To ordain or not

The members of Andrews University's Pioneer Memorial church have been studying the question of whether or not to have women elders. Dr. Russell Staples submitted to us a paper he had written for that study, looking at the general question of women's ordination from a sociological perspective. We adapted the following article from that paper, and publish it as part of our continuing discussion in print. As usual, we encourage your careful study of this topic.—Editors.

Two years ago church historian Martin Marty, commenting on the fact that women constitute a quarter of the ministerial candidates in North American theological seminaries, wrote: "No theological revolution of our time matches that signaled by the entrance of women into the theological schools . . . and into the ministry on such a scale." ¹

The roles women fill are being redefined. More women are entering the working force in this era than in any previous age. And they are entering most of the professions that before had been mainly male domains. Their entry into the ministry antedates this movement and is driven by different motives, but is parallel to it.

In most Protestant denominations the ordination of women has a long history. In fact, generally speaking, women were more actively involved in the work and administration of North American Protestant churches in the nineteenth century than they were during the period between the two world wars. This is as true of the Adventist Church as it is of the other denominations. In the late 1960s and the 1970s women began entering the ministry in large numbers, and presently almost all of the Protestant churches have ordained women clergy. ²

The major cultural and social shifts that took place after World War II opened up new opportunities for women in all spheres of society. The criteria for entering the professions changed from the traditional status-and sex-defined eligibility to those of competence and efficiency. That same era saw an increase in the number of college educated women. The proportion of B.A. graduates they constituted rose from 30 percent in 1950 to 45 percent in 1972. With an accompanying sharp decline in birthrate, increasing numbers of women gained the freedom to explore career opportunities. And with the passage of federal laws regarding equal opportunity—for example, the 1964 Title VII act that outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex—many women began to enter traditionally all-male professions.

In this new intellectual and social climate, those women who felt called to the ministry began to see in the churches spheres of discipleship in which they could make a positive contribution, and saw no valid reason barring them from ordination. Obviously, many male clergy and lay leaders in the church agreed with them.

Some of what has been written opposing this movement of women into the ministry portrays it as a capitulation of the churches to pressure from the women's movement. A more thoughtful analysis is inclined to give greater weight to other factors.

Societies have institutions in keeping with their character, and when a social system undergoes massive changes, the institutions within that system will also change. Who would deny that over the past two decades the American family, and especially the American urban family, has changed drastically? Sociologists attribute much of the change taking place in the church's patterns of ministry to a conscious effort to minister effectively to changing parish circumstances.

The Adventist Church seems to have made tentative steps in this direction in the early 1970s, recommending that women who felt called by God to the gospel ministry should attend the semi nary. And in some cases the church provided sponsorship. It has now apparently retreated to a holding pat tern.

Our church should not feel obliged to accept as a model for its own actions what others may do. However, it does need to understand what is happening in the wider world and the cultural climate that informs such grand-scale social changes, for it must eventually decide how it will relate to them.

What do sociologists see?

All human doing and thinking take place in social settings, and thoroughgoing sociologists endeavor to understand church decrees and ordinances against their social background. They pay particular attention to the way the parties in the discussions make their arguments and the scriptures they use. The difficulty for the church, of course, is that Scripture makes no clear statements either mandating or forbidding the ordination of women. From this point of view, the issue revolves around hermeneutical method. Those who interpret the passages by placing them in their cultural context find no weighty reason to withhold ordination from women, and those who insist upon a literalistic interpretation make a case against their ordination.

Since the arguments on both sides have been multifaceted, long, endorsed by prestigious scholars, and in neither case direct, a sociologist would be inclined to view them all as attempts to support preconceived ideas.

I often hear it said that those churches with a liberal orientation ordain women and the more conservative ones do not. While this is true of the Missouri Synod among the Lutheran churches, many of the most conservative church bodies are more open to the ordination of women than are their liberal counterparts. For instance, in 1977 three relatively small and ultraconservative Methodist-related churches—the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), the Wesleyan Church, and the Church of the Nazarene—had 1,044 ordained women pastors between them, while the more liberal 12-million-member United Methodist Church had only 319.

There seems to be another dimension to the issue. Churches with a high view of the sacraments appear to be more reluctant to ordain women than do the nonliturgical churches. The reason underlying this may be a lingering concept of female ritual impurity (a concern we will deal with more fully later). Because of it, the idea of a woman preaching may be more acceptable than that of a woman fulfilling priestly and sacramental functions.

