I had a chance to visit 2 churches today. Initially i just wanted to go for one where it talks about prophecy. I shall not name the churches i went to and shall call them A and B. I went to A and its title was Israel,Oh,Israel. It basically talked about how God had chosen Israel, gave it warnings and that it was destroyed and finally Israel will be restored. As i saw the presentation, i realised that the verses he used were all plucked from some parts of the bible like ezekiel and isaiah to come out with the story about Israel and its final settling into their land. Now don't get me wrong, collecting bible verses from other books is one good way for bible study, but what i didn't agree upon was that the verses he used had been reluctantly utilized to get that prophecy and thus, used totally out of context. Sorry i don't have examples to show but basically that's my experience. So far in my study of Adventist doctrines, there is a very convincing presentation of each doctrine like sabbath, state of the dead and that if we try to use verses from other places of the bible, we know that "oh, ok this is part of the jigsaw puzzle of the state of the dead" and ultimately we get a nice picture of the whole doctrine. For church A, how i felt was "Are you sure that verse applies to your prophecy? Or are you taking out that jigsaw piece from an existing picture and trying to fit into your own picture?" Basically that's how i felt and i really pitied the ppl there as they don't know what it is to have solid bible study. Church A has further cemented my faith in the SDA church and put more pressure on me personally to be students of the Bible because it's easy to be well versed in it as we have all the resources available.
My friend who brought me to church A had told me that there is a christian bookshop at another church. So after church A, we went to church B but found out that the bookshop was closed and only opened after the service so we attended it. This church was also a traditional church like church A. The senior pastor was an old guy of about 80 and i think half the time he talked about "We have to trust in God because he saved us and died for us". I didn't know the sermon title so i give them the benefit of the doubt that their sermons normally aren't so shallow. But even then, presenting the gospel of salvation can be much more solid and interesting. And again, his way of using the bible to show us how the coming of the messiah was predicted was not that convincing and powerful.
In summary, i thought both churches didn't have an easy and convincing way to present bible doctrines and prophecy. It's unlike the seminars we have like Jon Paulien and Geoff Youlden where it was so interesting throughout and after that, you could see ppl going up to them to ask more questions. For this 2, it was not that convincing and thus was abit boring. Ok yes, i've not been talking well about these 2 churches but i can't help it since i'm already been exposed to such easy and convincing bible studies set forth by the SDA church.
Anyway, after church B, i visited the church bookshop and went around checking out what they had. I realised that alot of stuff which Life bookshop sells weren't sold here which was a disappointment for me as i had wanted to buy some books for the library. The books that i saw were to me 1) controversial and 2) not popularly found in other christian bookshops. Personally i felt the congregation were not given the best kind of food and it hurts me. It's like selling books that would make you more confused about what you're reading and ultimately you would think that the bible is a difficult book to study where in fact it's not. Anyway, had to vent. After that, i went to the cult section. They had 2 columns of it and i was naturally looking for books about SDA. Most of the space taken up were talking about Mormonism or Jehovah's Witness and i only found 2 very thin booklets about SDAs. It was so thin that i thought that it wasn't a fair study on why the author thought that SDAs are a cult or dangerous. Anyway, inside contained the common complaints that EGW had been a plagiarist and was contradicting the bible and of course about the sabbath too and blah blah. Oh well...like what geoff youlden said, that's what happens when you're different, ppl notice and start to condemn you on your uniqueness and saying that you have apostasized from the mainstream churches.
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