Adventist Women in Ministry: Rebecca Davis
Not officially ordained. Merely a “de facto” pastor,” just like Berean Associate Pastor Danielle Pilgrim. Pastor Davis also served, once upon a time, as an associate pastor at Berean SDA Church (from 2011-2015). She is currently Senior Pastor of the Washington-Thomaston district in Georgia. She is often absent from her home church, on the road as one of the Adventist Southern Union’s featured speakers. Such was the case in regard to her appearance at the “Berean Womans Day,” August 13, 2016.
Pastor Davis earned a BA degree in Ministerial Theology at Oakwood University in 2004. She subsequently attended Andrews, but took half a year off while attending this school’s Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary in order to teach English and religion in South Korea. By 2007 she had attained a Master’s of Divinity degree. She was initially hired by the Potomac Conference of Seventh-day Adventists to become the Chaplain of a program called “In-Reach” (In-reach and outreach may have melded into a current endeavor that is simply called “Reach“). Rebecca Davis also became the first African American teacher at Shenandoah Valley Academy in Virginia (despite the fact that it has been around since 1908). In March of 2009 she was called by the South Atlantic Conference to blaze another trail. Below are some excerpts from a biography placed in the 70 page “Campmeeting 2016” program for South Atlantic, an event at which Pastor Davis was “consecrated,” for it does not yet represent the majority opinion that women of God who also happen to be Seventh-day Adventists can be “ordained.”
In March 2011, Pastor Davis received a call to the South Atlantic Conference, where for four years, she served as Assistant Pastor at the Berean SDA Church in Atlanta, GA. In 2014, she was introduced as Pastor of the Washington SDA Church in Washington, GA, and the Mt. Sinai SDA Church in Thomaston, GA; making her the first female pastor in the conference to be assigned a church district. Pastor Davis has two beautiful children, Justin Zachary Davis II, age six, and Olivia Nicole Davis, age two. Olivia and Justin are gifts from God!
AN INTRA-DEMONINATIONAL CONTROVERSY
Should women be allowed to preach the gospel in the Seventh-day Adventist Church? Should women be allowed to preach at all? Any Adventist who might choose to firmly reply to this question in the negative would find themselves in an uncomfortable position, since the principal prophetic luminary of the faith, Ellen G. White, happened to be a woman. Traditionalists note that she never claimed to be a preacher (yet she certainly did a lot of preaching). An argument against the side of the women has some good scriptural backing. First Corinthians 14:34 contains this statement by Paul:
“Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.” (NIV)
The condition of “submission” described at the end of this proscription is not abject in nature. The contributions of the daughters of Eve are not to be rejected by the sons of Adam. In a marriage partnership the husband’s authority is rather like that of the Vice-President of the United States, a public servant who shows up in the Senate chamber only should there be a tie-vote. His job is to break the tie. Ephesians 5:25-27, ironically written by the same perceptive individual who also wrote the preceding verse says this:
“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.” (NIV)
The Seventh-day Adventist denomination accepts that it may, under the direction of the Holy Spirit, modify its doctrine with regard to practically any issue, including the ordination of women. The fact that it has not yet chosen to do this is not a reliable indication that it will never do so. Church doctrine, like the Constitution of the United States, can be amended should the Spirit direct them to do so. The subject was up for a vote at the 2015 General Conference session of the Adventist denomination. Would each separate division of the church be allowed to decide for themselves as to whether women should be ordained? The idea was rejected, but not overwhelmingly so. The vote was 1,381 con to 977 pro. Five persons abstained. Some of the winning side broke into applause when the rejection was announced. Michael Ryan, a retiring VP rebuked these partisans: “There is nothing triumphal about this. There are no winners or losers.” General Conference President Ted N.C. Wilson poured oil upon the troubled waters.
“It did NOT disallow women from serving as commissioned church pastors.”
“It did NOT disallow women to serve as ordained elders in the local church.”
“It did NOT disallow the ordination of deaconesses.”
