A Hill to Die On
Kevin McGill writes from Seattle as senior pastor of the Green Lake Church. He reflects on the 2015 vote denying women equality in Adventist ministry, stating:
This was my first year as a full-time pastor, and I went away from these meetings disheartened. Jesus said we should be known by our spiritual fruit and love, but the fruit of the Spirit was not apparent to me in the Alamodome in 2015. Adventists were not known for our love that day. Instead, we were known in headlines across the country for denying women the right to be ordained as pastors.
Now you may be thinking to yourself, “That is because the Bible denies ordination to women. We are simply being faithful to the Bible.” I hear you. I once believed that, and I blame no one for following their biblical convictions. If you believe this way, you are not alone.
Some of our most famous evangelists have echoed this conviction. Notably, one such pastor declared, "It is easier to support from the New Testament that God has ordained that only men should be pastors and elders than it is to support the Sabbath. It’s easy to support the Sabbath. Anyone who does not come to the conclusion that there is a distinction from Adam through Revelation in the roles of men and women in the church has to go through phenomenal mind-bending gymnastics to escape the plain truth."
In 2015, I was in San Antonio for the General Conference meeting. The hot topic was if women should be ordained to the ministry.
On July 8, 2015, the answer was given in newspapers across the country: “Seventh-day Adventists vote against female ordination.” The opening sentence of The Washington Post described it succinctly: “Seventh-day Adventists voted Wednesday that individual regions of the 18 million-member Protestant denomination cannot choose to ordain female ministers.”1
As I observed the voting process in person, I could feel the tension in the air. It wasn’t a spirit of unity; it was a spirit of competition, rivalry and division. The tension was palpable when Jan Paulsen, former General Conference president, got up to the microphone to address the attendees.
Paulsen was “booed from the floor by delegates who were furious that he spoke in favor of ordaining women. Though everyone was asked numerous times not to clap, when the decision not to ordain women was read loud cheering and shouts broke out all around.”2
This was my first year as a full-time pastor, and I went away from these meetings disheartened. Jesus said we should be known by our spiritual fruit and love, but the fruit of the Spirit was not apparent to me in the Alamodome in 2015. Adventists were not known for our love that day. Instead, we were known in headlines across the country for denying women the right to be ordained as pastors.
Read the full article from Northwest Adventists.
Title illustration by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
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