In a subtle embrace of theological feminism, several male Seventh-day Adventist pastors are publicly forgoing ordination credentials, saying they don’t want to hold the religious title until women can do the same.
According to the Religion News Service, several pastors within the Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Christian tradition are asking local officials to change their ordination credentials to that of “commissioned” ministers — a position below the title of formal pastor, but the highest available to women in the church. The men say it’s their way of standing against the SDA’s official church policy, which bars women from ordained ministry.
“I wanted to stand in solidarity,” Pastor Kymone Hinds, a minister in Memphis, Tennessee who has changed his credentials, told RNS. “We realize that our female ministers do the same work and have the same education but there is a glass ceiling over them.”
We realize that our female ministers do the same work and have the same education but there is a glass ceiling over them.
Only a few men have requested the change so far, but the movement stands to grow as church members grow impatient for change. The spate of protests comes a few months after the SDA church struck down a resolution calling for the ordination of women at a major church meeting held every five years, the motion failing in a 1,381 to 977 vote. Analysts observed that the vote, which occurred in July, fell largely along geographic lines: The SDA church claims some 18 million members worldwide, but less than 7 percent reside in the United States, where worshippers harbor more liberal views on issues such as women’s ordination. In fact, many SDA women already perform pastoral duties in North America, but their leadership is often not officially recognized by church members in other parts of the world.
Discarding pastoral titles prohibits a pastor from being able to perform several duties in the SDA, such as officiating regional conferences, organizing churches, and ordaining local church officers. Outside of these changes, however, the immediate effect is largely symbolic: Adventist officials told RNS there is no significant salary difference between commissioned and ordained pastors.
The effort joins a number of longstanding movements for gender equality within Christianity. Mainline Protestant traditions such as the United Church of Christ, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the Presbyterian Church (USA) have ordained women for decades, although only after contentious campaigns that resulted in several schisms throughout the 20th century. Despite this fracturing, scores of women have since been elected high positions within their churches, and many now fill prominent pulpits all over the country.
Other Christian groups continue to oppose formalized female leadership, spurring the creation of advocacy groups that push for women’s ordination in Roman Catholicism, the Southern Baptist Convention, and Mormonism, among others.
Even some Mainline Protestants continue to struggle to equality for women among their leadership. Although the Episcopal Church has ordained women as priests and bishops for some time, the group’s global body — the Church of England — only agreed to ordain female bishops earlier this year.