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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

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Update: 4th Adventist Position on Ordination

In my post on the ordination discussion at last month’s General Conference Annual Council meeting (#GCAC14), I shared several background resources including the 1973 Camp Mohaven Report; Dr. Olive Hemmings’ book on ordination, interpretation, and culture; and the three positions that the Theology of Ordination Study Committee presented to the wider church:

(1) the headship principle means that only men may be ordained;

(2) the Spirit gifts without regard to gender, and so men and women may be ordained;

(3) the headship principle is the norm but the ordination of women is God’s Plan B to rebuke failed male leadership.

I’ve just received a fourth position on the theology of ordination that was shared with some Annual Council delegates but not presented at GCAC14.

J. David Newman waves goodbye to a smiling, applauding congregation in Fulton MD, July 2012
Newman on his last Sabbath as senior pastor of New Hope Adventist Church, MD, July 2012 | Photo credit: New Hope Adventist Church via Flickr

The author, J. David Newman, is editor of Adventist Today and adjunct professor of religion at Washington Adventist University. He writes:

“The three positions stated in the TOSC report assumed that there is no issue with the term
ordination itself. In fact the word ‘ordination’ was used synonymously with ‘select’ and ‘appoint.’

But the word ‘ordination’ has a very specific meaning in our church and that is why there is so much debate on whether women can be ordained as elder or pastor. It is interesting to note that the church has already approved the ordination of women elders but now debates whether a woman pastor can be ordained.

The TOSC does not explain why we have three ordinations in our church—deacon, elder, pastor.

It is the position of this paper that the real issue is ordination itself, that it is actually a Roman Catholic practice and not a Biblical practice. If we were to cease to ordain there would be no issue over women’s ordination. This paper examines whether the practice of three levels of
ordination can be found in the New Testament.” —J. David Newman, “A Fourth Option”

Newman is writing a book on the history of ordination from the Roman Catholic church through to early Adventism. He hopes the manuscript will be available in time for the 2015 General Conference session in San Antonio, TX, and tells me that “for those who want a deeper study, there will be extensive end notes to each chapter and several appendices.”

In this article, Newman describes the church’s practical ordination policy, analyzes the 5 distinct words translated “ordain/ordained” in the English King James Bible, and explains that the denomination’s method of setting apart distinct leadership classes with differing levels of authority over church rites may have organizational merit but “cannot be found in the New Testament.”

Read the 17-page paper on his website.

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At #GCAC14: Adventists Debate Women’s Ordination—Again

Today, about 20 minutes down the street from me, the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists is on Day 6 of its 2014 Annual Council meeting. The group reconvened for the afternoon session at 2 p.m. Eastern.

The Annual Council meeting convenes church administrators from around the world each October to present progress reports on their departments and major projects, get budgets and membership updates, approve or reject closed committee recommendations, and group-edit revisions to the church manual. Voted changes are then forwarded for final review to the full General Conference session held every 5 years. The group just unveiled the question it wants the General Conference delegates to consider next year.

Lay member participation at both of these affairs is minimal; we are neither in the room directly nor through accountable representation, but thanks to social media, the denomination’s PR team, and two independent media sources, church members and other interested parties not attending can eavesdrop on what’s going on. (Special thanks go to Adventist Today and Spectrum Magazine!)

View from the main hall at the 2014 General Conference Annual Council meeting. Photo credit: Jared Wright for Spectrum Magazine
View from the main hall at the 2014 General Conference Annual Council meeting. Photo credit: Jared Wright for Spectrum Magazine

The Annual Council agenda today includes the ordination of women to pastoral ministry. The last international discussion I remember about this was in 1995 when General Conference delegates refused to allow North America and Western Europe to move forward with gender-equitable ordination rules given the needs of their territory.

But the timeline of comment, study, and [in]action on this question goes back to the 1800s and the Adventist denomination’s founders, not just to 19 years ago and the NAD: check out this general ordination overview via the GC Archives and this women’s ordination-specific timeline from SDAnet’s At Issue.

