BATTLE CREEK, Mich. — Campaigners against women’s ordination are struggling with a simple yet annoyingly inconvenient reality: Ellen G. White’s gender.
“We do our best to seek Ellen White’s counsel in all things but this women’s ordination fiasco would have been so much easier if God had sent us a man as a messenger instead,” said lead campaigner Manny Mansome, bemoaning the “whole woman co-founder thingy” that plagues efforts within Adventism to permanently block the ordination of women.
“The Mormons have it easy with Joseph Smith,” said Mansome. “We poor Adventists, however, are stuck with a woman that even Smithsonian Magazine identifies as one of the most influential Americans of all time. Kinda hard to write off her leadership abilities.”
Mansome says that he cannot, for the life of him, understand why God showed Ellen White her visions when she clearly wasn’t a male or the head of her household. “What was God thinking?” asked an exasperated Mansome. “Couldn’t He just have given Joseph Bates the visions? What about James White for that matter?”
Mansome said that he and his colleagues, convinced as they are that a woman’s place is in the home, are also really struggling with Ellen White’s 19th century mobility. “She just couldn’t stay put!” complained Mansome. “She criss-crossed the country with this manic relentlessness and even went continent hopping. I have no idea how she had time to write.”
Although Mansome admits that Ellen White is a major obstacle to overcome he says that “ordination has been, is and needs to continue to be an old boys’ club initiation ritual for church heavy weights. We can’t have girls crashing the party.”
