I have a rather specific view of churches – I don’t judge how “good” people are by the church they belong to. I judge people by the impression they make on me and by how much their faith comes from within themselves and from their relationship with God, not with a church. I first came to the youth group in November 2009. Well, back then not to the youth group as such, just to see the pastor at the time, Mr. Strouhal, and to this day I remember exactly what we talked about, because I even drew him a sketch of something. In 2009 I believe the leader there was still Monika Stankova.
She later moved to Ostrava and started working at Hyundai, and after that I’m not sure who came next. Maybe Petr Hamrozi, then Ivonka Palarcikova, and from then on I think I remember it well – Petr Hamrozi again, then Stefan with Liduska, and currently Michael with Jirka. I tried to attend both the Sabbath services and the youth meetings, and even the afternoon “talking” sessions about one of Ellen White‘s books. The youth meetings were great thanks to the atmosphere of young people, and the Wednesday evenings because many interesting thoughts came up there and, what’s more, experiences too.
Those people truly spoke from experience with God and His kindness. I just quickly went through a few web pages and wrote down which areas one or more people can be in charge of:
- Pastor
- Church leader / Elder
- Music and choir leader
- Church board – I did search online for who sits on it, but as I expected, that is internal information and sensitive for the people involved. I know a few people from the whole congregation by first or last name, but in a way that is better, because I can’t take it “person by person” but rather “as one picture“.
- Treasurer / Steward
- Personal ministries (social worker)
- Clerk (administrative worker)
- Head deacon / ADRA leader (charity worker)
- Pathfinder / children’s leader
- Youth leader
- Family ministries leader (9 – 11 also Sabbath School leader)
- Mission leader
- Tracts
- Chronicler
- Webmaster
- People who help with the broadcasting
- Head of sound engineers, technical matters, digital equipment and recording devices
I have highlighted in bold the people I think the congregation is missing, which leaves a gap in those areas. It is only 2 out of 17, which looks negligible. Even so, the congregation is withering away, living from one Sabbath to the next. I believe God values genuine originality, enthusiasm and longing, not “I go to church and that’s enough for me and for God”. God wants each person individually, not the congregation as a whole. I deliberately put the pastor in first place and broadcasting in last.
My opinion is that the pastor should always have the final word – if only because he speaks to those people and senses much better what the congregation really lives by. He is more human and has a closer connection with the believers, and therefore with God as well. I also think that of all these “professions”, only the pastor should receive a “full-time salary”. The others should receive something symbolic, or if they want to do it purely as a service to God according to their faith, then that way. Appetite grows with eating, and the same goes for every pleasure, and money can buy you anything. Except God.
As for the areas of ministry – here I have a really strong feeling that most things, especially the influential ones, are concentrated in the hands of certain people. But I’ll get to that in more detail below; now I’d like to focus on the Sabbath itself – the worship service.
Ceremony The youth Sabbath School used to be very well attended. We met in the small hall, in a circle with no gaps, and people were eager to hear the others and to share their own view on the topic. But then the children’s Sabbath School was put there – I no longer know why it couldn’t be upstairs next to the pastor’s apartment – and we had to start meeting in the sanctuary. It was always chaos, though. It started with the children’s class being in the small hall and 2 Sabbath School classes in the sanctuary. Sometimes it even ended up with 4 classes because of mutual dislikes – 2 for the youth and 2 for the older members.
The last few times I was at Sabbath School, it was only Petr Hamrozi talking about his successes in selling Bibles, exhibitions and new premises. If he hadn’t been talking, there would have been almost deathly silence. Then a 30-minute break for chatting. This is where people chatted with those they know, because in that congregation there is no brotherhood, unity or equality. Then comes a full-blown theater show, with the difference that nobody films in a theater. With perfect precision a calming jingle plays, someone walks onto the stage and says who will preach today and what will follow. However, they don’t even introduce themselves – I understand that the same people keep coming and a new face is rare, but it would certainly be a sign of friendship and one Spirit – even for the “survivors“.
Then a story for the children (where I noticed several times that certain storytellers repeated, down to the last detail, exactly what the same children had already heard). Then maybe a youth song, or a solo song, a poem, a Bible reading, and of course the tithe collection cannot be missing. As for the tithe, given how non-transparently the money is handled, I’m not willing to give anything there. These days almost any church means almost a money printing press. When it comes to financial health, things aren’t that rosy anymore.
