Awakening believer, Jack Walker, dies at 86
Jack Walker, a member of the “Ridgetop Awakening Group” has passed away at the age of 86. Jack Walker was kind of the leader of the Ridgetop group. I don’t really remember him, but have a very faint feeling that he was a fun guy.
My mother was a believer in the Awakening message by Robert Brinsmead in the mid 1960s up to around 1972. This caused extreme friction in our family, as my father was very much against the “offshoots” as they were termed, and more derisively “Brinsmeads”. One of my first recollections of life is of a Seventh-day Adventist pastor of the church in Madison Tennessee screaming at my mother, and then later, my mother hurrying away with me into the neighborhood/fields behind our house to escape my dad who we could see driving his car looking for us, knowing that he would kill us if he found us in his rage.
There was an uneasy truce with frequent flare-ups in our house after that incident. Often, on Sabbaths, my mother would drive the 25-30 miles or so to Ridgetop Tennessee where she would fellowship with like-minded believers in the Awakening message. Normally I would listen to a few minutes, and then run off downstairs to play or whatever. Towards the end of that experience, I remember sitting in an old building in Coalmont Tennessee with maybe around 20 people, and the solemnity, earnestness, deep study etc. has left an impression on me that I thank God for, and for which I keep longing will be resurrected or even exceeded before I go the way of all humans.
In 1972 when Robert Brinsmead came to Nashville TN, he was teaching that Ellen White isn’t to be trusted, and even the first few chapters of the Bible can’t be taken literally. I can still remember my mother standing up in front of around 200 people at the Ramada Inn conference room, asking with tears in her eyes if he was rejecting the authority of parts of the Bible and Ellen White, and then leaving when getting an affirmative response. So after being rejected by the official SDA structure, she now was rejected by the Awakening people too. That was the single, bravest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do in my life. Sadly, most of the Awakening people were following Robert Brinsmead, instead of the truth, and Jack Walker, along with around 95% of them, left the truth and started forging their own path.
There was no more contact between myself and any of the Ridgetop Awakening people after that incident until around 2009 when I met Mr. Poulton at the Lebanon TN SDA church. At the potluck we talked a bit, and he was so lost in a fog of “no 2 apartment sanctuary in heaven, Jesus did it all on the cross” etc. I knew that Robert Brinsmead had gone from disbelieving Ellen White to rejecting the Sanctuary and Investigative Judgment to rejecting the Sabbath, and recently is on record as saying that he isn’t even sure if there is a God or not, but would like to think so, so I expected that.
Somehow I found Jack Walker on the internet in 2011. He remembered me, or more rightly, my mother, and kindly sent me a picture taken around 1968 with a young boy standing in front of him. Sure enough, it was myself 🙂 We had a few emails pass between us, but it was sad to see that he had rejected the basic truths of Adventism. He wrote me once: “The atonement was made on the cross. It is another human error to place the atonement some where in the last days.” He believed that Jesus will save all people except only those who outright reject him. I pleaded with him to come back to his earlier understanding of the Bible and Adventist and Awakening doctrine, but he wasn’t moved. Then yesterday, this email about his passing…..
Another piece of the puzzle that is my life is fixed forever in place in one respect, and lost forever in one respect. How is it with my soul today? With yours?