And there is yet a further consideration. Ordination not only confers the right to preach and perform the sacraments; it also elevates to a position of authority in the church. Churches differ in their responses to female authority. On the whole, because the more highly educated are used to judging proficiency by objective standards, they apparently find it easier to accept female leadership than do blue-collar workers.

(The large number of ordained women [1,572 in 1977] in the Assemblies of God Church make a notable exception to this generalization. Clearly, in this case intense religious belief and experience override social conventions. Simply stated, that church believes that it dare not withhold ordination from those the Spirit has anointed.)

How many ordinations?

Even defining ordination itself is not as simple as it might seem. While Christian churches agree on the broader outlines of the definition, they differ considerably on the finer details.

Protestants generally agree that the early church practiced two forms of ordination: that to the diaconate and that to the gospel ministry. Most Protestant churches consider the diaconate to be a class of officers separate from the clergy and charged chiefly with material duties (Phil. 1:1; 1 Tim. 3:8). Beyond this, there seems also to be a fairly general consensus that the second form of ordination is to the ministry of both word and sacrament, whether that ministry be lay or clerical. While the grades of ministry within this ordination may vary, there is but a single ordination.

Adventist Church practice harmonizes with this general understanding. We differentiate between the ordination of deacons and ordination to the ministry. And although Adventist Church policy doesn't specifically state it, we consider ordination to eldership and to the ministry a single ordination because it confers on both grades of ministry the rights to preach and to administer the sacraments and the authority to rule. These three elements constitute the fundamental offices of the ministry. (No Protestant church regards marriage as a sacrament, and so the right to solemnize marriages is more a legal provision than an essential mark of the ministry.)

Local elders, then, hold the essentials of the office of ministry. In contrast to pastors, their jurisdiction is regionally restricted and they do not receive a salary. But for the most part, Protes tantism understands this in terms of grades of ministry and not in terms of a different kind of ordination. Licensed ministers, for instance, may not celebrate the Lord's Supper or baptize or solemnize marriages unless they have been ordained as local elders. In other words, until they are ordained as pastors, it is the ordination to local eldership that confers upon them the essential offices of ministry.

In light of this, the 1974 and 1984 Annual Council actions seem particularly significant. Their significance does not lie in the fact that they authorized the ordination of women as local elders in the North American Division, but in the proviso that while women elders may perform the general duties of an elder, including the right to celebrate the Eucharist, they may not baptize. (This proviso is implied in the 1985 Annual Council deliberations on the ordination of women, but not specifically applied to the 1984 ruling.)

If my interpretation is correct, this exceptive proviso raises weighty questions. Restricting grades of ministry to particular regional jurisdictions is simply a legislative matter. But has the church the right to divide the authority conferred by ordination, or any precedent for such an action? How can it distinguish between the right to baptize and the right to celebrate the Eucharist? What is the meaning of an ordination that authorizes the preaching of the Word and the celebration of the Eucharist but denies the right to baptize? This dividing of its meaning is tantamount to reducing the divine order of ordination to the level of ecclesiastical legislation and enablement.

Nor can the church overcome the difficulty by distinguishing between the ordination of local elders and clergy. Not only is there no precedent for this in Scripture, but the church would still have to maintain different ordinations for male and female local elders—an untenable position.

There is one office of eldership in the church, not two; and there is but a single ordination to that office. I cannot see that it is possible to ordain women to any other eldership than that to which men are ordained. Anything short of this would have to be some kind of legislative enablement to an extraordinary ministry, not ordination.

In general, then, we must seek the reasons churches hold different positions as to the ordination of women on sociological rather than biblical or theological grounds.

Why do many in the Third World oppose?

Members of our church come from a wide variety of cultures, some from tribal societies with a sacral worldview and others from within the great world religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. Although women may constitute the majority in the Christian churches in such societies, only in exceptional cases have they been ordained to any form of ministry. In the recent discussions in the Adventist Church, members of these cultures generally were not in favor of ordaining women. Much of this opposition stems from concepts of the holy and of ritual purity and uncleanness.

All religions have concepts of the holy that may include holy beings, holy things, holy places, and holy time. Adherents believe that these must be protected from defilement. The holy is both powerful and dangerous, so the priest who performs sacramental rituals must be spiritually and physically whole and pure—neither maimed nor polluted.

