SILVER SPRING, Md. — “The General Conference San Antonio World Session has been upgraded and will now take the form of a men’s conference,” said lead organizer Solo Muchachos to Adventist press this afternoon. His statement came on the heels of even bigger news that all female delegates and other female event participants have announced plans to boycott the world session.
The reason for the female boycott of the GC session stems from what boycott organizer Lhettus Showem has described as “completely unabashed under-representation of women as delegates to the event.” Showem pointed to official delegate data in which a mere 17% of the 2,566 delegates who will be making the decisions on future church policy are women.
“How are we ever going to learn to treat women equally in our church if the vast majority of our decision makers are men?” asked Showem. “It is completely ludicrous that at the GC session where delegates will take a historic vote on the ordination of women, so few females actually get a say in the matter.”
Showem explained that female delegates had agreed that if women are this underepresented and ignored even before the voting begins, they may as well boycott the event en masse. “Ironically, we as Adventists don’t seem to have faith that God can speak through a woman,” said Showem.
Muchachos, for his part, explained that despite the boycott, the world session would continue. “The Alamodome is booked, we’ve ordered haystacks ingredients and, quite frankly, the transitioning of the session into a men’s conference wasn’t much work at all.”
