Yesterday I saw this clip⁠, in which Pia speaks about her experience of abuse. Her account felt so similar to our family’s experience with the administrative leadership at Church in the Valley. The difference is that our experience was not physical. I had seen the possibility, recognized what was happening, and did not believe that anyone would do anything about it if I spoke up.

And I was right.

Maybe Pia is right when she says that religious people are slower. I was.

I understand that spiritual abuse is rarely talked about. Most of us do not even know that it is a thing. For an introductory look at spiritual abuse, check out this information from WomensLaw⁠.

In John 7:24, Jesus advises us to look beneath the surface so that we can judge correctly. To judge is to ascertain what needs to be repaired and restored, and who needs to repair and restore it. There is to be no condemnation.

But within the Adventist community, leadership routinely seems to turn away from its responsibility to teach, model, and support accountability. The problem may be that spiritual abuse, and the lack of accountability for it, have become so entrenched in Adventist culture that leadership fears guiding the community in learning how to judge well. They may fear rupture and division if concerns are openly addressed. Therefore, they remain silent when harm is reported to them.

Inevitably, when accountability is neglected, an issue of abuse is sometimes dragged into the public square. Much buried resentment then explodes with volcanic force onto the individuals accused, creating infernos of condemnation. One accused person becomes a scapegoat for all who have been denied justice within the community.

I have been witnessing this phenomenon continue to wreak havoc recently as a high-profile Adventist family faces public scrutiny over allegations that have been taken before the criminal court. The community’s response has divided into factions committed either to defending or to condemning the individuals involved.

When leadership routinely protects its profit by sweeping injustice under the rug instead of building a culture of accountability and repair, there will be eruptions such as this. These are the language, as Dr. King said, of the unheard.

I recognize this pattern because our family’s concerns were also left unaddressed. The community’s response to allegations of abuse in the public square is connected to its response when harm is reported within the community. That is why I am bringing these experiences together.

And while I hope that this public incident will spark systemic change within Adventism and promote the elevation of Christlike judgment, that hope is deathly faint. In my experience, this organization continues to promote and protect perpetrators of harm and ignore the people whom they have harmed.

I spoke up to let our harm be known and attempted to have all levels of administration engage in the process of accountability. Here is my story.

The administration of Church in the Valley, CIV, invited us, a group of single moms, to use the facility as the venue for the single mom support initiative that we had already begun to build in the community. The administration offered to support the development of our work. I encouraged the group to refuse the offer because I felt that there was some underlying danger. It turned out that I was right.

In one founding mom’s words:

“To whom it may concern,

I am writing about the single moms group that we started as individual single moms, we would use the space at CIV. But we had no religious affiliation with the church as some of us came from different religious backgrounds. I myself am not a Christian. We started this group to support each other during our tough times. Our kids got together and played. I was never a part of the church along with many of the other mothers.”

The CIV administration had a similar idea: to expand its single moms’ oil change service into a single moms’ ministry. They had invited Jennifer Maggio, founder of The Life of A Single Mom, to host a training session for other pastors. They also hosted an event featuring Maggio as the guest of honour and keynote speaker, highlighting what single moms could become as the starting point of their expansion.

The administration seemed to have a leader in mind for its ministry. That person was already part of our core start-up leadership group. If our work became well-established and successful in the community without the church, the administration would not have had access to the person they had in mind to lead their ministry. In hindsight, it seems to me that they saw our potential and viewed our little community group as competition for their large organization.

The invitation to use the facility, accompanied by an offer to support our initiative’s development, seems similar to David’s invitation to Uriah to come to dinner and then go home to his wife to hide what David had done.

And just as David had no right to use Bathsheba, the CIV administration had no right to attempt to use any person to satisfy its ambitions without explicit consent and appropriate compensation. There could have been a successful and productive partnership.

The administration also had no right to surreptitiously present our work as theirs by bringing us into the building and offering enough proximity to mimic partnership or ownership, while neither supporting nor partnering with us as promised. They had no right to use me to continue building the work and then attempt to starve me out of the equation so that their handpicked leader would remain as evidence of the administration’s successful development of a single moms’ ministry.

Instead of supporting our success as joint leaders, they seemed determined to put a wedge between us so that our joint work would not compete with the kingdom they were building.

I remember the very day that the administrator guided an internal team member to limit communication with me and instead unilaterally pursue the person they had previously earmarked to lead. I saw it happen. I saw the discomfort in their internal team member’s eyes. Instead of resisting dishonesty and dishonour, like Joab, they complied.

But our work, our Bathsheba, has not died. The ministry that the administration had in mind never really materialized, just as the child conceived through David’s wrongdoing did not survive. Their kingdom and power were large enough to mask that failure, just as David had used his power to attempt to conceal what he had done to Bathsheba and Uriah.

But we have not died. Our village still lives.

And though we have suffered great loss and grieved betrayal, our work continues. I believe it will become more than we had even asked, dreamt, or imagined.

The single moms’ oil change service also remains. I believe it remains because it was the fruit of the hearts of people who wanted to serve and who sought a leader they hoped would help build a community of service.

The Extreme Home Repair and the Single Moms’ Empowerment and Support group have dried up. Yet the Kindness Hub, a revival of the original work, remains thriving and alive. We, single moms, revived that work and supported our intended replacement to keep that service alive.

I still believe that the work at CIV has the potential to live and thrive again, to become a valley of living beings instead of dry bones. I have been praying for this for them. Even though I am no longer part of that community, I took them a whole plan for reviving their community services work⁠.

I believe in the vision of having that place become a community that hosts a thriving community connection hub. I also believe that the current administration responded to a call to lead that revival. I hope they will lead the congregation to remove the covetousness that David and Achan allowed to bring death and devastation to the community.

I hope that no one’s reputation will be killed, that characters will be strengthened, and that dreams and visions will become a vibrant reality. I hope the community will become like a city set on a hill instead of a valley holding dead men’s bones.

To get there, injustice must be acknowledged. Otherwise, the work being done will be like sounding gongs and tinkling cymbals in a pen of goats who wonder why the community continues to be shuffled around instead of organically growing.

Instead of doing anything about the injustice, people have buried their heads in the sand or ended friendships because I was not being patient enough and waiting more years for accountability conversations to occur.

Two pastors met with me and told me that if I did not stop seeking accountability, I would likely hear from the Adventist church’s legal department. I experienced this as a verbal threat intended to silence me. In that meeting, they tried to pressure me to agree that speaking up was threatening the church.

One pastor said that I could have requested a conversation and waited for answers. He did not tell the other pastor that I had brought the issue to him almost two years earlier. I had sat with him and spoken for an hour in the presence of another person. He had told me that he would do due diligence and then call another meeting to discuss his findings. He did not tell the other pastor that I had been waiting for a response ever since.

His expressed concern in that meeting was, “all pastors have is their reputation.” I understood this to imply that their actions were to remain unchallenged to protect their reputation and preserve the appearance of peace for the congregation.

I kept showing up with a smile and encouragement to love each other more while bleeding internally from spiritual and economic abuse. I watched the people responsible be celebrated and elevated while my family suffered.

We are told that the church is a special place and taught that its leaders are spiritually and morally superior to common folk. Someone might challenge this idea. If you do, I invite you to reflect: how frequently do parishioners or members seek counsel from pastors because they have been taught that pastors are special men and women of God?

But they are not.

They are humans who have responded to a desire to contribute to the wellbeing of society by working in their chosen profession, as we all do.

Let’s pause to engage briefly with the dimensions of wellbeing⁠. Wellness is enough balance in each dimension to create the harmony of wellbeing. Every person who helps fill a need in these spheres is a person of God contributing to wellness and balance for us all.

So, dear reader, pastors are human beings who need correction and guidance just as much as the rest of us do. When we allow their behaviour to go unchecked, they can become more hardened and cause damage that continues to wound and divide the communities they serve for many generations.

Abuse can become the norm: a visible, tragic, and generationally accepted norm. We have many historical examples of the devastation that can cause.

Whom does it become acceptable to abuse, enslave, oppress, and exploit when no one corrects harm and it is allowed to proceed unchecked?

Enslavers have historically given enslaved people just enough to keep them alive, dependent, and singing songs of hope while their work is stolen, openly or surreptitiously, to build the enslavers’ kingdom and increase their profit margin. That was my experience at CIV too.

I finally recognized that while singing kept hurting souls tethered to life, to love, and to God, freedom did not come from singing alone. It also came from action that supported freedom and life, because faith without works is dead.

I have taken all the steps that Jesus asked us to take in Matthew 18:15-17.

And now here I am, speaking plainly with the hope that no other family will experience what our family has experienced. Maybe someone will be freed sooner than we were. Maybe someone will suffer less than we did because this offers enough light, love, and solidarity to give them the witness to leave and seek shelter sooner.

And maybe the community will truly thrive the way I have always hoped it would.

Good morning, friends.

A playground incident was recently shared publicly in which a child said she would not play with a dark-brown child because he is Black. Her family was held responsible for her words.

Her words require an antiracist, pro-harmony response that takes a wider look at the world from which she inherited these ideas, because one child and one family cannot carry the weight of that pain alone.

I heard that my previous response was too long. I listened. Here are the central ideas:

1. Address the words without scapegoating the child. Her family must guide her, and the wider community must examine what shaped her words.

2. Scapegoating protects the pattern. Blame finds a target. Awareness finds what must change.

3. Shame buries racism. It does not dismantle it. People can perform equality while continuing to carry hierarchy underneath.

4. Children absorb our contradictions. They hear that everyone is equal while watching who is trusted, heard, followed, and included.

5. Fondness is not equality. Friendship, admiration, or intimacy across race does not dismantle assumptions about who leads, teaches, rescues, or defers.

6. Integration did not always produce equality. Desegregation was necessary, but centring White institutions while dismantling Black ones preserved paternalism and White Saviourism.

7. Devaluation makes exploitation possible. Nobody’s worth or success should depend on treating another person as less capable, less human, or less valuable.

8. Service can reproduce hierarchy. When identity depends on being needed or in control, a community’s fracture can reinforce one person’s importance. Collective agency is the solution.

9. Threatened status can produce humiliation and exclusion. Once devaluing one person becomes acceptable, the pattern can spread throughout a community.

10. History shows us the stakes. Slavery, dispossession, the Indian Act, residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, Japanese Canadian internment, the Komagata Maru incident, and Woodlands show that devaluation costs people freedom, land, culture, belonging, and life.

11. Accountability and dignity belong together. We can name harm, interrupt it, require change, and repair systems without devaluing people.

Nobody needs to become less valuable for another person to know their worth.

Our children deserve nothing less.

It is the big people’s job to build and maintain that world.

I believe we can do it.

With love from the arena,

Saran

Remember that you are valued here.

I am therefore asking us to notice where devaluation, or its effects, exists among us and within us, so that we can repair the wholeness of each and all together.

My question is simple: How has the devaluation of any person or group of people served us, and what does devaluation look like?

David Hawkins, in Power vs. Force, wrote: “The statesman sacrifices himself to serve others; the politician sacrifices others to serve himself.”

I understand Hawkins to be distinguishing service from exploitation. When our sense of worth becomes dependent on accumulating money, possessions, recognition, influence, or control, exploiting others can begin to appear beneficial to our own success.

Slavery is an extreme expression of this pattern: a living being is devalued into a commodity or tool whose purpose is to serve another without mutual care and benefit. Across different systems of exploitation, the underlying pattern is similar: one person’s elevation is pursued through another person’s devaluation.

The same pattern can enter service.

When we do not know our intrinsic worth, service can become a way to construct and validate ourselves through being recognized, influential, necessary, or in control. Hawkins calls the self-serving person the “politician.” I don’t agree with the use of politician as pejorative and I do understand that Hawkins hopes to bring awareness to a particular pattern of leadership engagement.

A person can become increasingly identified with the work they do. Their face becomes associated with service, their service becomes associated with the community, and eventually challenging the person can feel like challenging the work itself.

When a community is already fractured, that person may become perceived as the glue holding everything together. Yet if their worth has become connected to being needed, the continued existence of the fracture can also continue to reinforce their importance when the community focuses on the person as the solution. It would be in the community’s best interest to recognize that their collective agency is the solution, while they continue to hold gratitude for the person’s service.

What I believe Hawkins noticed, as I have also noticed, is that a community is at risk of becoming broken when a leading person whose identity is tied to being the community’s solution feels that even one person may take away from their identity.

This is where humiliation and devaluation may begin to appear.

Kofi Annan said that “all the cruel and brutal things, even genocide, start with the humiliation of one individual.” When the humiliation of even one person becomes acceptable, devaluation can spread and eventually become embedded in the identity and practices of a community.

History shows us the devastating possibilities when devaluation becomes systemic. In the history of Western and Canadian culture we see examples of this in chattel slavery, the seizing of unceded land, the creation of the Indian Act, First Nation reserves, residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, prolonged treaty negotiations, the internment of Japanese-Canadians, the Komagata Maru incident, and the history of the mistreatment of persons with intellectual disabilities at Woodlands in BC. These are testament to the fact that in British Columbia, in Canada, and across the world people can lose freedom, land, culture, belonging, personhood, and life when we are not careful to treat all persons with dignity and respect and as persons who have the capacity to both contribute to and benefit from collective success. History shows us that harm does not remain with those who were first devalued. Every loss creates another wound in the relationships that support the well-being of the whole.

And this is precisely why I am not interested in finding someone to blame.

Blame is useless. Awareness is valuable.

Awareness allows us to ask:

Where is devaluation happening?

Where have we normalized humiliation or exclusion?

Where has our own worth become dependent on recognition, influence, control, or someone else’s diminishment?

Where are we participating in patterns we inherited rather than consciously chose?

And most importantly: what does repair require of us now?

Accountability remains necessary. We can name harm, interrupt harmful behaviour, examine systems, and require change without devaluing the people involved.

Our task is not simply to identify who caused the fracture. It is to become aware enough to stop reproducing it.

Then we can move toward greater equity, mutual care, shared well-being, and wholeness together.

Because nobody needs to become less valuable for another person to know their worth.

And our children deserve to inherit a world in which they can live fully, freely, equitably, and as themselves.

It is the big people’s job to build and maintain that world.

I believe that we can do it.

With love from the arena,

Saran

Remember that you are valued here.

Prologue The Canary’s Song

 Yes. Please, do use me as a cautionary tale, and also as a celebration of irrepressible hope in Yeshua M’shikha, Jesus Christ the Messiah.

In the Thrive Sabbath School class, a member once jokingly said to me that I was the canary in the coal mine. But at that time, I didn’t know why. I just knew that God (my Baba Ndiri) had been persistently encouraging me to grow more in love, and that through Yeshua’s (Jesus’) example I was learning more and more about what love looked like in the real world. I realize now that I was a canary in the coal mine because just as the canary was highly sensitive to airborne toxins, my infant experience of unintentional disconnection had created a high sensitivity to the harmful elements that cause disconnection which creates the toxic element contempt. Because those elements had created contempt in me. But God heals.

