As of the General Conference vote in Utrecht, 1995, the role of women in the Seventh-day Adventist Church is officially this: qualified women ministers may preach, baptize, participate in elder ordinations, marry, and minister in every other way except that they may not be ordained to do so and may not carry the office of conference president or any higher office.

To many Seventh-day Adventists between eighteen and thirty (and to not a few older than thirty), the position seems terribly inconsistent, especially when one considers that one of the church’s founders was a woman, ordained by God as a prophet.

What do I think the role of women in the church should be? It would be easy for me to say I think that they should be treated and allowed to serve equally with men (and I do), but I think the issue is broader than this. This debate would never have existed had we observed Mark 10:42–45, and believed that greatness is found in service and that the first shall be last and the last first. It is our hierarchical mentality with a correspondingly wrong value system that has led us to suppose that a minister has special control over the church—a control that belongs only to men.

Whenever dealing with any social issue, I ask myself, What did God originally create? Once I understand that, the next question is, What did human beings invent and then attribute to God? These two questions are terribly crucial to a clear interpretation of the role of women in the Bible. To me, the biblical position is clear: God created male and female equally (it took both to make the image of God). He made us to govern the natural world. Through sin, that order was reversed and woman became subservient to man and man became dominated by the earth from which he came. Death ultimately became the ruler of both. Salvation is God’s reversal back to his original plan, which includes gender equality.

On the other hand, human beings developed a false value system in which people became valued according to their power, strength, intellect, money earned, and so forth, instead of their worth being based on creation and redemption. This vertical system led to a society in which a few people ruled everyone else and many became slaves (a total devaluing of a human being to that of a commodity). Sin is dominance, manipulation, control of others, and desires for supremacy. All of this was modeled in Satan’s fall (Isa. 14:12ff.); all of it was unmasked with the revelation of divine humility in Jesus (Phil. 2:5–11).

Seventh-day Adventists look forward to the day when we will have the unity for which Jesus prayed: "that they may be one even as We are one." How we see the unity of the Godhead will determine the kind of unity we reflect in his church. If the Father rules the Son and the Son rules the Holy Spirit, then perhaps we answered Jesus’ prayer by our stand on women in ministry. But if their oneness means that the Father honors and serves the Son and the Son honors and serves the Holy Spirit and they all honor and serve one another, then the decision made at Utrecht about the role of women in the church is not the end of the discussion.

The author wrote this article for the Campus Chronicle, Pacific Union College’s student newspaper, where it was first published on May 3, 2001.

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