JAK, I'll assume your question is sincere and not erecting a straw man, as so many do on this very topic.

Yes EGW wrote that God's people were to avoid unions - have nothing to do with them.

But she never wrote to "stay out of the cities." Many detractors frame her words this way and ridicule such 'unChristian' counsel, much like the scoffers who perished in the siege of Jerusalem.

Her solemn plea was to avoid living in the cities, but to visit them regularly to share the truth, and provide an avenue and means for searching souls to enter upon a country lifestyle. She enumerates the moral dangers of city living, both in her day and at the end of time, especially for families.

Ministry in cities is for the purpose of leading people to separate from the world by providing an alternative in the relative freedom of a rural setting. Very few will follow this advice, almost none within Adventism. Most pastors and church officials are urban dwellers - many have been converted to the world - and this is their influence among the congregations. They have no sense of urgency, no interest in this discussion.

"Conformity to worldly customs converts the church to the world; it never converts the world to Christ." - Great Controvery 509.

Either way, nobody does it.

It's your choice JAK. Don't wait on others. Those who believe the counsel will follow it.

I think this sounds like something everyone with the means to do it in America does. It is world-wide known as "suburbanism"..

Whether someone else doesn't follow something else doesn't discredit everything. Reminds me of gay marriage advocates who say that since there is so much divorce, then anything should go. No. Continual degrading doesn't help that which should be done.

Hi there, I thought this was interesting and something to watch for this coming May if they are still going to go ahead with this plan despite the leak. This is posted by a non-denominational Christian minister who watches for the signs of Jesus soon coming. His blog entry at his website can be found here

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Disruptions in New York planned for May

A former SEIU labor official was taped at a secret meeting, telling of his plan to disrupt Wall Street and, in particular, J.P. Morgan Chase bank. He revealed that this would begin with some kind of rally in the first week of May.

This will be interesting to watch. Or perhaps it will be cancelled due to the leak.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/revealed...e-wealth-power/

The plan is to induce a Madison-style protest in New York City, the difference being that they will be on the offense, rather than playing defense (as in Madison).

It will be designed to encourage home owners to stop paying mortgages, to encourage college grads to refuse to pay back student loans ($1 Trillion), and to induce financial instability to collapse Wall Street.

He says (in the transcript): "Labor can’t lead it, but we can be a critical part of it. We do have money, we have millions of members who are furious, but I don’t think this kind of movement can happen unless actually the community groups and other activists take the lead."

He says that Labor Unions are no longer strong enough to lead such a movement. (No doubt this weakness is due to the Free Trade agreements that have shipped millions of jobs to other cheap-labor countries.) Also, he does not want the Unions to be caught up in lawsuits that would certainly be filed if Union involvement could be proven.

He continues: "[W]hat does the other side fear most? They fear disruption, they fear uncertainty. Every article about Europe says a riot in Greece, the markets went down. The folks that control this country care about one thing: how the stock market does; how the bond market does; and what their bonus is. So I think we weed out a very simple strategy: how do we bring down the stock market, how do we bring down their bonuses, how do we interfere with their ability to, to be rich. And if we don’t do, and that means you have to politically isolate them, economically isolate them and disrupt them."

"So, a bunch of us around the country are thinking about who would be a really good company to hate? We decided that would be JP Morgan Chase. …. And so we’re going to roll out over the next couple of months what will hopefully be an exciting campaign about JP Morgan Chase that is really about challenge the power of Wall Street. And so what we’re looking at is in the first week of May, we get enough people together – we’re starting now – to really have a week of action in New York with the goal of … I don’t want to go into any details because I don’t know which police agents are in the room, but the goal would be that we would roll out in New York the first week in May—"

All of this sounds strangely familiar from my reading of old-style Communist thinking. We know that Communists infiltrated the unions very early in order to hijack them for their own purposes. Their big enemy was Fascism, which promotes the reduction in the size and financial base of government (i.e., "tax cuts") in order that the huge, wealthy corporations and too-big-to-fail mega-banks can control those weak governments.

Of course, they did not realize that Communism was founded and financed by those same big banks in order to control both sides and scare the people into trading in their freedom for "security." The idea of creating two conflicting philosophies which would gather supporters for each side, and then controlling both of them, each offsetting the other, was promoted a long time ago by Hegel. He called it a "dialectic." It has worked very well over the centuries.

This centuries-old struggle used to be fought under the banners of Fascism vs. Communism. Now (at least in America) they are fought largely through proxies--the Republican and Democratic parties.

It appears that Mr. Lerner does not understand how his "hatred" is so useful to those who want to use it to grab more power for themselves. Or perhaps he does understand it and has been hired by the banking cartel to foment trouble in order that the government may have an excuse to declare martial law and grab the last vestiges of freedom that we have.

I do not know his motive, but my advice is to avoid getting caught up with either side of the planned conflict. Remember that only those with hatred or fear can be controlled. The Babylonian "elite" find both of these carnal motives very useful in their attempt to control the world.

We ourselves represent the Kingdom of God. It is a third option that is neither Republican nor Democratic, neither Fascist nor Communistic. It promotes the Monarchy of King Jesus who rules by Love, rather than by fear, and who unifies the people, rather than pitting one side against the other.

Well this is coming to the forefront...
https://www.axios.com/2023/10/16/union-strike-numbers-uaw-sag-wga-kaiser