The sources of pollution are many; one may be defiled by contact with death, disease, and that which is impure. But women are the major casualty. Because most societies associate ritual uncleanness with the female reproductive cycle, they bar women from intimate contact with the holy and therefore from priestly functions. The privileged ritual status many such societies give postmenopausal women makes obvious their belief.

This should not strike us as particularly strange, for the Old Testament maintains similar concepts of ritual purity. In fact, the explicitness of the laws in Leviticus 11-22 regarding the clean and unclean and ritual purity exceeds that of the regulations of most other known societies.

In many places the New Testament shows that these concepts continued on into its time. For example, after Jesus touched the leper, He could not "openly enter a town" because He was regarded as being ritually unclean from the contact (Mark 1:40-45, RSV). Jesus apparently respected the feelings of the people of His time in this matter. And it was to replace ritual ideas of purity with a moral understanding of it that Jesus said, "Hear me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a man which by going into him can defile him; but the things which come out of a man are what defile him" (Mark 7:14-16, RSV).

The rules for the churching, or purification, of women, remnants of which remained in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer until recently, show that the medieval church also retained this understanding of purity. Society now understands cleanness in scientific categories. But though it does, these earlier concepts of the danger of defilement that women pose remain a weighty, although usually subliminal, consideration in those churches in which a major function of the priesthood is the performance of the sacraments. Because of the danger of ritual impurity, women are not regarded as suitable candidates for this office. Similar ideas underlie some of the arguments for a celibate clergy.

I believe this is one of the reasons many Adventists in Third World churches do not favor the ordination of women. They and the societies in which they live are still too close to concepts of ritual purity and defilement to accede wholeheartedly to women preaching in holy places, handling holy things, and performing holy rites.

There are two other less weighty reasons for the reluctance of the Third World church to acquiesce in the ordination of women. In the first place, most traditional Third World societies have been male-dominated to a degree we find difficult to understand. In the massive social revolution now taking place virtually everywhere, women are being accorded unprecedented authority and prestige. The traditional male role is threatened in the home and everywhere else. Ordination to the ministry confers not only the right to perform the sacraments but also a degree of authority to legislate and govern. I have found that men whose authority in the home and in the workplace is threatened are some what reluctant to have it eroded in the church as well.

And second, where church member ship is comprised predominantly of women and children, I have found both men and women hesitant to have a woman pastor lest the church appear to be some kind of women's society. This may be a concern in the United States as well, but I suspect to a lesser degree.

I have noticed that Third World persons who harbor these views generally raise a biblical argument—the lack of a positive mandate—in defense of their stance. They seem reluctant to spell out the real and much deeper reasons.

Can women minister effectively?

Before concluding, we must ask two fundamental questions: Have women in ministry enlarged and enriched the ministry of the church to its own members? and Have they made the church's outreach more fruitful? The bulk of the large literature that covers, from every conceivable angle, the experience of women in ministry in North America says yes.

Women in ministry perform many tasks and fill particular roles that complement the work of the male clergy. Women excel particularly in specialized ministries: chaplaincies in colleges, hospitals, the military, and so on; team ministries in evangelism; and specialized ministries in multistaff churches. Women can often relate more effectively than can men to women—especially the young, educated, and professional women—and to children, and to people in certain life circumstances.

But women pastors minister effectively in every conceivable church set ting. Surveys indicate that some congregations rate their female ministers as better preachers than the male ministers on their staffs.

On the other hand, women in ministry encounter difficulty with some population groups. These problems are generally most intense in single-pastor churches with traditionally conservative congregations, and among some of the minority groups.

Some people, particularly some men, so identify the role of the pastor with maleness that they are not sure how to relate to a woman pastor. Should they relate to her as a woman? And is it possible to relate to her as if her sex makes no difference?

Some tradition-oriented male leaders have difficulty relating to a woman's exercising of clerical authority. And the history of women in ministry in North America is replete with examples of women whom churches have felt were overly preoccupied with the concerns of the women's movement.

But all in all, women in ministry have now become an intrinsic part of the ecclesiastical establishment in the Protestant churches of North America. Sociological expectations are that the percentage of women pastors (now about 5 percent of the total) will continue to increase well into the next decade and probably beyond that. The denominations that are ordaining women have learned to maximize the gifts of both men and women in ministry. Impartial observers are firmly convinced that the harmonious blending of dedicated ministries has strengthened and enriched those churches.