The Broken Blueprint
A Book Review by Nic Samojluk
Introduction
When John Burden, under the direction of Ellen White, secured a place for the training of medical evangelists in what is known as Loma Linda, he was given a blueprint which required no union with unbelievers, the use of natural remedies instead of drugs, no accreditation from non-Adventist organizations, and the avoidance of costly buildings and competition with the world.
Following Ellen White's death, Percy Magan and Arthur Daniells got rid of Burden, pushed aside the blueprint, sought the accreditation of the school, replaced the use of natural remedies with drugs, hired non-adventist teachers and physicians, incurred heavy financial indebtedness, and began the extremely expensive long journey of competition with the world.
To learn about the bitter fruits of this departure from the pioneer's blueprint, read this book review and, if you can, read also the original document entitled "The Broken Blueprint" authored by Vance Ferrell.
The Broken Blueprint
By Vance Ferrell
Published By Harvestime Books, 2003
The Books Purpose
Ellen White stated: "Let the history and experience of those who have made mistakes be a warning to others." This is the reason for the book "The Broken Blueprint."
The Original Blueprint
Right from the beginning Mrs. White insisted that our schools should include practical, vocational training in their curriculum, coupled with character building instruction. The issuing of diplomas and classical studies was discouraged. According to this blueprint, the expenditure of large sums of money and expensive buildings were not required. The teaching of practical health laws was emphasized. The plan stressed practical courses of short duration in order to help students enter the work phase of their lives as soon as possible. Manual labor was required, and sports and amusements were discouraged. Initial experience demonstrated that such a plan resulted in the baptism of many of the students and there was a willingness on their part to participate in missionary activities.
Physical employment was balanced with mental effort. Teachers were encouraged to work along with their students. Industries were encouraged to settle near the schools to provide employment for the students. An emphasis was placed on locating schools away from cities, where land for farming and industries would be available. Grades and competition were discouraged, since intividuals came with a great variety of talents and abilities. Every student was encouraged to reach the highest potential based on the natural talents he/she had been blessed with.
When Battle Creek College replaced the work study program with sports, Ellen White issued a strong rebuke to President Prescott. One of the Battle Creek College students, Percy Magan, believed that the only useful activity was the one that helped people, and he managed to convince his friend, Edward Sutherland, who was a fan of baseball, of this philosophy. After graduation, Sutherland eventually became the president of Walla Walla College, and under his direction his school was the first one to implement a vegetarian diet for students, something that Arthur Daniells never accepted.
When Sutherland sold most of the acreage surrounding the school, Ellen white wept. Actually she wept many times as a result of our leaders failing to follow the original blueprint. Later on Sutherland succeeded in buying back 80 acres of the land he had sold. Under his leadership, all the teachers worked alongside with their student, including the president. In 1897, he was invited to Battle Creek in order that a similar program could be implemented there. By that time, Percy Magan was a member of the faculty there, and they succeeded in instituting a vegetarian diet for the school. The school also dropped the conferring of degrees.
The school had a limited amount of land, so Sutherland and Magan ploughed the tennis courts to make room for a vegetable garden. Some friends donated money for the purchase of 80 acres of land, which provided a chance for employment for the students. When Sutherland was transferred to Battle Creek, the school indebtedness stood at $100,000, much of that debt was eventually eliminated thanks to the changes implemented by him.
Major Blueprint Setbacks
At the beginning of the century two major disasters hit the SDA church: the Battle Creek Sanitarium and the Review building burned to the ground. The Review at the time was printing non-Adventist, objectionable material, contrary to the advice of Ellen White. This practice was discontinued whe the original printing press was replaced.
The Battle Creek Sanitarium, led by John H. Kellogg, became a remarkable success in a short time. His success lasted as long as he trusted the blueprint outlined by Ellen White. Unfortunately, he became proud of his accomplishment and eventually departed from the blueprint. He managed to gain legal control both of the Battle Creek Sanitarium and the American Medical College adjacent to it. This prompted Ellen White to intervene. Eventually both institutions failed, and Kellogg was forced to declare bankruptcy.
Ellen White realized that there was a need to replace what Kellogg was destroying. She asked John A. Burden to locate a suitable land for said purpose in Southern California. Burden did locate a property in near Redlands and put a down payment in spite of instructions from the local conference and the General Conference not to incur additional indebtedness. When Ellen came to see the place, she stated to her son: "I have been here before." Of course, she had seen the place in vision.
