Adventist : mackenzian

April 28, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Accounting for everyone

I last mentioned the Outspoken series here in February, when Daneen and Stephen published the first installment.

The series features Adventist LGBTQIA people sharing their stories, families, and experience with their congregations.

In the most recent installment, about Philip, Alberto, Dahlia, and Nicolás, Philip and Alberto reflect on all the ways that their family’s life in their local church hangs on the comfort and welcome of the [heterosexual] members they’ve been worshipping with.

“We’re here and we’re a part of the Adventist family as well,” Alberto says. “Please take our membership into account when you make decisions that will influence the lives of us and our family.”

It’s incredible that this is still a controversial idea.

Watch Philip and Alberto‘s story online, and donate to help the producers publish the rest of the series.

April 12, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Lessons from the designers

The Seventh-day Adventist denomination revealed its latest visual identity standards today at the General Conference’s spring meetings in Maryland.

I’m impressed.

The core font family, Advent Sans, is open source, based on Google font typography, and designed for more languages than those that use the characters A-Z.

The twenty-year-old Bible-cross-flame symbol is unchanged and set on a triangular field. It now appears in a single color instead of two complementary colors, and includes a circular field variant. The symbol’s use guidelines are people-centered, generous, and designed with real-life contexts in mind.

Though [the symbol] may not communicate everything, because of its consistent use it now carries a deep significance for all who are familiar with it. The symbol, like all symbols, functions much more as a container for attributed meaning than as a theological statement. It is we, Seventh-day Adventist members, who give that symbol meaning.” —The Communications department of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Recommended colors evoke the rich and grounding colors of nature.

And the stroke of genius: an implicit visual structure for print media called the creation grid, which divides the field into seven equal vertical parts, reserves the seventh for the denomination’s symbol, and requires contrast between the first six and the last.

Imagine if the artists ran the .org. Thanks to the denomination’s designers, and despite the consternation of its administrators, I’ve been imagining that all day.

Explore the identity site.

March 17, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Despair and resilience among LGBT+ Adventists

Illustration credit: Jared A. Wright/Spectrum Media

Remember the Andrews University researchers who wanted to hear from LGBT+ Adventist young adults last summer? Nearly 500 people responded, and 310 young adults completed the survey. The researchers are reporting early findings now.

On the Spectrum blog this week, Drs. Nancy Carbonell, Curtis VanderWaal, Shannon Trecartin, and David Sedlacek talked with Alita Byrd about what they’re learning from their study of family acceptance:

Research shows that around 9% of teens in the U.S. are kicked out of their homes when they tell parents about their orientation or identity. We wondered how that statistic compared to the Adventist church (we found the same rate in our study)…

Although we knew from the research literature that suicidal thinking and suicide attempts were much higher among LGBT+ individuals than the general population, we were shocked to find this level of despair among those who had grown up as Adventists… Conversely, we were quite surprised by how many respondents have remained deeply spiritual and have continued their involvement in religious activities.” —Curtis VanderWaal

There is no doubt that LGBT+ adults often see their parents, homes, and churches as very rejecting places, making coming out or understanding their sexual orientation or gender identity extremely difficult for the majority of these young people…

While many of our LGBT+ youth reported having a friend that they could share their joys and sorrows with (70%), less found this support from their parents (34.2%), few found support from their pastor (11.9%), and even fewer found their congregation [to be an] important source of support (9.3%).” — Nancy Carbonell

In survey responses, LGBT+ young adults explained parents’ and caregivers’ responses to their coming out. Forty percent disclosed their gender or sexual orientation to their families during their 20s, 20% haven’t come out at all yet, and a full three-quarters of the respondents reported anti-LGBT prejudice among their relatives that made the disclosure process more difficult.

As well as drawing implications for Adventist church workers and educators, Carbonell, VanderWaal, Trecartin, and Sedlacek are also placing reports in professional publications like the journal of the North American Association of Christians in Social Work, Social Work and Christianity (Spring 2017).

One of these articles, “The Impact of Family Rejection or Acceptance among LGBT+ Millennials in the Seventh-day Adventist Church” (VanderWaal, Sedlacek, & Lane), focuses on young LGBT+ Adventists’ experiences and what caring professions can do to support members of this population who might cross their office thresholds for individual or family/social systems counselling.

“Caregivers, clergy, and religious congregations,” the researchers write, “were generally not considered to be good sources of social support for respondents.” But many of us hope that can change.

If you want to learn more about the subset of social work research that Carbonell, VanderWaal, Trecartin, and Sedlacek are contributing to, check out the work of the Family Acceptance Project, based at San Francisco State University.

February 12, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

David Newman was right

During the lead-up to the 2015 Adventist General Conference session in San Antonio, TX, several preachers, teachers, and scholars discussed the Adventist community’s approach to ordination.

The Theology of Ordination Study Committee (TOSC) and its regional subcommittees met over two years to thresh the questions. Their hope was that they would get to San Antonio with at least some consensus theology for the global collective to build on.

The North America Division’s report, for example, drew on the research of contributors across the US church and university network. It runs 240 pages long and includes articles from moderate Adventists like Dwight Nelson and Kendra Haloviak on leadership, authority, the priesthood, creation, and gender.

What it doesn’t include is a plain acknowledgement that contemporary denominational ordination isn’t “biblical”—neither modeled in the Bible nor mandated by the ethics of the early church. The international consensus statement conflates the ordination system with “public endorsement [from the Church] for persons who meet the biblical qualifications” or “[the Church] publicly recognizing those whom the Lord has called and equipped for local and global Church ministry.” It also buries the statement that “Over the course of Christian history the term ordination has acquired meanings beyond what these words originally implied.”

