Called By God
Peter and his companions consulted together briefly. They could hear these Gentile converts speaking in tongues and magnifying the true God.“ Can any one forbid water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”( Acts 10:47). Peter asked. Thereupon he took responsibility for the baptism of the Gentile converts in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. A time-established barrier had been broken.
After establishing their converts in the faith, Peter and his companions returned to Jerusalem, overjoyed because they had been instruments of the Holy Spirit.
Soon Peter found himself under interrogation by the apostles. Why, they wanted to know, had Peter unlawfully accepted uncircumcised people into the church?
Church policymakers were told how the Holy Spirit had affirmed those Gentile converts. For this reason, Peter explained, he did not feel free to bar from baptism into Christ the Gentiles who had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit“ just as we.”
The Jerusalem church leaders accepted this evidence. They not only ceased their opposition but actually glorified God. They rejoiced that their Lord wanted Gentiles as well as themselves.
This story highlights a dramatic turn-around in early church policy.
When I assumed the duties of an associate pastor in the 1970s, I thought, If God is pleased to call women into the ministry and to bless them with a portion of His Holy Spirit, then this action on God ' s part will soon become evident. At that point surely the church will cease considering ordination of women to the ministry to be inappropriate,( Actually, a resolution favoring ordination of women to the ministry was made as early as 1881; See Appendix C, p. 235.) just as the early church ceased to consider the acceptance of Gentiles into the faith to be unlawful.
However, as Annual Councils and General Conference Sessions followed one another for years with the results of repeated“ further study” never resulting in full acceptance, other women ministers and I were puzzled. After a growing number of us had spent years of service in the ministry without seeing a move toward ordination, I thought at first that my hope deriving from that Biblical model was not going to materialize.
Still later I realized that the analogy did hold, but in a different way from what I had expected. The denomination now is much larger than the early church, both geographically and numerically, and so progress on women ' s ministry to this point has been local rather than global in scope. Where there has been opportunity for women to accept God ' s call, a demonstration of the presence of the Holy Spirit has occurred, and in many such cases leadership has been more than willing for women to be fully accepted into ministry. The Potomac and Southeastern California Conferences, in which a growing group of women have been ministering during the last two decades, officially support their women ministers; Ohio is also affirma-tive. During 1989 two union conferences( the Columbia Union Conference Executive Committee on May 4 and the Pacific Union Conference on June 7) voted actions approving ordination of qualified women, either in general or specifically. These church entities agreed to delay ordination until after the General Conference Session of July 1990( See appendix C for relevant actions taken at the
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