Ship of Fools: Glendale Seventh Day Adventist, Phoenix, Arizona, USA
The Mystery Worshipper
Shipmate
Ship of Fools: Glendale Seventh Day Adventist, Phoenix, Arizona, USA
Masked? Socially distanced? Get thee behind me!
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Comments
I know you wouldn't.
But on rethinking my reply --
Our illustrious governor has pretty much said that you can have a mask mandate if you want, but it's not enforceable.
My regular church has a mask mandate that they enforce, and people do comply without exception.
What bothers me about Glendale SDA is that they appear to be saying, "OK, you can wear a mask if you want, but if you do, you can't sit with us and we're not going to socialize with you." I may be wrong -- only via an in-person visit could I be sure -- but that's the impression I got.
Yes, MW seems to have slacked off over Christmas. Hopefully it will pick up again.
We, too, hope that it will pick up.
There is a large Adventist centre a couple of kms from here, with a Temple, administrative offices to cover the entire State, and a very highly regarded hospital - I think the largest private hospital in the State. There's also a couple of large centres for specialist doctors. People around here would make sure that their health cover was ample for them to be treated there. One of the admin staff is a regular at morning coffee, although she has tea or hot chocolate rather than coffee of course.
We have an SDA church in our fair town (they took over the old Catholic Apostolic Church building in the 1950s, and later replaced it with a rather utilitarian structure, nowhere near as *interesting* as Glendale!), and from what I have seen of them, the congregation is largely made up of Black* people, as, indeed, are several other local independent churches.
(*Am I allowed to put my question this way? I don't want to offend anyone).
AFAIK , the SDA in England is largely a Black church, but I might be wrong. I was just wondering if the Glendale congregation reflected the demographics of the area, but I appreciate that it would be hard to tell if you couldn't actually see them!
The neighborhood is predominantly, but not exclusively, working class white.
The church also used to run a chain of well-regarded vegetarian restaurants.
I came close ... went to a tiny litte godbox in the fairly far north of NZ ... got all the details but lost my nerve.
[ETA ... PS ... sorry to derail (and to remove a stray apostrophe) ... now back to the SDAs and masklessness]
The SDA is a small denomination in the UK, largely Black (AFAIK), and not something we hear much about, so reading about a larger SDA church in another country is instructive.
Interestingly, one of the UK's few remaining colonies, Pitcairn Islands, is close to 100% SDA. Of course, that's only about 48 people in raw numbers.
(They also had that awful sex-abuse scandal back in the 2000s, which I only mention because it's the most significant thing to happen there in the last few centuries.)
@Amanda B Reckondwyth
Lead Editor, Mystery Worship
Afaik, the various Millerite churches in the UK tend to be largely Black churches of mostly Caribbean heritage due to the many missionaries in the Anglophone Caribbean - Jehovahs Witnesses for instance have a significant Black community in the UK due to this. Black churches in the US have different demographics, and the SDA in the US tends to be a fairly mainstream majority white evangelical denomination more akin to (majority white) Baptists.