? So then why do we spend most of our time arguing over select passages from the spirit of prophecy? Why do we argue about whether or not you are saved if you eat meat or not? To me a lot of these arguments are not only growing very stale but they also are leaving a bitter taste in the mouth of non Adventist believers. I am not going to completely deal with every issue but I do understand why we are given the side eye when we proselytize. Maybe the worlds heart isn’t “lukewarm” like we love to claim. Maybe we just don’t know how to lift up Jesus and instead we lift up the Adventist church.

I am not throwing out accusations just to be negative here. I ask these questions so we can hopefully learn, grow and change in the areas that we need to. We need to learn to uplift Jesus, solely Him. The beautiful part about each of our doctrines is that they themselves lift up Jesus more than anything else. So maybe what we need is to learn how to present things a little bit better, in such a way that we don’t sound so cultish. I know I need to grow in that area for sure. Our church is so unique and different, but we also simply believe the Bible and follow Jesus. Let’s not grow so proud of our differences that we fail to recognize where we are actually isolating ourselves.