Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 3, 1991 TAG: 9103010074
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-4 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: FRANCES STEBBINS
DATELINE: RADFORD LENGTH: Long
With details set forth carefully by their interim pastor, Elder Ralph Logan, their war concerned the confrontation in heaven recounted in the New Testament book of Revelation. White-haired Logan, who has been serving the Arlington Avenue congregation between younger ministers, preached for 45 minutes on the Adventist interpretation of the coming of the chief of evil angels to Earth.
Feb. 23 was a Saturday. Why were these folk, ranging in age from the elderly to restless toddlers, in church when everyone else was out shopping and running errands or checking TV on a raw morning?
Saturday is church day for Seventh-day Adventists, who, as Logan noted in his sermon, believe that Christians made a serious mistake when they set Sunday rather than the Sabbath of the Ten Commandments as the day to worship God. Logan blamed that mistake, as he did several other decisions, on the Roman Catholic Church, which rose to dominance in European religion about 500 A.D.
For those who worship at the Radford church, Sunday becomes the day when children go on outings as they might on Saturdays elsewhere. As the preacher's wife, Fleta, told a dozen youngsters in her 10-minute message preceding her husband's, God's recording angel will know where they are on Saturday mornings and will write down their whereabouts for further action.
The Radford SDA Church, with about 65 households, draws members from New River communities east of Pulaski. A few commute from Carroll and Roanoke counties. The stone building with its 1950 cornerstone is on a sloping lot with parking in the rear and too many steps for easy access to the handicapped.
Last fall, Elder Ben Dale, the pastor, was transferred to a West Coast congregation by the Potomac Conference, which oversees SDA work in Virginia. Logan, who lives in Radford, is filling in until a new pastor, Elder Philip Hamman, comes from Leesburg to start his work March 16.
Saturday morning activities begin with Sabbath School at 9:30. The Saturday I was there, many kept their seats in the nave with its red padded pews and stained-glass windows and chatted until Logan and another elder, Calvin Barnett, took their places behind the central pulpit.
Worship began at 11:20 with well over half the time taken by the pastor's message. Teaching the doctrines plays an important part in acceptance of membership.
The pews contained the 1985 denominational hymnal, which has a variety of music ranging from 20th century sacred songs by George Beverly Shea and John Peterson to evangelical classics by John Milton and Isaac Watts. A pianist provides music, and Logan offered most of the volume and leadership, since there was no choir.
When Barnett led the congregation in prayer for resolution of the Persian Gulf War - a child had asked for prayer for his father there - all fell to their knees on the red carpet for the brief, extemporaneous petition. Hymns were sung both sitting and standing.
Angels - the good ones who guard children from harm and the bad ones such as Satan, who got thrown out of heaven - populated Fleta Logan's theme for the children. She painted a graphic picture of a winged serpent sitting in a tree in the garden of Eden until God removed his ability to fly when humankind, as Genesis records, lost its paradise.
The all-knowing God was reinforced by her story of two little girls who fell from grace by stealing their teacher's lunch cookies and being punished by cakes with hot pepper icing.
Logan said his sermon was "evangelistic rather than pastoral." Called "The Woman in White," it covered a number of tenets of Seventh-day Adventists, who rely heavily on Revelation.
The woman, as the author of Revelation put it, was pregnant and crying with the pain of birth. About to bear Jesus the savior, she wore a white gown for purity and radiated the light of truth. But she was attacked by a dragon, which Logan likened to the same snake that tempted the first human beings in Eden.
This theme gave the preacher a chance to assert that the angel Michael, mentioned in Revelation 12 as representative of goodness, was really Christ and that the dragon was the Satan of all ages attacking the woman, who stands for the church.
This dragon grew more malevolent as Christianity advanced in history, said Logan. Catholicism, as it existed in Medieval centuries, contained so many errors that the woman suffered mightily under its persecution, the preacher continued. A significant breakthrough for true believers came, he said, when a pope was dethroned by Napoleon's army in 1798 and when America became a land free from such European corruptions. Logan noted that for Adventists, religious liberty is a major doctrine.
The pure but battered woman in white - the church - continues to save the tiny remnant who, Logan said, keep the correct Sabbath and take seriously the continuing presence of dragon Satan and the way he turns people against each other.
by CNB