 God had been transforming me by healing that wounded child within—the one who learned to survive by over-functioning, by pleasing, by shrinking to stay safe. And as I accepted that healing, something awakened: the gift of nurture which God had instilled in me long before pain distorted my view of love. This nurture became the antidote to contempt. Because the nurturer sees what others overlook. They perceive the signs of disconnection and supremacy in a person, not as irredeemable flaws, but as evidence of wounds still bleeding beneath the surface. The nurturer knows that wherever supremacy has taken root, a rupture has preceded it—and healing is still possible. This is the gift of God that lives in me now: not the one who condemns, but the one who midwifes return.

 God had been healing me as a child, as a person, as a parent, as a friend, as a family member because I chose to accept His invitation to move through healing until the very day that Jesus returns. And choice is powerful. Therefore, although my insides shook every time I spoke, I HAD to share that message. We were missing love. We knew a lot about a lot, and we were missing love.

 We knew how to make people feel that they were not good enough unless they became what we thought they should become. We knew how to do things for people, but we were MISSING love.

 I had been an active member of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church since March or April of 1980 or 1981, when my parents became members. They had been studying and seeking God independently, and God, in a dream, highlighted the gift of rest in the Sabbath to Mommy, and so eventually both Mommy and Daddy decided to become members of the only church which they knew of that observed the Sabbath – the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. I was either four and a half or five and a half years old when our family joined the Adventist community. 

 I was seven or eight years old when I asked to be baptized because I felt God inviting me to be in relationship with Him. The administrators didn’t baptize me because of that response to a divine invitation though; they allowed me to be baptized because I knew the denomination’s answers to questions about God. And then, on March 3, 2018, I had a deeply disturbing experience that helped me to understand why I had been feeling increasingly alarmed about the structure and impact of Seventh-Day Adventism.

 I have loved this community since I was a child. I have been nourished, challenged, and shaped here. That’s why I grieve so deeply when I see its potential twisted into something God never intended. I see the elements of disconnection which separate us from each other and separate us from active engagement in friendship with God.

 Members, especially those of us who have been members since childhood, tend to be supporters of the institution, holding firm belief in the points which we have been taught about God, and we believe that this belief is equivalent to faith in God. In our innocent vulnerability we have been taught that faith in the Adventist Church and all its ways and ideas IS faith in God. And we maintain and defend those beliefs even when cognitive dissonance attached to those beliefs creates anxiety and fear, as we ignore the Spirit’s promptings to see the truth for ourselves. Because we hold unconscious fear that nonconformity would mean disconnection from this body to which we have been attached for all of our lives. If we challenge ideas like: “The Bible does not contradict itself” we fear that we would become outcasts, living in the fringes.

 We would no longer be significant.

 And so we pass up the opportunity to investigate more deeply with the Spirit of God. We subscribe to subtle shifts in truth which have a major impact on our ability to become the kind of intimate friends who can sit and reason one-on-one with God.

Part One Love Lost in Translation

So what happened on March 3, 2018? A sermon on being financially healthy. And being financially healthy is sound advice. 

 

A Truthful Beginning

On March 3, 2018, Pastor David Jamieson preached a sermon titled Breakthrough – Part VI at Church in the Valley.

 He began by doing something important—something holy.

He lifted up the widow in Mark 12 and rightly declared that Yeshua honoured her. He read the text out loud. He echoed the heart of the Messiah, who pointed to her offering—not because of its size, but because of its surrender. Because of her trust. Because she gave everything.

 Then, with urgency and conviction, he named a great wrong in the church:

 “There are people who want your money… and are devouring widow’s houses. And I don’t ever want to be part of that.”

 This is truth.

And it must not be forgotten.

Pastor Jamieson spoke against devouring, and in that moment, he stood on sacred ground. He echoed Yeshua’s rebuke of those who exploit faith for gain. That truth matters. It must be fully honoured.

The Flip Prosperity in Disguise

But then—almost seamlessly—something shifted.

Pastor Jamieson introduced a four-tiered financial framework:

  1.      Financial Crisis

  2.      One Pay Cheque Away

  3.      Good Financial Shape

  4.      God-Honoring Lifestyle

And into the very first category—crisis—he placed the widow.

The one Yeshua said had given more than all others.

The one He lifted above the rich.

Meanwhile, those with monthly surplus were smoothly elevated to “God-honouring.”

It was a subtle flip.

A blending of truth with the familiar logic of prosperity.

A soft turn that reinterprets honour through the lens of economic stability.

And when that kind of framing is delivered confidently, backed by scripture, and spoken by someone we trust—it slips past our resistance. It settles into the soul.

This is not about villainy.

This is about the danger of unexamined frameworks.

And it deserves correction—not to tear down the preacher, because he is a man of great vision, called by God as we all are.  But for our healing and progress as a community in Yeshua M’shikha, it is essential to unmask the distortion.

The Supremacist Trap

I can now categorically say that those who have been immersed in the supremacist system such as is described in this four-part hierarchy of Adventist teaching fall into a trap of rightness and conformity that is deeply dissonant with the soul’s deep need to engage with the equality of love.

I know this because I have experienced this idea in my own life with regards to morality and the “best” God-honouring way of being while creating disconnection in my relationships because of this ingrained supremacist mindset.  

Even when individuals begin to awaken to this unethical supremacy which has infected the foundations of the Adventist system—they often find themselves slipping into the same trap of undermining or attempting to control Spirit-led individual and local initiatives born from a hunger to see love become the binding agent in community.

This happens because our neurological pathways have been programmed through repetitive exposure and practice within the system to reward conformity and suppress dissent, even when that dissent is rooted in love and integrity. Our very survival will often seem to depend on conformity, as to challenge norms often creates disconnection which is a human’s deepest fear.

Part Two The Stolen Ministry

And so here I insert a personal story of such harm:

The Invitation

We were already serving.

Before any building opened its doors, before any flyer was printed or promise extended, we were there. A circle of single mothers—sharing food, holding space, navigating courtrooms, parenting through crisis. We weren’t part of any church program. We were led by need and sustained by grace.

It was ministry in motion: responsive, resilient, Spirit-breathed.

We had known for as long as we had been mothering that this ministry was needed. We had delayed its inception because we did not feel equipped, qualified to lead and encourage each other and the others whom we knew needed us corporately. Who were we to think of ourselves as wise, as bearers of light?

And then one day, a woman who had been mothering too, like me, not connected to her children by biology, but by choice, by heart, by soul, broke under the weight of childish mischief in the space where we had gathered for corporate worship. She knew that the child’s behaviour was received as witness to the indictment of the shameful inadequacy of parenting singly.

She quietly took the child out of that place of gathering which is called sanctuary and then verbally unleashed a torrent of shame-laced blame-filled frustration on her.

Many adults saw and whispered and cried and raged that this woman was unworthy to be the protector of the young heart which they were certain had been shattered by the wave that had just broken over her.

And they just stood by.

But I knew better. Spirit had been calling me for so long to connect with her. To let her know that I understood the struggle to ensure that her children fit into the mold of goodness, instead of belonging in the sacred community. But I was too tired.

I was too tired of doing exactly what she had been doing, carrying unmanageable weight, and breaking while the benevolent community stood by and watched and whispered.

And that day as they shared their concerns with me and conferred and wondered whether they should call the child protection authorities to “rescue” the deeply loved and treasured child I spoke up for her and asked who had stepped in to help.

And then I cried.

I went home from that gathering, stepped into the shower, and let my tears flow as one with the water washing over me.  I apologized to God for not listening, for thinking that I was not enough to lead in building a supportive collaborative community of women who were parenting singly, so that we would no longer be alone while standing among sanctified groups of generous people who watched us struggle.

God assured me that no apologies were needed. They just wanted my trust in Their ability to be our guide as we built the ministry that we knew we needed.

And so, it began. In 2016.

We gathered in living rooms and parking lots, over dinners and diapers, building something holy from the ground up. Our children bore witness to the power of community made not by committee, but by compassion. No one asked us to do it. We simply could not not do it.

Then representatives of the Seventh-day Adventist Church approached us, they called our work valuable. They invited us into their space and promised support to help us grow. They saw what we were doing and said: “You belong here. Let us help you build. “

We trusted that promise.

It is not naive to hope. Hope is sacred, especially when you are raising children in the shadows of systems that rarely see you. And so, we said yes—not because we needed permission to serve and build, but because we were told that our vision was finally being seen, honoured, and uplifted.

We walked through their doors with our offering, our hearts, our labour, our vision, believing that partnership was possible. That shared purpose would lead to shared care.

We did not know that our offering would be absorbed.

The Entrance

We arrived with open hands.

Our ministry had never been about spectacle. It was quiet work, steady, sacred, unseen by many but vital to those it reached. So, when we entered the institutional space offered by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, we did not come seeking status. We came with a desire to serve more deeply, more widely.

The promises made to us were clear: support, partnership, shared vision. We were told that our ministry had value, that our work was “just what the community needs.” We were offered use of the space, verbal assurances of collaboration, and the opportunity to continue the work with fewer barriers.

It sounded like sanctuary.

But from the very beginning, the rhythm began to shift.

It was subtle at first. Conversations that once felt mutual began to carry a tone of supervision. Invitations turned into limitations. Our name was spoken less and less. What was once clearly our initiative was referred to as “a ministry of the church.” Gradually, it became harder to recognize the space we had stepped into, and harder still to be recognized within it.

I felt it long before I could name it. A slow unraveling. A calculated erasure. I had expressed trepidation to the others before we accepted the invitation, but they believed in the integrity of the well-known leader who had offered support.

We were present, yet increasingly peripheral. Present, but no longer credited. Present, but not consulted. The ministry that had been birthed in community was being slowly reframed within an institution that saw our offering as an opportunity—without ever truly seeing *us*.

Still, we stayed. We hoped. We worked. Because the need was real, and the people still came.

And somewhere deep within, I began to question whether we had been invited into partnership—or into absorption.

The Disappearance

We did not leave. We were removed.

Bit by bit, the ministry we built was renamed, repackaged, and redirected—until its origin no longer included us. What began as gentle shifts became formal reassignments. What was once partnership became possession.

New leadership was brought in. They were told there was no existing ministry. That they would be “starting from scratch.”. Our contributions were not acknowledged. The community we had built was inherited by others who were given credit for its existence.

We weren’t simply pushed aside—we were erased.

Funds that had once been meant to support our work were rerouted. Donations offered in good faith by those who believed in our mission were redirected without consultation. We watched, stunned, as the very thing we had poured our hearts into became a tool to elevate the institution that now claimed it as its own.

The people we served were confused. Some followed us outside the gates. Others were told that our departure was “a natural transition.” It was not. It was an unspoken dismissal—a soft severing that cut deep.

And when we asked questions—when we sought clarity or fairness—we were met with silence. Or scolding. Or a patronizing smile that masked discomfort and control.

What was done to us is not uncommon. It is a quiet legacy of Adventism: to absorb, to extract, and to rename without acknowledgment. Especially when the labour comes from women. Especially when it comes from those of us who are racialized, marginalized, and already unseen.

We were not paid. We were not credited. We were not even remembered.

But we are not forgotten. God saw. And we remember.

And memory is resistance. Memory is the seed of truth. And truth will always rise.

Part Three The Path of Sacred Confrontation

Direct Conversation

When you’ve been harmed by those who claimed to walk with God, who claim to be anointed by God, the hardest thing to do is speak.

There is a particular kind of grief that comes from spiritual betrayal. It doesn’t scream—it sits silently under the skin, whispering doubt into every sacred space. And still, I knew I had to speak. I had to choose the way of courageous love, not silent despair.

Jesus taught us what to do: If someone wrongs you, go to them privately and speak the truth in love. That was the path I eventually chose. Step one.

I wrote my letter carefully. Not to indict, but to invite. I wasn’t seeking vengeance. I was seeking understanding, recognition, and the possibility of healing. The harm was real. The erasure was real. And my silence had only allowed it to deepen.

I wrote as one who had once trusted—and who still believed in the power of transformation.

I named what happened. I named how it felt. I acknowledged my part—where I had ignored my instincts, where I had stayed silent too long, where I had hoped instead of acted.

I offered the opportunity to be accountable, not as a weapon, but as a gift. The gift of clarity. The gift of change.

No response came.

Still, the silence was not wasted. It revealed what needed to be seen. It marked the end of private hope and the beginning of a public process.

Step one was complete. And because there was no movement, I turned to step two: bringing witnesses, so that the truth would not be carried alone.

 

In the Presence of Witnesses

Silence can be louder than denial.

When my letter received no reply, I knew the next step. Not escalation, but expansion. Jesus said, “If they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.”

So I did.

Not to accuse, but to be accompanied. Because such great harm is too heavy to carry alone.

I gathered those who had walked beside me—those who knew the truth not just in theory, but in flesh. People who had seen the birth of the ministry. People who had witnessed the slow unraveling. People who had heard my heartbreak and held space for my voice when others would not.

I also invited into that witnessing one whom had begun to gather people like me together to advocate and educate, women, racialized, who hid the pain of marginalization and institutional colonization behind our welcoming smiles.

I sent another letter; this time copied to these witnesses. I clarified again: this is not about revenge. This is about accountability. I restated what was taken, how we were erased, and what I was asking for—truth, restitution, and a path forward that would prevent this from happening again.

I tried again to ask for justice, for acknowledgment. I did not call for shame. I spoke clearly and carefully, honoring even those who had harmed me, because I believe in the possibility of redemption. I believe in telling the truth without destroying the humanity of the other.

This is the heart of holy confrontation: it does not seek to conquer, but to uncover.

And once again—there was no reply. Only more silence. Or perhaps, more fear.

But this silence was not empty. It was revealing. It showed the power of institutional self-protection, the cost of truth-telling, and the long shadow that falls over those who dare to disrupt comfortable systems.

Step two had been completed. And so, in faithful obedience to the process, I turned to the next step: taking it to the community.

Telling the Church

Jesus said, “If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church.” Not for spectacle. Not for punishment. But because truth has a right to be heard.

And so, with trembling and fire in my bones, I brought the story to the wider community. Not as gossip. Not as scandal. But as sacred witness.

The church I addressed was no longer the local congregation. I no longer belonged to a single worshipping body. The “church” became something broader, a circle of conscience, of accountability, of Spirit-led kinship. I gathered voices who had walked with me in varying ways, who understood the weight of injustice, and who, I hoped, carried the courage to listen.