Starting all Over from Scratch
As plans moved forward for the Loma Linda school, Mrs. White stated that instead of training bedside nurses, we should train missionary nurses, who would visit the homes of people teaching them a better way of life, and giving Bible studies to them. The new school was named College of Medical Evangelists. Burden's vision for the school did not include the use of drugs, but rather natural remedies. In a long letter to the GC he argued that the AMA objective was to make money for the drug manufacturers.
Kelloggs American Medical College had failed because he sought official accreditation and could not afford the costly demands of the AMA. Elder Burden asked the GC not to seek accreditation, and Ellen White advised Burden not to relinquish yet legal control of the recently acquired property in Loma Linda to the conference, but he did, and later regretted having done so. Soon after Daniells, who was at the time the president of the GC, managed to get Burden transferred out of Loma Linda.
Before the accreditation fever, many Loma Linda graduates were eager to accept foreign mission assigments. This attitude changed later on.
The natural remedies envisioned by the blueprint were: "Pure air, sunlight, abstemniousness, rest, exercise, proper diet, the use of water, trust in divine power--these are the true remedies." These remedies required keeping patients out of doors a portion of time every day. In addition, such treatment did not require the purchase of expensive equipment so common connected with the operation of hospitals.
Ellen White repeatedly advised against the attempt to compete with the large institutions of the world. Also, she consistently suggested that land adjacent to our schools and sanitariums should be secured to keep the world encroaching on our institutions and thus influencing the behavior of our students. The emphasis on degrees was discouraged. "Caps. gowns, and degrees are not the best." stated Magan in a letter to Sutherland.
Another admonition from Ellen White was: "You are not to unite with unbelievers in medical work." (Medical Ministry p. 45) That is exactly what took place when the American Medical Association required the hiring of non-Adventists in order to avoid intellectual inbreeding. Such a move had long range consequences to our financial ability to implement our blueprint, and it exerted a baleful influence on our curriculum, our doctrines, and even our morality as we shall see later on.
By 1915 half a million dollars had been spent on accreditation requirements and the AMA determined that accreditation would not be granted unless the church build another hospital in Los Angeles. This was against Ellen White advice, which stated that the church should not build hospitals there. This advice was ignored and, by 1916, the foundation for the White Memorial Hospital was laid. Then the "C" rating was altered to a "B" one by the accreditation institution.
The Painful Regrets of the Men Who Pushed so Hard for Accreditation
"Like John Harvey Kellogg, He [Arthur G. Daniells] Was sold on the Spirit of Prophecy until the turn of the century, but, like Kellogg, he began thinking he could improve over the blueprint which God, through her [Ellen White], was presenting to the church ... It was Daniells, more than any other single man on a church executive level outside Loma Linda, who rammed through its accreditation. But, just as Percy Magan later wept, so did Daniells. ... One evening, a medical student found him walking in the hallway. Daniells was weeping. Turning to the young man, in an agony of voice Arthur said, 'Obey the Spirit Of Prophecy. I didn't and paid the price!'"
Soon after he was diagnosed with cancer, and he asked three reputable leaders to anoint him. They refused alleging that they could not do it with a clear conscience since he had worked in opposition to the Spirit of Prophecy and had never renounced a meat diet. Those men were Elders Starr, Cottrell, And Roberts. He was eventually annointed by other men before his death.
Percy T. Magan, who had pushed so much for the official accreditation of the College of Medical Evangelists, the forerunner of the Loma Linda University, eventually lamented the fact that most of the CME medical students were not willing to accept mission appointments once they graduated. Most of them opted to establish their own practice in California instead of going to the mission field, thus defeating the original objective the school was founded for: the training of medical evangelists.
In 1927 he privately made the following painful confession: "I feel that the situation is heart breaking." The student's mission had shifted from mission to a good paying job. Another shift was from an emphasis on morality to a stress on scholarship. Both Magan And Arthur G. Daniells deplored the sour fruits of the goal they had so ardently pursued: accreditation. In 1937 Magan Wrote: "It may be that this school will have to go down and upon its ashes God will uprear one of a sort more in harmony with his will."
The Heavy Financial Burden Connected with Accreditation
The push for accreditation required heavy indebtedness, which resulted in the lack of funds for the foreign mission fields program. The blueprint emphasized the use of natural remedies instead of drugs. It called not for expensive trauma care centers but rather for the instruction in preventive medicine and healthful living, and for many facilities around the world where patients would go to learn how to live a better lifestyle free from the use of harmful drugs, and where they would receive instruction in the true message of salvation through Jesus Christ. The push for accreditation altered all this.