A attribute of English Common Law is the idea that “if it is not expressly forbidden, then it is permitted.” Here is a link to the series of articles that this citation is extracted from, from the archives of ordinationtruth.com. This entity advocates an adherence to Scripture and Spirit in its attempts to clarify the issue, an offers many resources that are intended to aid in the construction of a “unified” view for the project’s sponsor, the Council of Adventist Pastors. A present accommodation prohibits the ordination of women, but by no means prohibits them from speaking in church.
The inflexibility of Paul on this issue has been countered by the pro-women’s ordination forces through a technique of Scriptural interpretation known as the “Principle-based Historical-cultural” approach. In this method, the spirit of the law is deemed to be superior to the letter of the law. A less “interpretive” technique (and official church policy) is the “Historical-grammatical” approach. Ted N.C. Wilson refers to this simply as the “Historical” approach, and reaffirms Ellen White's own advocacy of a literal approach to what the Bible reveals. In the course of a sermon at Berean SDA Church he quoted the Epistles of Peter as to the inadmissibility of Scripture to any “private interpretation.” The Historical approach, in times of less than stellar clarity (and these times are very infrequent in the Bible) will “compare Scripture with Scripture.”
“And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days.”
The scribbler of these lines will addend another set of statements by Paul, who is speaking on God’s behalf. “Silence in church” is a type of minor housekeeping issue. Like former United States President Jimmy Carter, no issue was too small to merit Paul’s attention. The same may be stated with regard to Ellen G. White. Tactics are, however, always hopefully tied to a grander strategy. God reveals His higher purposes in Galatians 3:26-28:
“So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
“The church is one body with many members, called from every nation, kindred, tongue, and people. In Christ we are a new creation; distinctions of race, culture, learning, and nationality, and differences between high and low, rich and poor, male and female, must not be divisive among us. We are all equal in Christ, who by one Spirit has bonded us into one fellowship with Him and with one another; we are to serve and be served without partiality or reservation. Through the revelation of Jesus Christ in the Scriptures we share the same faith and hope, and reach out in one witness to all. This unity has its source in the oneness of the triune God, who has adopted us as His children.”
(Did you spot the “male and female” part? It remains for some future commission to eliminate the highly-charged, antediluvian, and elitist reference to “high and low” from this Fundamental Belief. I have already done so in my own hyper-egalitarian mind. Hair-splitters from other denominations love to cause me grief over phrases like “the oneness of the triune God,” just on the basis of its prima fascia linguistic absurdity. They are not necessarily Unitarians. They just love to argue. I reply that such seemingly paradoxical statements in the Fundamental Beliefs should all have footnotes that lead to the tens of thousands of words that it takes to properly clarify the depths of thought that undergird these instances of “exegesis by reference.”]
The truth stated just above may not have been the official title of Pastor Rebecca Davis’s Sabbath sermon, but it shall serve quite nicely as one for now. Solomon lauds such perspicacity in Proverbs 31:10-31: “Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies…”(KJV) Solomon keeps his ideally virtuous woman as busy as a bee for the following 20 verses. Here is Proverbs 31:27: “She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.”
Ellen G. White, like Solomon, does not advocate that we squander any of our precious time. On page 215 of “Messages to Young People she writes, “Satan lies in ambush, ready to destroy those whose leisure gives him opportunity to approach them under some attractive disguise. He is never more successful than when he comes to men in their idle hours.” Pastor Davis built a good case that women are, relative to men at least, terribly overworked. They have the additional burdens of childbearing, childrearing, and “housework” to add to the wage-earning segments of their lives. Ellen White and Solomon would probably praise them for their typically high level of activity, bestowing upon them accolades rather than offers of tea and sympathy. Pastor Davis warned about taking too much of this “good thing” upon oneself.
Pastor Davis asserted in her sermon that women deserve both accolades and sympathy. Men may be, at least in Sister White’s eyes, negligent through their failure to live up to the good example set to them by women. Solomon, whose reputation for wisdom was often contradicted by his actions, may have considered the unequal apportionment of labor between the sexes to be so entrenched that it was part of the natural order of things. The Bible notes that Solomon was a great naturalist. He was also adept at mathematics, as he seems to have had no trouble multiplying wives.
Pastor Rebecca Davis was introduced by Berean SDA Lead Pastor Fredrick Russell. He said that Pastor Davis was the first “woman of ministry” in the South Atlantic Conference. He described her as the Jackie Robinson of the conference.