To “tell it to the church” meant speaking to the system that allowed the harm. It meant revealing the deeper pattern beneath the surface incident, the institutional culture that erases, absorbs, and silences, particularly when the work comes from racialized, female, or marginalized bodies.

It meant naming the Seventh-day Adventist Church itself, not to condemn it, but to call it higher. To remind it of its sacred claims. To urge it to remember that Jesus did not protect institutions; Jesus protected people.

I told the truth publicly. Not with venom, but with clarity. I described how our ministry was taken. How promises were broken. How exclusion became policy. How the sacred work of single mothers was repurposed to benefit those in power.

And I extended one more invitation—not to the individuals who stayed silent, but to the body that still has the power to choose healing. I asked for restitution. I asked for reform. I asked for something better for the next generation.

I did not tell it to destroy. I told it to restore.

Because I believe the church can still become the sanctuary it proclaims to be—if it has the courage to face its reflection.

This was not the end. It was the beginning of a deeper testimony.

 

Part Four Patterns Not Incidents

The System Is the Story

This was never just about us.

What happened to our ministry, its quiet absorption, the erasure of its origins, the refusal to respond, was not an isolated incident. It was a symptom of something larger. A reflection of a deeper pattern woven into the fabric of the institution itself.

The story of what happened to us is one thread in a tapestry that stretches across decades, continents, and generations.

There is a pattern: of member-led initiatives being welcomed, used, and then rewritten. Of Afro-descendant labour being spiritualized, extracted, and discarded. Of systems that claim to serve while building platforms on the backs of those they refuse to see.

I was told that unless I had explicitly declared my expectation to be compensated, the Church considered itself entitled to claim and absorb my work. Even work that did not originate within its walls. Even work that had already been recognized publicly as my own.

This posture is not just unethical. It is theological malpractice.

When a church builds itself on the unpaid labour of the marginalized, it becomes an empire, not a body. When silence is advised by legal departments and truth is treated as a liability, the sacred trust of community is broken.

And this pattern is not unique to me.

It is the same pattern that left Lucy Byard dying outside a church-run hospital because her melanin-rich body was not welcome inside, even though she had faithfully served the church for decades, grown it, and donated to her hard-earned tithes and offerings to it. 

It is the same pattern that offers “diversity” from the pulpit while withholding power from those who are not seen as truly belonging. It is the same pattern that turns ministries of healing into monuments of control.

This is the bigger story. The system affirms the value of justice and mercy in its doctrine but struggles to live them out in its dealings.

I discovered that the system fears accountability because it has been built on the fear of God while positioning itself as God’s emissary.

But truth has a way of rising, to clarify to the immersed believer that the system is not a reflection of God.

God is not threatened by truth. God is the ground of it.

And if we are to be a people of that God, we must be willing to look into the mirror and see not only our intentions but our impact.

The Children We Failed

There are things I will never forget.

My daughter, trembling after class, whispering that her teacher had accused her of lying about her own writing because she was too afraid to speak in class.

My foster children, excluded from birthday parties, playground games, and social gatherings, because they were “those” children.

The five-year-old, crying and asking if she, excluded and taunted often, belonged in this world.

My twelve-year-old, attempting to take her life.

This is not ancient history. This is not exaggeration. This is what happens when systems that preach love do not know how to practice it.

We stayed too long.

I stayed too long believing that if I kept trying, if I kept giving, if I kept quiet long enough, something would shift. That the church would see. That the community would rise. That my children would be safe.

Instead, they learned what many children in racialized families learn too early: that being different can make you a target. That even in sacred spaces, you might not be truly seen. That sometimes, survival means silence.

Teachers gossiped about us. Administrators minimized our concerns. Other parents quietly pulled their children away from ours. And all the while, my daughters were absorbing the message: “You are not enough. You do not belong. You are not safe here. “

They were called dramatic. I was called difficult. Our grief was pathologized. Our resilience ignored.

And the worst part? We weren’t alone. I know too many other families with the same stories, the same wounds, the same regrets. We failed our children—not because we didn’t love them, but because we trusted institutions that did not earn our trust.

The trauma lives in their bodies now.

And so, I speak, not only for myself, but for every parent who sees the ache in their child’s eyes and doesn’t know how to fix it. For every family who gave the church everything, only to be left bleeding in the pews.

We cannot change the past. But we can name it. We can hold it up to the light and say: “This is what was done. And this is why it must never happen again.

Surviving the Shadows

There comes a moment when the body says no.

After years of bearing the weight of unsupported ministry, motherhood, and marginalization, my body broke. Long COVID struck like a thief in the night, sapping my strength, fogging my mind, stealing my breath. And with it came the sobering realization: I could no longer outrun the toll of betrayal.

I had been cooking for the church’s workshop series, still supporting the work of feeding and nurturing trembling mama hearts even though leadership had been stolen from me, setting food on tables, trying to serve while barely able to stand. I clung to the counter to keep from collapsing. Laurie had to walk me out of the kitchen. I wanted to disappear not from shame, but from sheer exhaustion.

That was the day I admitted what I already knew deep down: I could not keep sacrificing my health for a system that refused to see me.

Even then, support didn’t come from the institution. It came from community. Sarah started a meal train. Others brought food, prayers, quiet acts of grace. It wasn’t official. It wasn’t structured. But it was enough to keep me breathing.

Survival became sacred.

There were days I didn’t think I would make it. Nights I asked God why I had stayed so long in a place that kept asking me to give more, be more, carry more—while denying what it took from me.

And yet, I lived. I kept breathing. Kept mothering. Kept healing.

Because God was not the one who asked me to disappear.

God was the one who stayed—when institutions fled. God was the whisper in the dark, the breath between sobs, the fierce and tender voice that said, “I see you. I remember you. I have not forgotten who you are.”

And slowly, I began to rise.

Not because the shadows were gone, but because I had been learning how to carry the light within them.

Part Five Root Rot Supremacy Silence and Systems

This has been my lived experience. When I sought to go through a truth and reconciliation process with the local administrators involved, they turned to the executive administration of the SDA Church who I am told advised them not to respond.

In several spheres where grave harm has been done to the members of the community or where there is great risk, even to innocent children, the SDA administration deliberately remains silent so that its corporate image can remain untarnished. 

When an admitted predator recounts, with pride, how he resisted temptation while violating child safety terms—and Church leadership still remains silent—it is no longer about ignorance. It is about willful institutional neglect.

This is again my lived experience.

Camp Meeting and Child Safety

In the British Columbia Conference my family and I came face to face with a known convicted paedophile at Camp-meeting in Hope last year, 2024. I went to have a conversation with him as my younger daughter was determined to confront him. In that conversation he said that he continues to fight the urge to reoffend. He is now elderly, and he says that he had been fighting that urge with varying degrees of success – sometimes harming a child, sometimes resisting for many decades. His local church has forbidden him to attend services or functions because of this tendency. Even at that very Camp-meeting, in 2024, he declared that he was very proud of himself for resisting the urge when a little girl, a toddler, walked over to him and put her hand on his knee. He says that he was very tempted to pick her up, although the terms of Camp-meeting attendance stipulate that as a sex offender he is to have no interaction with children. Instead of calling another adult to assist the child with finding her parents, he decided that he would allow her to hold his finger while he walked around with her to” find her mama”.

I raised the alarm with the pastor of a local church, then with the leadership of the Adventist Church at all levels- including the General Conference. To date they have not responded. This seems to fit a repeating pattern where credible instances of abuse or potential abuse are ignored by administration until there is public exposure which goes viral. Then apologies are made and restorative conversations planned which seem to be more performative than transformative, since the pattern has been repeated so often within the denomination.

Camp-meeting approaches again in just a few weeks, at the end of July, and to date there has been no public system-wide or public local response.

This moment was not just frightening—it was revealing. It exposed the Church’s dangerous reliance on secrecy and self-protection, even when children are put at risk. The fact that no clear system-wide changes have been communicated, even after direct outreach to every level of Church administration, shows that protecting the institution remains more important than protecting the innocent and creating opportunities for healing and transformation within the community.

In her time, Ellen White herself warned Elder Olsen and his contemporaries against building the church upon corporate structures and centralized control. She understood that such a foundation would betray the original purpose of the movement: to cultivate the kind of intimacy with God and each other that the disciples experienced with Jesus.

Immersion in this system—which also upholds the supremacist tenets of racism, classism, parentism, genderism, and other caste-based hierarchies—has produced profound, ingrained trauma. That trauma continues to have an impact on building real relationships and healthy community even in organizations formed by those who see the need for growth in love as the primary tool in personal and relational healing. I have faced this truth personally, and so I began to engage in therapy to directly address that supremacist poison to which I had been exposed since childhood. I do not believe that this poison was deliberately introduced by administrators in the infancy of the movement to do harm. I believe that this supremacist poison has existed among us as humans since the enemy of love infected us with it through deception, as he led us to believe that if we ingested the fruit we would NOT surely die.

The Poison of Supremacy

What we did not recognize was that the fruit represented supremacy- the idea that we were higher than God or any other, and that we would with its ingestion become aware of higher truths than the simple realities of love and connection which God offered to us as the best gifts. From then to now the poison of that fruit persists from generation to generation until somewhere in the third or fourth generation its impact is naturally lessened as God promises us in the second commandment. BUT if at ANY time any one of us confronts that poison the mercy of God IMMEDIATELY activates healing to a thousand generations. Love is THAT powerful.

 

Part Six Corporatism and Communion

The spiritual abuse and deception embedded in these structures are starkly visible in David Jamieson’s March 3, 2018, sermon, where he subtly shifted the honour and focus of Jesus’ message away from the widow who gave two mites, and toward the Pharisees who gave large sums. In doing so, he ratified a corporate shift that was already being implemented within his congregation—a shift where success in ministry began to be measured not by faithfulness or love, but by participant numbers and revenue generation.

This slow, subtle redirection moved the focus away from embracing community as family, toward targeting a specific social demographic that fit his revised definition of what it meant to be “God-honouring.” In effect, he substituted Jesus’ inclusive call to love with a market-driven model of religious growth.

To maintain this co-opted power, the church has also used Ellen White’s call to community service to attract the vulnerable, with a subtle focus to incrementally reshape them into supporters of the institution with the illusion that to be a supporter of the institution is synonymous with being friends of God. These individuals, lulled into toxic gratitude, which creates a sense of responsibility to repay kindness, are often used as low or  unpaid labour to grow the corporate wealth of the organization, which uses charitable status to attract investors, while often leaving the wounded exploited to suffer alone with breadcrumbs doled out as evidence of care, as these individuals continue to show up like the widow who brought her all to the offering plate, believing she was helping to build a sacred community rooted in love – even though the surplus havers had devoured her house.

Theology as a Corporate Tool

Jamieson’s shift reflects the deeper, corrupted roots of Adventism’s corporatist leanings—roots that have, for generations, prioritized institutional preservation over the protection and well-being of its people. This has led to the repeated covering up of abuse in order to shield the church’s reputation, leaving survivors deeply wounded and spiritually isolated.

We see further evidence of corporatism in the development of Adventism’s food industry, which exploited Ellen White’s health message—originally meant to guide people into divine healing and wholeness—for economic gain. What began as a call to sacred transformation became a commercial enterprise that still sells unhealthy food as it hides itself away from accountability for this exploitation by meeting the minimum standards of regulatory bodies across the world. 

This model breeds trauma, in mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual health. It does not promote divine transformation. It hinders the development of Christlike community. And it keeps people trapped in systems where being “right” is more valued than being humble, teachable, and willing to receive correction through the teachings and life of Yeshua—the Way, the Truth, and the Light.

The Daniel diet which the church holds up as the standard is not the core of the Adventist “health” industry. This reality is similar to the subtle shift in truth which is evident in David Jamieson’s March 3, 2018 sermon on God’s view of our finances. 

Exploiting the Health Message

Let’s take a closer look: the foods sold at many ABC Christian stores (Adventist Book Centers) and promoted as “healthy” often contain:

Ultra-processed ingredients

High sodium levels

Additives and preservatives

Low actual nutrient density

Hidden sugars or sweeteners

Refined seed oils

…and yet, they’re labeled as “health foods” simply because they’re vegetarian or vegan, or because they’re tied to the Adventist health message.

Here’s what’s happening:

1. Health-washing through theological branding.

Because the church promotes a vegetarian or plant-based diet as part of its spiritual identity, anything that fits that identity is often assumed to be healthy—even when it isn’t. This is theological branding, not nutritional science.

2. Regulatory loop-holes

As long as a product meets the minimum government requirements for labeling and avoids explicitly false claims, it can still be marketed as a health food—especially in religious or niche markets where customers trust the source more than the label.

3. Cultural conditioning within Adventism

Many Adventists associate food from ABC with spiritual safety. This makes it much harder to question whether the food is actually good for the body. “If it’s sold at ABC, it must be okay” is a widespread assumption, but it’s often untrue.

This disconnect between appearance and impact is part of the corporatism which Ellen White named and warned about. The health message Ellen White spoke of was holistic, simple, and sacred. But the modern application in Adventist food manufacturing and retail seems to serve the institution’s profit far more than people’s healing.

Some Adventist-branded food products are:

Ultra-processed “meat substitutes” high in sodium and MSG

Granola and cereals packed with sugar and preservatives

Shelf-stable, nutrient-poor options that rely on heavy processing for long shelf life

By all widely available information on what healthy food looks like Adventist health food seems to fall far short of that mark – although it is indeed 100% meat free. A morsel of truth packed with many lies. 

Part Seven Sacred Correction

Naming Without Shaming

I could have named them all.

Every leader, every administrator, every silence that felt like a stone. I could have laid it bare: names, dates, details. The receipts are there. The memory is intact.

But I chose not to.

Not because the harm wasn’t real. Not because the truth isn’t sharp. But because the purpose of this telling is not destruction, it is restoration.

Naming without shaming is an act of spiritual maturity. It is a refusal to replicate the very systems of punishment and humiliation that wounded us in the first place. I chose to speak in love, not to spare accountability, but to offer a better path.

This is why I did not name individuals here.

Because I do not wish to cause embarrassment or shame or harm to anyone.

Because I have been told it is the institutional posture of the Seventh-day Adventist Church to absorb member-led work unless a claim to ownership is declared explicitly in advance—even for projects that originated outside its walls.

Because I was informed that those from whom I sought accountability were instructed by the Church’s legal department to remain silent.

Because I know how institutions protect themselves. And I know that shame never built a better church. But truth might.

Because I see that they know not what they do.

I believe that telling the truth without vilifying is possible. I believe that transformation is possible. And that only happens when we are willing to look at what we have done, what we have allowed, and what we have silenced.

This chapter is not a list of names. It is a mirror.

To say: this happened. And it was wrong. And it must be made right, not through punishment, but through repentance, restitution, and reform.

