A Blank Canvas

Hey, this little introduction is yours truly, Dominic! The guest-bloggers section will be below. Just to clarify. The guest blogger is Marnina Lysinger (Molgaard).

Thats all.

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I have a bone to pick with the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.

And it involves colporteuring (or canvassing). For those of you who don’t know, colporteuring is going door to door selling books. The Adventist church promotes it to help students pay their way through Adventist schooling, and to spread their literature. And it’s something I did for two summers.

My mom decided to have me colporteur the summer after my Freshman year of High School, so I would have been 15 years old.

Disclaimer: I did have good experiences during my time canvassing, and I made several life long friends. This, however, does not stop me from questioning the reasoning behind a lot of what we did.

Let me explain to you how canvassing works. In the program, there were typically 20 kids and like four or five adults. The job of the adults is to drive the kids around and drop them off on streets that the kids then walk down and canvass. The kids are given radios that they use to then call the adults when they’re done with their street and need to be picked up.

Let me emphasize the fact that you never work with someone, because then you would have to split your profits. You go to the doors by yourself, and if you’re under the impression that you’ll always have someone working the street on the other side of you in case something goes wrong, you’re sadly mistaken.

I remember when my leader dropped me off on my first street to go to by myself, I realized that I wouldn’t have someone across the street from me. I was a 15 year old girl in the middle of a suburb of Milwaukee that I didn’t know, going and knocking doors, and if I needed help, I would have to call my leader on my radio, and a lot of the time it took them several minutes to get to me.

But Ellen White’s books need to be distributed, right?

First of all, I never liked how it felt like we were cheating the system. We’re Christians, right? We’re supposed to be honest, and truthful? Tell me how this makes sense: our leaders instruct us to still go and knock on doors that have “No Soliciting” signs on them because “we’re not soliciting”. They tell us that we’re “leaving books on donation basis”.

So this is how they imagine the scenario will go:

Person: “Hey, get off my porch! Can’t you read my ‘No Soliciting’ sign?”

Me: “Oh, but you see I’m not selling books! I’m just asking you for money for school, and then coincidentally I leave you with a book of your choice!”

Person: “But I’m still giving you money and in return getting a book.”

Me: “Yes, but it’s a donation basis , so it’s okay!”

Person: “Ah, that makes sense.”

No. No, it doesn’t. Guess what? When I was little, our school had us go door-to-door selling cookie dough to raise money for athletic equipment. It doesn’t matter what the money is going for. They’re giving you money for your product. That’s selling.

I got put in so many awkward situations where people were yelling at me because I ignored their sign that I began to skip houses that had No Soliciting signs, even though it goes against what my leaders were teaching me.

One time I knocked on a door and after I did I noticed their No Soliciting sign, so I started to walk away. A lady opened the door and called after me, and I told her I didn’t notice her sign right away. She was pleased that I honored her sign! We had a pleasant interaction and I walked away.

If we’re supposed to be making the world a better place, how can we be doing that by making people mad?

That whole idea just didn’t sit well with me.

More importantly, however, canvassing isn’t safe. At least not the way they had us do it. We would work until well after the sun went down, still walking to houses by yourself. Do you know how easy it would have been for someone to come along and kidnap a little 15 year old girl walking a street by herself in the evening?

“But you had your radio!”

Let me explain to you why that means nothing.

One time my leader dropped me off at a little mobile home neighborhood (or whatever you want to call them), that I was to work by myself. He drove off to go scope out some more places to drop me off when I was done with this area.

At one particular mobile home, a woman answered the door and I began my speech. I was rudely interrupted by her cussing me out and telling me (in other words) to get off her porch. Meek little me turned around and walked away without saying anything.

But she followed me.

I walked faster and tried to call my leader on my radio. No answer. Which meant he drove so far away that he was out of range.

The woman kept following me, yelling at me, and swearing at me.

I reached the highway where my leader had dropped me off, and didn’t know where to go next. The woman was berating me and I had nowhere to go, so I stood there and wept. She was saying that she was going to call the cops on me, and she was so mad. So I cried. She was yelling at me and so in my face, that at one point I said (and I cry as I think about this now), “Please don’t hurt me.” And she said, and I quote, “Oh, if I wanted to hurt you, I would have done that by now.”

Eventually, another woman drove up in a vehicle and saw what was going on. She could tell the woman was crazy and I was stuck because I was waiting for my leader to come, so she offered to drive me a little ways away. And because I was in such an awful mental state, I accepted.

So I GOT IN A STRANGERS CAR AND LET HER DRIVE ME AWAY. Thanks to canvassing, I was put in such a horrible situation that I chose to get into a strangers car. I could have SO easily been kidnapped.

I know it’s my fault that I wasn’t thinking clearly and I chose to get into her car. But at the same time, how dare you convince YOUNG people that the Lord is calling them to go door-to-door and be put in horrible situations like that, so they can pay their way through Adventist education that ends up failing them anyway?

I was not mature enough at that point in my life, obviously, to know what to do in a situation like that. I was so naïve that I didn’t know the woman was horribly intoxicated.

I get so worked up when I think about my experience canvassing. I will never let my children go through it.

“But you grew so much as a person, didn’t you?” Of course I did.

I also grew as a person because of my parents divorce. That doesn’t mean I promote divorce.

There are many reasons I love my church, but there are also several issues I have with it. And this?

This is one of them.

-Marnina

7:48 PM EST

2/4/2021