Subject: Offshoots of the Seventh
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Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2008 13:01:42 +1000

Offshoots of the Seventh-Day  Adventist Church

Melvyn
Warfield

Within the church there
have been many groups to arise and take positions in conflict with the
teachings and organization of the denomination.  This paper is a brief synthesis of
some of the more intense groups that have sprung from within the ranks.

Offshoots

At
sundry times in the history of the Seventh-day Adventist church, offshoot
movements and apostasies have involved leaders of the church.  In Ellen White's lifetime, however,
only one movement eventually organized its sympathizers into a distinct
denomination-the Church of God (Adventist).

While
The Church of God has had its own splinter groups, the origin of the main
body has usually been linked with the remnants of the Messenger party, first "organized"
in 11 853 by H. S. Case and C. P. Russell.  The Messenger party, and later the
Marion party, brought the first organizational challenge to what was to
become the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

It
was not until 21 860 that the name Seventh-day Adventist was adopted, and
the General Conference itself was not organized with a constitution until
1863.  Nevertheless, the Messenger party threatened to
break the unity established among early Sabbatarian Adventists who
subscribed to the positions upheld in the Review.  A rival paper was started in 1854,
called the Messenger of Truth.  This became the primary channel
for gathering supporters to the Messenger party cause.

The
subsequent defection of two Adventist ministers, J. M. Stephenson and D.P.
Hall, extended its influence another two or three years until the paper's
publication ceased for lack of financial support, and the movement's
sympathizers disbanded.  Within
five years, however, many from the former Messenger party were revived by
Gilbert Cranmer, who being refused a license to preach for Seventh-day
Adventist organized his followers into a group known first as the Church of
Christ.

Cranmer's paper, The Hope of Israel, lasted about two years but found
new life as the medium for another disaffection in Marion, Iowa, involving
B. F. Snook and W. H. Brinkerhoff, the president and secretary,
respectively, of the newly formed Iowa Conference.  About half the Marion church joined
the new movement, known as the Marion party, and were disfellowshipped in
1866.  Adherents of this group
eventually organized into the Church of God (Seventh Day).

Cranmer
said this of the Adventist Church: 3"About ten years ago [1853] a
Seventh-day Adventist minister, by the name of [Joseph] Bates, came to our
town and advocated the whole Law, the gifts of the Spirit, and many other
glorious truths.  The gifts
belonging to the Church, I had believed in for over twenty years.  Hence I felt to rejoice, supposing I
had found the people I had been so long looking for.  He told me that the gifts were
realized among them, that they had the gift of prophecy and the gift of
healing the sick.  But as long as I was with them I never
knew of any being healed.  I
have known them to try but they always failed.  In this I was disappointed.  I also found the spirit of prophecy, with them, was confined
wholly to a woman.  By this
time I became suspicious that I had gotten on board the wrong ship.  I then commenced to giving her
visions a thorough investigation.
I found they contradicted
themselves, and that they contradicted the Bible.  My doubts concerning the visions
I made known to the brethren.
At once they gave me the cold shoulder, and I was held at bay.  Not knowing any people I could unite
with, I remained with them for years, hoping they would get sick of the
visions of E.G. White, and that we could yet walk together in unity of
spirit.  But instead of
rejecting them, as I hoped they would, they only drew the reins the
tighter.  At last I made up my
mind I would not belong to a church that was ruled by a woman any
longer.  From that time the
Bible has been my creed, with Christ at the head of the Church.  I started alone, with my Bible in my
hand.  God has blessed my labors
beyond my utmost expectations.
We have some eight ministers and some hundreds of members in the
state of Michigan.  God has
manifest His power among us in a wonderful manner."

Cranmer
became openly disgruntled with the church and formed his own group, naming
them the Church of God (Seventh Day) Later in the Seventh-day Adventist
church there came yet another group. Moreover this one would still keep the
phrase Seventh-day Adventist in their name.

The story began March 2, 1885, with the birth o Victor Tasho Houteff
in Raikovo, Bulgaria.  Infamous to both church and state,
he was violently expelled from Bulgaria in 1907 and migrated to the United
States.  On May 10, 1919, he was
baptized a Seventh-day Adventist in Rockford, Illinois, and in 1923 moved to
Los Angeles where he became a member of the Exposition, Park Church and
served as a Sabbath School teacher in 1928 Houteff began to advocate views
about- last day events incompatible with Adventist understanding of Bible
prophecy.  Houteff began to
voice his views to his Sabbath School class.  Matters peeked the following year at
the Tabernacle church in nearby Fullerton when, in defense of his views, he
laid claim to the prophetic gift.
In a business meeting on November 4,1929, the church formally
requested P. E. Brodersen, president of the Southern California Conference,
to examine his teachings.  In
January 1930, Brodersen, together with J. E. Fulton, president of the
Pacific Union Conference, and others, concluded that Houteff s views were so
fanciful as not to be taken seriously, and dismissed the matter.

