Our Core Beliefs Feature
FINDING God in the
GREAT
CONTROVERSY Within Christianity, the concept of a cosmic struggle between good and evil is uniquely articulated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s eighth fundamental belief as the Great Controversy, a struggle between Christ and Satan that ultimately reveals God’s loving character. Carlos Craig has spent a lifetime coming to understand not only how the Great Controversy plays out in this cosmic sense, but also on a very personal level. Carlos is the president of the Southwestern Union, a position he says he never would have imagined, something he often metaphorically scratches his head at and remains in awe at God’s leading. Carlos was adopted as a newborn into an Adventist pastoral family in Kansas, and never met his biological mother, a 16-year-old Cherokee, or his biological father. His adoptive father was a dedicated pastor, and the family moved for the ministry from Kansas to Florida and then to Colorado, where he attended Mile High Academy. While Carlos says he knew his family truly loved him, he struggled to find his identity within what he felt was a very rigid Adventist
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environment that didn’t always emphasize the love of God. Rather, he felt that it focused on fitting a specific mold of what Adventism looked like: strict rules with little focus on love, forgiveness or grace. He struggled so much that he was kicked out of the academy twice for his behavior. While he did graduate from the academy in 1979, his concerned parents searched within Adventist education fora conservative university for him to attend. They found the University of Montemorelos in Montemorelos, Mexico, over 1,000 miles away from Denver. Unsure of his future and faith and speaking only the Spanish he learned at the academy, Carlos says that he performed very poorly academically in his first year at the university. A young man named Tony Anobile befriended and encouraged him. The two bonded over their love for music and played guitar and sang together. The following year, his grades and Spanish improved. He also met his future wife, Letty. He did better academically, taking a dual undergraduate program for education and theology. He began to feel optimistic about his future.
Carlos and Letty married and had their first child, Danette. After they graduated, theymoved to Keene, Texas, where he hoped to secure a pastoral position at the Texas Conference. He was able to arrange an interview with the Texas Conference, but the president took one look at him and said he would not hire him. Not only that, he told him that Carlos would never be employed as a pastor. He was devastated and deeply frustrated. He left, not understanding what about him caused the president to be so dismissive. But, with a family to care for, Carlos took on a list of odd jobs, including delivering pizzas, laying asphalt and working in nearby Southwestern Adventist University’s cabinet shop, where Letty also worked. Three years passed before his friend from Montemorelos, Anobile, called him and said there might be a position for him in Los Angeles. “Come on out and see,” he told him. So, Carlos went and was offered a position as the seventh- and eighth-grade teacher at Long Beach Adventist Academy. “I learned more in those two years of teaching than I have in the other 33 years in min-
