That SDA story on NTV could be true. There are elements in SDA who discourage education.
I have a cousin who abandoned education to sell church literature, most of which are authored in North America and Europe, many of which lack the local context of life as lived in an African landscape.
Such people, in church langauge, are referred to as Colporteurs.
SDA’s early foundations in Kenya are rooted in colonial-missionary complexes. To understand the church’s role in education you must understand that the SDA ‘sect’ was founded with a narrow eschatological worldview – this idea that the world would ‘end’ in the 1880s.
When that did not happen, the sect reviewed its theology and made the new date of the ‘second coming’ a matter of urgency. They explained the failure of Jesus to return as they’d predicted by saying he had actually now entered the ‘Holy of holies’.
Every SDA adherent undergoes a period when the world no longer matter because – if anything – it is ending ‘soon’. Why, therefore, should one go to school, or start a business, or invest, when there’s no guarantee of enjoying these returns?
The first generation of SDA converts impoverished their families. At a time their peers were amassing land and other worldly wealth, their new faith attached little value to material accumulation.
SDA ‘church schools’, not to be confused with GoK schools with SDA sponsorships, till this hour have remained centres for theological indoctrination rather than secular education.
In the period leading to the collapse of white rule, South Nyanza, where SDA was the ubiquitous faith, lagged behind developmentally partly on account of the church’s dim views on the longevity of man on earth, for, to the church, man was a passing cloud!
SDA has evolved and continue to evolve. For decades now the church has participated in many educational programs – building schools and colleges, offering scholarships, etc. But there are still early church doctrines that need to be uprooted. And they are many.
Remember, the church started as an extremist sect. The church’s epiphanous matriarch, Ellen G. White, was more of a Prophet Owuor type. In North America, where SDA ‘came from’, the church is still very peripheral in American life, because its doctrines are still extreme by American religious standards.
Be that as it may, I am and will always remain adventist, not because the church is infallible, but because I really want to go to heaven.
