One of the pretty correctly titled groups on Facebook is called BarelyAdventist. It is, I think, from the same people who give us Adventist Today and Spectrum online. Lately, they have taken to preaching on their Facebook page, and here is one of their latest declarations.
For decades, the Adventist Church has had people who feel it’s their personal duty to correct everyone else. Emails packed with Ellen White quotes. Whispered critiques in the church lobby about someone’s outfit. Cornering the pastor over sermon points. The assumption is always the same: I am right, and I must set you straight.
“Telling the truth in love” has been distorted. In practice, it often becomes a license to judge, critique, or lecture people you barely know. Love gets a bad reputation. Relationships are damaged. Church becomes a place of fear, not grace.
Here’s the truth: Jesus didn’t go around policing or judging people. Even He, with perfect authority, did not insist on correcting everyone else. You are not Jesus. You are not an Old Testament prophet. Trying to “set someone straight” before even having a relationship with them is the pinnacle of hypocrisy.
Start with relationship. Listen. Engage. Care. Only then might someone actually invite your guidance—if it’s truly needed. Correction without trust and connection is not faithfulness; it’s pride in disguise.
Love in Adventism should not be about pointing out every misstep. It should be about showing up, respecting others, and offering help when it’s asked for. That alone could heal far more hearts than a thousand unsolicited “corrections.”
Let's look at some of the logic that this
post makes:
For decades, the Adventist Church has had people who feel it’s their personal duty to correct everyone else.We will see this “everyone” several times in this post. So far, I have never met a person who feels it is their duty to correct everyone else. So this first logical fallacy is the introduction to their post. It is not simply that I have not met anyone who felt it was their duty to correct everyone; it is impossible to correct everyone. So this horrible person in the introduction is not only set with an impossible “duty”; if that was what they actually thought was their duty, they would have to be mentally deranged.
Emails packed with Ellen White quotes
Is that supposed to be a sentence? Let us assume that it is a continuation of the logical fallacy of the first sentence. The person with a duty has packed up what they want to say, hidden behind an email with only Ellen White quotes. If that is their duty to email Ellen White quotes to people, we can assume that indeed it is from a mentally deranged person. But that mentally deranged person who cannot even tell the recipient the reason for the quotes could hardly be said to feel it was their duty to correct everyone with a bunch of quotes from a dead assumed prophet.
Whispered critiques in the church lobby about someone’s outfit. Cornering the pastor over sermon points. The assumption is always the same: I am right, and I must set you straight.We will move past the other two points because, as we can tell, this is all built from a false view of, at best, a deranged person. It is possible for a deranged person to always feel they are right. Of course it is still not at all likely that even the deranged person is “always” acting with the assumption that that they are always right and that they must set you straight, apparently to the above author it is by packing an email with Ellen White quotes, or whispering a critique of an outfit or simply cornering a pastor to talk about sermon points.
Now we
are getting to the point of this author's point. Some people do things the author does not like, it is hard for the author to
recover from the initial logical fallacy, so for the sake of
continuing the analysis, we can assume that that is their concern.
“Telling the truth in love” has been distorted. In practice, it often becomes a license to judge, critique, or lecture people you barely know. Love gets a bad reputation. Relationships are damaged. Church becomes a place of fear, not grace.
Telling the truth in love is not a thing, “speaking the truth in love” Ephesians 4:15. We have Biblical direction to speak the truth in love, but the key is the truth. So to know something is the truth takes a lot more than to regurgitate Ellen White quotes; critiquing an outfit could in no way be considered in the truth category, it is the opinion category. Love, on the other hand, can be classed as permissive to hard love to discipline. That means that something can be done in love in different ways. Certainly, talking to the pastor about a sermon is not necessarily about truth or love. Why is it even included here? Could it be that what this author wants is for people to simply accept what they are told?
Here’s the truth: Jesus didn’t go around policing or judging people.Are you sure? He cleared out the temple of money changers (John 2:13–17, Matthew 21:12–13) He called the Pharisees a brood of vipers ( Matthew 12:34, 23:33), and He specifically judged those who were of their father the devil. (John 8:44) Of course, Jesus also called Judas a son of perdition (John 17:12). So, Jesus did do it; what the author means by “go around” is kind of meaningless. We also have a lot of sermons on how people should behave, which could certainly be termed policing, as that is a very broad term, especially if you use the idea of community policing or self policing, which deals with relationship building, problem solving, decision making, and trust building.
Even He, with perfect authority, did not insist on correcting everyone else.
Jesus, in his incarnation, would be in the same situation as the first logical fallacy in that Jesus could not correct “everyone”; instead, he taught, but He did not spend his time personally correcting “everyone”.
You are not Jesus. You are not an Old Testament prophet. Trying to “set someone straight” before even having a relationship with them is the pinnacle of hypocrisy.
It has taken a while, but we have finally gotten to some truth in the above post. You are not Jesus or an Old Testament prophet. Then it wanders off into nonsense again. Can you set someone straight, for instance, point out their extreme use of logical fallacies without having a relationship with them, of course it is pretty common on the internet, though it may not set them straight, that depends on the person. But it is certainly not the pinnacle of hypocrisy. That pinnacle might be more like teaching others not to sin while publicly practicing the same sins.
I am going to end
this here because I think the post is pretty much summed up with
hypocrisy. It is worse yet because it is fueled by logical fallacies.
It ends by trying to sound caring, but it is really uncaring because
if one cares, they actually try to be truthful, even when saying
difficult things. That was the focus of Ephesians 4 and a
pretty fitting way to cleanse our minds from the BarelyAdventist
sophistry.
14Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. 15Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. 16From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.
17So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking. 18They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts.... 25Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body.