A focus on teaching, rather than preaching probably explains why Dr. Lister-Smith is prominent as a educator, rather than a minister. A favorable review that she gave to a book by Terrell McCoy on Adventist education dominates her current internet footprint, but it is hard to discover information about her preaching activity. An article in the April 2007 edition of Southern Tidings magazine mentions that during a consecration ceremony at Carolina Adventist Academy “The consecration speaker was Pennie (sic) Lister-Smith, Ed.D., Conference vice-president for education.” Her speech may well have been much like a sermon, but she must have done so little preaching as to slip beneath the normally highly functional radar of Pastor Russell.]
Pastor Russell referred to the verses in Joel that reveal the enhanced role women will play (do play) in eschatological (end of the age) affairs. The Bible includes this information twice, as Peter quotes Joel in order to enlighten perplexed bystanders concerning the peculiar manifestation of the initial descent of the Holy Spirit. Peter sets the record straight in Acts 2:15: “For these are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day.” Pastor Russell explained what a euphemism is to the congregation by declaring “commissioning is ordination by any other name.” He revealed his personal view of the issue: “The day will come when women are ordained just like their male counterparts; they do the same amount of work.” He added that Rebecca Davis had been first in many realms, both personal and professional. “We honor her…”
Pastor Rebecca Davis’s presentation was immediately preceded by a song, one which stated that “for your goodness and your mercy, we give you all the praise!” Pastor Davis restated this observation, and added that “He is worthy of our worship.”
She said that she was glad to be present, and first offered her thanks to Berean Women’s Ministry leader Currine Harris. She then thanked Pastor Russell, whom she described as “determined to make me cry today.” She included wunderkind Pastor Austin Humphreys in the thank-you list (“I am his mentor, you know,” she noted), and did not fail to mention Pastor Danielle Pilgrim (who is following her on the trail that she started to blaze way back in 2011). Luke 10:38-42 was now cited:
“As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed–or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”
Studies and statistics were further provided, but thy all just served to verify facts that everyone is already well aware of: women are doing much more housework than men, and according to the Centers for Disease Control women are feeling tired (this CDC link claims that women constitute 60% of the American workforce, a full 12% higher than Pastor Davis’s figure). The pastor noted a similar study by the American Psychological Association. Here is an informative, and also very depressing quote from an APA study:
“A large body of literature on occupational stress has identified certain job and organizational characteristics as having deleterious effects on the psychological and physical health of workers. These stressors include high workload demands coupled with low job control, role ambiguity and conflict, lack of job security, poor relationships with coworkers and supervisors, and repetitive, narrow tasks. Unfortunately, these stressful attributes characterize many of the jobs that are traditionally female (e.g., clerical/data entry work, caregiving). Stress from such work can give rise to low job satisfaction, poor job performance, and impaired health.” (Swanson, Piotrkowski, Keita, & Becker, 1997)
Pastor Davis remarked that often women respond to workplace stress in a counterintuitive manner; they work even harder! The pastor included men into the typically overstressed environment of the early twenty-first century: “We do, do, do, do, and overdo!” The focus was than returned to the augmented levels of stress that women seem to be subject to.
THE MAIN BODY OF THE SERMON
The domestic encounter between Jesus, Martha, and Mary that is described in the 10th chapter of Luke is immediately preceded by the Parable of the Good Samaritan. There exists a strong connection between the attempt at self-justification by the lawyer who provoked Christ’s relation of the parable (“Who is my neighbor?”) with a similar attempt at self-justification by dedicated hausfrau Martha (“Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself?“).
Martha, like the lawyer, also attempted to get Jesus to endorse her way of doing things. She sought to confirm that she is, indeed, was a most virtuous woman. She was older than her sister Mary. She tried to dominate Mary. As it was Jesus who is came to see her, and not vice versa, it was she who appeared (at least in her own conceit) to have the home-field advantage. She was the mistress of the house, hardworking Martha, good old domestic stalwart Martha. Jesus beheld the tableau of the two sisters. One is diligent to a fault. The other is seemingly indolent. In Luke 10:40 the right honorable Martha accuses Jesus of apathy for her plight: “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”
Martha, despite her touch of smugness about this fact, was still a doer, a real go-getter. “Doing is good,” Pastor Davis remarked. But the story of the domestic encounter between Jesus, Martha, and Mary contained not one, but two good things. Jesus does not condemn Martha for her perspicacity, but replies in Luke 10:41-42: “‘Martha, Martha,’ the Lord answered, ‘you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed- or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.’”
