WHY EQUALITY, by GERI ANN FULLER

In the past, TEAM’s newsletter has been just that, a newsletter. We have not written about our purpose, our why. We have informed readers about our activities, scholarships, and fundraising, perhaps assuming that our name, Time for Equality in Adventist Ministry, was self-explanatory.

More recently, we thought, what if someone were to pick up our newsletter from a tabletop and wonder, who or what is TEAM? Why are we raising money, giving scholarships, and attending conferences?

TEAM is a group of Seventh-day Adventists, mostly but not exclusively women, some of whom started a conversation swimming in a lake in Western Pennsylvania at the home of Pat Habada in the mid-1980s about how discordant it is that our church hires women to be pastors and allows them to perform all the functions of a pastor but denies them the full-throated endorsement we call ordination. To be sure, ordination is not a biblical term, but it is a public recognition and affirmation by the church that God has called an individual to serve and that the church confers its blessing of that calling. Our church, with a few exceptions, denies ordination to women. We think this is wrong, considering God called a woman, Ellen Gould Harmon White, to be an instrument in starting the church in the first place.

Although we were not successful in persuading the church to vote to ordain women, we decided to move forward to be a presence and a voice calling for equality in ministry. From TEAM’s first days, our purpose has been to call for the Seventh-day Adventist Church to fully embrace and exemplify the teaching of Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (NIV).

What if that was the plan from the beginning when God called Ellen White amid the ashes

of the great disappointment in 1844? “To make known to others what I have revealed to you” (White, 1922, 1940, p. 67.2).*

In the Scriptures, God spoke the same truth to different people in different times in different

ways. What if the intention behind the call to Ellen White was to tell the world at this moment in history, “Let’s all be part of this. Let’s all work together to spread the Gospel commission to a suffering world. I can call anyone I want, and I might call you next.”

The church at the end is not going to be an administrative behemoth. It’s going to be people working together and led by the Holy Spirit. What if Christ crucified and risen became what matters most to us, and we united behind those who lead us as pastors and affirmed them in their work? Maybe we were supposed to go in a different direction all along. If God called one woman, why would He not call others? It’s time for us as a church to look more deeply at what it means to be called.

*White, E. G., 1922, 1940. Experience and teaching of Ellen G. White. Silver Spring, MD: Ellen G. White Estate, Inc.