Sometimes I even think it’s like a slot machine at Bonver by the border. You can throw in everything you own, lose your mind, see it as an escape from your problems – the road is fast, but it leads into the abyss. Back then I quite liked Patrik‘s prayer. Even though he wanted to imitate what he sees every week, he couldn’t, but he said what he himself felt, right at the moment when he didn’t know what to do. Not like the people who come up every week and say almost word for word the same thing. It isn’t spiritual, it’s ritual.
Aggressiveness Evidently the goal here is to put as much power over the whole congregation as possible into the hands of a few people who want to be sovereign masters. I don’t know what is behind it, but of course it creates a rift with everyone else, so it shows signs of sectarianism… in other words, a closed community of people who look normal on the outside, as if they were just like everyone else, but on the inside some pretty demonic things are going on.
Everything 2 From what I read online about the SDA Church, people who fled from it in despair recall manipulation, depression and an absence of almost any humanity in the congregation, everything staged and artificial. Constant attacks on other churches.
Passivity The problem in that congregation isn’t that people don’t want change. The problem is only those leading “personalities”. People go there only out of inertia and habit; I don’t believe it has a real spiritual dimension for anyone. People lack any courage to express themselves. They are prisoners of sin and of the church, with absolutely no freedom to do something from their heart. Since they have been recording it for so many years, they wouldn’t even have to film anymore, they could just play something older, after all it’s always the same tune.
“The SDA congregation in Tesin is recorded.” It will be recorded, but maybe only someone “in front of their TV screen” will see it. The congregation will live on emptiness. Adapting to current conditions and acting spontaneously is the only way out, not planning and doing nothing most of the time; a person can be alive and yet not react to anything – “to be soulless”. It shows how sick the congregation is, or rather the people who make it up. How are such people and such a congregation supposed to be capable of evangelism?
Web and digital promotion I really don’t know where they store those GB of video. I mean I don’t know whether they have their own data center or whether they pay through the nose. Let’s look at, for example, RIP – this server didn’t even survive its own hosting.– that is the largest one, Full HD quality, 7035 MB.
If we add up all 4 videos plus the MP3 recording, it comes to 11010. From an IT person’s point of view that might be a nice for loop, but we’re not talking about bits, we’re talking about megabytes. On that website I’ll reach a much smaller potential audience than on, say, YouTube, which also has perfect statistics, effective and affordable promotion, comments, and the chance to share the thoughts people had while watching. Here you can only play it from the web (which, when 78 MB is transferred every minute for about 1.5 hours, would require a free connection with a real minimum throughput of 586 Mb/s, and you don’t get that even in university dorms. The same goes for HopeTV vs. BibleTV.
Manipulation I also don’t like that someone stands at the head of the whole church. In my view, that is where the motive of controlling people comes from. How can someone in America or maybe somewhere in East Asia decide down to the last detail how we should hold our worship services? I understand that each country has its delegate or delegates there, but even so, how can they unify something as diverse and varied as the whole world? I’m also quite sensitive about the term “joint prayer”.
We told you that now you have to pray, so pray for whatever you want if we allow it, otherwise for our interests (which they present as the interests of the whole congregation, of specific people with whom one may have an impersonal relationship, or of the church). It reminds me of how Satan tempted the exhausted Jesus in the desert – kneel down and surrender to me: Then the devil took him to a very high mountain, showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and said to him: “All this I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.”
Then Jesus said to him: “Away with you, Satan! For it is written: Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.” (Matthew 4:8-10). The space is being abused here to manipulate people – in the most intimate and often most sensitive thing a person has.
Pretense People who got baptized no longer come to church. That is also one reason why I don’t want to be baptized, because I don’t know which church is the right one; I think none of them is, and besides, I would feel a choking leash. I don’t want to be a member of any church either, for the same reason. If there is only 1 God, why are there so many churches, each with a different, sometimes very contrasting, doctrine?
Pharisaism I really don’t understand Adventists who say “we are the furthest along in knowledge“. Do they know about the whole world, what churches there are, about every congregation, about what every person feels inside, and about the all-knowing God at all? I believe knowledge really can’t be measured by which church a person belongs to. There is only 1 Bible, there is only one Ten Commandments. It always depends on the person. A church or anything else can influence us, point us in a direction, but everyone has to walk the path themselves. A truly needless fondness for sharp argument and pushing oneself forward.