Pastor Davis now referred to a book titled “First Things First,” by Stephen Covey et al. The pastor stated that one of the premises of this book is that most of us are working in the “urgent.” Somewhere, in the midst of this maelstrom of frenetic activity the “important” gets lost. The Wikipedia article on the book displays a four-quadrant decision-making matrix whose creation was inspired (perhaps apocryphally) by Dwight D. Eisenhower. This general/president was a technocrat at heart, and was responsible for a vast expansion of the Federal bureaucracy (an act one would not expect from a titular Republican). The “Eisenhower method” is predicated on this statement by the philandering soldier/statesman: “”I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”A sample of the matrix this memorable quote inspired is replicated below:
Pastor Davis asserted that had Martha initially emulated the actions of Mary before she started to keep house everything would have been OK. It was all a matter of setting priorities. Housework would qualify as belonging to the upper-right quadrant in the chart above- important, but not urgent. Pastor Davis recognized that many (perhaps even Martha herself) spin their wheels with activities that would best be allocated to the lower-right quadrant: “Not important & not urgent.” She furnished this stark comment: “Most of what we have to do has nothing to do with nothing!” This deserves a follow-up quote from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” Act 5, Scene 5. Shakespeare seems to be channeling the writer of Ecclesiastes:
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Pastor Davis left the door open for progress by using the modifier “most” rather than the Solomon-like adjective “all” when referring to the sound and the fury of life. But in the tale of Mary and Martha, both women were, as noted, doing good things. Martha was in bondage to her everyday routine, however. Yet here before her stood the Son of God, voluble, and in a mood to share supernatural wisdom with the sisters. Martha’s priorities were very much out-of-whack.
The conventional wisdom of the Hebrews of that era squarely relegated women to the kitchen. Spiritual matters were not considered especially important for women to concern themselves with (Mary was a type of pioneer with regard to her focus on matters of the Spirit). This 2,000 year old prejudice persists unto this day. Women preachers? The very idea is offensive to many. The pastor is currently a very prominent target for the venom and vituperation of the “traditionalists.” She interjected a comment at this point [the truth of which I, the now persistently intrusive summarizer of Pastor Davis’s remarks, testify is painfully true]: “It’s one thing when a man tells me that I can’t stand up here, but when a woman says this it is TOO MUCH!” The modern female critics are all kinswomen of Martha.
The wide-ranging and wretchedly excessive level of activity in the pastor’s life could not be managed were there not a center of gravity that kept thing well ordered. She quoted what a pastor of her acquaintance one reiterated constantly: “No Bible, no breakfast!” She tied this concept into the title of the book she had previously mentioned. “First things first,” Pastor Davis said. A parable of sorts now followed, lifted from the aforementioned book, that revealed the importance of arranging proposed activities into an appropriate sequence, aka “setting priorities.”
A teacher was to give a demonstration to his (her) class. A large glass jar was on the lab table. Beside this jar were quantities of stone aggregates in various grades and grinds, as well as another significant substance which will be revealed at the proper moment in the object lesson.
Step #1- The teacher takes the jar and fills it with large rocks. He (she) then asks the class, “Is the jar full?” The pupils are in agreement, and reply, “Yes. It is.”
Step #2- The teacher adds gravel to the jar. He (she) shakes the jar so that the gravel fills the big gaps that existed between the larger rocks. He (she) now asks the class the same question he (she) had previously asked: “Is the jar full?” Most replied again in the affirmative (and a few may have reserved judgment, humiliated as they now were by having answered incorrectly the first time that the question was posed).
Step #3- The teacher now begins to add sand to the jar, shaking it in order for the sand to settle into every cranny not occupied by the rocks or gravel. The question gets asked for the third time: “Is the jar full?” Even those who had been skeptical after Step #2 were now fully convinced. The class was again unanimous: “Yes! Yes! The jar is definitely full!”
