Two things have happened recently that leave conservative Adventists shaking their heads.
First, at last summer’s General Conference Session, the delegates passed a package of wording changes to the Church Manual that provides for female elders. While it is true that the movement to ordain female elders met with initial success way back in 1984, the groups that approved female elders were the Spring Council and then later the Fall Council. The General Conference Session had never taken any action to approve female elders.
Now it has. The SDA Church in General Conference Session has now voted, in effect, to regularize female elders.
This action pulls the rug from under any principled opposition to female ordination. In Scripture, the headship offices of the church are the elder (presbyteros) and the bishop/overseer (episkopos). Although two different words are used, these offices have the same biblical requirements or criteria; whoever can be an elder can also be a bishop/overseer. If a woman is qualified to be an elder, she is also qualified to be a minister, conference president, union president, or General Conference president.
Second, the U.S. Senate voted to approve the “respect for marriage act” (which the House had already passed several months ago), which repeals DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act and requires the federal government and the states to recognized same-sex “marriage.” Incredibly, the SDA Church’s Public Affairs/Religious Liberty Department lobbied in favor of the “respect for marriage act,” a fact confirmed by three senators in public speeches.
A few weeks ago, I was commiserating with my local pastor, who is an adult convert to Adventism, about the church’s role in the passage of the “Respect for Marriage Act.” He could not understand why the our Church's PARL Department would back such a measure.
“We Adventists don’t care about sexual issues, not in society at large and barely within the church itself,” I said.
“But Scripture is clear . . .” he replied, before I cut him off.
“This isn’t about Scripture. Yes, Scripture couldn’t be any clearer. But this is about Seventh-day Adventist culture. This is a cultural thing, and Adventists just don’t care about these issues. These are not our issues. Our issues are the Sabbath, and to a lesser extent, the state of the dead and the sanctuary.”
It is undeniable that Adventists today do not have much to say about biblical sexuality, or indeed about the whole constellation of issues surrounding sex, gender, and sex roles. All of these issues are tied in to the Scriptural model of sexuality, which can concisely be described as patriarchy, and there is a strong culture of feminism in the SDA Church.
We are gradually moving toward ordination of women and mass female spiritual headship. About 80% of North American SDA clergy are pro-female ordination; in most SDA conferences in North America, a candidate for the ministry will not be hired if he or she opposes female ordination, and increasingly that question is asked of job-seekers.
The SDA Church’s weakness, since 1970, on abortion has been much written-about here and elsewhere, and I will not belabor the point here. We are also gradually normalizing homosexuality in the church, as witness the NAD’s promotion of the book, “Guiding Families.”
Why is the SDA Church so louche, so loose, on sexual issues?
The answer lies in our history. When the SDA Church was formed in the mid-19th Century, the entire culture was very strongly patriarchal. The biblical worldview on sexuality was dominant and widely enshrined in law—sodomy was a crime in almost all states, abortion was criminalized in almost all states in the mid-19th Century, state by state.
Women had few rights; men, husbands and fathers, held all the cards, which is why for every statement from Ellen White affirming the basic structure of patriarchy, there are several others seeking to curtail men’s abuse of their primacy. Most of us cannot even imagine how strongly patriarchal the 19th Century culture was. (One exception is Gerry Wagoner, who grew up in the German Anabaptist tradition--which is a plain culture, just like the Amish--which still had a patriarchal culture. So he can imagine it!)
The world that the SDA Church was born into had a biblical sexual constitution that Adventists had nothing to add to. We were focused on bringing the new light that the Christian world urgently needed, light on Christ’s role in the heavenly sanctuary, the state of the dead, and that the Bible Sabbath was Saturday, not Sunday. These issues informed our evangelistic priorities and they eventually came to form our unique sub-culture.
Because sex and gender were not among our evangelistic priorities, they assumed a secondary position in our culture. Christian sexual morality simply was not part of our portfolio. It was not something that we considered "present truth" or something that urgently needed to be presented to the Christian world.
Worse, all those texts establishing male spiritual headship-- e.g. “I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man; she is to be in submission”—had been used by other Christian groups against us, against Ellen White, our female prophet, and since Ellen White was clearly a prophet, a messenger from God, mustn’t there be something wrong with these passages?
I can attest to the power of this SDA sub-culture. I remember being in Idaho for the 2009 Idaho Camp Meeting because the then-conference president there had read and enjoyed my recently published dinosaur book, and had invited me there to speak and promote the book. I remember speaking to someone about the liberalism creeping into the church, and saying that although I was opposed to the obviously nihilistic effort to bring in Darwinism, I didn’t really have much of a problem with female ordination. It seemed okay to me.
Having grown up in the church, and having attended SDA schools from Kindergarten through college, I had never been confronted with anything casting doubt on the feminist agenda of female ordination. There had never been anything about it in the Sabbath School Quarterly, nor in the Review, nor in any of the usual Adventist places. Of course, I had read the Bible and been confronted with the Pauline passages—"Women are to be silent in the churches. They are not permitted to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says”—but I assumed they must not be very important, or my church, which I and everyone I knew and respected esteemed to be the most biblically correct church, would have formed a doctrine around them, and it had not.