Earlier this morning, Annual Council delegates voted (275-11) to affirm this consensus statement on ordination from the Theology of Ordination Study Committee (pdf). (Other interim reports from the TOSC are hosted on the GC Archives website.) The TOSC committee needs the entire church to know that regardless of their differences they are loyal to the church’s 28 Fundamental Beliefs.

"VOTED: To affirm that in spite of the differences of opinion on the subject of women's ordination, the members of the theology of ordination study committee are committed to the message and mission of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, as expressed through the 28 fundamental beliefs.
TOSC members offer the world church assurances about their continued loyalty. Photo via @adventistchurch

Related: The First Step in Apostasy: The Anti-creedalism of Charles Beecher (July 2014)

I’m not a neutral observer today. I’m the daughter of an ordained female elder who was among the first ordained in the British Union Conference.

I’m also the daughter of an agnostic former Adventist who, last time we spoke about this at any length, shared reservations about how much religious authority dresses up garden-variety games of power and control.

The pastoral team at the Adventist congregation I participate at weekly includes a woman doing good, diligent, soul-watering work despite a denominational climate that’s both passively and actively hostile. No, I’m not neutral about this debate and I’m not at all inured to the human costs it has charged us over at least the last 41 years.

No, Bill. Women who are also ministers can be spoken about in the abstract, but they can’t be spoken with in the flesh.

Related: Women Pastors Tell Their Stories (September 2014)

By this afternoon, observers expected the Annual Council to approve an “ecclesiastical” church policy solution to the problem of global disagreement about women and which roles women may or may not play with equal pay and responsibilities in denominational service.

Three options are being presented: for male headship and no women’s ordination (presented by Clinton Wahlen of the GC’s Biblical Research Institute; for gender mutuality and for women’s ordination (presented by Carl Cosaert of Walla Walla University); and a “third way” promoting men in ministry as God’s ideal, and women in ministry as “Plan B” (yes, really, that was their chosen term)—the lawful concession when men are not available or qualified (presented by Nicholas Miller of Andrews University and co-authored by David Trim of the GC Archives).

Only one of these options will advance from Annual Council to the next stage, which is “study” in the wider church ahead of July 2015’s international General Conference session in San Antonio, TX. All week long, GC President Ted N.C. Wilson and others have been hammering home the idea that whatever GC delegates decide next year should end the debate and all who disagree must “submit.” We can expect continued pressure along those lines between now and next summer.

I’m astonished that it has taken about 44 years to get to this point. It has also taken 19 years for the conversation to circle back to letting divisions compelled to ordain do so yet not forcing opposed divisions to do so. This was the very request that the North American Divison made in Utrecht (1995). Again, here is the question being referred back to the General Conference delegates:

In this millennium, however, the 1995 proposal is being offered alongside the reasoning, “Female ministers aren’t God’s best, but it is acceptable if we ordain them when men have failed.” And that argument is being presented as “moderate.” There are a number of missing voices across the discussion, as at least a few spectators have pointed out.

So in the absence of these women, today’s meeting involves abstract debate, compromise, and concession. Only two women spoke all day, and the first, a Chinese psychologist, didn’t reach the mic until after 4 p.m. I don’t expect female minsters to go to bed tonight feeling seen, heard, or affirmed: I suspect many have learned not to care how strident criticisms are, and others are beginning to learn. Someone said to me recently that this is a generational issue, that change will not be possible until the most recalcitrant voices move out of office or influence. I don’t know if that’s true, and I don’t know who will be left to wait if it is.

I did see something interesting between the church stats and Peter Handless’ comments, though. Internationally, the majority of the church’s 18 million members are under 35yo. That is not a conclusion you’d draw from looking at the Annual Council photos. If the majority is not represented during discussion, how will we assure the legitimacy of the conclusion and policy changes that result from it?