In
1930 Houteff hectographed his views under the title The Shepherd's Rod, the name by
which he and his followers were known over the next 12 years.  Persistent refusal on his part to
cease promoting his ideas led the church, in a business meeting on November
20,1930, to disfellowship him.
In 1932 a second volume of The
Shepherd's Rod appeared.

Relentless
advocacy of his views led, in 1934, to a major hearing that involved
representatives from the General Conference as well as the Pacific Union and
Southern California conferences.
The result was a pamphlet with the title A Warning Against Error, endorsed by
the Autumn (now Annual) Council later that year as an official General
Conference publication and issued by the Pacific Press as A Reply to the Shepherd's Rod.

In
February 1935, Houteff moved to Waco, Texas, and in May settled ten miles
east of town on a farm he named Mount Carmel Center.  At various times as many as 90 to
125 people, including children, took up residence there.  On January 1, 1937, Houteff married
Marcella Hermanson, daughter of the Center's treasurer, and later appointed
Marcella, his wife, as his successor.
Administration of the community was strictly theocratic.

With
the outbreak of war in the Pacific, Shepherd's Rod "ministers" faced the
draft, and as a result in 1942 the Center formally organized as a church and
adopted the name "Davidian Seventh-day Adventists." In 1955 Victor Houteff
died and his wife became president, however after extensive meetings with
the General Conference, she later denounced the teachings of the shepherds
saying " its wrong".

David Koresh -- high school dropout, rock musician, and polygamist
preacher -- built his church on a simple message: "If the Bible is true,
then I'm Christ." It was enough to draw more than a hundred people to join
him at an armed fortress near Waco, Texas, to await the end of the
world.  The same message tempted
Koresh to entertain a vision of martyrdom for himself.  He would die in a battle against
unbelievers, then be joined in heaven by the followers who chose to lay down
their lives for him".

Koresh
moved a little closer to that nightmare vision after more than 100 agents of
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) assaulted his
compound.  When the firing
finally stopped after an hour, four agents lay dead and 16 were wounded;
inside the compound as many as 10 cult members were reported dead,
including, Koresh said, a two-year-old girl, one of many children that
Koresh has fathered by more than a dozen wives.  The body of a man presumed to be a
Koresh follower was found outside later, clutching a gun.

Koresh
eventually let 21 children -- none of them his own -- and two elderly women
leave the compound, but he remained held up inside with 90 adults and 17
children awaiting instructions from God.  He claimed to be wounded, but he
sounded remarkably fit as he broadcast his end-of-the-world message across
the airwaves in exchange for a promise to surrender.  Meanwhile, more than 200 law-
enforcement officers surrounded the compound and waited, day after day, for
Koresh to make good on that pledge.

The
Waco cult is the product of an apocalyptic theology, refined over decades by
a succession of zealous but nonviolent splinter groups, that was seized at
last by a charismatic and combustible leader.  The son of a single mother, Koresh
was bom Vernon Howell in Houston in 1959.  Growing up in the Dallas area, he
was an apathetic student but an avid reader of the Bible who prayed for
hours and memorized long passages of Scripture.  He also played guitar -- not badly
by some reports -- using rock music as well as his magnetic preaching to
recruit followers.  Some of the
grim interiors in the Waco compound were decorated with posters of the wild
man rock guitarist Ted Nugent and the heavy-metal band Megadeth.

Koresh
dropped out of school in the ninth grade.  Raised in the mainstream Seventh-day
Adventist Church, he found comfort as a young man in the teachings of an
obscure offshoot, the Branch Davidians, which was a mutation of an earlier,
Adventist splinter group. 5 The Davidians trace their roots to Victor
Houteff, the Bulgarian immigrant who was expelled from a Los Angeles
Adventist church in 1929.
Houteff had become obsessed with passages in the Book of Ezekiel in
which an angel of God divides the faithful from the sinful before
Jerusalem's fall to the Babylonians.
Believing that passage to be a warning to Adventists, Houteff
established a splinter congregation in 1935 on the outskirts of Waco, in the
intensely religious grassland of Texas.

When
he died 20 years later, his widow assumed leadership of the sect.  She dissolved it after the failure
of her prediction that the last days of creation would commence on April 22,
1959.  But some members stayed
on near Waco with Benjamin Roden, a preacher who styled himself as the true
successor to King David of Israel.