So I was well into middle age as a good cultural Adventist, seeing nothing much wrong with female ordination or feminism in general.
What alerted me that female ordination might not be right was sheer guilt by association. The three-legged stool of “Spectrum Magazine” was (and is) Darwinism, normalization of homosexuality and transgenderism, and ordination of women. But you cannot bring Darwinism into Adventism. If Darwinism is true, then Seventh-day Adventism, with its strong emphasis on the seventh day Sabbath, is a bad joke. So I knew Spectrum was promoting nihilism, and obviously the female headship issue merited closer study.
And when I studied it more closely it became clear that the most basic elements of Christian sexuality—no sex before marriage, sex only within marriage, no sex outside of marriage, no same-sex sexual activity—were all part of the system called patriarchy. Not only that, but the sexual program that opposes these strictures is strongly associated with idolatry and with pagan religion and spirituality.
I include my personal story on this issue because many adult converts to Adventism—Gerry, my pastor, and many others like them—are wondering how the SDA Church got so far off track on the sex and gender issues, and why so many Adventists either see nothing wrong with the church’s stance or do not think it is very important. As a cultural Adventist, raised and educated in the church, I can attest that as strange as our “position” is, how we got here was the most natural thing in the world.
But that doesn’t make it right. Christianity was born into the pagan Greco-Roman world, whose sexual norms prominently included man-boy sex, masters’ and mistresses’ free sexual use of their slaves of both sexes, sapphic sex, and discarding infants to die of exposure. Christianity’s radical rejection of these practices was the very thing that most characterized the early Church and distinguished it from paganism. Biblical sexuality is basic to Christianity. It is just as important for the SDA Church to uphold creational distinctions about sex—Eve created as Adam’s helpmate, there are only 2 genders: “male and female created He them”—as it is to worship on the created Sabbath. The SDA Church urgently needs “revival and reformation” on this constellation of sex and gender issues.
Writing the phrase “revival and reformation” brings to mind Elder Ted Wilson, who has used it so often. What was he thinking when he allowed the General Conference in session to make the Church Manual’s language on elders gender neutral? Doesn’t he know where this is going? The churches that have ordained women as elders and pastors and eventually bishops and archbishops have all ended by embracing liberalism across the board and becoming irrelevant to Christianity going forward.
Here again, it helps to be a cultural Adventist. I can tell you what Ted Wilson thinks: he thinks that Jesus is coming soon, and will return to earth and render irrelevant the SDA Church’s failure to uphold Bible sexuality. The Sabbath will be the issue of the end times, and none of the other Christian doctrines will be important in the end. We don’t need to be right on sexuality because we’re right on the Sabbath, and Jesus is coming soon. That might be a caricature of Elder Wilson’s thinking, but like all caricatures, it is true in essence.
But Jesus is not coming back to save the SDA Church from its failures on sex and gender. To the contrary, Jesus is not returning until we get this corrected. We need to change our culture, and the good news is that cultures can change. But it will be mostly adult converts who change the culture; it won’t be cultural Adventists who were born into the church, because, as I have been at pains to explain, we do not know what we’re doing wrong. We say, “I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing.”
Who got the ball rolling on the new statement on abortion? Andrew Michell. Yes, that’s right, “Pro-life Andrew,” another adult convert to Adventism. You did not know he precipitated the new statement on abortion. I didn’t know it, either, until he put out this video: “3 Missiles.” Pro-Life Andrew rubs many the wrong way; his mono-mania on the abortion issue strikes people as fanaticism. But he is clearly very effective; decisively effective, we now know. (Andrew is still not happy with the new statement on abortion—he hates that it includes a loophole for undefined “birth anomalies”—but objectively it is a big improvement.)
I have concluded that it will take a monomania approaching fanaticism to change the culture of the SDA Church on sexual issues. It is a big task, humanly speaking a hopeless task. There’s a complicating factor that I haven’t discussed yet. Today, half a century after the Sexual Revolution got rolling, governments are promoting the attacks on biblical sexuality. In most Western nations, the full weight of government—the statutes, the regulations, the policies, the courts, and the ponderous machinery of regulatory and law enforcement agencies—has been marshaled to replace Bible sexuality with pagan sexuality.
This means that if the church is serious about revival and reformation on sexual issues it will be subject to persecution. We will be persecuted if we are to be right on these issues. But, again, this seems wrong to cultural Adventists. There’s an SDA cultural belief that anyone facing persecution not over the Sabbath has brought it on himself; we believed we would only be persecuted over the Sabbath, and that if we are persecuted because of anything else, it is no one’s fault but our own. This is exactly what Kevin Paulson said about Dr. Eric Walsh, who was fired from his job as director of public health for the City of Pasadena, California, and denied a similar position in rural Georgia, over a Sabbath sermon that correctly stated the biblical position on homosexual sex. Paulson said Dr. Walsh should not have been trying to be both a lay pastor and a public health officer, so it was his own fault.
If the SDA Church is ever going to get its mind right on sexual issues, it will do so against the pull of every fiber of our Adventist sub-culture, and in the face of increasingly severe governmental persecution. This can only happen if a lot of adult converts get fanatical.