My name is James (Jim) Coffin. I was born in the Midwestern United States during the first third of the Baby Boom. My parents were committed Seventh-day Adventists. Deeply committed. In fact, I’m a fourth-generation Adventist on both sides. We were strict vegetarians. We were meticulous in our Sabbath observance. We gave liberally of the meager means we had. It was taken for granted that all the children in our family would go to Adventist schools, even though our family income wasn’t really adequate for such an expenditure. But we all worked hard.
At the age of 12, I got my first regular summer and after-school job, working on a neighbor’s farm. I earned only 50 cents per hour, but it was enough—along with the much-better-paying construction jobs that came along later—to enable me to pay every penny of my Adventist education from the beginning of my sixth-grade year until I graduated from college. It required hard work, but I never for a moment considered not doing so. In fact, when during my senior year at Sunnydale Academy I was awarded, on the basis of grades and my ACT score, a full-tuition scholarship to the University of Missouri, I didn’t give it a second thought before declining.
Instead, I worked long days during the summer after high-school graduation selling Adventist books to earn my fees for Union College—never lamenting the fact that had I gone to the University of Missouri, it would have been tuition-free. Nor did I think about it during my year at Union College, when I worked 15 hours every week for the college—and then often worked an additional seven or eight hours on Sunday doing odd jobs around Lincoln for anyone who contacted the college in search of a student who wasn’t afraid of hard work and getting dirt under his fingernails. During those times, I never thought of the University of Missouri’s generous offer because that school couldn’t prepare me for what I wanted to do as my life work: I wanted to be a minister for the Seventh-day Adventist Church, God’s Remnant.
After a year as a student missionary in Mexico, I went to Newbold College, in England, where I discovered that the fees were low enough I could study for a year, plus travel throughout Britain and Europe, plus pay my airfare—provided I worked like a dog each summer and worked reasonably hard during the school year. Besides, Newbold had a great theology department, headed by a Norwegian named Jan Paulsen. Amazingly, I so enjoyed the essay-writing at Newbold (most American students hated it) that I decided I’d like not only to be a minister but to be an editor for the church. So I set my sights in that specific direction.
During my summer vacations, I worked for a land developer and builder who’d inherited a lot of money. He went out of his way to ensure that I always had a job when I needed it. My father also worked for him, and Dale thought very highly of both of us. “Jim,” he said to me one day, “I have a proposal to make to you. We need a good doctor in this town. And we don’t seem to be able to attract one. I know you’re a Seventh-day Adventist and seem to believe in going to Adventist schools. So here’s my offer: I’ll pay every penny it costs for you to go to your church’s medical school out in California so you can become a doctor—provided you’ll come back to Centralia to set up your practice. If you do well and can pay me back, good. But if the only pay I get is having provided our town with a good doctor, that will be reward enough.”
It was a stunning offer. I knew he meant it. And I knew he had the wherewithal to make it happen. But I didn’t even ask for time to think it over. “Thank you so much, Dale,” I said. “It’s an amazing offer, and I’m honored. But I feel called to the ministry. So I’ll have to decline.” He swore—literally—about my stupidity, then grudgingly commended me for my commitment to what I believed in. I believed I was called to be a minister. There was no question about it. And better offers weren’t going to turn me from that goal. If the apostle Paul was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, I was definitely an Adventist of the Adventists.
At Newbold College, I met my wife-to-be, Leonie, who had an impeccable Adventist pedigree. Her paternal great-grandparents were converted to Adventism by the first Adventist missionaries who went from America to Australia back in 1885. Her great-grandparents personally knew Ellen G. White. They were the first Seventh-day Adventist missionaries to Samoa. Several members of the family have been pastors or other church employees. And her father for years served as a departmental director at the General Conference.
Of course, Leonie’s Adventist pedigree wasn’t what attracted me to her—I learned all about that later. She was a beautiful, delightful person whose presence brightened any location where she happened to be. She had a gentleness of spirit and a true concern for people, which I admired. That same spirit, however, also made her vulnerable to those who didn’t approach life with the same deep care and concern for others. Tragically, her experience as the daughter of a Seventh-day Adventist minister and as the wife of a Seventh-day Adventist minister put her in contact with too many people, especially church leaders, who too often lost sight of the Golden Rule. That fact has taken a terrible toll, as will be described in more detail later.
After I graduated from Newbold, Leonie and I were married in Maryland in the autumn of 1975. On February 1, 1976, I began working as a youth/assistant pastor in Australia’s North New South Wales Conference (having not gotten the travel bug totally out of my blood during my year as a student missionary and my three years at Newbold!). My denominational employment has included nine years as a youth pastor (both in Australia and in the United States), nine years as an editor (four of those on the staff of the Adventist Review and five as senior editor at Signs Publishing Company in Australia) and more than fourteen years as a senior pastor (all at one church, in a suburb of Orlando, Florida). In all, I’ve worked just more than ten years in Australia and more than twenty-two years in the United States. I’m a hard worker who has given prodigiously of time, energy and such money as we have—often to the detriment of my family.
Throughout both my pastoral and editorial ministry, I’ve sought to build bridges of understanding between our denomination’s traditionalists and progressives. Having come from an extremely conservative background, and having had conservative thinking drummed into me from the cradle, I understand well the concerns of those who feel we’re running off the rails in many of the changes—both in practice and theological emphasis—that our church has embraced or at least tolerated over the past few decades.
Having over the years moved into greater alignment with progressives, I likewise understand their rationale. So I’ve made it a mission to try to help the advocates of change understand the mindset that prefers preservation of the status quo. And I’ve sought to help status-quo advocates understand the thinking of those who advocate change. In the congregations where I’ve served and in larger regions of the church influenced by my writing of magazine articles and books, I feel that my insights, my emphases and my efforts have proved helpful. I feel that I’ve had a productive career.
I don’t share this information to boast. I tell it simply to point out that my life has been enmeshed with the Seventh-day Adventist Church totally and completely. I don’t ask for accolades for the second-mile commitment I feel I’ve given. But I’d like to think that my family and I would at least be treated by church leaders with the basic respect called for by the Golden Rule—respect we’d want to see given to anyone and everyone. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened on far too many occasions in our experience of denominational employment. And we know we’re not alone.
Copyright © 2008 James Coffin