You can see it a little even in the name of that church. Sometimes I feel that the more words, the fewer deeds. As if they were hiding behind impressive ones and trying to impress only with their speech. The strongest and mightiest things in the Bible are named simply and clearly. God is love. I am who I am. In my opinion it can come across as chaotic to people and, on the contrary, attract people who are looking for information about God rather than for God. That Adventists don’t seek God in their practical life, their heart and their joy, but in thoughts, and try to limit Him to the scope of their understanding.
Intrigue Adventists say about themselves that they don’t take a single crown from the state. For anything. So I really don’t know what they would use to pay for that whole apparatus of people, from the Moravian-Silesian Conference through the Czecho-Slovak Union, then the Inter-European Division, all the way up to the General Conference. And I’m not even talking about the costs of the church building, energy and repairs. If 700 CZK is collected in tithes every week, you could maybe “get by” on that in prehistoric times somewhere in a cave. If a business behaved as senselessly as the congregation in Tesin, it would have gone bankrupt long ago.
False teachings I have read quite a few books by EGW, and do you know what it reminds me of? The Bible states VERY CLEARLY, several times, that no one knows the day or the hour of the coming of the Lord Jesus. And here are a few spiritists and mystics, led by EGW as the writer (who allegedly copied most of “her” books – that I don’t know), but what I do know is that it’s practically the same thing over and over. 40 books, told in a way that more than once makes a person cry, and God too, out of compassion for that person and the disorientation in the spiritual world they have fallen into.
The same online, needlessly many websites about practically the same thing, mainly emphasizing the Sabbath, which, pardon me, try to play on emotions and push a person who is looking for help lower and lower. The websites controlled by Petr Hamrozi clearly use the same graphic template at first glance, just swap the header image, the colors and the domain, and there’s a new website. Plagiarism, a mixture of various occult influences and big contradictions with the Bible – those are the main things I see as a flaw. Adventists call her a prophetess, but what did she actually predict that came true?
Apart from calculating the end of the world to the exact day, and when that didn’t happen they made a correction together with Miller, and when that didn’t happen either they stopped calculating and founded the Seventh-day Adventist Church (and even then there were quarrels like today, because a group later split off from the SDA – today’s Jehovah’s Witnesses). She suffered from frequent left temporal lobe seizures, during which she fell into a state of insanity.
Likewise, I don’t like speculating about what will happen to the world next; I know the world is heading toward ruin, but what can I do about it? Every person’s task is to act according to their conscience, not to deal with things that completely exceed their knowledge and ability to connect the dots. It is ordinary fortune-telling, just not for one person but for the whole world, a pursuit of sensation, and it most likely took place at some kind of seance.
Closedness Take, for example, the split of the congregation in Zabreh (I hope I’m spelling the town correctly). Apparently there was some powerful businessman there whose tentacles reached into various areas; he started promoting Adventism and in the end wanted to take over the whole congregation – or at least remake it in his own image. That didn’t work out and the congregation split in 2. As far as I know, there are also some ties between this businessman and Atmosfera in Ostrava. That’s why I don’t like being there – I won’t be somewhere that splits a congregation. Locally, various municipal and town periodicals publish articles by pastors and other public representatives of congregations, even just about activities in the congregation/parish/etc., but in 99% of cases those are the “non-chosen” churches.
The desire to be seen The number of people who regularly attend worship services has been declining over the long term. I’m not surprised. They try to prevent it with online broadcasting, but I don’t see any real point in it. Someone opens a tab in the background of their browser, while anything else may be playing at the same time; they can stop it at any time, leave, do anything while it runs. Such a “listener” gets only a certain fragment of the sermon and can piece it together any way they like. It doesn’t motivate those people at all, not even to walk over to the church.
Complete passivity, boredom, disgust. And the argument that it’s for grandmas and grandpas who can no longer come because of their health – do they really think those people will buy a smartphone or a computer to watch BibleTV? Broadcasting everything and then archiving it – even the wedding of 2 young people. Good thing the wedding night isn’t on there too…
Public image I feel that Adventists try to present themselves like other churches, as helping the helpless and abandoned, but as far as I know, they do almost nothing outside the congregation. Just babbling about what visions they have and blah blah blah… Since Mr. Stanek left, they don’t even cook goulash once a year anymore, and there is no effort at any cooperation with other churches. There is no chosen one, there are only better and worse ones, and how else to bring people onto the right path than by talking with them and sharing one’s own experiences? I feel that Adventists are sometimes ashamed of their faith. I don’t know of any other church charity that has been more discredited in the media than ADRA – and ADRA is the strongest instrument of Adventist mission. When the Night of Churches took place years ago, all the churches in Tesin took part. Only the Adventists stood aside, unwilling to work together for Christ.