To name without shaming is to honour both justice and mercy. It is to remember that accountability is a form of love.

This Is Not Rebellion

They may say I am rebellious.

That by speaking, by refusing to be silent, I am causing division. That by naming harm, I am undermining unity. That by asking for accountability, I am threatening the peace.

But let me be clear: this is not rebellion. This is return.

Return to the God who overturned tables. Return to the Christ who called out religious leaders for missing the heart of the law. Return to the Spirit who breaks into rooms with wind and flame and cannot be contained.

This is not rebellion. This is resurrection.

What I am calling for is not punishment, it is possibility. What I am naming is not a scandal; it is a pattern. What I am asking for is not control; it is care.

The call is not to tear down what is holy. The call is to stop calling harm holy.

I do not want the community to fall. I want it to become what it claims to be: a sanctuary for the wounded, a community of compassion, a place where justice and mercy walk hand in hand.

But to get there, we must be honest. About the ways we have protected the religious corporation instead of people. About the ways we have prioritized image over integrity. About the ways we have silenced prophets and uplifted performers.

This is not rebellion. This is repair.

To build God’s kingdom on Earth as it is in heaven means we cannot keep covering rot with gold. We cannot keep branding brokenness as blessing. We cannot keep demanding submission in the name of salvation.

The kingdom of God is not found in domination or denial. It is found in the people who dare to rise, to speak, to love more fiercely than fear.

So no. I will not be silent.

Because this is not rebellion. This is holy remembering.

Proposals for Sacred Change

Telling the truth is only the beginning.

If the church is to become sanctuary again, if it is to walk in the way of Jesus, not just speak His name, then it must move beyond apology and into action. Not cosmetic reform. Not PR campaigns. But sacred change.

Here is what that change might look like.

Financial Restitution and Transparency

When work has been absorbed, rebranded, and used for funding or reputation without acknowledgment, the ethical response is not silence—it is restitution. Not as charity, but as justice. Ministries built by marginalized members should not become platforms for the powerful without recognition or compensation.

Protection of Intellectual and Spiritual Labour

There must be formal policies that acknowledge and protect the contributions of members—especially those whose work emerges from lived experience, not institutional appointment. Consent, credit, and compensation must be part of every partnership. A Creative Rights Acknowledgment Form should be implemented across local and regional levels.

Child Safety and Community Care Reform

There must be clear, enforceable policies regarding the presence of known sex offenders in shared spaces, especially at family events like camp meetings. Silence and secrecy have no place in matters of child protection. All attendees deserve safety, and all communities deserve transparency.

I did not go into detail in this article about my call for accountability. But I have also engaged in a long process of attempted communication with the leaders of the institution, and they have responded with silence.

A Public Reckoning With Racialized Harm

The Church must reckon with its historical and ongoing complicity in racialized harm. This includes acknowledging cases like Lucy Byard and countless unnamed others. Public storytelling, reparative action, and leadership training in anti-racism are not optional, they are the fruit of true repentance.

Accountability Rooted in Justice

There must be external review systems for when harm is reported. Internal silos protect abusers and retraumatize survivors. Justice cannot grow in isolation. Independent oversight, survivor advocacy teams, and restorative pathways must be created and resourced.

These are not demands, they are invitations. Invitations to become what the Church claims to be. Invitations to rise out of fear and into faith. Invitations to protect the vulnerable, honour the invisible, and return to the heartbeat of the gospel: liberation, not control.

Sacred change is possible. But only if we choose it.

Part Eight The Call to Loveolution

It is therefore deeply important that Adventists develop a close and personal friendship with God, so that each can be guided by the Spirit of God which is available to all, so that truth can be separated from the lies which have been deeply and deliberately ingrained into our minds. 

I promise that if we accept God’s invitation to come and reason with Him, we will each be guided through a journey of transformation which will indeed lead us to the kingdom of God now on Earth as it is in heaven, instead of being deceived into being a part of the system which will claim to have fed the hungry, the naked, the imprisoned but to whom God will say “Depart from me. I never knew you”. 

Informed compassion is essential.

The MRI is just as important as the treatment.

And God—Baba Ndiri, Mweya waMwari, Yeshua M’shikha—offers both.

This divine compassion is the kind David wrote about in Psalm 103. It’s the same compassion that flipped the tables of exploitation and invited us to a different kind of feast.

It’s not about revenge.

It’s not about shame.

It’s about Loveolution.

The holy revolution of love that casts out all fear.

Let me be clear:

I do not want Pastor Jamieson vilified.

He is a human being, struggling with shadows, like we all do.

And he has spoken much truth—especially when he named the devouring.

That truth matters.

But the flip must also be named. Because that theological distortion, whether intended or not, helped justify systemic theft and exploitation within the Adventist Church. It paved the way for exploitation in the name of servolution. It set the stage for devouring—again.

Truth must be fully honoured.

And distortion must be fully corrected.

She Gave Everything

The widow’s offering was not crisis.

It was courage.

It was not an error.

It was embodied faith.

She is not to be pitied.

She is to be followed.

So am I.

So are you.

We are not defined by what was taken from us.

We are defined by the love that held us through it all.

By the God who sees and says, “This one has given their all.”

May we hear that voice again.

May we respond with trembling trust.

May we welcome the table-flipping, fear-clearing, house-restoring power of Love.

Only a Loveolution can do that.

God is not looking for us to become a part of a servolution. God is inviting us to be a part of a loveolution, and service to all will naturally flow from there. Not one need will be unfulfilled. Like the Early Church the needs of all will be met. In that space of relationship we will begin to see lives transformed as people begin to see their value in connection with the divine sustainer and creator of all things, and THERE in love is where all forms of health – financial, spiritual, mental, and emotional health will be experienced AND lived as wealth in the kingdom of God now on Earth as it is in heaven. 

Part Nine This Is Permission

My Beauty From Ashes Testimony

Just in case you needed it — this is permission.

This is permission to stop spiritualizing and romanticizing our pain, our trauma, and our poor choices. Yes, we are doing our best. Always. With all the factors that affect our decision-making capabilities, we are — in each moment — doing our best. And it is beautifully okay and divinely wise to listen to the lessons offered through each circumstance, so that we can create a new best as we travel forward.

Consider Hosea.

Hosea married a woman who was troubled. He loved her. He chose to stay with her through all the ups and downs of their relationship.

Did God tell Hosea to marry that specific woman so that he could experience pain as a symbol of God’s love for us? I don’t think so — because God does not use people as anything less than examples of divine image-bearers.

And yet — God created something beautiful from their story.

I made a decision to accept an invitation to work with someone whom I absolutely did not trust. I knew they were unsafe. Things unfolded just as they do when a fly accepts an invitation to tea in a spider’s parlour.

And yet — God created something beautiful out of our story.

For years, I kept telling myself that I had asked God for a sign that it was safe to go. And when I got that sign — though I ABSOLUTELY knew they were unsafe, and though I did NOT want to go — I went anyway, because everyone else wanted to go.

Because of impostor syndrome, I failed to believe in myself. I failed to believe that if everyone else went, I could have said, “No. I love you. You go ahead. I’ll build from here.”

I could have been courageously clear and compassionately honest about why I knew it was unsafe to go. But years of immersion in spiritual trauma and Bible idolization had taught me to doubt the voice of the Spirit within me — to silence what I clearly heard — because I had been taught not to touch the Lord’s anointed.

And I missed the deeper truth: That I — that we all — are the Lord’s anointed.

God was not calling me to blind obedience. God was calling me to the sacred strength of being compassionately resolute — not rebellious, but faithful. Faithful to Love. Faithful to truth. Faithful to the Spirit who speaks within and among us.

And God created something beautiful of our story.

God gave me the house I needed to do everything I ever dreamt of doing — 9465 156th Street, Surrey.

I left that house. I closed up my daycare — the one I had literally built with my own two hands — and moved to a different community, so that my children could attend a school I had been taught was essential to their survival as “good Christian children.”

Even when it clearly did NOT serve their best interest, I cried for FOUR WHOLE YEARS before finally trusting what I knew and moving them.

It took ANOTHER SIX YEARS — years of tears and trauma — before I recognized the deeper truth:

We were being harmed.

We were being harmed by years of spiritual trauma and Bible idolization, with the self-centered principles of capitalism dressed up as sacred obligation.

Luxury was not in that system.

Luxury was going to public school, with teachers and staff who loved their students, who fought to create better pathways for ALL children to access their agency.

Luxury was going to the food bank to provide food for ourselves and for others, while we built community, shared a home, and stood together through thick and thin.

Luxury was working hands-on, day and night, with the baby no one expected to speak, or see, or thrive — and watching that baby rule her world LIKE A GIRL.

Luxury was opening up our home to a whole other family while their mother healed.

Luxury was doing a full two-room move — twice in four months — to make space for that guarding of a friend’s heart.

Luxury was waking up several times a night to bring a baby to her nursing mother, while dealing with my own exhaustion and burnout, so that fear would not steal their bond.

Luxury was doing the hands-on work of learning to accept all things from all people so that I would destroy no one. I learned to choose what I would do.

Luxury was learning to love as recklessly and relentlessly as God has loved me.

Luxury was learning that the process of all things matters.

That sign I thought I saw? It wasn’t a sign.

It was growth — growth filtered through the shadowy glass of trauma. Had I trusted that growth was the fruit of love, of skill, of divine connection, we would have built the community and the economy that is in us to be built.

Because the same power that spoke the world into being is available to all of us. We need only believe it is — and be willing to boldly live and work in partnership with others who believe in amplifying equality and equity.

THAT is luxury.

If right now you are struggling to believe in yourself — if you think you are a worm, too low to soar like the anointed ones you were taught to revere — look around.

Look closely.

You are not a worm.

You are a caterpillar. And those soarers? They were once caterpillars too.

And you— You will soar.

For now, walk. Be nourished. Be protected.

And when you move through the stages of transformation, and become a butterfly, gently descend toward the caterpillars who are still finding their way. Whisper to them: “You will soar too.”

And if, along the way, you are damaged and broken, fear not.

When you emerge from your cocoon — from the dark night of the soul where everything seems dissolved into darkness forever — the One Who Is Love will have their hand ready for you.

If you choose to step onto that hand, you will soar higher and farther than you could ever ask, dream, or imagine.

That is luxury. That is love.

Today is July 5, 2025. A week ago, I wrote this, and I have been wrestling with whether or not to share it because I don’t enjoy challenging the status quo. It is not ever comfortable. But for all of my life my heart has hurt so deeply when I see patterns that persistently rob us of the friendship that God is seeking with us, and also therefore rob us of healthy intimate productive relationship with each other.

Baba Ndiri, Source of Everything:
Dear God of holy disruption,
You do not dwell in temples made by human hands alone.
You dwell in the trembling hearts of those
who mourn corruption
who grieve deception
who refuse to conform when conformity costs us You.

Help me, like Ellen, to speak with fire
and walk with tenderness.
Help me to call Your people home
without returning to what I resist.
Help me remember that the truth
does not need to shout to be known—
it only needs to be spoken in love.

Let my voice echo Yours.
Let my anger flow from mercy.
Let my grief become a well of hope.
Let informed compassion fill my heart.

Amen.

Part Ten Faith Is Not Synonymous With Conformity

Those who had used Scripture for many generations to maintain control of the people were terrified that Yeshua was freeing the people—not just from Rome, but from the religious authority of the Priests and Pharisees.

Yeshua wasn’t abolishing Scripture—He was fulfilling it.
He wasn’t destroying the law—He was revealing its heart.
He wasn’t rejecting their traditions—He was exposing their misuse, and leaving His light in Word for future generations to use as an introduction to the Way, the Truth, the Son of God.

People may think that I am determined to create confusion and harm to Christianity and especially to the Adventist Church. But no one knows how much I have agonized and struggled from 2007 to now with the huge concerns that have been burdening my heart, as I have watched the Executive Branch of the Church and some of its clergy and associates keep strange fires lit among the Spirit’s light of truth that have deceived and done grave harm to the spiritual, mental, emotional, and fiancial health of its members.

A friend recently mentioned a couple of months ago that the SDA Church had effectively banished Ellen White to Australia in order to silence her.

I had never known that. I had only ever been taught of her approval of all things SDA. I was taught that she was much like the cornerstone of the movement.

This morning as I was asking God how to move forward – mainly how to move past the block that was preventing me from clearly hearing His next step – searching for Ellen’s struggle came to mind.

That was instructive for me. She reminded me to be careful about what I said, and how I said it. She reminded me not to use a sword to cut off the leader’s servant’s ear – as Kefa (Peter) had done.

She reminded me that Yeshua had not directed us to buy a sword to harm anyone, but that we were to use our swords as tools that served the need of the common good.

Did you know that Ellen White was banished to Australia – away from the General Conference so that her voice of caution would no longer be heard because she strongly cautioned against conforming to unhealthy church policies and doctrines?

Ellen White and Institutional Authority

Throughout her writings, Ellen White warned repeatedly against centralization of power and the dangers of placing trust in human structures rather than the Holy Spirit. A few key points from her concerns:

Institutional Power

“The church is in the Laodicean state. The presence of God is not in her midst.”
— Manuscript Releases, vol. 1, p. 249 (1898)

“Men have taken unfair advantage of those whom they supposed to be under their jurisdiction. They have taken upon themselves responsibilities that they were never fitted to bear. Their decisions have been relied upon as the voice of God.”
— Testimonies to Ministers, p. 279

Corporate Control and Holy Spirit Leading

“The General Conference is no longer [relaying messages from] the voice of God.”
— Manuscript 37, 1901

She said this during a time when leadership structures were failing to respond to the Spirit-led movements in different parts of the world, and instead were consolidating authority.

Mission Drift and Wealth Accumulation

Ellen White cautioned against the growing tendency to run the church like a business or legal corporation:

“The work of God is not to be carried forward after the world’s plan… Let not the work of reform be hindered by the selfishness of men who hold the truth in unrighteousness.”
— Review and Herald, August 28, 1900

Her Vision

Ellen White dreamed of a people shaped not by policies and power structures, but by divine love, humility, and the prophetic call to serve, not rule. She longed for a church in which:
• Decisions were made through prayer and mutual humility.
• Every believer was empowered to follow God’s leading, not just those in positions of leadership.
• The focus was on freedom in Christ, compassion for the oppressed, and readiness to move wherever the Spirit led—not protection of image, wealth, or control.