The funds needed to carry out the original blueprint program were diverted for the building of 2 mammoth size institution of tertiary trauma care where emergency patients who received temporary help went back home to live the same unhealthful lifestyle that brought them to the hospital in the first place. Our health institutions, instead of offering an alternative type of service to the communities around the world based on the natural remedies outlined by Ellen White, free of drugs, focused on trauma care in competition with the rest of the world, thus aping what the world was already doing. This was not what the Lord and the early pioneers had in mind.
On the occasion of the first courtesy call by a representative of the accreditation committee, the CME leaders explained to him the mission of the school, and the opinion of the visitor was that the school had no need to seek accreditation for the training of medical evangelists. At that time, medical missionaries could be sent to most of the countries of the world and provide their service without having to show any degrees conferred by accredited organizations. The cursory visit was not followed by a grade assigned to the school. To the accrediting organization surprise, later on the CME leaders requested a grade be assigned to the school which resulted in a low "C" grade.
From that point on the school began the painful task of yielding to the ever increasing demands for changes in curriculum, buildings, instructional material, course work, library holdings, and teaching staff. The end result was that the institution was altered beyond recognition when all was over. The use of drugs became mandatory and replaced the use of natural remedies; teachers were required to comply with the world standards; AMA eventually demanded that, in order to avoid inbreeding, non-Adventist teachers be hired, who were later on granted academic freedom thus preventing our schools from firing them regardless of their religious beliefs.
Firing a teacher for religious reasons demanded a heavy penalty equivalent to a year's salary severance pay. In addition, once CME was accredited, AMA required that any school offering pre-medical training had to seek accreditation as well, which forced all our schools to follow the same painful and expensive accreditation path. All this made the availability of higher education for the children of our people very expensive and even prohibitive for the majority of our church members.
Ellen White and Burden's plan envisioned a few, experienced Adventists possessing a solid foundation in the Adventist message, to seek higher degrees from non-Adventists institutions of higher learning. The push for accreditation resulted in young, inexperienced graduates, lacking a solid Adventist foundation, flooding the non-Adventists schools in search of degrees, who were gladly hired by our schools seeking accreditation. The result was a loss of the missionary spirit and a lowering of all standards in SDA curriculum, entertainment, morality, and dedication to the high ideal of service in the mission fields initially set up by the early pioneers.
The Bitter Fruits of Accreditation
Back then, and even today, a portion of the General Conference budget goes for the support of LLU. A survey in the 1950's revealed that the world field felt that CME should probably be closed, since they felt they were not receiving any significant benefit from the money the Adventist world invested in the support of the School. The result of the survey was never published, and the document was destined for burning. In 1961 CME became LLU. The Term "Evangelists" no longer fit for what the institution was doing.
That same year a state law was enacted making it illegal to either discipline or fire a teacher based on his/her religious beliefs. Eventually all hydrotherapy instructions were dropped in order to comply with AMA accreditation requirements, which emphasized the administration of drugs. Vitamins suffered the same fate. AMA had a vested interest in drugs, but this conflict of interest was ignored by society and the church. No wonder physicians have no desire nor courage to prescribe natural remedies for fear of placing their sponsoring institutions on danger of loosing their accreditation.
It is a well known fact that LLU students have a higher rate of divorcing their wives who helped them get through their training than any other school of medicine in the country. Besides, in 1984, The Los Angeles Times commented that there were many half evolutionists in LLU, for which reason they saw no problem in transplanting the heart of a baboon into a dying baby.
The Widespread Effects of Accreditation
By 1990 most of LLU students were non-Adventists. Is this the reason Ellen White and Burden sacrificed so much: To train non-Adventists as doctors and nurses? Non-Adventist institutions were doing this already quite well. Ellen White had admonished that the mission of our schools was not to compete with the rest of the world. Well, this is exactly what took place.
One SDA school tried to fire a teacher who privately confessed that he didn't even believe in the Bible. The accrediting committee intervened and he was reassigned to the German language department. The Bible teachers were protected now by the "Academic Freedom" thanks to our desperate push for accreditation. We sacrificed our freedom and our beliefs for the sake of expediency and the desire to emulate the rest of the world.
