Church

(entry for 1/29/2025)

Several times in these posts I have mentioned the fact, in passing, that one of the features of my childhood was being raised in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. That denomination is different in many ways from most other denominations, but the one most significant difference is the honoring of the seventh day of the week as holy. (It’s sort of a joke in the church that the Catholic world keeps the Saturday of the crucifixion week as Holy Saturday. To SDA members, every Saturday is holy!)

The difference doesn’t involve merely having a different day of the week from other religions for worship services. It has to do also with the style of ‘keeping the Sabbath’ that is far different from ‘keeping Sunday’ for most of the churches that follow that practice.

The SDA church takes the fourth commandment quite literally. Unless you’re a farmer with cows to milk or animals to feed, you don’t do any work from sundown Friday night until sundown Saturday night. Those hours constitute The Sabbath, and you don’t do business, you don’t do any labor, you don’t do anything that isn’t related to worship or at least to spiritual activities of some kind. It’s OK to go for a walk in the woods to admire God’s nature creations, but it’s not OK to buy gas for your car to get there!

You don’t use money for anything other than putting it in the ‘offering plate’ during the church service. Other than that, you don’t touch money. No getting. No giving. No paying for anything, not even necessities. (Of course, if you’re the church treasurer, or related to her, you do count the offering plate and get the bank deposit ready, as I hae outlined in an earlier post: HERE)

I remember one exception to this quite vividly. When I was about seven, my dad invited a couple to come home with us for Sabbath Dinner (the so-called noon meal, though not usually served till 1 or 1:30, as church usually lasted well past noon). He didn’t check with my mother first. Huge mistake. We had no bread in the house and she refused to serve Sabbath Dinner with no bread on the table. (Not that anyone would necessarily eat any, but it had to be there, just in case.) My mom insisted that we go to a grocery store on the way home, to buy a loaf. Yes, it violated the Fourth Commandment, but the rules of hospitality trumped the rules of Sabbath-keeping, so we did go to the store and we did buy a loaf of bread. When questioned about it later, my mom blamed my dad for the need to violate the Law, and he didn’t argue the point.

The only other exception I can recall occurred when I was fourteen. We were visiting an unfamiliar church in Oregon, though we still lived in Colorado. Nobody invited us home for dinner after the service (almost unthinkable, but nobody did), and my mom demanded we ‘eat out.’ I was perfectly willing to wait till sundown to eat, but was outvoted. We ate at a restaurant. We paid for our meal. My dad even left a generous tip for the waitress. The point is, this was such an outrageous thing to do on the Sabbath that it still stands out vividly in my memory banks.

These and other religious prinicples permeated every feature of my early life. It was unthinkable that I should attend any ‘worldly’ public school, so, after a first grade in my ‘home school’ environment, presided over by my mother, I attended only SDA schools for the rest of my educational life, including college. (Though I did take some post-graduate classes in non-religious schools later.)

It was also unthinkable that I should socialize with non-Adventist kids, so my friendships were restricted to my fellow students from school. 

We weren't allowed to participate in 'worldly' activities, such as belonging to Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, so we had our own church-run equivalent: Pathfinders. The activities and rewards that were available in that organization were very similar to Scouting, and were undoubtedly based on them, but they were held zealously separate, all the same. Not only were Adventist kids not allowed to join Scout troops-- non-Adventist kids weren't allowed to join Pathfinders!

Non-Adventist businesses, especially those owned or operated by Roman Catholics, were highly suspect. Imagine my shock when, at age 15, I landed my first job (arranged for by my dad) with a ‘Mormon’ employer in Grand Junction. I almost fainted! (Grand Junction then, and still is, a very active LDS community, so he didn't have much choice.)

In addition to the issue of what day to keep holy, there were other things to be ‘separate’ about. There was no going to the ‘movies.’ There was no dancing. There was no playing of traditional card games. Men wore no jewlry other than fancy wristwatches. Women wore no jewelry other than ‘pins.’ Wedding rings (and engagement rings) were forbidden. Men gave their fiancees watches.  My paternal grandmother caused a near-riot when she insisted on wearing her wedding ring during her Adventist baptism. He husband was long dead, but she was ‘still married’ to him, so she insisted. And she talked the minister who baptised her into allowing it! 

There was an emphasis on healthful eating. Those few Adventist who did eat meat ate only the ‘clean meats’ listed in Leviticus. Adventist companies created non-meat ‘substitutes’ long before the current trend in that direction began. (I still miss some of those, long gone now.) 

Throughout my pre-teen and teenage years, I dated only Adventist girls. My first marriage was to an Adventist woman I met in college.

Adventists had their own chain of hospitals, and their own related chain of medical clinics. I never went to see a non-Adventist physician until I was in my twenties.

To put it mildly, a non-Adventist has no idea what it was like growing up in this environment. The church was proud of being ‘a peculiar people,’ as the founders put it. One of our peculiarities was that we believed in the Divine inspiration of the books in what we called The Spirit of Prophecy series, written by an early Adventist named Ellen Gould Harmon White, who penned hundreds of books and thousands of published articles. Much of what we practiced in regard to healthful eating was from her books, and much of our style of worship was dictated or at least suggested by traditions established by her and her husband, James White, and their friend Joseph Bates.

One of these traditions was baptism. Along with Baptists and a few other fundamentalist denominations, we did not believe in infant baptism, and we most vehemently did not believe in ‘sprinkling.’ Baptism, as we practiced it, was a symbol of death and resurrection, and you can’t achieve that by putting a few drops of water (holy or otherwise) on a person’s head!

The traditional age for baptism in my childhood days was 12, though it has moved a bit downward in the intervening years. So as I approached that age a huge focus in my life was on my preparation for, instruction in, and understanding of the rite. We had moved to Montrose (300 miles away) a couple of years previously, but my dad decided I should be baptized in the SDA Central Church in Denver, which I had attended from birth to age seven, and which all my Adventist relatives still attended.

The church is now medical offices, but still looks like a church!

The pastor at that time was a J. L. Dittberner (long since passed on) and he was involved in the planning from the beginning. My grandma (of wedding ring fame) had to work at the SDA Porter Sanitarium on the Sabbath in question, so on the Friday night before the ceremony I would answer an altar call during the Vesper service, so she could witness that. Then everybody except her would be at the Saturday morning worship service where I would actually be baptized.

The picture at the head of the post is NOT me, and that’s not Elder Dittberner, but aside from the stained glass (which was at the time thought to be too ‘Romanish’ for Adventist churches), the photo is farily accurate.

Last night (I’m writing this on Janyuary 12, though it won’t be published till the 29^th), I dreamed that I was in the baptistry again. It was totally dry and hadn’t been used for years, but still looked very familiar. A minister (not Dittberner!) was there with me and I told him that this was the baptistry where my ceremony had taken place. He made some trivial comment, and we passed on to other things. Strange dream! I hadn’t thought about any of that for many years.

The main thing I actually do remember from that rite was that my feet left the floor when Elder Dittberner ‘dunked’ me, and that, since I had no idea how to swim, I feared I was about to drown. However, when the minister lifted me up from the baptism, my feet found their place again, and I recovered quicky.

Anyway, the dream and the memory are the impetus for this post. Shades of the very distant past!

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