Here are several insightful quotes from Ellen G. White that reveal her deep concerns about the growing institutionalism and corporatism within Adventism:

Warnings About General Conference Authority

“There is being done in America, by the General Conference, that… the churches in the conferences know nothing about… the General Conference so-called is no longer the voice of God. It has become a strange voice, and they are building strange fire.” (spoken to W. C. White, 1901)
• “It has been some years since I have considered the General Conference as the voice of God.” (1898)

• “Never should the mind of one man or the minds of a few men be regarded as sufficient in wisdom and power to control the work…” (Testimonies for the Church, vol. 9)

Re-establishing Biblically Grounded Organization
• “When the judgment of the General Conference… is exercised, private independence and private judgment must not be stubbornly maintained, but surrendered.” (9 T 260.1)

https://m.egwwritings.org/en/book/14059.12729001?hl=General+Conference+strange+fire+&ss=eyJ0b3RhbCI6MiwicGFyYW1zIjp7InF1ZXJ5IjoiR2VuZXJhbCBDb25mZXJlbmNlIHN0cmFuZ2UgZmlyZSAiLCJ0eXBlIjoiYmFzaWMiLCJsYW5nIjoiZW4iLCJsaW1pdCI6MjB9LCJpbmRleCI6MH0%3D#12729009

Institutional Corruption versus Divine Mission
• “And the General Conference is itself becoming corrupted with wrong sentiments and principles… human inventions were made supreme.” (Letter 55, September 19, 1895)
• “The sacred character of the cause of God is no longer realized at the center of the work… the voice from Battle Creek… is no longer the voice of God… maintained by men who should have been disconnected.” (1896)

Re-establishing Biblically Grounded Organization
• “When the judgment of the General Conference… is exercised, private independence and private judgment must not be stubbornly maintained, but surrendered.” (9 T 260.1)
• She supported broad, representative meetings—not small, isolated councils: “God has ordained that the representatives of His church from all parts of the earth… when assembled in a General Conference… shall have authority.”

Why This Matters Today

1. Caution Against Power Concentration
   She witnessed how a few in central leadership could shape direction away from divine guidance, warning that such structures could become entrenched and impure.
2. Championing Spirit-led Collaboration
   She wasn’t anti-organization—rather, she supported structures that were prayerful, transparent, and representative, not top-down or cloaked in bureaucracy.
3. Balancing Spiritual Authority
   Her vision emphasized a church led by the Holy Spirit through collective counsel, not by institutional hierarchy or vested personal authority.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church never formally excommunicated or publicly condemned Ellen G. White—but they often ignored, resisted, and isolated her, especially when her prophetic voice challenged institutional power, racial injustice, or hierarchical control.

What Happened

1.     Her Move to Australia

In 1891, Ellen White was sent to Australia by General Conference leaders, officially as a missionary. But many historians and insiders recognize that this move effectively distanced her from Battle Creek, the headquarters of the church. At the time, she was a strong voice against centralized control and the spiritual decay at the core of the institution.

“I know not how long my stay will be in this country. I will go forward in the name of the Lord… But I feel greatly distressed as I see what is coming in upon us.”
— Letter 85, 1896

White never outright said she was “banished,” but she clearly felt exiled and sensed that her absence allowed dangerous patterns to deepen unchecked at headquarters.

·       Letters Ignored or Minimally Acted On

Ellen White wrote numerous letters to leaders at Battle Creek warning about pride, wealth accumulation, abuse of authority, and spiritual apathy.
• Her appeals for racial justice (like her 1891 sermon “Our Duty to the Colored People”) were almost entirely ignored.
• Her calls for decentralizing power and letting the Holy Spirit lead were met with minimal structural reform until the 1901 General Conference session—and even that was short-lived.

“You are not definitely doing the will of God. The work of God is not to be fashioned after human devising.”
— Letter 41, 1896

·       Undermining From Within Leadership

Some church leaders saw her as a prophet when convenient, but dismissed her when she challenged their policies.
• A.T. Jones, one of the 1888 reformers, supported her early on but later drifted into spiritual extremism and undermined her influence.
• Uriah Smith and others resisted her warnings about over-centralization and racial injustice.

Ellen White was deeply grieved by this rejection, and at times even questioned her own usefulness:

“I feel sometimes that I have no place, no home, in this world.”
— Letter 127, 1903

·       Withdrawal From Organizational Leadership

By 1903–1905, after years of trying to reform the church from within, Ellen White focused primarily on writing and local ministry, stepping back from formal institutional influence.

“Let men beware how they give themselves up to the control of any human being. Let them not dishonor God by placing blind confidence in men and accepting the work of man for the work of God.”
— 8T 78 (Testimonies for the Church, vol. 

Final Years: A Prophet Sidelined, But Not Silenced
• She continued to publish powerful works—Steps to Christ, The Desire of Ages, The Ministry of Healing, and more.
• She never abandoned the Adventist message, but she challenged the system that distorted it.
• At her death in 1915, the church honored her publicly—but many of her most radical warnings were quickly buried, and her legacy was later institutionalized in ways she never intended.

Ellen G. White believed that the Seventh-day Adventist Church had a prophetic calling, a divine mandate to proclaim the three angels’ messages (Revelation 14), and to prepare people for the second coming of Christ. However, she did not believe the Adventist Church was infallible, nor did she teach that belonging to it guaranteed salvation.

In fact, she repeatedly warned that the church could fall, become corrupt, and even be “Babylon” if it betrayed its calling.

✅ YES — She believed Adventists were called by God
• Ellen White clearly saw the Adventist movement as raised up by God for a special purpose:

“God has a church upon the earth, who are His chosen people, who keep His commandments.”
— Letter 12, 1893

“The Seventh-day Adventist Church has been chosen by God as a peculiar people, separate from the world.”
— Testimonies for the Church, vol. 7, p. 138

This calling was missional, not a badge of superiority. It came with a weighty responsibility: to reflect God’s character, uphold truth, and remain faithful to the Spirit’s leading.

BUT — She strongly rebuked the idea that the church was unconditionally “the remnant”
• She did not teach that the Adventist Church was immune to apostasy or above divine judgment:

“We are in danger of becoming a sister to fallen Babylon, of allowing our churches to become corrupted, and filled with every foul spirit, a cage for every unclean and hateful bird.”
— Letter 51, 1886

“The church is in the Laodicean state. The presence of God is not in her midst.”
— Manuscript Releases, vol. 1, p. 249

She consistently emphasized that faithfulness—not affiliation—determines spiritual identity.

Conditional Faithfulness and Institutional Imperfection

Ellen White’s vision was not of a denomination being saved, but of a people shaped by truth, mercy, and surrender to Christ:

“Not by name, but by character, will God judge His people.”
— Testimonies to Ministers, p. 422

She also made clear that others outside of Adventism were sincerely following God.

She did not support the othering of Catholics:

“Among the Catholics there are many who are most conscientious Christians, and who walk in all the light that shines upon them…”
— The Great Controversy, p. 565

 曆曆曆曆曆曆曆曆曆曆曆曆曆曆曆曆

I have great hope that we will begin to deliberately invite God in to engage with us, so that we can be cleansed of the subtle distortions that have infected our hope, our mental, spiritual, physical, financial, and emotional beings. I have great hope in us as a community. And as I sat in worship with Adventists in my local community, on Saturday, July 5, I felt residual resentments rise to the surface of my heart, and I felt them leave me as we harmonized together on the closing hymn “The Lord’s Prayer”. 

Hallelujah and Amen. 

Epilogue The God Who Stayed

The Being Withness of God

God never left.

Not in the silence. Not in the sickness. Not in the betrayal cloaked in benevolence. Even when my body broke and my spirit trembled, I could still hear God, not above me, not beyond me, but beside me.

This is the Being-Withness of God.

Not the distant deity of pulpits and policies, but the One who sits on the floor beside the wounded. The One who weeps when harm is done in Their name. The One who danced with me in the kitchen, whispered peace as I drove up the mountain, and stayed through every sacred unraveling.

God is not only found in sermons and scriptures. God is in mangoes and rivers, drumbeats and lullabies. God is in the rhythm of resilience passed down by my ancestors, those who survived oceans, chains, and silence.

They knew this God. The God of survival and soul.

The God who sat in hidden spaces, wrapped in the prayers of those whose names history tried to erase. The God who reminded me, again and again: “You are not what they say. You are not what they stole. You are not what they fear. You are mine. “

This God, the God who dances and dwells, was never found in the institution. They were found in the in-between places. In the breath between breakdowns. In the arms of strangers who became family. In the quiet yes that rose up inside me when everything else said no.

The Being-Withness of God is not theoretical. It is embodied. It is queer. It is wild. It is unbought and unboxed. It is fierce enough to flip tables and tender enough to braid grief into blessing.

This is the God who walked with me when no one else did. The One who showed me that I do not need permission to be loved. That my ministry was never wasted. That joy is not naive—it is holy resistance.

I do not serve the god of control, fear, or hierarchy.

I walk with the God who is with. Always. Still.

The Prophetic Benediction

We have come to the threshold.

This story was not told for revenge. It was told for release. For reclamation. For resurrection. It was told so that others would know they are not alone, that what was taken from them can be named, and what was buried can bloom again.

So let this final chapter be a benediction.

Not the kind whispered over pews by those who do not know your name.

But the kind that rises from the soil, where your tears once fell and where your truth still grows.

Let this be for the ones who laboured in silence.

For the ones whose ministries were misnamed.

For the ones whose children were wounded while the sanctuary stayed still.

For the ones whose bodies bore the weight of the church’s denial.

Let it be for the daughters who are still learning to dance again.

For the mothers who still question if they were wrong to believe.

For the prophets who were dismissed as angry, rebellious, unstable, or “too much.”

Let it be for the joy that still rises.

 

Joy Rises

This is not the end, beloved.

You were not made to be used, discarded, or silenced.

You were made to rise.

Like seed from split earth.

Like song from breathless lungs.

Like sun through shattered stained glass.

You do not need permission to be whole.

You do not need validation to be sacred.

You do not need to carry what was never yours.

Let joy rise—not because the world is healed,

but because you are healing.

Let justice rise, not for vengeance,

but for vision.

Let the church rise, not as a brand,

but as a body that remembers how to breathe.

And when they ask what kind of God you serve—

Tell them:

The God who stayed.

The God who sees.

The God who holds even this.

Amen. And let it begin.

When a person does not produce in the way we believe they should, we often call them incompetent.

As the parent of children with significant support needs I had to find the balance between roaring and/or attacking like a lion or collapsing like a jellyfish when my children’s needs were met with what I considered to be disdain at worst or nonchalance at best. And this is often the reality for parents such as us.

Neither extreme was effective, and neither was a reflection of either my intentions or who I wanted to be or how I wanted to be treated

Incompetence and insufficiency are not ideas that began with us, and yet they are ideas that begin with us.

Labelling people this way did not come from our wholeness or our vitality as individuals and as communities. This began in our defensiveness as somewhere along the way doing a lot, in our minds, became tied to survival and success.

With production as survival at the forefront of our minds we began to devalue persons who did not produce as expected, and chose the words incompetent and insufficient as the label to define them. Those labels carry heavy judgment.

What would change if instead of labeling others incompetent or insufficient we would look at the person, at their capacity, and ask: how can I support you to meet this goal?

What I have learned is that when we slow down to see the person instead of what they are producing, we have the opportunity to help that person repair whatever affects their capacity to meet a particular goal. We see more of how we can work together and less of what is not being done.

And when we become connected to a person, in an attempt to share our strengths with them, or to sit with them and work out a way forward to produce together what we expected them to produce alone, life becomes so much less stressful.

We begin to use our energy to flow instead of using our energy to judge.

And what’s even better is that our judgment no longer rebounds on us, and we cease to carry the stressful weight of working alone to prove ourselves to be capable.

Because how can we face ourselves if we treat ourselves the way we treat others when we deem them to be incompetent and insufficient?

Would we thrive more when there is the expectation of continuous mutual cooperation?

There is that word mutual again. It seems to be a core part of success and peace.

It seems that working together with mutual respect and dignity creates more opportunities for the development of ideas that make life more profitable and enjoyable than we could ever ask, dream, or imagine.

I’ve always known that I am the love of my life. The wounding concern has always been the pain associated with how other people who are seeking love outside of themselves react to my knowing that I am rightfully the love of my life and that I love them as I love myself, and refuse to fear them or follow them just because they say to.

I’ve moved through the very painful experience of refusing to play small—not to be grandiose—but to be my full self without feeling shame for the imperfection and the dependence that is inherent to any learning curve.

Grounding me throughout this has been the awareness that as a full person I am a part of the collective as both a teacher and a learner. As a teacher I bring resources, expertise, skill, wisdom, knowledge, passion, and purpose. As a learner I have needs, dependence, and room to receive the resources, lessons and ideas that others bring as my teachers who also have expertise, skill, wisdom, knowledge, passion, and purpose.

Therefore as the love of my life I don’t need another person to complete me. It is however a wonderful thing to be in close relationship with others who value both the teacher and learner in me as I equally value the teacher and learner in them too.

The idea of being slave to submission is absolutely repugnant. And so I’ll wait until I can be in partnership with someone who has no need to be dominant, but who honours equality, wholeness, interdependence, and imperfection as the way.

In the meantime here I am learning to shed the shame which is a part of the virus of dominance that infected the wholeness of being teacher and learner as we were all born to be. And I am also learning to shed the fear that some other will inevitably try to dominate me. Experience has taught me that as Baba, Source of all, is with me I can rise from any attempt at subordination to regain my rightful place as my autonomous interdependent self.

August 30, 2026

A reflection for single mothers on identity, labour, justice, and wholeness.

A song came on this morning, and I let it soak in. I did not rush past it. I let it sit with me, let it press against the parts of me that still know how to hide. And I shared it because its invitation to me felt like an invitation that needed to be shared—to tell the truth without self-protection, even when the truth hurts, even when it is ugly, even when naming it makes your voice tremble. If we can be honest enough to expose what is weak or broken, not to condemn ourselves but to finally see ourselves clearly, we may discover the very place where strength begins to rise.

That invitation to truth is the current running through today’s reflection.

It is the day before my birthday, and I am on my way to a worship gathering. There is something tender about standing at the edge of another year, looking back over what has stretched me, what has steadied me, what almost broke me, and what resolutely kept me alive.

I am wearing my 12345 shirt, appropriate as I celebrate my fifth decade of life. This shirt is a part of a powerful message  primarily connected to mental-health awareness. Megan te Boekhorst created this shirt as a part of her Living With (Mental Illness) nonprofit work. Her goal is to bring awareness to the need for Canadians to recognize and pay attention to mental illness as openly as we pay attention to physical illness and invest in healing. Living With wishes to inform us that approximately one in five Canadians experiences mental illness in a given year. All of us have mental health to maintain, yet many of us do not pay attention to mental illness even when we ourselves are experiencing it. We learn to keep functioning while hurting. We learn to smile while carrying weight. We need to become more aware. We need to pay attention.

As I continue to share the feedback that has shaped me through these years of life, my single mamas, today this one is for us. Everyone may benefit from the conversation, but Mama I especially invite you to pause and dialogue with me.