Related (updated 11/2018): The NAD’s 2013 TOSC report. The NAD removed its summary, “WANTED! More Female Pastors — Essential for the Harvest,” in 2018. A new page compiles approved statements and documents.

Resources

I’ve compiled a list of resources that may help you read behind the tweets—and certainly get a rounder view of the topic than the Adventist Review will be able to provide.

Daily Reports

Adventist Today’s prime correspondent is J. David Newman.

Related: The Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary Faculty: On the Unique Headship of Christ in the Church (pdf)
ANN reports on Andrews statement. | Andrews faculty reaffirm statement in October 2014

Spectrum/Adventist Forum’s correspondents are Jared Wright and Bonnie Dwyer.

Further Reading

The report that started it all: The Camp Mohaven Report on Ordination (1973) via the Columbia Union Conference, which began ordaining ministers without regard to gender in 2012.

Some solid recent research on the role Adventist interpretation plays in this conversation: Sacred Texts and Social Conflict: The Bible and The Debate Over Women’s Ordination in The Seventh-day Adventist Church (2010) by Olive Hemmings, Washington Adventist University. I’ve summarized her recent presentations on this website, at Spectrum, and at Adventist Today.

The 2014 Theology of Ordination Study Committee Report – as received by #GCAC14 today.

Other comments: Jon Paulien, Loma Linda University | David Asscherick, Lightbearers

At 5:35 p.m., the proposed motion has still not yet been voted, but I expect it to pass comfortably based on the discussion so far. If it does, Annual Council will have punted on making a clear recommendation to the General Conference and we’ll have to await the delegates’ decision this July.

Update: By 5:40 p.m., both Spectrum and the @adventistchurch account reported that the motion passed 243-44 (3 abstentions). The GC in session will have to answer this question again.

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When Popular Analogies Steer Us Off-course

On Friday morning I eavesdropped on the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Annual Council meeting at the denomination’s headquarters in central Maryland. Several voices will live-report on the 8-day meetings via the Twitter hashtag #GCAC14: follow along over the next week.

Mark Finley is an Adventist statesman, an internationally known Adventist speaker and elder. For most of the 1990s and early 2000s, Finley was the gentle face of the televangelism series It Is Written. He currently serves the worldwide church as its evangelism vice president, and he spoke to the Annual Council Friday morning on using the stories in Acts 1-15 as conflict-resolution models, as examples for how to address intractable contemporary church debates.

His full remarks are already available via the General Conference Archives. Bear in mind that Finley is a member of the denomination’s theology of ordination study committee and has written that 1st Century believers received the Holy Spirit “without respect to either gender or ordination.”

Using Analogies to Guide Decision-Making

The denomination’s official account and Spectrum Magazine staff shared some of Finley’s key points, including these:

Analyzing the Analogy

Take a closer look at this rhetoric:

Context
1st Century CE: The Acts community of Christians
21st Century CE: The Seventh-day Adventist Church faith community—administered by the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, an association located in Silver Spring, MD. The association is legally represented by the General Conference Corporation of Seventh-day Adventists, incorporated in Washington, D.C.

Decision-makers
1st Century CE: The apostles hand-picked by Jesus Christ and those who knew him
21st Century CE: The administrators and leaders of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Deeply Contentious Problems
1st Century CE: Include selecting Judas’ replacement, Matthias; developing a just process for serving indigent widows; and deciding whether to receive non-Jewish believers
21st Century CE: Include whether to permit women to serve alongside men as ordained elders or pastors

Resolution Method
1st Century CE: The apostles and Acts community resolve disputes via prayer, casting lots, and submission to the apostles’ decision
21st Century CE: The Seventh-day Adventist Church and its members should resolve disputes via prayer, church delegate votes, and lay member submission to thusly-decided administrative policy

1st Century : 21st Century : : the Acts community : the Seventh-day Adventist faith community

This analogical premise requires us to accept a very narrow view of the last two millennia, but it’s a common move for Adventists. As a restorationist tradition, the denomination believes that its gift to the world has two parts: (a) uncovering teachings once held by the first few generations of believers but lost through time; and (b) drawing out a remnant of faithful ones “from any and all corners to the purposes of God.” As such, Adventism represents itself as the end-times repository of Bible truth, and this has consequences for members’ attachment to the group. Former GC president Jan Paulsen once told youth that if he were to leave the denomination he would “risk [his] whole spiritual life and salvation” by doing so. Not all Adventists agreed with this point, but many did.

