Out here, in the Inland Empire of SoCal - the Seventh-day Adventist Church has a large presence.
The SDA, like the Catholics - does not recognize the ordination of women.
This is from our local paper - The Press Enterprise:
Corona’s Sandra Roberts on Sunday, Oct. 27, became the first woman to lead a Seventh-day Adventist conference, a controversial move the worldwide church says it will not recognize.
Roberts, who last year became one of the first women ordained as an Adventist minister in the United States, was elected president of the five-county, Riverside-based Southeastern California Conference by a 72 to 28 percent margin. A conference is similar to a diocese.
Delegates at the meeting in Riverside’s La Sierra University Church of Seventh-day Adventists stood up and applauded loudly after the result was announced.
“I think this is an idea that’s past its time,” said Robert Edwards, former pastor of San Bernardino’s All Nations African Church of Seventh-day Adventists, after the vote. “I’m grateful she can be the first, and she won’t be the last.”
The vote puts the Southeastern conference at odds with the worldwide Adventist Church, which does not recognize the ordination of women.
Ricardo Graham, president of the five-state Pacific Union Conference, to which the Southeastern conference belongs, said worldwide church president Ted Wilson called him Saturday night to say the election of Roberts “would put the Southeastern conference and Pacific Union Conference in direct confrontation” with the world church.
Graham told delegates that Wilson asked him to convey to them that the election of a woman “would not be recognized by the world church.”
It’s unclear what that may mean, Graham said. World church officials were not available for comment Sunday.
Last year, the Pacific Union conference and an eight-state East Coast conference became the first in the nation to authorize the ordination of women, votes the world church’s executive committee called “serious mistakes” that “weaken the fabric of Church life.”
Opponents of Roberts’ nomination warned that the vote would sow divisions in the world church.
“Unity is moving together,” said Rodney Bowes, a lay delegate from Mentone Seventh-day Adventist Church. “This vote was specifically putting one conference in opposition to the rest of the church.”
Mario Veloso, a retired pastor and a delegate from Yucaipa Valley Spanish Seventh-day Adventist Church, said the conference should have waited until after 2015, when the world church is likely to vote on women’s ordination. Veloso said he is one of about 110 people on a church committee studying women’s ordination. The world church’s General Conference has voted twice against women’s ordination, in 1990 and 1995.
Veloso opposes the ordination of women, viewing it as against biblical teaching.
But others argued that nothing in the Bible prohibits women’s ordination.
Randy Roberts, the senior pastor of Loma Linda University Church of Seventh-day Adventists, said during deliberations over Roberts’ nomination that her election would promote unity, not undermine it.
“If we want unity, we have to fight for unity of all people,” he said.
In an interview after her election, Roberts said the church is stronger when it allows men and women to serve equally.
“God gives each person gifts and talents, whether you’re a male or a female…,” she said. “If we exclude one half of a demographic, we exclude half of a whole lot of gifts God has given to a whole lot of people in the body of Christ.”
Even though the world church forbids ordaining women as pastors, it allows “commissioning” them as pastors.
Roberts was a pastor at Corona Seventh-day Adventist Church from 1995 to 2000. Unordained pastors function almost identically as ordained pastors, said Gerry Chudleigh, spokesman for the Pacific Union Conference.
Edwards, an ordained pastor who once served under a unordained female pastor, views the distinction between unordained and ordained ministers as a matter of semantics. But he said it matters deeply for some people, especially in more conservative parts of the world, because of different scriptural interpretations.
The Southeastern California Conference includes Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, San Diego and Imperial counties. With more than 74,000 members, it is the largest local Adventist conference in the country.
Roberts had served as executive secretary of the Southeastern conference since 2004. A 27-member nominating committee recommended Roberts, who was the only candidate for the presidency.
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