Introduction, part 1

My personal experiences and goals for this project

As Seventh-day Adventists, we own a stack of 28 golden bricks, but that is not a home. God wants each of us to build golden houses with decorated rooms founded on the Rock. He wants us to have a consistent and complete experience filled with His creative power. The Seven Pillars Project helps you build a glorious mansion-fortress in which you can entertain and educate many guests for all eternity.

The Seven Pillars Project is all about building YOUR house, YOUR understanding, YOUR experience with Christ. Like the five wise virgins, this is about filling YOUR lamp with oil.

Why do I think that is important? Because of my experiences.

My problem

I’ll share more later, but very briefly, I was raised Catholic with caused me to become a full-fledged atheist. During that time I acquired an interest in psychics which revived an interest in prophecy. During my research in the first year of high school, I came across Adventist books, which led to a face to face encounter with Jesus while I was reading in a library. I began a pursuit of God and concluded the Seventh-day Adventist church was the closest to Him. I shared that with my staunch Catholic dad and he asked me three questions that started this whole process.

“How can you say that I, your father, am wrong?”

“How can you say that the oldest, biggest church is wrong?”

“How can you say that the whole world is wrong?”

My solution

I honestly had no answers and felt pushed into a tiny corner with every earthly support removed. The next few years were spent in libraries and in the woods secretly researching everything, because I had to be sure. The consequences for myself and others seemed enormous if the Bible was true.

History, science, theology, religions, anything and everything was on the table. I didn’t have much of a belief system, but I started from scratch anyways. I wasn’t raised with a sense of right and wrong, but with what was logical and what I could get away with. Now I needed a system that explained things from beginning to end, top to bottom, inside and out. Before making a leap, I needed to know there was an immovable rock to jump to.

My problem again

As you might have guessed, I became an Adventist. I transferred to an Adventist college, studied theology and education, and graduated to become an academy teacher. For twenty years I taught in, and learned from, the conference-based system as well as the self-supporting system. There are pros and cons to both, but their methodologies are similar—conform.

Both say they follow the Bible and Ellen White and best practices and so forth, but both are institution-centered, not student and mission driven. All over again, I began to wonder if I was drinking the Kool-aid, as it were. Maybe I was trusting too much in the church and too little in God. Maybe we were all wrong?!

My solution again

I got out of teaching for several years and started over, again. I opened myself to the possibility that I was deceived, that God was a fiction, that we were all chasing each other’s religious tails. That is when I became even more systematic in my thinking and the basic outline of what I am about to share with you began to take shape.

After years of overwork, I rediscovered in a much deeper way the benefits of solitude in nature. The Holy Spirit has a way of soothing our hearts and straightening out our minds when we walk many miles and sleep many nights under the trees on the shores of mountain lakes. I returned to my first Love in a much more intelligent, humble way.

I work FOR God, but work WITH the church, not the other way around.

A list of doctrines is not a system, no more than a pile of bricks is a safe, comfortable home.

The secret to a successful Christian life and church is Christ—in the heart, in the life, at any price without worrying about cost.

My goals

I have many goals I hope to accomplish by writing these books.

First and foremost, I want to see a revival of personal Bible study among our church members. I don’t mean this in a casual, let’s-jawbone-about-Adventist-cultural-understanding-during-Sabbath-school-class, I mean it in a let’s-open-a-window-and-let-in-the-fresh-spring-air-after-the-long-stale-winter sort of way. It’s easy to watch the Adventist preacher on the TV or internet. Now let’s become motivated missionaries ourselves!

God called me to be an evangelistic educator (20 years in the classroom) or an educating evangelist. I want to teach others how to teach! Jesus told His disciples to make other disciples.

I have presented parts of this system at campmeetings, in churches, in personal Bible studies, and in Sabbath school. The response, every time, is the same. Eyes light up. Smiles fill faces. Real understanding of God and the Bible takes place, and the students say so! Whether they are newly baptized or raised in the church, the big picture becomes painted in their minds and they get excited about God, eternity, and telling others. Isn’t that the whole point of Christianity? Isn’t that part of the latter rain and the gospel going with power to the whole world?

To achieve those goals, my goal is to keep things as simple as possible. KISKIS is my motto: Keep It Simple, Keep It Spiritual. I need to keep things as clear as possible so the average reader can have confidence to know and share. I believe in not jumping around and cherry picking Bible verses, but rather it is better to let the Scripture patterns speak for themselves so the teacher hardly needs to speak.

That goal leads to another one: By letting the Bible unfold itself, we can avoid a lot of the prejudices of the “woke” country and cancel culture in which we live. We need to speak the same truths, but not in language from 100 years ago. It won’t work. We need to be harmless as doves and wise as serpents, just as the Waldenses who carried Scripture in secret pockets.

Finally, you will often read “consistent, complete, creative.” This is the only real, lasting solution to the extremes of liberalism and conservatism that plague our church right now. Technically, a conservative and a liberal in a church make it balanced, but not effective. After working for years with unbalanced minds, I realized the only effective method is not countering with the opposite, but presenting the whole truth as it is in Jesus—justice and mercy, faith and works, grace and law. Explain eternity with all of its principles and let the people come to Christ in the center. That is the way.

This especially applies to my ultimate target audience—young adults. They have neither the educational nor historical background that some older adults have. Name calling and labeling of enemies is repulsive, so they must be described instead. The features and characteristics of evil actors must be shown, then let the readers make the final leap for themselves. The feedback from this widely distributed newsletter will help polish and clarify the approach in the printed materials to come.