So Finley is well within mainstream Adventism in looking to the early church for a guide to conflict resolution in our time. We can leap from the 1st Century CE to the present day because the Adventist church’s 151-year history is less continuous with the rest of the Christian story and more a counterpoint to it: Time and Spirit all but warp-drove from the unveiling visions in Revelation to the denomination’s formation in 1863! Our network of assumptions and analogies works to mask both the commonalities and the diversity across 38,000 Christian denominations. At the same time, it suggests that the Acts authority mantle now falls not on the shoulders of the entire Christian community but on the policy committees of one group, ours.

According to the argument Finley presented on Friday, there are just a few roles available in this play and they have already been assigned. Non-administrative church members may be out of the loop when it comes to “points of disagreement” even if we’re otherwise trusting and supportive. And we cannot count on being included in discussions or decision-making about these issues either.

Per Finley, an ordinary member’s role in discussions about ministerial ordination, membership restrictions, and any other church-wide controversy is to pray, submit to the denomination’s decision, accept the General Conference’s conclusions, and “move on” thereafter. The only lines we have to say are “Yea” and “Amen.”

How did we get here?

Finley’s analogies and suggestions about unity are not controversial if we accept that common business logic should bind how family members interact.

Debates on Adventist community websites like Adventist Today and Spectrum Magazine often invoke corporate disloyalty, suggest people who disagree with a given interpretation or policy should “just leave,” or argue that the church is right to bind its pastors, teachers, or vocal members by the closed-circle corporate preservation standards Coca Cola or Apple might use to weed out Pepsi advocates or Samsung sympathizers.

“The church has a brand,” some say, “and it’s only good stewardship to protect it. Further more, it has the right to.”

From Organization to Organism

Because this post will not be a book, I’ll offer just 7 short comments on why using corporation analogies as a positive guide for the “church family” steers us off-course:

  1. Though participating in a denominational group is largely voluntary (at least for those who join as adults and aren’t born and raised in the denominational culture), members of this faith community are not best compared to businesses’ employees. Employees trade skills and services for money and other forms of compensation. Church members freely contribute skills and services without compensation, and also donate both time and money to support their group.
  2. The relationship between church administrators and church members doesn’t map onto the relationship between employers and employees, except in denominational institutions where there actually are employment contracts, responsibilities, and rights. In these contexts, both employee and employer have rights and responsibilities that are buttressed by employment law. The transactional mutuality of the employer-employee relationship doesn’t transfer over to church-as-business, and quid pro quo isn’t a suitable matrix for relationships among members of a faith association. While churches can and do list any number of responsibilities that members are expected to fulfill, U.S. law offers individual church members no rights in relation to their church except for the right to leave.
  3. “God’s family” is one of Christianity’s primary analogies, and has been from the community’s start. In businesses, supervisors and staff can be fired for failure to perform, disagreement with the boss, and noncompliance. There’s no logical expectation of life-long relationship. In families, while parents can divorce and children can emancipate themselves from abusive or dangerous elders, mothers can’t usually fire sons or daughters fire fathers.
  4. Family members are genetically and/or emotionally bonded for life: legal emancipation doesn’t break these bonds. Families do have the option of living in acrimony or deliberate indifference with other. They can also choose to grow through the process of discerning how to work and live together without seeking dominance over each other through social role.
  5. The Adventist church appeals to the Bible in its conversations about hierarchy and role, and the scriptures define the community of believers as a body and not a corporation, as an organism, not an organization. Yet so much denominational energy goes to maintaining hard organizational boundaries, to determining who shouldn’t be permitted to stay and who really ought to go. We use support for “church organization” as a shibboleth (see Finley’s 5th “biblical essential”), yet persist in undermining the mutual trust necessary for the health of the church organism. Appealing to corporate and legal traditions to parse and rank organic variations, discipline members, and govern acceptable norms for debate suggest we prefer the fixed rules of ledgers and manuals to the ever-morphing order of flesh and blood.
  6. It makes no sense to expect to reap healthy, functional relationships of family and friendship from the doulos and kyrios patterns we’ve sown. Every tree still bears the fruit of its kind. Whereas Jesus described and taught his disciples as “servants” at the start of their relationship (e.g. Matthew 10), he spent his last discourse explaining that they were siblings and friends. He changed the matrix for their relationship and we are yet to grasp the implications of that change.
  7. Instead of building our interactions around family and friendship, we operate as if sanctions for disagreement can heal rifts, as if one group’s decisions must bind others absent a proven relationship of trust, and as if the closed discussions of a few can in any way guarantee “the unity of the faith.” This is not wise.