The financial side The church building in Tesin reportedly cost 18 million, of which 2 million was cameras. 16 million for such an unimpressive building, which by my layman’s estimate is worth 4 million at most? And that’s if it had been all-in-one, but the company only built the bare walls; I saw photos of the entire youth group of that time pushing wheelbarrows full of rubble and toiling like day laborers. From a biblical point of view that is right, it is a service to God, but then the amount should have been half a million, not 32 times that.
On top of that, a very outdated PC with Windows XP, not connected to the internet, in such a state that even at the height of XP‘s glory nothing could be done on it, because half the system is missing, and that peculiar non-ergonomic keyboard, which you can’t even pull out properly because of its short cable, deals the final blow. And the congregation’s website says it urgently needs 200,000 CZK for online broadcasting, so if any of you wins at Korunka, go for it 🙂 The winning numbers on korunka.eu were deleted long ago.… and meanwhile around 100 people watch it. If it were for a year, that comes to 2000 CZK per person. Money is being foolishly thrown away on nonsense and the whims of certain individuals. And maybe Radim Passer could contribute something – after all, exactly 6 years ago he gave a lecture in Tesin – on April 16, 2016 at 5 p.m. When I typed passer congregation lecture into Google, in the first 10 results I learned that in 2010 he was in Brandys nad Labem and in Cesky Tesin, and in 2014 he gave a series of lectures in Prague – Bethany. And the fact that he came here, which is quite out of the way from Prague where he probably lives, suggests that the Tesin SDA congregation really does attract things related to business. Also, Passer was reportedly originally a Jehovah’s Witness, according to people who supposedly knew him personally.
Leading the leadership I sense that the people who have claimed the congregation as their “territory” can’t stand even the smallest deviation from their vision. If someone dares to voice their opinion, a war of opinions breaks out, a vein starts throbbing on the foreheads of several people at the top, and all those good qualities a Christian should have go out the window, even in their theatrical form. Most of the people, by an overwhelming majority, know everything best, and even though in theory they have no plan, they want things their way. There are only arguments and nothing gets done.
I sense arrogance and domineering there. Absolutely. God is where people long for Him, where they need His help, where there is solidarity. A fish rots from the head down, and the whole congregation then looks accordingly. Strong and authentic people understand that they are in the same boat, and either everyone keeps sailing or everyone goes down. The weak and those blinded by their desires (whether for power, money, etc.) will cling to them tooth and nail. And these quarrels happen even at the General Conference; what kind of example does that set for the whole community of believers? Unity only in the Bible, and let them do everything else however they like. Maybe then this financial machine would stop…
“One for one, none for all” Every congregation on its own domain; at least the youth groups share one. Count me out, I’d happily put it on poslitodal 😀 but I didn’t know whether it runs on shared hosting or a VPS, and if the latter, whether on Linux or Windows Server. And there’s really a pretty small chance it would run on Windows Server, since it’s much more expensive, ASP.NET is used far less, and poslitodal.cz uses PHP everywhere. You can actually use ASP.NET on Linux too, just unofficially, and it makes no sense.
Lack of solidarity I’ve already written about that in the previous paragraphs.
Conclusion I’m not saying that all of Adventism is bad. It’s just that, even though the church as a building is brand new, the principles at work in it are rotten through and through. The church has turned into an excellent steward and accountant, but not for God, rather for itself. A congregation is not a company where people have to go to earn money; it’s the opposite, and until true Christianity reigns in the congregation, they can push whatever they want with as much force as they want, but it will always fade out anyway.
Whoever has no way to engage people with what is expected of them resorts to desperate measures. Whoever can’t engage people in person will hardly engage them from a distance. In my view, it is the perfect example of how things should never be done. The congregation is stuck. Now it is in a spasm, falling from the sky. If the parachute doesn’t open, the impact is inevitable and fatal. So instead of the congregation and its people being “divine”, that is “connected with God”, you are doing everything to make it “divide”, that is “division”, “separation”.
That congregation is a disgrace to God, brought on Him by people. And by the way, have you tried https://casd-ceskytesin.cz/ and https://www.casd-ceskytesin.cz/ ? Do you really not know how to use htaccess to redirect the domain without www to the one with it?