In 1847, the American Medical Association adopted its first code of ethics. The document was largely borrowed from a British physician named Thomas Percival, who had drafted his own guidelines decades earlier after a dispute among doctors at a Manchester hospital left patients caught in the crossfire. The profession, Percival concluded, required rules that existed independent of any individual physician’s character or intentions. Good men, left without structure, would still do harm.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church was founded eight years later. It has yet to draw the same conclusion about its ministers.
Mark Carr has spent decades watching institutions fail the people they were built to serve. He holds both a Master of Divinity and a doctorate, spent 16 years teaching at Loma Linda University and co-directing its Center for Christian Bioethics, then transitioned into secular healthcare as a regional director of ethics for Providence Health & Services in Alaska. Few people in the denomination have watched the gap between personal piety and professional accountability produce real-world damage from as many vantage points. In a recent presentation for Adventist Today, he argued that his own church has been making that mistake for a long time.
The presentation, titled “Ethics in the Sanctuary,” runs roughly an hour and is featured on the the Adventist Today Sabbath Seminar YouTube series.
Carr is measured, precise, and generous toward the tradition he is critiquing. But the argument he advances is more disruptive than its tone suggests: the Seventh-day Adventist Church has no meaningful professional ethics infrastructure for its ministers, and people have been hurt because of it.
The distinction Carr builds his case on is between morality and ethics. Morality is internal, governing the self before God. Ethics is horizontal – the rules a profession establishes to protect the people it serves. Medicine has them. Law has them. Adventist ministry, as a formal institutional matter, does not.
That absence has allowed certain practices to calcify inside mainstream Adventist evangelism without serious scrutiny. Carr names several. Evangelistic flyers that omit the Adventist name. Evangelists trained to sidestep doctrinal questions until later in a series, when the audience is more committed. Testimonies selected and deployed from the pulpit to pressure conformity rather than offer genuine witness. New converts advised to put distance between themselves and unbelieving family members. Promises of improved health and financial stability tied to dietary observance and tithing. These practices have survived partly because the church measures pastoral performance in baptisms and tithe revenue. When those are the metrics, manipulation becomes strategy.
The corrective Carr draws from healthcare ethics is a move from paternalism to what he calls a care ethic, sometimes described as maternalism. Paternalism in ministry looks like a pastor who delivers authoritative judgments from above and expects compliance. The care ethic model asks the pastor to sit with the congregant instead – to engage the person’s actual circumstances, relationships, and doubts rather than run them through a doctrinal checklist. The ongoing health of the pastoral relationship becomes a value in its own right.
Carr also challenges the familiar pastoral defense of “speaking the truth in love.” Because no minister can be fully certain of his own motivations, claiming divine authorization for blunt or damaging speech is more self-protective than pastoral. The phrase has functioned as a conversation-stopper. Carr wants it examined.
The structural gap he identifies is significant. Across the global network of Adventist higher education, there are no robust, multi-professor degree programs in professional ethics. Individual courses exist, often taught by theologians with adjacent interests. That falls well short of a serious institutional commitment to the field, and the difference shows up vividly in the denomination’s institutional history.
The clearest illustration remains the Davenport scandal of 1981-82, still the most devastating financial disaster in Adventist history. Donald Davenport, an Adventist physician turned real estate developer, ran a Ponzi scheme that drew in regional conference treasurers, tithe-fund managers, and senior General Conference officials by offering above-market interest rates on church investments. When Davenport went bankrupt, the church lost an estimated $20 million, equivalent to more than $70 million today. The subsequent internal investigations revealed the mechanism clearly: many of the leaders who voted to funnel church funds to Davenport had personally accepted private financial favors from him. They faced a textbook conflict of interest and lacked the training to recognize it as such. Personal relationships and a shared sense of Christian brotherhood had substituted for professional judgment, with catastrophic results. More recent cryptocurrency schemes involving church administrators follow the same pattern, separated from Davenport by four decades and very little else.
What Carr is calling for is straightforward. Formal ethics programs at Adventist universities, led by trained ethicists rather than theologians working at the margins of the field. A professional code of conduct for ministers covering confidentiality, transparency in evangelism, and continuing education requirements. Every comparable profession already operates under these standards.
Thomas Percival figured this out in 1794. The argument that a professional formal ethics framework would somehow compromise the Gospel has always been weak. The more pressing question is what it costs to keep operating without one.