“I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.”—John 15:15

“There is a fellowship of the spirit, fathoms deeper than differences of opinion. It is the fellowship of those who love the Way of the Ages.”—Lewis Fisher

“I care about the Adventist church. I want it to be healthy and, most importantly, faithful to Christ. The only way that I can imagine that possibility is if Adventists can get over their obsession with Adventism, and decide to become a church whose chief question to itself isn’t its confessional identity, but its faithfulness to the One in whom it confesses faith.” —Matt Burdette

A Story from Recent History

The Association of Adventist Women recently honored Merikay McLeod (Silver) as their Woman of the Year. In the late 1970s, McLeod (pronounced Muh-Cloud) settled an EEOC claim out of court with the GC-owned Pacific Press, and, after several more years, the denomination agreed to compensate female workers who’d been denied equal pay for equal work.

McLeod shares the short version of her story with Spectrum editor Bonnie Dwyer in this 10-minute edited interview.

Note: The video is only auto-captioned and caption accuracy is about 65%.

“The Equal Opportunities Commission sued Pacific Press and the court directed Pacific Press to deposit $600,000 into a bank account and distribute it to the women they employed but paid less than men for similar work.

In this case, the state showed more pity for the poor, the divorced, and the widowed than did the church.” —Association of Adventist Women

Ouch.

It’s probably easier for administrators to reframe the church family as a corporation and encourage us to structure our expectations and engagement patterns of it accordingly. After all, there’s no single universal family model: family looks different around the world and among groups within each culture. Family structures are also evolving in each culture in new ways.

Family is no guarantee of healthy relationship, however: “family culture” was the excuse Pacific Press staff gave McLeod for her and others’ low salaries. It also claimed “intra-family disputes” as the reason civil courts and agencies shouldn’t be allowed to intervene on behalf of underpaid female employees. So family isn’t always a sanctuary, but it does suggest a quality of parity, safety, and communion that we’re yet to manifest.

Analogies and metaphors have cognitive, material, and relational consequence: our core analogies structure our thinking, our relationship to others, and how we manage common space and resources. We can’t afford to be cavalier about them.
(To get this point from scientists, start with the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. To get it from humanists, start with the work of Toni Morrison.)

So if we were to prioritize the metaphors of family and organism across this faith community, it’d be appropriate to be careful and thoughtful—Finley-style—about understanding the kind of family we are, what nature we have as an organism, and how to nurture our interdependence and ability to adapt. For now, though, the organization still dominates both our community and our conversation and determines the tight, restrictive way many of our leaders lead.

