San Antonio vote defines “future GC delegate” as “male Adventist with midlife crisis”

The vote passed by a landslide...
The vote passed by a landslide…

SAN ANTONIO, Texas — On the last day of General Conference Session business meetings, a landslide majority of delegates voted to tighten the definition of “GC delegate” to “male Adventist with a midlife crisis.”

Capping off a GC Session marked by numerous attempts to tighten the parameters of church belief, the majority consensus of delegates was that the safest way to preserve the status quo going forward was, in the words of GC delegate Manny Mansome, “to keep having the same guys make all the decisions.”

Mansome said that many felt Wednesday’s hugely laborious process of voting against regionally-approved women’s ordination could have been “streamlined or avoided altogether if the church had not made the elementary mistake of selecting female delegates to join the official voting body.”

To avoid excessive debate at future GC sessions, delegates voted not simply for male gender exclusivity but also opted to bar male Adventists under 50 from being GC session delegates. “We have noticed the tendency of some of our younger male delegates to suggest ideas that are new and go against the grain. They have now been released from future participation,” said Mansome.

Although this is a significant deviation from what many Adventists were hoping would be an increasingly representative and inclusive delegate pool, Mansome did not foresee any major difficulties going forward. “There were so few female and delegates under 30 this time anyway,” said Mansome. “Nobody will notice.”

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9 Comments

  1. Ray Kraft

    Yes! Yes!

    Nothing must change!

    Movements begin as revolutionary, Jesus was turning the religious establishment of his time upside down, so of course they had to kill him . . . and then the revolution is adopted by more and more people and is transmogrified into doctrine and dogma and orthodoxy and theology and becomes the new establishment and then into reactionaryism . . . change is forbidden! . . . and the whole purpose of the original revolution is lost and forgotten.

    Before long the minimum age requirement for GC delegates will go from 50 to 70, then 80, maybe 90, just to keep things under control.

  2. APlusDave

    I used to think that our church had the right ideas. Then came the time when the “Union” level had outlived it’s usefulness in the NAD, but no one wants to fire the folks with all of the money, so they stay in place, sucking valuable church assets out of the system, and adding nothing to the ministry, despite numerous informed recommendations to disband that level.

    Now we come to a point where small-minded men, afraid they will be shown to be the poor leaders that they are, have decided to keep the church in some kind of 1950’s limbo. They steadfastly ignore the fact that there are tens of thousands of people who can be better reached by a woman minister. So they continue to deny the needy because they desperately want to stay “in charge”. How pathetic.

    To paraphrase a frequent contributor to this column, “Woe is all of us!”

  3. Kylie

    What I live about you guys is to help us laugh at ourselves. Humour as the amazing ability to unlock us from hard truths. Be careful this was so very close to the truth.

  4. Pingback: Seventh-day Adventists and Ordination | A Better World

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