To illustrate this, Walla Walla College Health Services provides condoms for sexually active students. It is estimated that almost 50 percent of students at Adventist colleges drink alcoholic beverages. At a PUC vespers meeting students were instructed on how to have protected sex. Not a word was said about abstinence. When pregnancies take place, girls Are told where they can get an abortion.
A Jewish convert to the Adventist message argued that what happened to Adventism mirrors what happened to the Jews two thousand years ago. The Hellenistic influence affected the Jewish education system, they adopted Greek customs, philosophy, and values, and this is what led them to eventually crucify their own Messiah--Jesus Christ.
Ellen White made repeated calls for the establishment of small sanitariums around the world where people could learn a better lifestyle. This call fell on deaf ears, since the establishment of a few large accredited schools and medical institutions absorbed all the available funds the Adventist community could afford at the time.
She was in favor of a large number of independent ministries free from church control. Battle Creek College, Emmanuel Missionary College, Madison College and those that followed made the same mistake: they sought accreditation. Nevertheless, none of them exerted such a baleful influence over the entire Adventist educational system like Loma Linda, which chose the same painful accreditation path.
The Harventing of Organs from Live & Kicking Babies
"The January 1996 issue of Rutherford, the journal of The Rutherford Institute, included an article which discussed how the Chinese eat babies and Loma Linda Medical Center harvests organs from living babies--which, in the process, kills them. ... Since these infants, in Loma Linda's opinion, did not qualify for personhood, their organs were considered fair game."
The controversial program was discontinued, not for moral reason, but rather because the transplants failed. "These were anencephalic babies, kept alive till LLU surgeons decided to kill them and get their organs. Of course, this procedure required the redefinition of the death criteria. These babies were declared dead just prior to the procurement of their organs. Based on the pretext that the baby's brain failed to develop in a normal fashion, they were labelled as dead, in spite of the fact that they were alive and kicking.
The Reviewer Comments
A Strange New Concept of Death
Ferrel does not mention this, but a whole book was written in the mid 1990's justifying the modified death criteria. The title of this book is "What is a Person," authored by a highly respected LLU scholar: James Walters. In it he argues for the redefinition of death for anencephalic babies whose brain has failed to develop in a normal fashion. He states that a baby lacking a normal higher cortex, is legally dead, and its organs should be available for harvesting and transplant. My question is: How can someone say that said baby is dead and, at the same time, instruct the nurses to keep the baby alive for the eventual organ procurement? If it is legally dead, it should be ready for burial. Will the law allow the burial of a live and kicking anencephalic baby?
The Accreditation and Degrees Dilemma.
Vance Ferrell is quite persuasive in his arguments, which are profusely documented from reliable denominational sourcess, that the original plan by Ellen White and the founding fathers of the Seventh-day Adventist church was not implemented as envisioned by them. What is not so clear to me is whether the implementation of the original blueprint, given the present circumstances, would be feasible today. The author quotes the pioneers belief that most of the countries of the world would have allowed medical evangelists trained without accreditation to practice their profession without hindrance, and I am not questioning said fact. My question is: Is this feasible today in 2007?
In order to illustrate this, let me use my own experience. Back in 1966, after graduating with a major in English, and a Masters in Education, I was sent by the General Conference to Argentina to teach English. When I arrived there, I was informed that I would be granted a temporary permit to teach provided I enrolled at a state university and completed a four year's course in English. Notice that in Argentina English is a foreign language. My degrees from California authorized me to teach English to English speaking students, but proud Argentinians felt that this was not enough. They wanted me to take all the English major courses all over again.
After much search, I was lucky to locate one state university which allowed me to challenge the title of English Teacher on the basis of en exam and the writing of was equivalent to a doctoral thesis. Of course, thanks to God's providence, I was able to pass the examination with flying colors, but the idea of having to go through the college training all over again scared the daylights out of me. Things have changed all over the world. Even third world countries feel proud about their local universities, and they do require degrees and licenses issued by their local schools. Given these facts, is it realistic to entertain the hope of being able to implement the blueprint with its original features today?
I will further illustrate this with another anecdote: There was in Argentina a patient who had an unfortunate accident, and his condition was so serious that his doctor told him he would never be able to walk again. A friend told him about an unlicensed practitioner who had helped many people recover after similar accidents. The poor man thought, "What do I have to loose?" He was treated by this unlicensed medical expert, and in a couple of months he was walking as if nothing had happened to him. By conincidence, he bumped on the street into his former physician, who, quite naturally, was amazed that his former patient was walking again. He asked him who had treated him, and the men identified his benefactor. The doctor reported the unlicened practitioner to the authorities for practicing medicine without a license, and got him in big trouble. I wonder whether there is a place in the world where a medical evangelist could practice medicine without a license today.