Howell
joined them in 1984, after he was expelled by a traditional Seventh- day
Adventist church.  Before long
he was locked in a struggle for power with George Roden, who then headed the
sect with his mother Lois.  It
ended with Howell being driven from the sect at gunpoint.  He briefly established his own
desolate congregation, living with them in tents and packing crates in
nearby Palestine, Texas.  But
the feud between the two men reached another flashpoint soon after, when
Roden exhumed the body of a female church member with the intention of
bringing her back to life.
Insisting that Roden had violated the woman's body, Howell and a
number of followers returned to the Waco compound to shoot it out with the
Roden group.

Though
Howell and several followers were charged with attempted murder, a jury acquitted the followers, and
the charges against Howell were later dropped.  But the trial revealed that the Waco
sect was already well armed, with at least a dozen firearms, including
shotguns and .22-cal. rifles.
Roden, who was judged
unable to stand trial in an unrelated slaying, is presently in a state
mental hospital.

With
Roden out of the way, Howell became undisputed leader of the Branch
Davidians in Waco, completing their transition from congregation to
cult.  He and a few select
followers began recruiting new members on trips around the U.S., Britain and
Australia.  In 1990 he changed
his name legally to Koresh, Hebrew for Cyrus, the Persian king who allowed
the Jews to return to Israel after their captivity in Babylon.  His apocalyptic theology joined
together with secular survivalism, with its programs for hunkering down amid
stockpiles of food and ammunition to endure a nuclear holocaust or social
collapse.

Koresh
began to preach that his followers should ready themselves for a final
battle with unbelievers.  The
Waco settlement, once a collection of old cottages scattered around 78 acres
of scrub pasture and woods, was concentrated into a compact fort the size of
a city block.  Having equipped
it with an underground bunker and an armory -adjacent to the chapel __ 6CU,t
members discussed renaming the place Ranch Apocalypse.  Federal agents began tracking
frequent shipments of firepower that they say amounted to 8,000 lbs. of
ammunition and enough parts to assemble hundreds of automatic and
semiautomatic weapons.  Some
time ago a package addressed to the compound split open before it could be
delivered by the United Parcel Service.  The contents: hand grenades.

To
equip his flock psychologically for the battles to come, Koresh reportedly
played and replayed films of his favorite movies about the Vietnam War:
Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Hamburger Hill.  His followers prepared themselves
physically with weight training, military-style drills and obstacle-course
runs.  To acquaint them with the
experience of famine, their vegetarian diet was strictly rationed.  Daily life was a harsh mix of work
and Bible study.  Men labored at
construction around the compound, while modestly dressed women did household
chores and schooled the children, who were rarely taken off the
grounds.  Television was
forbidden, and children's birthdays were never celebrated.  In caustic monologues, Koresh would
lead his zealots through the Scripture in sessions that could last far into
the night.  To cover expenses,
cult members donated their paychecks if they worked outside.  Older members gave their Social
Security checks and food stamps. 7,'Step by step, you give up everything in
your life," says Lisa Gent, an Australian whose son Peter and daughter
Nicole are believed to be with Koresh, as well as Nicole's two children who
were fathered by Koresh. 8"You begin to live for a pat on the head," adds
Lisa's husband Bruce.  Ex-cult
members’ warned that some Davidians would do anything for their leader.
9Australiarr James Thom recalls Koresh asking him one day, "How far are you
prepared to go?" When Thom looked puzzled, Koresh asked, "Which of your two
children are you prepared to sacrifice?"

But
Koresh had stricter rules for his flock than for himself.  Beer, meat, air conditioning and
MTV, restricted for others, were available to him.  So were any of the female members,
though the other men were quartered separately from the women and sworn to
celibacy.  Some of the women
whom Koresh termed his wives were already married to male cult members.  Others were perhaps as young as 11
or 12.  "He was fixated with sex
and with a taste for younger girls," says Marc Breault, who belonged to the
group in 1988 and 1989.  "He
began to teach that all the women in the world belonged to him and only he
had the right to procreate." His rationale, according to Elizabeth Barabya,
another former member, was that "God believed it was necessary to send him
down to be a sinful Jesus so that, when he stood in judgment of sinners on
Judgment Day, he would have experience of all sin and degradation."

