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Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

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Risking injury for justice

This is a marathon, not a sprint. Image via Women's March: https://twitter.com/womensmarch/status/822990468321595392
Image credit: Women’s March, January 21, 2017
This evening’s reports are that 3.6-4.3 million people or more gathered in major cities across the United States and thousands more gathered worldwide, all in solidarity with the Women’s March in Washington, D.C.

The Women’s March movement has had some major hiccups since its birth in the pro-Clinton secret Facebook group Pantsuit Nation. I’ve shared others’ ambivalence about its founders and messaging, and didn’t participate personally though I supported several people who did.

Reports have also been encouraging. The people who moved across cities and towns today include hundreds of thousands of people in every possible social class and on every continent. Light may not have dawned for them until November, but many of them are now declaring fed-up-ness, articulating support for women’s rights as human rights, and hitting the streets in ways that defy the very human impulse to ignore conflict, disagreement, and the disagreeable.

Yes, they’re late. In the context of human history, we’re all late, but Angela Davis reminded marchers in DC today that our organizing for justice across communities and issues still counts and is still needed.

No matter when in the story of justice people join the cast, they risk some injury.

Society’s oppressive default means that clapping back against injustice through street protest means risking contact with police or others with volatile temperaments and access to weapons. Clapping back in direct conversations or confrontations with those who passively or actively support the current order can mean being tagged a troublemaker and alienated from social and professional networks.

While there’s nothing holy about being injured in the pursuit of justice, it’s so common a consequence of social change work that it can be easy to expect or even valorize it.

Today, I co-ran a session on clapping back in local faith communities with my colleague Verdell A. Wright. One of the things we invited attendees to think through is a risk assessment: if they were to respond to oppressive actions or rhetoric, how vulnerable might they become? What resources could they draw on? Who might tangibly support them?

It’s easier to take proactive action against oppressive theologies and policies when you have a strong support system and can bear the cost of responding to attacks. Developing the resources to persist despite injury and through healing is a dimension of the resilience I wrote and taught about last summer.

And resilience is exactly what the participants in today’s global marches will need to endure social oppression’s dismissals, counterarguments, and shape-shifting. As the US organizers wrote tonight, “This is a marathon, not a sprint.”

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Core questions for Christianity

In order for us to become whole we must reject the culture that shapes our abuse and dissociate ourselves from the institutions that glorify our suffering.
In the classic book Christianity, Patriarchy, and Abuse, several writers and feminist theologians discuss how Christianity teaches people, particularly women, to accept suffering as a utility for spiritual growth or an explicit virtue modeled by God Godself through Jesus.

This was a theme that I and Herb Montgomery addressed during our talks at the Spectrum Conference on atonement and nonviolence this fall.

In the first chapter-essay, coauthors Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker broach the conundrum that people who want to keep participating in religion face: we have to determine whether our faiths are fundamentally flawed or simply complicit with cultural oppressive patterns. Neither is a fun conclusion to come to.

As we make that determination, though, we have to be careful that we don’t simply become apologists, making shallow excuses for our religions as Brown and Parker say: “they don’t mean it; they said they were sorry and would be better; they need me/us; we can fix it if we just try harder and are better; I’d leave but how can I survive outside; we have nowhere else to go.”

I’ve heard the latter few justifications several times in the last five years, and may have made some myself, while male ministers have debated whether female colleagues who share similar and sometimes greater workloads should receive the same denominational credential as they do. The denomination has declined to treat all of its ministers equally, and ministers and members alike make comments like “Leaving this church would leave me in cold isolation.” It’s not just women’s imaginations that are limited in this system—the source of the quote in the previous sentence is a man who’s invested almost 40 years in denominational work and cannot imagine a whole, healthy life without it. That concerns me as much as I imagine it would concern Brown and Parker.

“Only if the church is the place where cycles of abuse are named, condemned, and broken can it be a haven of blessing and a place of peace for women. That the church is such a place is not clearly evident.” —Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker

While these authors come to bleak conclusions about the historical Christian tradition, they also counter-propose a compelling vision of how Christianity and Christians can express faith that “frees” people instead of “imprisoning” them in the assumption that the best they can hope for in life is enduring suffering patiently.

As I continue my public faith work, I keep asking and beimg asked the question “Why stay?” My answers have changed since I first began my work, but still boil down to this:

If I can be a counter-illustration just by showing up, that’s fun; if I can cooperate with others in the spaces between the bricks and logs of an institution carrying on as normal, that’s great; and if either of those things is no longer true, I will stop. (“When faith fails, people move on.“)

In the meantime, it’s better for me not to daydream about changing the character of a multi-million-member organization from the edge: you have to be in the center to do that, and the center turns much too slowly for the kinds of people I’m committed to.

But out on the edges, when we recognize people are overtly suffering and where we can take much more fluid direct action, we don’t need permission to work with them, and we don’t have to wait for the fundamental logic of the institution to change. We can acknowledge the system’s gifts and weaknesses with clarity, and work without flinching with all the people, not just those our institutions deign to include.

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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.

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Doubt as corrosive

Evangelical author Lisa Sharon Harper spoke at The Justice Conference in Chicago last month, shortly before the release of her book, The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right. Since the launch, she’s been hosting short live video broadcasts where she comments on each book chapter and highlights the key issues it raises.

I listened to one tonight (via Facebook Live; not captioned).