“As one person or as a small group of insulated advisers to a leader, you don’t have access to all the information you need, and you also, unintentionally perhaps, put in the minds of people ‘Oh, don’t worry, we’ll figure this one out.’ I haven’t met a senior leadership team that actually knows what it’s doing anymore. And I’m speaking about national governments as well as large corporations or very large NGOs.

“I would love leaders to realize that as they narrow their focus and only work with a few trusted advisers—which is the arc that almost all leaders take when they’re in crisis—realize that that [approach] decreases your capacity, and the very people you need who would be a wonderful resource of imagination and creativity and working 24/7, are The People.

“And when you take it back to your office with a few groups of advisors, the signal you’re sending people is ‘We’ll figure this out, and then we’ll tell you what to do.’ And people are becoming more and more dependent as that dynamic gains more traction.” —Dr. Meg Wheatley (with Let Go and Lead)

That being so, it doesn’t benefit us to treat the question of our shared identity as a second-tier priority. Who we are at our core and, hence, what will grow from us as olives grow from their vine must not be deferred while we push doggedly ahead with “mission.” At this stage in the human story, I can’t imagine anything less inspiring than a global purpose that accommodates or justifies sustained discrimination against any vulnerable or marginalized group of people. Discrimination undermines the credibility of institutional religions and the moral universe they present to the world as ideal.

I agree with Mark Finley and Reinder Bruinsma on this point: we’ll get so much more done building up from what connects us and what good we can create together then we now do heel-digging into our differences.

So imagine that Mephistopheles himself offers us an accomplished mission if we’d only leave some family members to fend for themselves while we carry on for the cause. Can you also imagine we’d have the vision to recognize that proposal’s hollow heart? The cause we’re called to isn’t viable without a strong, applied commitment to the value of the whole human person, and I believe this commitment is something Adventism could advance quite coherently if we chose to. I’m in no way motivated to engage or participate by the thought of becoming one of many cogs in one of many organizations, but working with my siblings as peers under God does motivate me: it’s not a self-definition consolation prize. Yes, “God can take care of Himself,” and I say it’s our mission to take care of each other.

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News: The Record Keeper’s Now Dead

The Record Keeper release date was pushed back three times, and finally suspended April 2014.
The Record Keeper release date was pushed back three times, and finally suspended April 2014.

“There are no secrets.” And now there is no Record Keeper.

The Adventist News Network and other Adventist sources report today that the General Conference will not release The Record Keeper project: The Record Keeper is dead. The GC’s April 11 press release states that the project is “suspended” and “similar creative outreach projects” might be possible in future.

Back in January I wrote about efforts to save The Record Keeper and updated my post with Williams Costa’s statement that the GC was “not considering stepping away from the Record Keeper project.” Today’s announcement to the contrary will make it hard for church advocates to deny that Seventh-day Adventism struggles to support creativity in form and complexity in thought: our fundamentalism makes us a poor ally to art.

If we have a certainty bias that makes us hostile to new forms of thinking, seeing, and understanding, then we have a massive and possibly insurmountable challenge for those Adventists in each generation who want to drink deeply from theology and philosophy thanks to their love of literature and film. Story isn’t tidy and truth has many faces—when will we learn?

I feel sad today not just for Jason Satterlund, Garrett Caldwell, and the rest of the TRK team but also for the thousands of youth at Adventist colleges and academies who’ve already screened the entire series and were looking forward to sharing it with new viewers. I also think of those baptized during evangelistic screenings of TRK last year who are now seeing a church nervously disclaiming the tools that brought them into Adventism.

I am not concerned about the money that’s been spent. The Adventist denomination isn’t short on funds and didn’t waste them by funding or developing The Record Keeper. I am concerned about the message the GC is sending by abandoning this project, the creatives behind it, and the audiences that have already responded to it.

And yet the statement claims the GC’s “strong endorsement for creative outreach.” No, no.

That The Record Keeper has become the 21st Century’s Rise of the Minions is a loss for all of us.

