Ohio Conference leaders and pastors have sought to dictate where staff members from Conference institutions may attend camp meeting. They have even gone so far as to threaten withholding financial support if the staff members do not fall in line. This is like taking a page of history right out of the ecclesiastical control of the Middle Ages, when the Roman church dictated how and where people should worship. Man does not have the right nor the prerogative to do such a thing; only God does. If we notice that a brother or sister is acting outside of God’s will, we should engage in Christian admonishment and endeavor to bring the person back into the safety of God’s revealed will. But we should never through fear seek to be a conscience for someone else. This is a dreadful development in God’s church.
“The man who because he is president of a conference dares to take the responsibility of telling his fellow-workers what their duty is, is working out a wrong experience. The influence will be to destroy the God-given personality of men, and place them under human jurisdiction. Such management is laying a foundation for unbelief. The men who instruct their fellowmen to look to men for guidance, are really teaching them that when they go to the Lord for counsel and the direction of His Spirit regarding their duty, they must not follow that counsel without first going to certain men to know if this is what they must do. Thus a species of slavery is developed that will bring only weakness and inefficiency to the church of God.
Those who bring in this unhappy chapter into the experiences of our work, and willingly accept the idea that the rulership of other men’s conscience has been given to them, need to understand that they have made a grave mistake. Their office was never intended to give to them the responsibility which they have been led to think it bestowed. The danger signal is now lifted against this evil. Never, never let men consent to stand in a position which God alone should occupy.”—Letter 344, 1907, p. 3 (October 1, 1907, to A. G. Daniells, G. A. Irwin, and W. W. Prescott).
--Christian Leadership, 28
“Satan’s skill is exercised in devising plans and methods without number to accomplish his purposes. Dissimulation has become a fine art with him, and he works in the guise of an angel of light. God’s eye alone discerns his schemes to contaminate the world with false and ruinous principles bearing on their face the appearance of genuine goodness. He works to restrict religious liberty, and to bring into the religious world a species of slavery. Organizations, institutions, unless kept by the power of God, will work under Satan’s dictation to bring men under the control of men; and fraud and guile will bear the semblance of zeal for truth and for the advancement of the kingdom of God…. If men resist the warnings the Lord sends them, they become even leaders in evil practice; such men assume to exercise the prerogatives of God—they presume to do that which God Himself will not do in seeking to control the minds of men. They introduce their own methods and plans, and through their misconceptions of God they weaken the faith of others in the truth, and bring in false principles that will work like leaven to taint and corrupt our institutions and churches. Anything that lowers man’s conception of righteousness and equity and impartial judgment, any device or precept that brings God’s human agents under the control of human minds, impairs their faith in God; it separates the soul from God; for it leads away from the path of strict integrity and righteousness.
God will not vindicate any device whereby man shall in the slightest degree rule or oppress his fellowmen.”
--Testimonies to Ministers and Gospel Workers, 366
“No man was to exercise an arbitrary power over another man’s conscience.” --Spirit of Prophecy, Vol. 3, pg. 245
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