In this video, Harper acknowledges the impact of gender injustice and patriarchy on women who lead. She argues that the ideal of shalom (a) decouples gender from leadership “calls” and “capabilities,” and (b) further refuses to make gender an excuse to dominate any category of human.1

It breaks relationship when there is the impetus to dominate one over the other… We were created to partner in our dominion with no distinction in the way that partnership looks in Genesis 1 or Genesis 2. The way that [domination] plays out is consequential. It has the potential to squash people’s calling, to squash their spirit.” —Lisa Sharon Harper

I resonated with Harper’s observations on the women of Nuns on the Bus, aninitiative of NETWORK that I’ve tracked since hearing NETWORK’s executive director Sr. Simone Campbell and her peers live at Georgetown a few years ago. As Harper says in the video, these women are people who have “found their voices” despite the cultural tale that older people should consider winding down and stepping back, and despite ecclesiastical discomfort with vocal, public, and moral female leadership. These women are using their voice nationwide to challenge federal budget priorities, advocate for fair and equitable access to housing and healthcare, and promote consciousness about issues from immigration to voting rights.

Harper also shares some of her personal experience with being demoted from worship teams and prayer groups when men began to debate whether women who were doing ministry could do ministry. she reflects on how that controversy about her and other women’s capacity to exercise dominion, to steward, and to serve yielded in her a deeply corrosive doubt about the value of her skills, the quality of her ideas, and the merit of her voice.

Years later, I was on-staff with another Christian ministry that actually really valued women’s leadership. And I began to see the difference between [me] and the women who came up through that ministry. Those women assumed leadership. Those women actually—they had great ideas, and they would just run with them… and they would just get stuff together and they would do it and it would be brilliant and amazing! And people would be served, and stuff would flourish.

But with me, having had that [domination] background, I realized I…had to step back and wait to be asked to lead, and then when somebody asked me, I was like ‘No, that’s not me; I can’t do that,’ or my ideas would never get put forward because I didn’t think that they were valuable enough.” —Lisa Sharon Harper

Systemic social oppression damages its targets. It also damages those who wield it. But it especially damages its targets in minority stress and internalized devaluation as well as in overt violence and discrimination. It corrodes both social interactions and the health of our cells.

So we can ask, as Harper does, “Where have we believed the lie that we are not fully made in the image of God?”

And then we must go further to ask, “How can we transform the social structures and institutions and laws and environments that teach and reinforce that lie, so that we can all instead live the truth?”

It’s not enough for a few fortunate individuals to declare the truth in our private universes: truths that the external world never validates can easily be reframed as delusion. I’m more interested in a world where we don’t have to scratch up remedial self-concepts against an oppressive social current, and where individuals can be whole because we all are.

  1. Throughout the video, and the book chapter it’s based on, Harper refers to “both” genders—just two. That model leaves quite a few people out from the ancient world of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, let alone variously gendered people in contemporary society. I suspect that this focus is about the kinds of evangelicals she is writing to. [Back to text: ◄]

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An Affirmation: Ann Roda-Hernandez

I posted this note earlier today in a closed discussion group for people who support women in ministry and promote their full affirmation in the Seventh-day Adventist denomination. I’m re-posting it outside the group so that I can share it with the person I wrote about.

Thank you, Ann, for your encouragement, rooted-ness, patience, and service.

Photo of Ann Roda's January 10 weekly column.
Pr. Ann Roda specializes in ministry to families and children at New Hope Adventist Church, Fulton, MD. 1 This was her weekly column in the January 10 bulletin. Click the image to read at full size.

 “Every week, Pr. Ann Roda writes a short column that’s part of our congregational bulletin. This was this week’s column. (It fits in with the ministerial team’s sermon series on discipleship for January-February.)

“When I say ‘I support the ordination of women in Adventism,’ I have ministers like Ann in mind. And on those occasions when I’m tempted to abandon the wider Adventist community—this is my family and my family knows exactly how to wear a sister out—I imagine not knowing people like Ann, I shudder a bit, and I take a nap instead.

“I would challenge [Ann] on describing any role in the Church as 1st/2nd/3rd place since I think that’s arbitrary social value talking, but I get the bigger point. And she’s lived that bigger point in her own life: she traded a great corporate job to study and serve in a denomination that’s still arguing whether she’s qualified to do the work she does. She answered the call and is doing the work regardless.

“As the apostle Paul wrote, not all parts of the body draw praise, and because of our own skewed value systems we don’t rank them equally, but they all serve a function, and they all have merit. All of them.

“I support the calling, training, ordination, and work of women in Adventism because I support the effective ministry of every believer, in every role, through every office, and in the exercise of every spiritual gift for the purpose of the maturation of the entire Body and the transformation of the world God made and ‘so loved.’

“It’s not just about the mini-organization I call my family and not just about the ‘clergy.’ I support women in Adventism because I support all of us.” —Keisha E. McKenzie

After J. David Newman retired in 2012 and Kumar Dixit emigrated to Vancouver in 2013, New Hope welcomed two new ministers: Mike Speegle (from Washington) and Jason Decena (from Pacific Union College). Ann Roda has been one of the congregation’s notes of continuity through all of this change.

Today, Mike told us that the pastors have been discussing the guiding vision they hold for the work they do together. They shared it today and I am so here for it. It is, simply:

To help you live out the kingdom of God wherever you are.

This vision seems perfectly aligned with how these pastors actually interact with congregation members, so I don’t expect to see whole new sides of them. But I feel good for them and for the congregation that their pastoral philosophy is now explicit. I hope they’ll go on to articulate this vision in more detail, and I will comment here when they do.

[1] This is my fifth year intersecting with New Hope as a regular visitor, and it’s my first as a member. ↩

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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.