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Time to Speak Up

"Where are our LGBTI voices?
A new meme asks “Where are our LGBTI voices?” at the GC’s summit on gender and sexuality this March in Cape Town, South Africa

As I wrote last year, the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists has planned a global summit on gender and sexuality for March 21-24 this year. The summit falls under the planning authority of Elder Pardon Mwansa, a GC vice-president and chair of the committee on “alternative sexuality practices” [sic] that will report to the church in session in 2015. He has been receiving a great deal of feedback on this summit far more graciously than most.

Despite recent criminalization initiatives in Nigeria and Uganda that were influenced in part by US-based Christian evangelicals and received limited on-continent pushback from local or international Adventists, the General Conference decided to host this meeting in Cape Town, South Africa. South Africa is one of 9 African nations that has embedded anti-discrimination principles in its law, but it also has a disturbing culture of sexual violence against women, especially women known or assumed to be non-heterosexual.

The summit schedule and presenter line-up has now been released and several observers have wondered how the global church can gain from excluding so many participants from a conversation that already affects them.

A Possible Approach to Conversation

I know several more people who have met with attendees or plan to do so ahead of the summit. If you’re among them, reflect on and/or pray about your approach before you do. I offer you a few items you might consider to help guide your thoughts:

  • Concerns: What most concerns you about the summit given what you already know? What are you hearing from SDA Kinship, from the Seventh-Gay Adventists film community, and other sources? Believe Out Loud published an article on this today too; are your questions being answered? If not, what other questions do you have?
  • Goals: What do you think the church wants to accomplish with the people it intends to gather? What might the church worker you reach out to be able to tell you about the denomination’s goals? What questions might you have about whatever they tell you?
  • Your Own Story: What’s your personal stake in what happens at the summit? Does your contact already know about it? If not, how might you share your story with them in a brief, but relevant way? What about your biography and experience do you most want them to remember when they go to all the sessions at the summit and/or vote on any statements that result from it?
  • This Friendship: How do you plan to keep in touch with this person after you talk? What if you might be able to share with them over the long term, no matter what their opinions are right now? Would that continued relationship be meaningful to you? If so, how can you let them know?
  • Overall: Simply enjoy being one human sharing conversation with another: you and this person, regardless of their organizational status, are peers. Enjoy their company as much as you can and consider that they may be even less at ease with the conversation than you are! Whatever is said, however it’s said, offer them grace.

Climate Concerns

The climate for workers at the General Conference hasn’t been too open in the last few years. Some have shared with me that they feel hyper-monitored or even repressed because of informers and backlashes. They don’t want any drama; they want to keep working and serving, so they guard what they say to colleagues and church members, especially in sensitive cases like this. This is one of a few possible adaptations to a surveillance subculture.

In this climate, should you have the chance to speak to a church worker, please do whatever you can do to show that you want to keep their confidences and honor their willingness to discuss freely with you. Also, the denomination is quite comfortable framing the “issue” in terms of arguments and decontextualized text debates. If conversants refocus their discussions on real people, their lives, families, and consciences instead, that’s likely to produce more effective and more humane outcomes all round.

My Thoughts

To be sure, as an individual, I have very strong opinions on the arguments and the last 40+ years of research and experiential evidence, and I continue to pursue my own inquiry about the subject. I could argue confidently about this with family and friends, but for the last several years, I’ve chosen not to. I don’t see these debates as a good use of my time or energy or as beneficial for the people involved in them. The Backfire Effect is real.

I also don’t accommodate these debates for the same reason that I wouldn’t debate a White supremacist about ethnic segregation. I don’t accept the core premise that the mainstream’s “approval” or “agreement” is required or appropriate in this case. If they don’t own the “standard” from which Others deviate, they also have no authority to police it.

We are each born into this life and come to know ourselves as one of billions. We’re not responsible for the demographic categories we occupy. We are responsible for the quality of relationship we nurture with people in and beyond those categories. That’s what guides me.

What about SDA Kinship?