The Unintended Consequences of a Departure from the Original Blueprint.
The question is: What about the unintended, undesirable consequences of our departure from the original blueprint. The price we Adventists paid, and are still paying today, as a result of our departure from the original blueprint is rather high. Because the incesant demands from the accreditation entity became almost unbearable with time, which was described by Ferrell as a "bottomless pit" or a black hole that could never be filled without much repercussion on the original mission assigned by the church to our medical institutions. It affected our entire educational system, since no sooner our CME was accredited, it became very clear to our leaders that all our other educational institutions had to folow suit. The funds intended for the building of a large number of smal sanitariums around the world had to be channeled for the accreditation of a small number of mammoth size educational institutions.
Because the AMA eventually insisted that, to avoid "inbreeding," which was also described as intellectual incest, CME was forced to hire non-Adventist personnel. This had the tendency to water down our missionary zeal, our emphasis on doctrine, and even our morality. The emphasis on higher degrees, also had the same undesirable influence on the high ideals of service instilled in our students by our pioneers. Instead of sending a few, well grounded in our SDA beliefs, to non-Adventist institutions for the securing of university degrees, young and inexperienced students crowded non-Adventist institutions of higher learning and were eagerly hired by our schools who were desperately trying to get accredited as well. Many of these new teachers came with evolutionary ideas about origins, and helped shape the liberal ideas inside our schools.
A good example is what took place in Hawaii. We had there our Castle Memorial Hospital, which was built with the financial assitance of non-Adventist donors. Like CME, the managers of this institution hired a mixture of Seventh-day and non Adventist staff. When the state legalized abortion, the non-Adventist doctors demanded the right to provide elective abortion services to their patients and threatened to take their patients elsewhere if they were denied said privilege. This represented a serious financial threat to our hospital. A former rich donor of the hospital demanded that CMH perform and abortion for his teenage daughter. The manager didn't know what to do. An inquire went to the Pacific Union Conference, and later to the General Conference. The pressure was extremely great, and the then president of the GC stated that the church was leaning towards abortion. His justification for this incredible move was: "There is much hunger and overpopulation in the world."
Imagine this: the maximum authority of the "Remnant Church," which keeps God's Commandments, one of which forbids the shedding of innocent blood, declaring in the riches country of the world that the killing of the unborn was justified because there was too much hunger and overpopulation in the world. No wonder that some years later a survey of our hospitals revealed that five of them were performing elective abortions.
Eventually, the church issued an officiall document entitled "Guidelines on Abortion." This document justified therapeutic abortions for pregnant minors, victims of incest and rape, and women whose pregnancies affected their mental health. This made rather easy for women seeking to destroy their unborn babies by claiming that the pregnancy was affecting their mental health. The evidence was that they felt very depressed. The unexpected pregnancy was interferring with their studies, work, or other plans for the future, and quite often they were depressed because they were not financially ready to assume the responsibility of raising a child.
Of course those therapeutic abortion were no therapy for the innocent babies waiting to see the light of day. On top of this, we must clarify that these abortion guidelines were not mandatory. Each hospital was free to adopt them or devise their own guidelines. Several of our hospitals decided that profit was more important than the sacred life of the unborn. No wonder that recently a leading General conference official described our hospital in Washington as "an abortion mill." A few years ago, a group of pro-lifers picketed the institution with signs that read: "What about the Commandment that forbids murder?"
When Percy Magan and Arthur Daniels decided to seek the accreditation of the College of Medical Evangelists, the forerunner of our Loma Linda University, they had no idea about the heavy financial, doctrinal, and moral price we would eventually pay for such a decision. Had we followed the original blueprint, I doubt that we would be killing babies in some of our hospitals today, and we would not have to counteract the influence of so many evolutionists in our midst. Neither did they foresee that the pursuit of the accreditation goal would eventually force our institutions to hire non-adventist personnel, which violated the Biblical and Ellen White's warning against uniting with unbelievers. If you, the reader, happens to disagree, please write to me and give me your reasons!
Note: The link for this book was submitted by Bernice RN.
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