In the 1990s in the United States, the idea of the “superpredator” was a prevalent and popular narrative. Young Black boys, particularly those in certain neighbourhoods, were labelled predators in the making through research and statistics that were deeply flawed. From that label, policy was formed. Stop-and-frisk in predominantly Black neighbourhoods increased. New statistics then grew from those increased encounters, appearing to reinforce the very story that had produced them.

Years later, it was acknowledged that the research was flawed. There was no such thing as a superpredator, and policy needed to pivot. But changing a policy does not erase the harm created by the policy, especially when the super-predator label had been laid over generations of racial supremacy that had already shaped both the flawed statistics and the poor treatment of young Black boys.

The label normalized and legitimized supremacist treatment that was already in play. It robbed young Black boys of childhood. They were treated as men developmentally, emotionally, and mentally; tried and punished as men; and sometimes killed by police as though they were men in man-to-man combat. If police officers were taught that Black boys were becoming superpredators, then Black men could be treated as superpredators already formed, deserving harsh treatment within a punitive legal system. I say legal system because legality is not necessarily justice.

How did that label affect the way those boys learned to see themselves? If you are continually treated like a criminal, you may begin to judge yourself as one. What does that do to the way you move through life, to what you believe you are capable of becoming, to the goals you attempt, and to the way you dream?

And who profited from defining young Black boys that way? How many businesses arose to imprison, reform, monitor, and manage the people created as a problem by that definition? Countless structures within the school-to-prison pipeline were tied to a label built from statistics already distorted by supremacy. People profited from defining young Black boys as predators in the making.

Single moms, who defined you as less than? And how long have you been trying to live, breathe, parent, pray, and build under the weight of deficiencies that were never true?

Who defined you as the leader of a family destined, by virtue of your singleness, to fail and flounder? Who defined your home as incapable of raising and guiding children who will be successful in society? Who has defined you that way, and how has that affected you?

Who profits when you receive that definition into your being and allow it to limit the way you show up in the world? Who profits when it changes what you believe about yourself? I need you to look deeply at how that story has affected you, not with shame, but with compassion. Because some of us have been surviving so long broken by the burden of that story that we no longer recognize the places where it has narrowed our voice, our dreams, our expectations, and even the way we allow ourselves to be loved.

Have you felt whole, successful, vibrant, and worthy in your singleness and your womanhood? Have you recognized the worth of your leadership, resourcefulness, resilience, insight, advocacy, and ability to create something from nothing? Have you felt worthy of the way you celebrate your children in the absence of a father?

How did the statistics become focused on you parenting singly, as though there were not another person involved in that equation? How did fathers not being present become evidence that you were less? How did that happen?

Why have systems, communities, and churches so often told single mothers how downtrodden we are and then served us as though we are standing with our hands out, bringing nothing to the table? Why is what we bring to the table assigned less value? Do you understand the value of your work, whether other people understand it or not?

I have had to ask myself the same question. I have had to look honestly at the skill I offer and the worth I bring to the table. My first instinct was to blame myself for not having understood it earlier, but I caught myself. Blame is not useful here. What is useful is to examine this way of seeing ourselves, and recognize that it began somewhere, for reasons that need to be understood and addressed.

Now, I know the proficiency with which I work. I know the rooms I have held steady, the people I have helped breathe again, the visions I have helped carry from fragile idea to living reality. I show up when people are in distress. I show up when people are celebrating. I show up when people are dreaming and when visions are being put into play. I show up, even when I am tired, even when I am grieving, even when my own life is asking more of me than anyone can see. That is who I have always been and who I will continue to be because peace, progress, profitability, and purpose are my lifeblood and my passion.

I’ll share one of many situations where my service was sought because of my proficiency with little expectation of compensating me even close to market value. They were in a situation where they would have absolutely needed care that would have typically cost between $40,000 and $50,000. I told them not to spend that kind of money because I would help. I did not establish a fee. I simply told them to pay what they thought was fair.

Never do that. Do not undersell yourself. AND do not participate in the inflated capitalist market either.

Look at the work you are offering. Look at its value in the market, your expenses, and the actual profit you need in order to cover those expenses and live well and sensibly. Then assign a fair price. Do not balloon your profit. I do not believe a 50 to 100 percent profit markup is just when vulnerable people come to us for a necessary service rather than a luxury. A person should be able to make enough profit to live well, but another person’s vulnerability should never become an opportunity for exploitation.

In this case, the person suggested $1,000 for work that would ordinarily have cost between $40,000 and $50,000. It threw me for a loop. They understood business and what things cost. They would have paid the market price if necessary. What made $1,000 seem reasonable for my work?

As I processed it, I realized that I had been giving my work away within a system that was willing to exploit that generosity. The realization hit me squarely in the face. It was not only about money. It was about all the moments I had taught people, without meaning to, that they could receive the fullness of my labour while offering me only a fraction of honour in return. Somewhere in my forties, I understood that I had spent years offering my abilities without attaching an honest value to them, and an expectation had formed around the perception that this devaluation was an acceptable norm. This was the part that I played having unconsciously internalized the devaluation assigned to nurture, giving care, and singleness.

That was my part. I have examined it. What was theirs?

The work was not substandard. They kept returning for it because it was excellent. That was the painful part. The very thing that proved its value was also being used as permission to keep taking it lightly. The problem was not the quality of what I offered. The problem was the expectation that my excellence could continue to be received without being honoured materially.

That is why I shared the economic impact assessment alongside my reflection titled Love Pays Attention to the Shadows. I knew the worth of the work I had done. I know that all of this work is invaluable, and we also live inside a system in which money is the tool we use to pay for food, shelter, and what we need to live, and live well. I know what my work is worth within that system. I also know that other people have usurped my work to make money.

That recognition leads me to the parallel between my experience and the story of David, Bathsheba, and Uriah. The connection may initially seem like a large leap, but hear me out. David looked at Bathsheba and desired what he saw. He used his power to take her. In doing so, he betrayed Uriah, a Hittite warrior and one of his mighty men who had served him faithfully, and then arranged Uriah’s death to conceal what he had done.

David did not fail to recognize value. He saw what he wanted and chose to take it at another person’s terrible expense. That is part of the shadow I was naming when I shared the economic impact of my work. Sometimes people recognize what is good, valuable, and profitable in another human being and, rather than honouring that person, deliberately use what they carry for their own benefit.

When one person deliberately and knowingly uses another human being for profit at that person’s expense, that is the logic of slavery. Slavery requires a person to be defined as less than human so that their labour, gifts, body, or life can be treated as available for someone else’s taking. That was the experience of people of African origin and others around the world who were trapped in slavery and often legally defined as less than human. The false definition created permission for the exploitation.

So, single mom, within whatever context you are looking at yourself in the world today, please do not allow yourself to be defined by someone’s false narrative serving their flawed or nefarious purpose. Do not let someone else’s convenience become your identity. Do not let their inability to honour you become the measure of your worth.

You are a woman of God.

You are a reflection of the Creator, a reflection of I AM.

You are full of purpose.

You are full of passion.

You are full of possibility.

You are full of wonder, joy, and amazement.

You are full and worthy and whole, alone.

Being whole does not mean that you must build alone. Please hear that gently. Wholeness is not isolation. Strength is not silence. Faith is not pretending you have no needs. Whenever we want to build something meaningful, we typically cannot build it alone. While society shines a blinding spotlight on the absence of a father in your household, it often fails to ask how a team might be built around you.

So begin to build your team. Begin to build your life. Teach your children to view themselves as whole and your family as whole. Build a team of other whole people—including single people— around your family so that all of us can thrive together. You are not less because you are single. You are a whole person who needs a team in order to build.

I think specifically of churches when I consider this subject, because churches often feed us a narrow narrative about the family God created, as though any family that does not match that arrangement is not ideal. But who among us, in any way, shape, or form, is ideal? And who defined any one type of family as the ideal, and why? What I do know is that when circumstances are not ideal, the question that we would best ask ourselves is “What are we doing to create a stronger way forward?”

Instead of building forward together as equals, why do we label people as less than or define them as the problem, while continuing to use their labour and gifts to thrive and profit as they struggle? That pattern is one of the things that drove me to build single-mother community. Every time I saw an announcement for a service to single mothers, it seemed to use the same mournful, needy framework: we must help these poor women. Even the speaker’s tone of voice would change, as though our lives were only tragedy, as though our homes held no laughter, wisdom, strategy, beauty, discipline, prayer, creativity, or power.

I do not think we are always conscious of it. We can sit inside a way of being for so long that it becomes normal. But what is normalized is not necessarily right. I continue to reference the photo of a child posed smiling beside the charred body of a lynched Black man because the violence surrounding her had been normalized. The horror of that is obvious to us now and hopefully warns us to examine what our own cultures have taught us not to see. Diminishing societal value based on a set of hierarchical ideals has caused us grievous harm.

Those who are harmed are clearly harmed. Those who do harm also harm themselves. They rob themselves of the profit of being in good relationship with another human being, and they place themselves inside the consequences that follow harm.

The universe delivers consequences when we harm others. If we atone for the wrong we have done, there is mercy. Without atonement, the consequences remain. That is not an externally imposed punishment. It is the flow of justice. What is stolen calls for restitution, one way or another.

Jesus told the story of the rich man and Lazarus. Lazarus lived in poverty and suffering at the rich man’s gate while the rich man lived comfortably and did not help him. After they died, Lazarus was restored while the rich man experienced the torment he had permitted another person to endure. The rich man asked Abraham to warn his brothers, but the answer was that they had already received the message and had chosen not to listen.

Our refusal to listen does not eliminate consequence. If we keep stealing from others, be that money or honour, justice will come in some way, whether or not it comes immediately.

I was once reminded of this matter of justice  in a small and unforgettable way. One day, I was deeply impatient with a child. I raised my voice and completely flipped my lid because I believed the child should simply have listened. In my anger, I was no longer fully in control of my body. When an adult or a child flips their lid, the ability to focus and regulate is diminished.

I turned a corner, struck my foot against the doorpost, and broke my little toe. As soon as it happened, I recognized justice. I asked myself: Why are you losing your mind? Why are you not being gentle? Why are you not being kind? The pain you feel in your foot is like the pain that child felt when you raised your voice and lost control because they would not listen.

And how well did I listen? How well did I listen to the Spirit saying, right as I raised my voice, “Stop it,”

 Did I stop? No.

God did not push my foot into the doorpost. That is not what I am saying. I lost control of myself. I chose not to listen, and I struck my foot as a consequence. I broke my little toe, and I would never again forget the lesson.

Was God with me as it happened? Absolutely. As soon as I recognized the justice in that moment, I also felt seen, known, and surrounded. I did not feel abandoned. I did not feel ashamed. I felt that I had learned something and gained something from the pain. It became a significant turning point for me.

Accountability does not erase our worth. It calls us back to ourselves. It tells the truth without throwing us away.

Single mom, know who you are.

Do not wear the definition that anyone else has placed upon you.

Arise today to wholeness.

Begin the journey home to yourself, one honest breath, one reclaimed boundary, one brave step at a time.

Your children will be blessed because of it.

I love you.

Isn’t she though?! Hell to the yes!!

August 22, 2026

Being a part of Seventh-Day Adventist Church communities from the Caribbean to Canada has been both wonderful and excruciating. From five years old I had the opportunity to be in relationship with people from all over the world who share the common goal of living with love, joy, and health, and being of service to the wider community, as Yeshua M’shikha (Jesus) was. I could enjoy passionate and inspiring spiritual debates, youth and children’s festivals, potlucks, friendships, knowing that almost anywhere in the world I could find a gathering of people who shared many common traditions, lingo, values, and beliefs. Amazing.

And while I am no longer a member of the denomination, people whom I dearly love remain and others have recently become members. Because of my very painful dream-crushing experience I would like to share information that might empower someone to thrive instead of suffer the setbacks which retarded my progress.

For while there are many joys there are also the shadows, as exist in all of us and in all organizations—because people are the lifeblood of any and all organizations. That is why it is integral to live an examined life. Not as a source of shame and censure, but as a part of the process of living with integrity as we embrace progress, peace, purpose and increasing possibility.

What follows is information that hopefully informs someone who may encounter the shadow of co-optation as they bring their dreams and visions of mutually profitable service to life.

Question: What is cooptation?

Co-optation is taking over another’s work, idea, or movement without proper consent or credit.

Question: What is policy in the Adventist Church regarding ownership of ministries which are brought into the church?

Adventist policy does not establish that an independently created ministry automatically becomes church property merely because it is “brought into,” promoted by, or permitted to operate within an Adventist church.

“Brought into the church” is not a defined ownership category. The decisive question is what relationship was formally created.

Relationship as Related to Ownership and Creative and Financial Control

Independent or supporting ministry

Remains independently governed, financed, licensed, and legally separate. Adventist policy expressly describes supporting ministries as not controlled by or legally affiliated with the Church. Collaboration, funding and use of property should be governed by written agreements. Adventist Risk Management, 2023, pp. 2–8⁠

Local-church department or auxiliary ministry

The founder no longer has unilateral authority over the ministry’s church operations. The church business meeting and church board govern it. The church treasurer holds its funds, and its official records and account books are church property.

Official denominational institution

Requires a formal organizational process, appropriate approvals, denominational governance provisions and governing documents addressing the organization’s assets and their disposition. It is not created merely through informal association

For a local-church ministry, the current Church Manual says:

• The church board coordinates the departments and must approve departmental outreach plans.
• Official records and account books of church officers belong to the church.
• The church treasurer holds auxiliary funds, but those funds “belong to” the auxiliary organization and are held in trust for their designated purpose.
• Those funds remain restricted to that ministry’s stated purpose. Even the board cannot divert them.
• If the ministry is discontinued, the church business meeting determines what happens to the remaining balance.

Those rules appear particularly at pages 90–92 and 138–142 of the official Church Manual⁠.

Importantly, this does not say that the church automatically acquires everything the founder created beforehand. A ministry may include several distinct things:

• Its name and public identity
• Curriculum, writings, artwork and program materials
• Website and domain
• Equipment and inventory
• Money donated specifically to the ministry
• A society or corporation
• The authority to operate the ministry within a particular church

Each must be examined separately. Church governance of a local program does not, by itself, prove that the founder transferred pre-existing intellectual property, physical assets or an independent legal organization.

Under Canadian copyright law, the author is ordinarily the first copyright owner. A copyright assignment must be written and signed, unless the work was created in the course of employment, where the employment rule may apply. Copyright Act, s. 13⁠

The strongest conclusion is therefore:

If an independently created ministry was merely welcomed, supported or operated in partnership with an Adventist church, it remained independent unless an actual transfer occurred. If it was formally adopted as a local-church ministry, the church obtained governance over its church operations and ministry accounts, but that still does not automatically prove transfer of every pre-existing asset, name or creative work.