Step #4- The teacher takes a jug of water and proceeds to pour it over the agglomerate a rocks, gravel, and sand that so evidently “filled” the glass jar. The void spaces between the minute grains of sand were now seemingly indisputably filled. Only a nuclear physicist would have the temerity to argue that there yet remained significant spaces between the nucleus and the orbiting electrons that constitute the atoms that comprise the rock, gravel, sand, and water [Pastor Davis did not compromise the simple beauty of this “object lesson” with physics, as the summarizer has now so insensitively done].
“What is the lesson that we are to draw from this demonstration?” The teacher asked this question to the class at large. A bright scholar provided a reasonable answer: “No matter how busy your schedule is, you can always find the time to do more!”
“WRONG!”
Pastor Davis revealed the principal lesson of the demonstration, simultaneously adapting it to the religious content of her sermon. Secularized versions of the “takeaway” doubtlessly also exist, but while illuminating, they are not transcendent (as was Pastor Davis’s custom rendition of the moral of this tale).
“If you do not put the big rocks in first, you will never be able to fit them in later. Jesus is our big rock!”
“If this [Jesus] will literally change our lives, than why don’t more of us do it?” Pastor Davis seemed to be highly exasperated by this dreadful degree of negligence by most “church folk.” [Pastor Fredrick Russell would dedicate the better part of an hour to an extended, but loving excoriation of spiritual slackers in a Sept. 10 sermon at Berean SDA Church. As it will, due to my present lack of spare time, probably remain un-summarized, here is a link to the ENTIRE SERVICE. The loving excoriation commences at time marker 1:55:44 and ends at time marker 2:48:38. I had invited a guest to the service, her first exposure to the LP Berean SDA version of Adventist Sabbath worship. I was just a little apprehensive about how she would react to this atypical sermon by Pastor Russell. I need not have worried, however. She thought it was great!]
[The “theme” verse of the long-running Adventist television franchise “It is Written” is relevant to Mary’s perceptions, and Pastor Davis’s description of it. It may be found in Luke 4:4, and again in Matthew (also, rather miraculously, in 4:4): “But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.”]
“Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone. Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works.”
Pastor Davis noted that the hearing of the word was an indispensable preliminary to the doing of the word. Mary had indeed chosen the better part. But the next step was to put these lessons into practice. Christ taught us to love our neighbors. Who is our neighbor? Everybody! Mary was now equipped to be a good neighbor. Pastor Davis asserted that the churches need to incorporate the characteristics of both Martha and Mary. Mary represented the hearing of the word, the “faith” of the church, and sermons and Bible study are representative of these fundamental activities. The energy and industry of Martha are analogous to reaching out to those in need in our community and in the world at large (the topic of the most recent quarter of Seventh-day Adventist Sabbath School study).
“Its not about what you do or don’t do!”
“Its not about what you eat or don’t eat!”
“Its not about what you wear or don’t wear!”
John Milton went blind, and wrote this poem about it. The last line has been stolen by many, including Churchill. Milton kept on working, however, despite his blindness. He could not just stand and wait.
“So I want to appeal to someone today, to some woman today… “
“It’s OK to let something fall through the cracks.”
“It’s OK to go and get a manicure.”
“It’s OK to go and get your hair done.”
“It’s OK!”
But Pastor Davis sought to look beyond whatever one’s current appearance may be, or the present circumstances of their existence. This appeal was all about the future, and had nothing at all to do with one’s past.
“I don’t care what your hair or face look like!”
“I don’t care what you did last night!”
“I just want to invite you down here to pray… just for the women. Not for the men.”
Pastor Pilgrim (a woman) and Elder McCurdy (also a woman) stood at the front of the aisles to receive the large group (all women, save for one very possessive, or very protective, or very confused man).
Guest Pastor Rebecca Davis (a woman) offered one of her trademark prayers in a venue that had, back in the day, witnessed many of these distinctive prayers. Her trademark is a series of silences between a string of petitions. These silences speak volumes, however, and serve to enhance the solemnity and importance of communicating with God. The next Sabbath would probably find her in some other distant or nearby locale, for a woman’s work is never done.
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