Resistance is in the Air: The Ordination of Women Continues in Adventism

On March 3, 2018, Bill Miller, President of the Potomac Conference of SDAs and others, ordained female Pastor Renee Stepp into the gospel ministry of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The ordination service took place at the Williamsburg Seventh-day Adventist Church in Virginia.

We live in remarkable times. You can defy the rules of the General Conference, you can defy the decisions of the world church in session and you can defy God’s expressed will about unity and cooperation and no one is disciplined.

Many who are in very good standing in the church are refusing to accept and comply with the counsels given to us regarding church unity. Many are refusing to accept the church’s 1990, 1995 and 2015 decision on women’s ordination. In spite of these world session decisions some are still working at cross purposes to grant women the right to conduct weddings, perform communion service and baptize and ordain elders and deacons.

How can members so openly and publicly disregard the duly constituted and officially binding vote by 3 different world sessions and get away with it? This is not working in unity; this is sowing the seeds of confusion, division and anarchy for which we will have to reap a very bitter harvest one day.

It is time for a serious discussion on unity; but a unity that is based upon coming into alignment with God’s Word, His expressed will, and the voted policies from the world sessions. If this does not happen and if the seeds of discord continue to spread then they will bear fruit and resistance can very easily turn into something worse.

Yet if we would all unite in obedience to the Bible and the Spirit of Prophecy then unity, love and peace would be restored and the final message of obedience by faith could be powerfully carried to the world. The Latter Rain would descend, Christ would come and we would all be able to go home!