Michigan Church Demands Action Against LGBTQ Acceptance in California Churches

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.

Source 

My Return to Kinship Kampmeeting

10 July2026

By Loren Seibold | 10 July 2026 |

Back in the late 1980s, I was a new pastor in the San Francisco Bay Area. At a church event I met sociologist Ron Lawson, who was researching a book on Seventh-day Adventists. Ron told us of a still relatively new organization called Kinship, a gathering for gay and lesbian Seventh-day Adventists. (Bisexual, transexual, and intersex people weren’t yet on the category list, though they were surely present in the church.) Kinship’s Kampmeeting (always spelled with a K) was at the Monte Toyon Retreat Center in the Santa Cruz Mountains the next week, Ron said, and would I come and speak to the group?

I did—and I should admit that I was well out of my depth. I tried. But I had just come from being a pastor in rural South Dakota, and though I was liberal in my beliefs, I was inexperienced and unconfident. I wasn’t fully comfortable in my own pastoral role. I was addressing a group of people who I sympathized with, but didn’t really understand.

Although everyone was kind to me, I do remember it as a tense and occasionally angry gathering—and for good reason. Back then, most were young. (The group is older now.) Then there was little Christian fellowship for people who openly identified as L, G, B, T, I, or otherwise Q. Some hoped that they could “come out” and still be Seventh-day Adventists. But most had, by that time, realized that wasn’t going to happen quickly—or possibly ever. A few were church workers who desperately needed reassurance, but were terrified they might be exposed.

The Colin Cook affair—denominational leaders’ continuing support of a gay ex-pastor who sexually abused young men under the cover of changing them into straight people—was very much on their minds. AIDS had emerged just a few years earlier; there had already been fatalities, and everyone knew there were going to be more.

The President of SDA Kinship: Celebrating Pride Month

30JUNE2023

The President of SDA Kinship: Celebrating Pride Month


by Floyd Pönitz | 30 June 2023 |

As PRIDE month—a time to celebrate equal rights for LGBTQ individuals—comes to a close, I want to celebrate our accomplishments as humans over the past 54 years since the June 29, 1969, Stonewall riots in New York City.

As a 10-year-old Adventist who already knew that he was different, I remember hearing about Stonewall and somehow identifying with what was happening there without really having the vocabulary to connect with it.

That was also the year that I got baptized and became an official member of the Adventist church. I had no idea what magical things would happen when I was dunked under the water, but that unexplained and unmentionable feeling that would later be identified as “gay” did not get washed away.

It was an innocent time—and I would become increasingly confused as the years went by and I learned the church would condemn me for just having these feelings.

Fast forward

Fast forward to today. The church’s stance and refusal to openly talk about my feelings and those of millions of Adventists is as confusing today as it was to my 10-year-old self. I thank God for SDA Kinship; it was a major influence that has saved my life and got me to where I am in life today, and has helped me to not only exist, but to thrive.

(Kinship has released many videos from people from all walks of life expressing what Kinship means to them. They can be viewed on the Kinship YouTube channel here.)

Many of our members participated in Pride Events around the world, and some Adventist churches made space for the queer members of the church to celebrate with their friends at the church. I am very proud of these church communities.