Investigation into the role of women during early christianity : implications for the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Zimbabwe

Abstract

Employing a hybrid methodological framework which infuse African feminism and social-scientific criticism as research methodology, the study focused on investigating the role played by women during early Christian households’ pre-AD 70 milieu, an epoch understood by this research to cover the Hellenistic, Pauline, Synoptic Gospel, and deutero-Pauline households. The research sought to discover the implication of an African feminist and social-scientific reading of the above-named epochs’ texts which speak on the role of women in church as compared with their male counterparts and establish the light that reading cast on the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Zimbabwe’s (SDAZ) role assigning praxis between women and men. The findings were used as case study materials to justify reasons for her women’s ordination ban, a position that is against her official church policy directives contained in the 20th edition of the SDA church manual’s pages 78 and 85 which approves women’s ordination for deaconry and eldership roles to elected female church members. It was evinced that she opposes the SDA church manual directives on women’s ordination because of their incongruence with her African epistemological, philosophical, and cultural frameworks, which to a greater extent, resembles those of the early church’s milieu and thus through cultural borrowings, both the SDAZ and the early church ascribe collaborating-with-men roles to women, while the key authoritative ones are reserved for men. On this regard, she sees her ban on women’s ordination as having biblical support since she claims to be continuing with the early church practice. On the other hand, because the SDAZ’s epistemological, philosophical and cultural worldviews are diametrically opposed to those of her sister churches in the Euro-American continents, an ambivalent ordination of women practices thus exist in the SDA global church where the Euro-American SDA churches ordain with ease their women for the same roles that the SDAZ women are barred from. However, a deeper study on the SDA church’s policy documents discovered that their controlling body, the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventists (the GC) has never approved women’s ordination for eldership and commissioned pastors’ roles even by the date of writing this research (see Chapter 2’s points 2.1 to 2.2.3), thereby revealing that the official position in the SDA church as regards women’s ordination, is that all Adventist women regardless of the territory they are in, are barred from the ordination rite. This reality shed the light necessary to see that the SDAZ is not violating her church policies in barring women for ordination. Rather, she is standing by the GC’s official position which currently does not approve the ordination rite to be administered to any female church member. As such, it is the Euro-American SDA churches that are opposing the GC position and thus are to face disciplinary action as is stipulated in on the 67th page of the SDA church manual. With this, the study concluded that the ambivalence is unofficial, yet unavoidable. However, the research recommended, as a future work, that there be studies to establish reasons why the universal ordination of women pronouncement carried in the 20th edition of SDA church manual’s pages 75 and 85 came about if the GC has not yet endorsed it. Also, that whether it gets approved in the upcoming GC Session to be held from 03 - 12 July 2025, they modify the phrase so that it does not project a universal application since the research foresees that the universal ordination of women is likely to be rejected again at the up-coming 2025 GC Session. The territorial ordination of women practice is thus the most likely outcome according to this study, where each territory/Division is to be allowed to decide on whether or not to ordain women guided by its epistemological, philosophical and cultural frameworks. The research revealed too that, although SDAZ women are barred from key leadership roles which require ordination, a plethora of other equally key leadership roles are open to all members regardless of sex or gender, ordained or non-ordained, through the GC working policy BA 60 10’s non-discriminatory employment practice claim thereby projecting the SDAZ as an inclusive church which offers leadership roles to all qualifying members regardless of gender, sex, race, ethnicity, class, or geographical location, which is enforced by the GC working policy FB 05 - K 05 (see Chapters 2 and 6). These led to the recommendations suggested in Chapter 7, where the SDAZ has been challenged to consider the extent to which the inevitable reality of the non-static nature of culture and the effects of cultural borrowings from her Euro-American SDA churches, and / or other continents of the global village may be allowed to inform her future ordination practices just as the Greco-Roman of the early church, which she claims to be continuing with, also later evolved to partially relinquish its previously rigid laws of persons, property and family for example, which denied privileges to women and other classes of people who were denigrated on gender, class and sex basis such as women, slaves and plebeians and began to offer them roles and statuses which were previously blocked for them. The SDAZ therefore, ought to stand ready to justify her claim that she is continuing with the early church cultural practises which governed relations between men and women by establishing whether her Zimbabwean/African culture is likely to begin to loosen its rigid patriarchal ethos, like did the Greco-Roman, to allow women to assume roles and rite previously barred for them, which their counterparts in Euro-American SDA churches are currently enjoying.