As far as the SDA Kinship membership goes, I think there is an incredible, mostly latent power in its stories and in how widely members’ stories vary. I don’t think Kinship should respond to the denomination’s Single Story about LGBTI people (“Not a category of their own, just a broken, maladjusted subcategory of us!”) with a Single Story of its own (“Just like you, but with a twirl!”). At minimum, SDA Kinship is an LGBTI group and not just a “gay” one; not all members remain Adventist today—some have been chased out of membership and others have voluntarily moved on.

But beyond these basics, the organization shouldn’t agree to tell a Single Story because it’s not the Borg. It thrives because it isn’t. Members have different experiences, different beliefs, different approaches, and different strengths to bring to the organization’s table as well as to the commonly held table of their church. The under-acknowledged fact is that LGBTI people have co-built, co-funded, and co-staffed the Seventh-day Adventist church from its founding days and continue to do so. They don’t serve the church to claim any special stars in their crown; they serve because of their religious convictions and beliefs in improving the world and witnessing through healing work. For decades, LGBTI Adventists have worked alongside heterosexual members to advance the church’s mission regardless of those heterosexuals’ marital statuses—whether they are unmarried, married, or remarried, whether they are content, struggling, or suffering. And this will always be true.

The diversity of the people who have co-created the church as it stands today—that is what I think makes SDA Kinship such a powerful continuing witness to the mainstream, mainstreaming SDA church. Variance makes learning possible, but we have to be open to that variance in order to draw its best out of it. I do hope the church learns to listen to its own diversity: listening is a holy act, and not listening isn’t sustainable.

Fortunately, the church will have plenty of opportunities to choose new directions for this and similar conversations in the near future: Kinship’s community and its growing cloud of witnesses and advocates isn’t likely to fall silent, and the LGBTI Adventists around the world won’t disappear.

It’s time to start learning; it’s time, they say, to speak up.

By

Seventh-day Adventist Creativity Takes a Hit: Save The Record Keeper

Jason Hill as Larus, an angel in The Record Keeper
Dennis Hill as Larus, an angel in The Record Keeper (2013)

UPDATE: The Record Keeper‘s official Facebook page has posted a statement from the General Conference Communications Director Williams Costa: The GC is “stepping back” from the series’ planned February 2014 release date; no new release date has been announced. Read the GC’s statement (Friday, January 24). See also this extended feature on The Record Keeper: the director Jason Satterlund and co-producer Garrett Caldwell discuss their motivations and the General Conference review process. Caldwell is quoted in the original post below.

ORIGINAL POST FOLLOWS:
The Record Keeper is one of the latest efforts by Adventist creatives to create, to tell a visual story, and to do so accessibly and effectively.

We hope to provide people with a fresh perspective on stories that may be familiar to some, but in a way they may never have thought of before. —Garrett Caldwell, executive producer and associate director of communication, General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

The 11-part web series

It has already won film festival awards and has been promoted by the Adventist News Network and other Adventist news sources.

After premiering in October 2013, release was then delayed until this February. I haven’t seen it yet. I want to.

But now it’s at risk of being shut down. The General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists owns the rights to the series and so is free to block its distribution before it starts or edit it into a shadow of itself.

Save The Record Keeper 

If you value the arts and support #Adventist creativity, encourage the General Conference to release this project so the youthful, visually discerning, and media savvy demographic it was designed for can see and share it with others. 

Williams Costa, executive director of the General Conference communications department, is collecting letters of support for The Record Keeper. Email him at: costaw@gc.adventist.org

Don’t let The Record Keeper become another Rise of the Minions, a promising visual project from the mid 2000s that never saw daylight due to lack of support. It was written by an Oakwood graduate and its trailer voiced by Wintley Phipps. That wasn’t enough.

Spread the word about The Record Keeper by sharing this post or any of the linked articles or Facebook pages about it.

Support creatives. Share quality media. Save The Record Keeper.