Allegations
surfaced that Koresh physically abused the children with frequent harsh
beatings for infractions as minor as crying after a nap.  But child-welfare authorities who
investigated found no evidence at the time to support those charges.  By 1991 Koresh was also traveling to
La Verne, California, where in a gated house he established what police
called a "women's dormitory" for 18 "wives." When neighbors reported that
one of them was 12 years old, police launched a child-molestation
investigation against Koresh that is still open.

Paul
G. Fatta, a resident of the compound who was out of town on the morning of
the raid, told the New York Times last week that firearms were kept there
merely to defend against potential attack by disaffected members who have
left the group.  He also said
that Koresh's followers regarded his polygamy as a Biblical trial for the
rest of them.  "Do not judge a
person by his actions, but by the message that he has," Fatta insisted.

Planning
the raid began, when federal and state law- enforcement officials concluded
that cult members were stockpiling guns and preparing to make legal
semiautomatics into illegal automatic weapons.  ATF agents acquired a house near the
compound, pretending to be neighbors and potential recruits.  Search warrant in hand, more than
100 agents charged the buildings early Sunday morning, only to be met by an
explosion of gunfire.  "From the
moment we stepped out of the trailer we were under fire from everywhere,"
says one agent who was pinned to the ground for 45 minutes.

The
Cult of Death 9

The
failure of the assault led to criticisms that ATF had fatally underestimated
its adversary -- or overestimated its own capabilities in a bid for the
media spotlight.  Treasury
Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, whose department includes the bureau, promised a
full inquiry.  ATF officials
claim that the raid failed largely because Koresh was tipped off.  About 45 minutes before the shooting
began, an agent who had infiltrated the cult's worship services saw Koresh
get a phone call that he believes warned him that attackers were on their
way.

Among
the questions that remain is why ATF agents did not try to nab Koresh on the
frequent occasions when he left the compound to jog, shop or eat in local
restaurants.  And with children
in the buildings, why didn't they treat the whole operation as a delicate
hostage situation?  "When these
groups are confronted by law enforcement they should be handled gingerly,"
said Marc Galanter, a professor of psychiatry at the New York University
School of Medicine, who has studied cults.  "You should establish communication
rather than confront them head on."

'OATF
spokesman Jack Killorin said that his bureau decided to move because it
believed that during a long siege -- or even if Koresh were seized alone
outside -- cult members would opt for suicide, taking the children with
them.  And almost all showdowns
with determined and fanatical groups have led to casualties, he insisted, no
matter how they were handled.
"We've gone about them in a number of different ways -ruse, ambush,
siege and talk," said Killorin.
"In almost every one we lose lawenforcement officers."

After two days of negotiation that followed the
shootout, Koresh promised to surrender himself peacefully if he could
deliver a statement on radio.
But after his rambling 58-minute address was broadcast on Christian
stations around the country, he reneged, saying he was still awaiting
"further instructions from God." With Biblical scholars on hand to help them
understand Koresh's thinking, three negotiating teams headed by the FBI
remained in periodic phone contact with him and other Davidians.  "The constant theme was, 'When are
you coming out?'

The
cult has stockpiled enough water, canned goods, grain and ready-to-eat meals
to last several months.  Even if
electricity is cut off, the group may have its own emergency
generators.  Koresh is telling
negotiators that he is annoyed by reports that he has claimed to be Christ,
despite the stories of ex-cult members that he often did so.  Though it is said that he urged his
flock last Easter to prepare for mass suicide, he was now insisting that
they would not turn their guns upon themselves.  But people who knew them well were
not reassured.  Say the worried
Lisa and Bruce Gent: "They will kill for him." And Koresh, a man caught up
in a dream of the Apocalypse, may be ready to die as well.

Footnotes

1.
White, Ellen.  Model One:
Disaffection Turned Rebellion The Messenger and Marion Parties

lbid.

http://www.ellenwhite.org/

Time
Magazine, The Cult of Death. 1993

The
Shepherds Rod web page and information center

Cult
of Death, Time magazine 1993

Ibid.

Ibid.

The Death
Cult

David
Koresh, Man or Prophet

Bibliography

1.       The
Cult of Death, TIME Magazine 1993

2.       The
internet, The Shepherds Rod Official Website

3.
Issues: The Seventh-day Adventist Church and Certain Private
Ministries., 1992

4.       Anti
Ellen White website, www.EllenWhite.org

5.       The
History of The Branch Davidians website.

6.
Report of a Meeting Between a Group of "Shepherds Rod" Leaders and a
Group of General Conference Ministers.  July 27- August 7, 1959 Tacoma
Park,

Washington
D. C.

7.       The
StoKy of the She]2herd's Rod, The committee on Defense Literature of the
General Conference Of Seventh-day Adventist (October, 1955)