From Thursday Nov. 1 to Tuesday Nov. 6, I was a part of a group of student leaders that had the opportunity to attend the North American Division (NAD) year-end meetings.
These meetings had leaders from the NAD, such as union and university presidents and pastors from different churches, come together to make decisions for the NAD. They also made presentations on what the NAD is doing in regard to the mission of the Adventist church.
The theme this year was Working Together with Jesus, and on each day of these meetings, we had a specific agenda that we worked through. There were different business sessions where we had voting rights and were able to participate in voting along with the rest of the members of the NAD on major church decisions.
One primary decision made was the NAD taking its official stance on women's ordination. They voted to reject the Compliance Document that was voted in by the General Conference (GC) at the Annual Council held Oct. 11-17.
This document discusses how the church should relate to unions that are “out of compliance” with General Conference decisions (specifically in the case of the NAD’s practice of ordaining women). The compliance document stated this process: Entities out of compliance will be warned (visitations, prayers, hymns), reprimanded (shame anyone who is not in compliance), removal (stripping of voting rights, delegates and potential removal from the division).
On Sunday Nov. 4, a major discussion took place about the document and how it changed the design of the church from a constituency based model, where people at the local levels make decisions, to a hierarchical model, where the leaders at the top make the decisions for the people.
This was also a time for people to discuss the negative impact that this document had on women in ministry. Throughout this discussion, the primary theme that came out was that women in pastoral positions deserve to have the same rights and opportunities afforded to men for doing the same pastoral work.
The NAD year-end meetings are important for the youth because we are the present and future of our church. All of the student representatives from Adventist and public universities across the NAD came together and assembled a statement about what the youth need in our church.
The central point of the statement is that youth long for opportunities to create intentional relationships with our church leadership and to have opportunities to be actively involved in facilitating conversations and forming decisions within our church body. As youth, we need to be aware of the things that are happening in our church leadership and try to make a difference by getting involved with leadership at a local level so that the church doesn't end up dying.
Image credit: Dylan Gibbons