Through the Eyes of a Woman

In  my next few blog posts, I will be taking up the topics of feminism and patriarchy. Who on earth came up with the idea that women should be of less value than men? As far as we can look back into history, we see women treated as less than human beings, without worth. The discrimination of women is astonishing, considering that at Creation, God created humankind in his image, as a double pack of equal worth. Of course, we know that we no longer live in the ideal world created by God and that things went terribly wrong at the outset when the first human couple decided to test their free will. Both Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit: Eve because she longed for more knowledge, and Adam, because he deliberately decided to disobey God’s command. The result was that their ideal world was destroyed. For thousands of years, we as women have suffered most under the resulting oppression and discrimination.  God’s plan, however, was to restore his human children to their original condi

  If you are being punished anyway, you might as well do the thing that earns the punishment. This seems to be the thinking behind the vote that was passed yesterday by the executive committee of the North German Union (NGU) of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The constituents of the NGU voted in 2012 to treat men and women equally and to ordain regardless of gender. This vote was later put on hold, as there were no women pastors requiring action. At about the same time hopes came up that the General Conference (GC) might be interested in changing its stance as it instituted a study commission on ordination (TOSC). These hopes were dashed when in 2015 the GC in session in San Antonio refused to allow local world regions to decide this practice for themselves according to their local needs. In 2016 the leadership of the NGU again took up the matter and tried to find a way to be compliant with the regulations of the world church by giving both male and female pastors the same kind of