Part XII :: Return to Ukraine
After around two months in India and Nepal, we arrived in Kyiv the day after COVID began. We would soon endure months of lockdowns at an Adventist friend’s house in the country outside of Kyiv. To say I was thrilled to be back in Ukraine was an understatement. I loved it there, and returning was a dream come true. Sadly, COVID changed that dream into a time of deep reflection on the religious trauma that had been building.
At the time I had no idea what religious trauma was, but I know that I had
something. The people we stayed with in Kyiv were very kind, and the woman who owned the house was the person I would be working for. Yet, when it came to religion, I had started to check out. I had no desire to sing, study, or be a part of any of it. I felt strange about that, and I felt that it was wrong. It was easy for me to see parallels between what was said in our home church and what I had heard at Countryside. It wasn’t anything cult-like, but it was just the source material. Even a verse that Albert read repeated by one of our hosts made me shudder. I had no desire to hear about Ellen White, even though I believed in her wholeheartedly still. I felt that so much of mainstream Adventism was legalistic. I needed a break from it.
After about four months, we left the house in Kyiv and made our way to Dnipro where I would teach English. I enjoyed Dnipro, and it was the first time in years that I was not a missionary. I was just an ordinary person living an ordinary life. At first, that felt wrong, and I felt like I needed to be working for God again. Yet, I had a regular job. And it was really nice. In fact, it was one of the best times in my life for quite a long time. With that said, something was still eating at me.
I thought a lot about the Countryside cult and realized that I needed to write about it. In the period of a week, I wrote and edited my book Disrupting Adventism. The book went into detail on why Ellen White did not support offshoots that say the General Conference is in apostasy. I talked about my time at Countryside (albeit in less detail than in this book) and loaded it up with Ellen White and Bible quotes. With all of Ellen’s quotes, it sounded more like a reversal of an Albert sermon.
After a year of living in Dnipro, we were thinking about moving somewhere new. I was interested in teaching English in Southeast Asia and furthering my career. However, my wife longed for missionary work again and got in contact with the head pastor who oversaw us in Queets. I fought hard for staying away but eventually agreed to go back. I thought that we would do better financially back in the United States. We would train with Adventist Frontier Missions (AFM) and fundraise for our expenses. I never was interested in fundraising (as an Adventist, I had read that any good missionary work required maximum personal sacrifice), but after much debate, I decided it would allow us to live a decent life and work for the church again. I also longed to be able to spend more time with my daughter and see her grow up rather than working all the time. After agreeing, the countdown to our return to the United States commenced. As the date approached on which we were to leave Dnipro, I felt very sad. I longed to stay and wondered if I made the wrong choice. Yet, I kept telling myself that God had a plan for us and that we were doing the right thing.
During COVID, Albert and Bill Hughes were adamant that COVID was another conspiracy theory. Hughes had written a book called “COVID-19: The Rest of the Story.” I never read the book, but I suspect Jesuits were involved. The COVID vaccine had recently been released, and I wanted to get it both to make a statement and to also protect ourselves, our family, and those who we were serving. I was told and watched how almost every Countryside sermon was staunch against the vaccine, claiming it had something to do with the soon-coming mark of the beast and imminent Sunday law!
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