Adventist Media Response and Conversation

Wednesday, April 07, 2010

GC President decides via opinions rather then research

Adventist News Network reports the following:

The issue of women's ordination will not be added to the agenda for the 59th General Conference Session of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, the church's President Jan Paulsen said April 6.

Speaking to leadership at Spring Meeting in Silver Spring, Maryland, Paulsen said that a canvass of the church's 13 world church divisions revealed only three willing to accept a change in the current policy of not ordaining women to pastoral ministry, and eight divisions reporting the move would negatively impact membership. Two other divisions apparently did not respond.


After all the arguments both pro and con on the subject of the ordination of women we see the true colors of the method of decision making in the Adventist Church. The President of the GC will ask the divisions leaders for their opinions, because of course they are all Bible scholars who would never allow their cultural traditions and personal biases to intervene with their opinions. Therefore the church cannot deal with the issue in the General Conference session because the majority of the World Division leaders don't want to accept the idea of the ordination of women and they think it would negatively impact their divisions. Because of course they have researched it well and they are all scholars and cutting edge researchers.

The problem here is that the World Division leaders are not in the main scholars they have not done any research into what will happen to the church should women be ordained. All they have is their opinions taken to the extreme as if their opinion is the will of all the divisions or even any divisions. Would it really upset the members of Division A if Division B ordained women? It is silly to expect the opinion of a Division leader to have any real value in that question. But it is given supreme value and the President Jan Paulsen takes it upon himself to veto any discussion at the GC session.

How can it be that our church has fallen into this state of arrogant leadership. It is of course symptomatic of the whole delegate process which is heavily weighted to employees of the church, who of course owe their employment to those same leaders of the SDA church.

All hail the bureaucracy!

4 comments:

perpetualstudent said...

Worse still, most of these leaders are deep inside the Adventist bubble, with fathers who were also in positions of influence before them. Afterall nepotism is strong in the church. I don't think they have any clue what people in society think about the issue (not that we should treat women badly because of opionion polls.)

Jason & Janelle Shives said...

You are right! With our new GC president Ted Wilson, we will get back to the Bible's stance on this unnecessarily controversial issue. Let's let politics and opinions fall to the wayside.

Blessings, Jason

Vynn Mar said...

Research can do something but not everything. The Lord is alive and can talk or can send His messages through His messenger/s. The question is, are you willing to listen and obey what God will say. If He is silent about it..be silent too and don't be a fault finder.

Ron Corson said...

don't be a fault finder, because God is silent? Really is that how religion works, Let errors multiply unless some supposed messenger comes to tell you they are errors...but all those who point out those errors are fault finders not messengers.

Very sad perspective.