That acknowledgement was an outlier among the arguments that emerged during 2013 and 2014, often dropped in conversations and then run past. But J. David Newman made the most direct case for it.

Newman has argued that it’s inappropriate to debate ordaining pastors when modern pastoral ministry is discontinuous with the church roles described in the Christian scriptures, and the church has already allowed for the ordination of women deacons and women elders, two roles that are described in the Bible.¹

Though Newman’s position never found vocal advocates within the NAD, it seems to have persuaded some of his peers in Europe. Since the General Conference meetings denying world regions the autonomy to determine ordination policy for their own contexts, conferences in the Netherlands and Germany have continued to “lay hands” on ministers regardless of gender, and Sweden has abandoned the “ordination” category altogether.

Just a few weeks ago, however, while most of the US focused on the inauguration of No. 45, North American Division church officials met with the General Conference president to assure him of their continuing loyalty to the Adventist denomination. Other ministers have released their “ordination” credentials and sought “commissioned” credentials instead, the only kind the global church recognizes for its 3,500 women ministers.

“Non-doctrinal issues on which we have no consensus are not a basis for splitting the church,” church leaders reportedly told the General Conference.

Yet describing disparate treatment of employees on the basis of gender as a “non-doctrinal issue” is no way to end the disparate treatment. That description instead lowers the stakes and makes it less likely that Adventist community members will learn to see this as a problem that needs resolving.

This Bridge Called My Back was first published in 1981, a decade after the 20th Century Adventist church started reclassifying its women ministers. Co-editor Cherrie Monaga explains in the 2015 foreword that women are still marginal in US and global culture. Granting a few individual women exceptional treatment in this system doesn’t change the system’s nature because the underlying philosophy, ideology, and logic are still at work. All surface inclusion does is change the kinds of faces that enact and speak for the system.

The denominational discussion about ordination has been limited because discussants have preemptively committed themselves to saving the current structure. Regions of the world that have made the most emphatic progress despite this have been those that have worked around or replaced the category of ordained pastor entirely. We’d be much better off imagining a structure that’s just and doesn’t compel workarounds. For the sake of the employees still graduating into a two-tier workforce and members still acceding into a two-tier church, we’d be best off imagining differently.

^[1]Newman closed his site early in 2018. Some of his work from 2014 remains on Adventist independent media sites like Adventist Today. ↩

February 3, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

New Project: Outspoken

The latest project from the co-directors of Enough Room at the Table is a series of mini-documentary videos called Outspoken.

I mentioned this back in August when the filmmakers came to my home to talk to me.

Tonight, the first video hits the web. It features Yeshara Acosta, who I met just under three years ago and who never fails to be a human light.

The people featured in this new series are people who inspire us [to] let our light shine. They give us hope and joy, and we know you’ll be blessed by their stories and gifts as well.” –Daneen Akers, co-director, Outspoken

Watchfire Films plans to release new features each Friday until the series is complete.

Meet Yeshara below and donate to help the team edit, subtitle, and share the rest.

I’ll post mine when it’s out.

December 18, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Knowing history can change the conversation

This weekend I watched an extended presentation by Bert Haloviak and Dr. Kendra Haloviak Valentine on the Adventist community’s first 150 years with female pastors. It’s part of a series of talks from 2014, and so occurred before the 2015 General Conference vote in San Antonio.

Adventist Women In Ministry – Progress or Regress? from Azure Hills Church on Vimeo.

Bert Haloviak is a former staff member of the denomination’s archives, and has written several papers exploring the 19th Century church. Kendra Haloviak Valentine specializes in both Revelation and women’s role in the 1st Century house church.

Facts they share:

At least 50 Adventist female ministers received ministerial licenses from the 1870s to the 1970s.
Early Adventist language for what we now call “ordination” included the phrases “laying on of hands” and “setting apart.” Ordination practices in the denomination’s first several years involved prayer and a piece of paper, and recognized a person’s authority to preach and baptize as early as the 1850s.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the IRS began asking questions about how the Adventist denomination determined which ministers merited tax-shielded benefits.
Rather than treat all ministers equally, GC officials chained future decisions to global consensus, stripped female ministers of their credentials, and granted them “missionary” licenses instead. Missionary-licensed ministers and “associates in pastoral care” were no longer eligible for “ordination.”
In the 1970s, three congregations, including a university church, recognized female ministers serving locally and ordained them. These ordinations in Maryland and California were not nationally or internationally recognized.
The first Adventist recognized as a local church minister rather than an itinerant was a woman, Bert Haloviak says.

An interesting point surfaces during the post-presentation questions: Kendra Haloviak notes that her younger students tend to assume that because they have seen female ministers at work in churches, there is no policy obstacle. And this makes them less exercised about removing those barriers: if people are doing the work, how can there be a problem?

The North American Division has indeed hosted a different kind of conversation about ordination in the 2010s than it did in the 1970s, but the wider denominational stalemate persists and institutional limits are still in place. While male pastors encourage their female colleagues, these structural limits mean that Adventist congregations are not by default welcoming environments for ministers who aren’t male, and congregations and conferences that do welcome them remain unusual.

But once we acknowledge our history a full century before mainstream society woke up to women’s equality, the question shouldn’t be “should we ordain women?” It should be “Did we ever have sound reasons to stop ordaining them?” When the motivation for redefining “minister” as exclusive of women was money and pressure from the IRS, my answer has to be no.

You can read a text version of this presentation; the video is not captioned.