Rebellion begets rebellion.
On December 9, 2021 the South German Union Executive Committee voted to engage in an unbiblical practice, the so-called “equal ordination of women.” The world church, which originally created German Adventist church entities and granted authority to act in that geographical location, never granted authority to contradict the broader authority of the global church body. Delegates from the South German Union participated in San Antonio, Texas in the 2015 world church General Conference Session. In that meeting, global representatives met as the church’s spiritual authoritative decision-making body—and in due course voted not to permit individual sections of the church to engage in unilateral and independent ordination practices.
But Werner Dullinger, president of the South German Union, states that,
"In deciding in favor of the equal ordination of women and men to pastoral ministry, we had to weigh two competing values: on the one hand, conformity with the decision of the General Conference Session of 2015, and on the other hand, the right to equal treatment as set out in our Fundamental Belief 14 (Unity in the Body of Christ)."
The decision of the South German Union is exactly rebellious. For almost 2,000 years God’s church has lived by the values God’s Holy Spirit led His servants to write into the Scriptures. The Bible is the inspired Word of God, the infallible expression of God’s will. It is not self-contradictory; it is not, as minds in thrall to self-serving sophistry would have it, a mere container filled with competing and conflicting stories from which an elite administrator-clergy class pick and choose what they will obey.
The papacy is still stinging from those days when the Protestant Reformation defended Jesus’ truth against errors and teachings promoted by a corrupt church hierarchy. Then, the faithful resisted the suppression of truth through tradition. Today, truth is again suppressed there, now by church leaders openly fanning flames of rebellion against the very body that appointed them to teach His truth in the glorious heartland of the Reformation.
The South German Union president’s justification for the action taken is cheap deconstructionism. The Union asserts contradiction between beliefs that most in the world church see as biblical and non-contradictory.
There are faithful members and workers in the German church but it is dominated by a culturally-captured class who act in open rebellion. The haughty action of the South German Union supporting women’s ordination is just the tip of a very cold iceberg.
I invite you to join me in prayer that God will divinely intervene in support of German church members who want to be faithful participants in the world church body. A church divided against itself cannot stand. All our cleverness cannot save us if we surrender to the shifting sands of secular cultural values. Let us pray Heaven will raise up faithful members and leaders in Germany to abandon deformation and continue God’s Reformation.
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