16 September 2026
The board of a small church in rural Michigan has prepared and submitted a detailed complaint against church entities in southern California who have shown acceptance toward LGBTQ people. The Coloma church asks the Michigan Conference Executive Committee to officially act on their complaint, and forward their request to discipline California’s leaders to the North American Division Executive Committee.
The document, which runs to 248 pages of obsessive detail, singles out Southern California Conference, particularly the Glendale City Church and its now-retired married gay pastor Leif Lind. It also complains about the Southeastern California Conference, location of La Sierra University and the La Sierra University Church, for LSU’s accommodation of LGBTQ students which includes a Kinship Sabbath School class and a private “Lavender Graduation” for LGBTQ students.
About 230 pages, many of them taken from Adventist Today and Spectrum, are appended as “evidentiary preservation… because live web links may not preserve the evidentiary record if source pages are later changed, moved, restricted, or removed.” It also includes annotations for “the purpose of helping the reader to quicker focus on relevant contents or to understand specific contexts.”
Support of LGBTQ people is condemned as a “long-term pattern,” with “current conference administration support,” and blasts the two conferences for allowing the “continuity of current conference officeholders.” Besides Leif Lind (who was paid by the Glendale City Church, not the conference) it singles out Southern California Conference president (formerly executive secretary) John Cress, current executive secretary Danny Chan, and Los Angeles regional director Brett Poynter. In Southeastern California Conference, it blames former LSU church pastor Chris Oberg.
“Taken together, this sustained, intentional, publicly documented pattern … conflicts with SDA biblical and voted standards, raises issues of institutional accountability, and affects member confidence and the Church’s public witness across the NAD, thus warranting submission to the NAD Executive Committee for formal consideration and action.”
Leif Lind writes,
“After the articles came out about my years of service at Glendale City Church, I was kind of holding my breath to see what happened next.… It’s almost uncanny the detail that this document has put together. Bulletins are included, with all relevant parts highlighted in red font, photos of me at the church that I never even knew existed, with my name highlighted in yellow boxes, page after page. It doesn’t make me feel worried, but it does leave me feeling disgusted as well as astounded that people can waste so much of their time on such trivial pursuits. Probably 60% of the document is about me, GCC and the Southern California Conference (as pertains to their interactions with me). The other 40% is about La Sierra University Church and SECC, with their Kinship Sabbath School class and “Lavender Graduation.”
Floyd Pönitz, president of Kinship, wrote this to Adventist Today:
“This document from the Coloma, Michigan church highlights a long‑standing challenge within Adventism: the difficulty some congregations have in opening their hearts to people whose lives or identities differ from their own. Many LGBTQ Adventists still long to feel at home in the church they grew up in—to belong without fear, without scrutiny, and without being treated as outsiders.
“Yet it’s important to recognize the hopeful movement happening in the church. Pastors Leif Lind and Chris Oberg and the leaders in their respective conferences have taken meaningful steps toward listening, learning, and creating space for LGBTQ Adventists. Their willingness to engage in grace stands in stark contrast to the Coloma church’s fixation on what happens thousands of miles away, rather than focusing on how the gospel of love and welcome might be lived out in their own community.”
You can read the whole document here.
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