The documents that would settle a particular situation are the church-board and business-meeting minutes, any memorandum or transfer agreement, incorporation records and bylaws, bank-account records, donation receipts, employment agreements, and any signed intellectual-property assignment.

Question: Does Adventist guidance recognize that informal relationships with independent ministries can cause harm?

Yes. Adventist Risk Management acknowledges that some Adventist organizations have treated these relationships too informally, resulting in claims, legal exposure and strain on denominational resources. Its guidance repeatedly calls for due diligence, accurate descriptions of the relationship, written agreements and clear separation of operations.

In other words, the Church’s own risk guidance recognizes that goodwill and shared ministry are not substitutes for clarity. The relationship should be formally established at the beginning, not reconstructed after conflict develops.

Adventist Risk Management, Structuring Relationships Between Seventh-day Adventist Church Organizations and Supporting Ministries, 2023

Question: Does being a church member transfer a member’s ministry, work or property to the Church?

No. Nothing in the Church Manual or other sources reviewed says that church membership transfers a member’s independently created program, property or intellectual property to the Church.

Giving one’s time in service is not automatically the same as donating everything created through that service. A donation, licence, assignment, partnership or transfer must be established separately.

Question: Does accepting church support or using church facilities transfer ownership?

Not by itself.

Permission to meet in a church building establishes where activities may occur. It does not automatically establish ownership of the ministry using the building. Adventist Risk Management recommends that a supporting ministry’s use of Adventist property be documented through a properly executed land-use agreement or lease.

Being included in church announcements, calendars, reports or Community Services activities may demonstrate collaboration or operational intertwinement. Those facts do not, without more, establish a transfer of the ministry’s pre-existing identity and assets.

Question: Can the Church select the leader of its own Community Services department?

Yes. The Church Manual places an official Adventist Community Services leader on the church board. Where a church operates a Community Services centre, the Personal Ministries Council is its governing committee and appoints the centre’s director.

The Church therefore has authority to govern its own department and choose its departmental leadership. It may also decide whether an independent organization may continue using church facilities.

That authority does not, by itself, prove that a previously independent community ministry became church property. Replacing a church officer cannot retroactively transfer a founder’s pre-existing name, materials, equipment, goodwill or independent history.

2025 Seventh-day Adventist Church Manual, pp. 110–111 and 139–142

Question: Is operational intertwinement the same as transfer?

No. Several different forms of control must be examined separately:

• Authority over activities conducted inside the church
• Custody of money in a church account
• Permission to use a ministry’s name or materials
• Responsibility for volunteers and participants
• Ownership of equipment
• Ownership of pre-existing creative work
• Ownership of the ministry’s public identity and goodwill

A church may legitimately regulate activities occurring on its premises without owning the independent organization that delivers them. Custody is not necessarily ownership. Permission is not necessarily assignment. Collaboration is not necessarily surrender.

Question: Does being unincorporated make a ministry ownerless?

No.

An unincorporated ministry may not have a separate corporate legal identity. That can make it more complicated to determine who may enter contracts, hold property or bring a legal claim in the ministry’s name. It does not create an ownership vacuum into which another organization may simply step.

Ownership must be traced through evidence such as:

• Who created and first publicly used the name
• Who authored the materials
• Who purchased equipment
• Who held the accounts and domains
• What donors were told
• What the founders agreed among themselves
• Whether anything was gifted, licensed or transferred
• What the parties represented to the public

Depending on those facts, particular assets may belong to founders, individual creators, purchasers, members or persons holding them for an agreed purpose.

Question: Can someone own the idea behind a community program?

Copyright does not protect an abstract idea, goal, method or general ministry concept. It protects the original expression of that idea once it has been placed into a fixed form.

A program may therefore contain several legally distinct interests:

• Written curriculum and training materials
• Forms, reports, photographs and artwork
• Website and promotional content
• Databases and original compilations
• Its name, reputation and community goodwill
• Confidential information
• Equipment and inventory
• Money and contractual rights

The general concept of supporting single mothers may not belong exclusively to anyone. The particular name, written materials, visual identity, records and resources created to deliver that vision may have identifiable owners.

Canadian Intellectual Property Office, Copyright Basics

Question: What if there is no written transfer?

For copyright, Canadian law is clear: the author is ordinarily the first copyright owner, subject principally to the employment exception, and an assignment must be written and signed by the owner.

Other forms of property can sometimes be gifted or transferred through words and conduct without a single formal transfer document. Therefore, the absence of writing is not conclusive for every asset. It does, however, make it necessary to examine the entire record carefully.

A person or organization asserting ownership should be able to identify what was transferred, by whom, to whom, when, on what terms and through what authorized decision.

Copyright Act, s. 13

Question: Does volunteering inside a church transfer copyright in the volunteer’s work?

Not automatically.

Volunteering does not by itself establish that creative work was produced under a contract of employment. If a volunteer wrote curriculum, designed materials, created artwork or produced website content, the authorship and any agreement governing that work must be examined.

Permission to use material may sometimes be inferred from the circumstances. Permission to use something for a particular program is not necessarily an assignment of ownership or unlimited permission to use it forever.

Authors also retain moral rights, including rights relating to attribution and the integrity of their work, unless those rights are expressly waived. Moral rights cannot themselves be assigned.

Copyright Act, ss. 13 and 14.1

Question: Who owns the ministry’s name and community goodwill?

A name is not ordinarily protected by copyright. Rights in a name and the goodwill connected to it may instead arise through trademark law, trade-name use and the law against passing off.

Registration is valuable, but prior public use can also matter. Evidence may include dated flyers, social-media pages, emails, websites, domain registrations, photographs, media coverage, participant testimony and community partnerships.

Canadian trademark law considers matters such as how long a name has been used, how well it has become known and whether another use could create confusion about who is providing the services.

Trademarks Act, ss. 6–7

Question: Who owns money collected for the ministry?

The answer depends on how the money was collected and what donors were told.

For an official church auxiliary, the Church Manual says that money received by or for the auxiliary organization is turned over to the church treasurer. Importantly, it also says that the funds belong to the auxiliary organization, may be disbursed only by its order and are held in trust for the purpose for which they were raised. Neither the treasurer nor the church board may divert restricted funds to another purpose.

Money given directly to an independent ministry must be examined according to its account records, donor directions, receipts and any agreement with the church.

Financial administration is evidence of custody. It is not necessarily proof that every underlying interest belongs to the institution administering the account.

2025 Seventh-day Adventist Church Manual, pp. 91–92

Question: Who owns equipment used inside the church?

Usually, the evidence begins with who purchased it, whose funds were used, whether it was donated and whether a transfer was accepted.

Storing equipment in a church, allowing church volunteers to use it or using it in a joint program does not automatically transfer ownership. Relevant evidence includes invoices, bank statements, donation records, inventory lists, correspondence and photographs.

Question: Can participant records simply be transferred to a new leader?

Not merely because leadership has changed.

Participant records may contain sensitive personal information. In British Columbia, the Personal Information Protection Act applies to organizations, including unincorporated associations and not-for-profit organizations. It regulates the collection, use, disclosure, custody and protection of personal information.

Questions about participant files therefore extend beyond who physically possesses the documents. They include who collected the information, what participants were told, what they consented to, the purposes for which it may be used and whether disclosure to another organization or leader is legally authorized.

British Columbia Personal Information Protection Act

Question: What is the significance of telling an incoming leader that no program previously existed?

Such a statement does not itself create or transfer ownership.

It may, however, prevent the incoming leader from asking necessary questions about the program’s history, founders, assets, relationships and existing obligations. It may also create an inaccurate public or institutional record.

Adventist Risk Management specifically emphasizes that publications, correspondence and public statements should accurately describe the relationship between the Church and an independent ministry. Where prior existence is disputed, the appropriate response is to preserve the evidence and investigate, not to treat one party’s description as settled fact.

Question: What does an economic impact assessment establish?

An economic impact assessment does not, by itself, determine legal ownership or the amount of legally recoverable damages.

It can nevertheless document matters that might otherwise remain invisible: years of unpaid labour, program development, organizational capacity, community relationships, lost professional opportunities and the potential economic scale of the work that was interrupted or assumed by others.

Its purpose is not to suggest that every projected dollar would certainly have been earned. Its purpose is to show that caregiving, community development and grassroots organizational labour have real economic value and that their loss can produce real financial, professional, social and emotional consequences.

Question: What would responsible investigation and resolution require?

A responsible process would:

• Preserve all relevant records and disputed assets
• Obtain church-board and business-meeting minutes
• Identify what existed before church involvement
• Hear directly from the founders and successive leaders
• Trace each asset separately
• Produce a complete accounting of restricted money
• Determine what authority each leader actually possessed
• Correct inaccurate descriptions of the ministry’s history
• Address participant privacy and record custody
• Consider acknowledgment, attribution, return of property, licensing, compensation, restitution or an agreed separation
• Record the final resolution in writing

Question: How can members protect their ministries before accepting institutional support?

Before operations become intertwined, both parties should sign a written agreement addressing:

• Whether the ministry remains independent
• What support the church is offering
• Who governs which activities
• Facility access
• Ownership and permitted use of the name
• Ownership of existing and future creative materials
• Banking, donations and financial reporting
• Equipment and inventory
• Participant privacy and records
• Insurance and safeguarding
• Public descriptions of the relationship
• Leadership changes
• Termination and return of property
• Dispute-resolution procedures

Clarity protects the Church, the ministry, its founders and the people they have come together to serve.

Note on scope: This is general educational information, not a legal determination of any individual situation. The linked legislation and denominational documents are the authoritative sources. Particular circumstances should be reviewed with appropriately qualified legal counsel.

Wise Safeguards for Moving Forward

Question: What is the most important safeguard?

Name the relationship before beginning the relationship.

Is the ministry:

• Remaining fully independent?
• Entering a temporary partnership?
• Participating in a jointly operated project?
• Becoming a local-church department?
• Donating particular assets to the church?
• Granting the church limited permission to use its name or materials?

These possibilities create very different expectations. “We are supporting you” is not sufficiently clear.

Question: Does putting the relationship in writing suggest distrust?

No. Clarity is a form of care.

Written agreements protect everyone when memories differ, circumstances change or the leaders who began the relationship move on. A simple agreement can preserve trust by ensuring that no one must later guess what was intended.

Friendship may begin the conversation. Clarity helps the friendship survive leadership changes.

Question: What should be documented before operations become intertwined?

At minimum:

• The ministry’s history and date of establishment
• The names and roles of its founders
• Whether it remains independent
• What support the church is providing
• Who makes which decisions
• Who owns the existing name, materials and equipment
• How jointly created materials will be treated
• Where money will be deposited and how it may be spent
• Who is responsible for participant information
• How the relationship may be ended
• What happens to every asset when it ends

Both parties should receive a signed copy.

Question: How can a ministry preserve its history?

Create a dated ministry record containing:

• Founding documents and early planning notes
• Flyers, photographs and program announcements
• Media coverage and community correspondence
• Meeting notes
• Financial records and receipts
• Copies of curriculum and creative materials
• Volunteer and partnership records
• Website and domain information
• Annual summaries of activities and community impact

This is not merely preparation for conflict. It honours the people who conceived, built and sustained the work.

Question: How should money and equipment be protected?

Maintain an asset inventory from the beginning. Record who purchased or donated each item, the source of the money and any conditions attached to the gift.

Independent ministries should ordinarily keep independent accounts. If money must pass through a church account, both parties should document:

• Whose money it is
• Why the church is holding it
• Who may authorize expenditures
• How frequently statements will be provided
• What happens to the balance when the relationship ends

Financial transparency should be mutual and routine, not something requested only after trust has broken down.

Question: What should happen when leadership changes?

The outgoing leader, incoming leader and ministry founders should participate in a documented handover.

The incoming leader should receive:

• An accurate history of the ministry
• The written agreement governing the relationship
• An inventory of assets
• Current financial information
• The limits of the church’s authority
• The names and continuing roles of the founders
• Any unresolved concerns

No incoming leader should be required to make decisions based entirely on one person’s oral account.

Question: What safeguards are needed for names, websites and creative materials?

The agreement should identify who owns:

• The ministry name and logo
• Website and domain
• Social-media accounts
• Photographs and videos
• Curriculum, forms and training materials
• Written stories and publications
• Mailing lists and databases

It should also state what each party has permission to use, for how long, for what purpose and what must stop when the relationship ends.

Shared access should not mean uncontrolled access. Important accounts should have secure recovery information and more than one trusted administrator, while ownership remains clearly recorded.

Question: How should participant information be protected?

Participants should be told clearly which organization is serving them and which organization will hold their information.

Before records are shared or responsibility changes, the parties should determine:

• What participants originally consented to
• Who is legally responsible for the records
• Who may access them
• How they will be protected
• Whether new consent is required
• What happens to them if the partnership ends

People receiving care should never become invisible assets in an organizational transition.

Question: What are early signs that clarification is needed?

Pause and seek clarity when:

• The ministry is described differently in different settings
• Church leaders begin making decisions outside the agreed scope
• Money is combined without regular accounting
• The founders are excluded from meetings concerning their program
• Materials are reproduced without acknowledgment
• New leaders are introduced without consultation
• The ministry’s independent history disappears from public descriptions
• Requests for written clarification are repeatedly postponed
• Support gradually becomes supervision without discussion

These signs do not automatically prove bad intent. They show that the relationship needs immediate attention.

Question: How should uncertainty or conflict be addressed?

Begin early, while repair remains easier.

The parties should:

• Pause major changes
• Preserve the relevant records
• Put their separate understandings in writing
• Identify the particular points of agreement and disagreement
• Review the original documents together
• Involve a mutually acceptable neutral person
• Obtain independent legal or accounting advice where needed
• Record any resolution in writing

The goal should be truth, repair and a workable future, not victory over one another.

Question: Should a ministry depend entirely on one supportive leader?

No matter how wise, trustworthy or encouraging that leader may be, the relationship must extend beyond one person.

Promises made by an individual leader should be recorded and appropriately authorized by the organizations involved. A healthy agreement should remain understandable and enforceable after a pastor, founder, board member or Community Services leader leaves.

Question: What should churches do when members bring forward community visions?

Churches can honour those members by:

• Learning the ministry’s history before offering support
• Asking what kind of relationship the founders want
• Encouraging founders to receive independent advice
• Clearly explaining church governance requirements
• Recording what will and will not become church property
• Respecting authorship and community knowledge
• Ensuring that support does not quietly become control
• Celebrating the ministry’s origin honestly
• Planning together for leadership transitions and possible separation

Support should increase a community vision’s capacity, not absorb its identity through ambiguity.

