Comment on Review of “The Naked Emperor” by Pastor Conrad Vine by Shelley Bacon.
Barry and I read through Sean’s article and then read the comments. We recognized your name, Guy (Loma Linda School of Medicine class of 1984!), and resonate with your thoughts. Our church recently invited Conrad Vine to speak. We had never heard of him before and quite by accident ran across “The Runaway Train II” video when one of my friends posted on Facebook about questing his Adventist theology and someone responded with a link to this video. We had thought the video would affirm my friend’s faith, but it was quite the opposite.
Our church elders as well as our church board have discussed Vine’s speaking engagement several times after hearing from us and others about our concerns. However, Vine has promised to stay away from speaking about the pandemic, vaccines, etc. during his presentations at our church when he comes in May, and the church board voted to move forward. We are still very concerned about his speaking engagement, especially after listening to the first part of “Naked Emperor” and hearing Vine say “We entered the pandemic as Protestants and we exited as a papal system.”
We live-stream our church service every week, and I have been the one posting the link and intro to each week’s service. I feel I cannot in good conscience post a live-stream of this speaker when viewers (non-Adventists particularly) may well search for other sermons by the same speaker and run across one of the many talks he has given about this subject. However, if we do not live-stream it, our local regular viewers will contact me personally to ask if there is a live-stream, and if not, why. It’s a lose-lose situation. I can only pray God will limit the negative impact this could potentially have with our local congregation, our local live-stream audience, and our broader live-stream audience (I guess we have 5,000 people watching from the Philippines!).
Your prayers are appreciated.