Question: What is the ultimate purpose of these safeguards?

The purpose is not to build walls between churches and community visionaries. It is to create relationships strong enough to hold generosity, accountability and change.

Clear agreements allow people to share facilities, knowledge, money, labour and encouragement without anyone losing their history, dignity, contribution or right to informed choice.

Love does not require ambiguity.

Love pays attention, tells the truth and makes room for everyone’s light.

August 21 & 22

In the days leading up to my birthday, I continue to share the feedback that has helped me to grow; today’s offering is the idea that:

Love pays attention to the shadows.

The shadows:

Persons employed by the Seventh-day Adventist Church have expressed supporting interest in programs begun in the community by members, and when the invitation of support is accepted assume control without consent, transfer, or acknowledgment.

When informed of this injustice the Executive Leaders of the Organization fail to act, refuse to engage in discussion or investigation, and threaten legal action against the affected parties if they speak publicly.

Because Momunity was unincorporated, that does not mean it was ownerless. Its name, records, equipment, money, creative materials and community goodwill can be traced to their actual owners. 

This was my experience.

It is not bad for a person to point out an ominous shadow. A shadow may signal harm because it reveals that something is blocking the light. Pointing it out is a call to carefully investigate what is happening. The risk to the room lies in refusing to acknowledge the growing shadow.

I’ve always known that it was highly important to know when to pay attention to shadows. I had a now resolved decades-long sensitivity to darkness which I suspect may have been caused by an early infant memory of shadows in the night. That may be one of the reasons why shining a light on what lurks has always been important to me. That brings a memory to mind.

When I was a little girl I dearly loved watching Perry Mason. I was so enthralled by his defence of the complicated innocent that on the days when school became too overwhelming for me, I would take an unauthorized mental health afternoon, and find safety in Raymond Burr’s portrayal of Mason, the defence attorney who consistently prevailed because he listened, and lead his team to invest themselves in paying keen attention to the details. And then one evening in 1988 our family watched a Perry Mason marathon which included the re-run for the first time since its initial release in 1963, of the only case that he lost: the Case of the Deadly Verdict. It was a complicated tale of a young woman who thought that what she had seen was too harmful to share—she thought that too many people would be hurt—and so although she held her tongue with some resentment, she refused to share the information that would have saved her life. She was found guilty of the murder of which she had been accused, and was sentenced to death. But Perry never gave up. He had listened to her. He had paid attention to the details, and he knew that he was missing the one thing that could exonerate her.

Enter the shadows… After relentlessly reflecting on every single detail Perry realized what he had missed. And with the help of the devoted family housekeeper, Perry, Paul, and Hamilton Burger set out to draw the real killer into the open—out of….the shadows.

That eerie scene with its mournful music twisted round the depths of my soul as the convicted woman’s errant brother-in-law stealthily went up the stairs intent on strangling the housekeeper so that the secret of his murderous deed would die with her. He was disguised as a woman to hide his identity. That disguise had almost cost Janice her life. She had been willing to hide what she thought was her brother-in-law cheating on her beloved sister to spare her sister the pain—what she didn’t know is that the woman whom she thought she had seen was in fact her brother-in-law in the disguise which he used to protect himself from being accountable for his actions.

As his shadow crept closer to the housekeeper, hands extended to do the dastardly deed, Perry, Paul, and Hamilton Burger turned on the light and revealed themselves.

That scene made me sick. Literally, physically sick. I couldn’t sleep alone that night. I had to sleep in bed with my parents. I spiked a fever. My nervous system went into full overwhelm mode. It took hours for my system to return to calm—to be able to connect with gratitude that the truth had been revealed in the end.

Perry naming what he had seen was not the problem…the brother-in-laws life-ending actions and his attempts to cover up at all costs including up to committing murder again was the issue. Much like the experience in the biblical story of David orchestrating the murder of his very close friend, Uriah, whose wife Bathsheba, David had stolen by force of his word as king.

And Nathan courageously flipped on the light to invite David into accountability.

Naming what has or may cause harm is not condemnation. It is responsible care. The great danger begins when preserving comfort, appearance, or certainty becomes more important than acknowledging what may threaten the security and healthy growth of the community.

Please, don’t shoot the messenger. Please listen to the message. I am speaking because I care, and because I have repeatedly tried to speak with community leaders privately. I waited too long to speak more openly, hoping that what I had raised would be carefully examined and addressed. While I waited, I watched other people be hurt.

I have also lost relationships with several people who were, and remain, very dear to me because, after years of denying my own experience, I could no longer ignore what I had experienced, what I had witnessed with my own eyes, or the patterns of concealment surrounding it.

I have repeatedly pursued private accountability. Those efforts have not resulted in a meaningful response. I therefore have to speak to the community.

I am not seeking to shame or blame, and I am not seeking to drag anyone into the figurative community square to be condemned. I am asking the community to listen, to investigate carefully, and to decide what responsible care now requires of us.

I am asking us to turn on the light.

With love and solidarity,
Saran Lewis

Momunity: Single and Strong

• Existed independently in the community before Leader 1 extended an invitation of support and mentorship.
• Entered the church because its leaders were promised support, mentorship, encouragement and facility access.
• Was never formally transferred, merged, donated or dissolved.
• Became operationally intertwined through the conduct of church leadership, not through our informed agreement to surrender it.
• Was later placed under new leadership as though it had always belonged to the church.
• Had its prior existence concealed from two successive incoming leaders.

Operational intertwinement is not the same as informed consent to transfer ownership or control.

The fact that incoming leaders were told “there was no existing program” is especially important. It suggests this was not simply an unclear transition:

• It effectively erased Momunity’s documented community history.
• It prevented the new Community Service leaders from engaging in ethical collaborative engagement with Momunity’s founders.
• It concealed that control was being assumed over something that already existed.
• It created the false impression that the church was establishing a new program rather than erasing the leaders of an existing grassroots ministry.
• It deleted the financial and professional benefit to the founders and stole their opportunity to grow and develop this vision which we began to execute together. This robbed us and our families and created deep social, emotional, professional and financial trauma and vulnerability.

Here is an economic impact assessment. This seemed to be needed because caregiving in home and community seems to be deeply undervalued. I knew its value socially, spiritually and financially. No one took our pain seriously because they did not view our work as financially valuable. As a person of great wisdom and vision Leader 1 saw the value in it.

I have the receipts.

I’ve made dozens of these warmth and lovingkindness (WALK) blankets and given them away. Melissa and Shannon have told me several times that I should also offer them for sale and special order.

And it’s time to do that.

But today I made a pretty pink WALK Neck Nuzzler (scarf) for a precious young person, and got 3/4ths of the way through a blanket that I’ve had on hold for a fabulous wild child. Next will be a Shrug Hug – a warm snuggle of love that wraps around one’s shoulders.

I can’t find my quilting square so as I was leaving the house to run errands I quickly grabbed a piece of cardstock that had been previously used–as I intended to make the blanket while I waited for the girls.

As I cut the piece of cardstock as a guide to anchor each of the four corners, I smiled as I remembered how much more anxious I used to be about perfecting the process when I first began to cut the blankets myself instead of getting them pre-cut by the CIV Prayer Team.

I was sometimes so frustrated that I cried. The fabric needed to be perfectly laid out, the squares all needed to be precisely cut, strips needed to be exactly one and a half inches wide and three or four inches long. Then one day as I was wrestling to line everything up just so, Priya said, “you’re supposed to be enjoying this Mom, not worrying about it being perfect.”

Yeah. Chick. Practice what you preach.

Anj rubbed my back, and reminded me that it was okay.

I listened.

My shoulders dropped, tears stopped and I leaned in to enjoyment.

That soon evolved to not needing the quilting square, not needing the big table, not needing anything but the fabric, sharp scissors, a piece of a flat surface, a comfy chair, and a four-sided piece of paper with edges that could serve well enough as a guide.

As I prepped the fabric today I chuckled as I realized that peace and purpose had long ago aligned with process to create joy.

August 18, 2026

In the days leading up to my birthday, I continue sharing the feedback that has helped me to grow; today’s offering is the idea that:

To get to peace, one important piece of the puzzle is to stop repeatedly asking closed people to become the witnesses that we believe we deserve.

Several years ago I was watching Grace and Frankie and was SO inspired by Frankie’s celebration of her birthday as Frankie Fest. My very good friend’s birthday was coming up and I had been wondering what to do to celebrate her with the kind of joy that our friendship had brought to me. And so the first friendfest was born. It was SO MUCH fun to find little ways to celebrate her each day until her birthday. I wasn’t really sure that I could do it, because there were almost forty days until her birthday. It was amazing though, how as each day went by I didn’t run out of things to say. And with each day of expressing gratitude for her the ideas of what to do to honour the final day grew.

It was so much in my wheelhouse because giving openness that honours each person is one of my very favourite things. I have always felt so constrained from doing that because I never felt like I had enough money to do that for all of the people in my life, and for everyone everywhere.

I used to feel highly stressed and like a huge failure at Christmas, because I always felt inadequate with not enough money to give to everyone whom I have ever loved. That’s a super duper long long long long list.

But as the years went by I began to learn that money is an investment in living life. I learned that I might not be able to give as many tangible gifts or as much money to everyone as I have always wanted to do. I realized that what I really wanted to do was to let people know how much they were loved. And I realized that the stress I felt was fear that the recipient would not understand just how much love was being given—and worse the bigger fear was that they would reject it or maybe even worse belittle it. They would not realize that I took their existence and their worth very seriously.

I sat with God because I was feeling so immensely overwhelmed that I felt like I was about to die. That’s burnout. I was so exhausted that the songs that used to bubble out of me had completely dried up. Completely. Every single breath and step felt almost impossible—like I was wearing the heaviest lead shoes. That’s depression.

And at the same time I was frantic. I couldn’t stop showing up. I’d be a failure. That’s anxiety.

I continued to live and continued to show up, wringing every drop of effort out of myself to be to the world the love that I feel for us all.

In 2012 for the first time I went to seek professional therapy. My professor, Jennifer, who almost immediately became my big sister, said to me that she could see the overwhelming wounds obstructing the flow of love and excellence that she could also clearly see in me.

I knew that I needed help; I just didn’t know WHAT KIND OF HELP I needed, and I didn’t know where to find it. She gently guided me to the Trinity Western University Counselling Centre.

Pause here with me.

It’s very important that I say this and as clearly as I possibly can:

I grew up with a very clear understanding that I was not all. That’s a wonderful thing to know. My parents had guided me to accept the openness that I felt to a higher comforting presence. And with what I believe was the best intention to keep me safe and well, and anchored in that presence’s lovingkindness, I was taught that I had to be “good”, and that goodness was the only thing acceptable to that higher comforting presence. Goodness was unintentionally defined as continuous perfection. That definition didn’t begin with my parents. It had been taught to them, as it had been taught to their ancestors, and their ancestors’ ancestors; it had been taught as far back as my ancestry could be traced.

Continuous perfection. A standard defined not by the comforting presence but by my ancestors. And we were driven towards that goal largely by judgment and punishment.

That definition didn’t even begin with my ancestors though, it began somewhere far in the past where all of our early ancestors were taught that no person was acceptable as a part of society unless they were visibly 100% perfect. I say all of our early ancestors were thus taught because what I have witnessed as a common leaning towards punishment and insistence on perfection implies this.

Then a multitude of rules began to be constructed, increasing with each generation, to define perfection. And we were driven towards that goal largely by judgment and punishment.

I was taught that to be continuously perfect all I needed to do was believe in that comforting presence to which I had been easily and comfortably open. I did believe. Deeply. Easily. Completely. And I was a child, a human, a person who learned by trying, feeling, making mistakes, receiving guidance, and trying again. I could not be continuously perfect because no child can be. No person can be. We grow in the ability to be skillful by doing, and failing, and trying again with the strength and the knowledge gained from the attempt before. But that’s not what punishment and judgment taught me. Punishment and judgment taught me not to be confidently human, it taught me to be increasingly afraid.

Because when I was inevitably human, I did not learn that the definition of perfection was impossible to attain; instead I learned to question myself. I learned that every mistake might mean that I had not believed enough, tried hard enough, listened enough, prayed enough, been good enough. The ordinary process of growing became evidence against me. The dissonance in that process is counterproductively crippling.

Therefore I learned to monitor, correct, and override myself. I learned to keep showing up long after I was exhausted because goodness had become something I had to prove.

And now come back with me to the beginning of guided therapy.

This has been long—it will be longer in another place—but I’ll shorten it today by saying that therapy in all the various forms to which I have been guided brought me to this one conclusion: that comforting presence, which some of us call God, loved us so much that they sent their beloved son as a messenger and teacher to tell us the truth about how much they loved us, even though they both knew that we’d be so entrenched in our belief, in our idea of perfection, that we would reject and execute the messenger. The messenger, Jesus, didn’t come to condemn us. He came to relieve us so that we could stop being so exhausted and anxious and have the opportunity to embrace his example of the comforting presence’s way of life. Peace.

And so in 2015 after years of therapy and listening to teachers speak of the way that our brains were really designed to work in harmony, to grow developmentally with each other, I said “God, I want my song back.”

Each day for a whole year, I awoke and the first thing that was on my mind was a song that I had known in the past. I wrote each one down, and journaled about it as and after I sang it. I wish I knew where to find that journal now.

I don’t need it though. Because eventually I began to sing and jam and enjoy life again. And as we began to look at the wounds, I began to let the messenger guide me through the Bible, to understand and become acquainted with the comforting presence again. And that’s where I had the amazing experience of being freed from “goodness”: from the well-intentioned but deeply flawed compounded definitions of being. There, God freed my fucks on my journey through the Bible with Jesus, and became my best friend.

Everything that I have done since, my passion for being with and sharing the joy of being with each other and supporting each other without feeling consumed came from that journey.
To get to peace, one important piece of the puzzle is to stop repeatedly asking closed people to become the witnesses that we believe we deserve.

We often remain remarkably open to reconciliation, even after serious harm. That is beautiful. That is a worthy goal. And we can become stuck waiting to progress until the person or institutions who have caused us harm are open to the full process of reconciliation.

And because being unanswered or dismissed is particularly painful for many or some of us, silence can pull us toward giving more explanation, seeking more evidence, and making more and more attempts to finally make the person understand.

Sometimes nonresponse is information.

We may need to move towards these steps:

🦋Make one clear request.
🦋Follow up once.
🦋Document what matters.
🦋Then choose escalation, boundary, release, or grief.

We can pursue accountability from persons and institutions without depending on the other party’s emotional recognition of our reality. Not every rupture will be reconciled, or not every rupture can be reconciled in the timeframe that we expect or desire, because reconciliation requires participation from both sides.

Happy almost-birthday to me.