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Yes I agree with Tom man and woman were created to have dominion. I agree also that equality is not sameness with B/W. I personally am somewhat neutral with respect to WO but I do believe that if the many conversions and baptisms we see in China are at the behest of the Holy Spirit, it may be time to recognize this as Peter recognized the Holy Spirit working with the Gentiles in Acts. Brotherly Love thank you and I agree Paul spoke of general principles of male leadership. I believe some he applied within his culture, such as head coverings, not that he caved to his culture, just that he tried to apply the general principles within the culture. We need to remember that there were exceptions and modulating texts with regard to to the strictest interpretation of the texts in question, both in the Pauline epistles and in the Hebrew priesthood. Deborah was a judge in Israel, the highest role then present outside of the priesthood. Women were allowed into an outer court of the temple, but Gentiles were never allowed inside. If in Christ there is no Jew or Greek and no male or female, to assume one prohibition is done away and one never will have any exceptions is certainly open to discussion, especially because the roles of public speaking and exhortation of a pastor were filled for many years by Ellen White. We are told to anticipate the priesthood of all believers, that in the last days your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and in Christ there is no male or female. Paul also in I Corinthians 12 lists spiritual gifts in order, first apostles then prophets then pastors and teachers. If God has used women as prophets, it does not seem to be unscriptural that he could at some time choose to use them in the lesser role of pastor. Ellen White also says women should work as pastors, and (in a separate place) that ordination is overemphasized. I agree with Tom that some of this may be setting up a straw man. I am not here to defend women;s ordination per se but to say that there are sufficient Scriptural and evidentiary reasons to give it earnest consideration and not dismiss all who after thoughtful consideration believe it to be Biblical as extreme or not students of the Bible.

The Florida Pathfinders and Adventurers had their annual Red Zone this weekend at Forest Lake Academy. The children all had a lot of fun, and as far as I know, there were no big problems. But what I really wanted to tell you is that my boy's "bug" came in second for the Adventurer boys in the whole state!!! Yay! The children were given a kit to put together to make little bugs that would race down a board. They were allowed to do anything they wanted with the parts, as long as the bug didn't weight more than 3 ounces. After four heats,Sonny came in second! He was very excited, especially since he won a remote-controlled truck. Jesus loves ALL the little children, even the special-needs child.

But my point in even mentioning that Ann Roda is a dynamic speaker was simply to refute what I have heard quite often by those that oppose women as pastors. Specifically I have heard objections about their speaking and preaching ability without any regard for the content of their sermons - things like they speak too softly or that they just don't like hearing a woman's voice delivering a sermon. I agree that that is not necessarily an essential quality of being a good pastor, even if it might be a superficial distraction. But I think we can all agree that being a dynamic speaker is an asset to getting a message across. It is hard to pay attention to someone that is not a good public speaker.

I don't recall anyone here trashing a woman speaking against WO because she was a bad speaker. I do recall critical comments about the content of what she said. There is a difference. I do recall several here responding to my request for opponents of WO to relate their own personal experience with women pastors specifically acting in a pastoral capacity and all I got in response were several harsh comments about having once heard an isolate remark or idea stated by a women pastor in a sermon that they found offensive or inappropriate. Maybe that was what you recall? But you do highlight an odd irony that has been noted already about women as speakers. Many who oppose women as pastors readily refer to the passages about women needing to be silent in church and not teaching men. Yet if seems painfully obvious that they intentionally use..., include women in public speaking and teaching against women doing that very thing. But I think it seems a rather intentional ploy to use women to lend credibility to what they are saying against women as pastors. Seems hypocritical to me.

I don't see anyone here confusing equality with sameness. That is really just a strawman argument. The Creation story in Genesis is clear in describing that God created both man and woman and gave them dominion over all creation. Dominion is rulership/authority/leadership, being in charge over all things on earth. Notice that it does not make a distinction between the man and the woman regarding this role God gave them before sin entered and messed with all that. The inequality was caused by sin. If you believe we are to be overcomes of sin, you should understand it to mean a restoration to the way things were before sin entered the picture, back to equality of man and woman.

It is now one hundred years since drugs were first banned -- and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my new book, Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs, to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong -- and there is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it. If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves. I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels. From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and helped to kill her. From a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man. From a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer. From a man who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected President of Uruguay and to begin the last days of the war on drugs. I had a quite personal reason to set out for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. Ever since then, I have been turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind -- what causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can't stop? How do we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a heroin addict. I guess addiction felt like home to me. If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: "Drugs. Duh." It's not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That's what addiction means. One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments -- ones that were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is just water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more and more, until it kills itself. The advert explains: "Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of ten laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It's called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you." But in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then? In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn't know what was in them. But what happened next was startling. The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did. At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that there was -- at the same time as the Rat Park experiment -- a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported using heroin was "as common as chewing gum" among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers had become addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified; they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended. But in fact some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers -- according to the same study -- simply stopped. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so didn't want the drug any more. Professor Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It's not you. It's your cage. After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for fifty-seven days -- if anything can hook you, it's that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can't recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is -- again -- striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.) When I first learned about this, I was puzzled. How can this be? This new theory is such a radical assault on what we have been told that it felt like it could not be true. But the more scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I discovered things that don't seem to make sense -- unless you take account of this new approach. Here's one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well happen to you one day. If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief. The heroin you will get from the doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street-addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right -- it's the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them -- then it's obvious what should happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets to meet their habit. But here's the strange thing: It virtually never happens. As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts and leaves medical patients unaffected. If you still believe -- as I used to -- that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander's theory, the picture falls into place. The street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different. This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It's how we get our satisfaction. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find -- the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 'bonding.' A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else. So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection. (The CHURCH! Added by GayatfootofCross) When I learned all this, I found it slowly persuading me, but I still couldn't shake off a nagging doubt. Are these scientists saying chemical hooks make no difference? It was explained to me -- you can become addicted to gambling, and nobody thinks you inject a pack of cards into your veins. You can have all the addiction, and none of the chemical hooks. I went to a Gamblers' Anonymous meeting in Las Vegas (with the permission of everyone present, who knew I was there to observe) and they were as plainly addicted as the cocaine and heroin addicts I have known in my life. Yet there are no chemical hooks on a craps table. But still, surely, I asked, there is some role for the chemicals? It turns out there is an experiment which gives us the answer to this in quite precise terms, which I learned about in Richard DeGrandpre's book The Cult of Pharmacology. Everyone agrees cigarette smoking is one of the most addictive processes around. The chemical hooks in tobacco come from a drug inside it called nicotine. So when nicotine patches were developed in the early 1990s, there was a huge surge of optimism -- cigarette smokers could get all of their chemical hooks, without the other filthy (and deadly) effects of cigarette smoking. They would be freed. But the Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop using nicotine patches. That's not nothing. If the chemicals drive 17.7 percent of addiction, as this shows, that's still millions of lives ruined globally. But what it reveals again is that the story we have been taught about The Cause of Addiction lying with chemical hooks is, in fact, real, but only a minor part of a much bigger picture. This has huge implications for the one-hundred-year-old war on drugs. This massive war -- which, as I saw, kills people from the malls of Mexico to the streets of Liverpool -- is based on the claim that we need to physically eradicate a whole array of chemicals because they hijack people's brains and cause addiction. But if drugs aren't the driver of addiction -- if, in fact, it is disconnection that drives addiction -- then this makes no sense. Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers of addiction. For example, I went to a prison in Arizona -- 'Tent City' -- where inmates are detained in tiny stone isolation cages ('The Hole') for weeks and weeks on end to punish them for drug use. It is as close to a human recreation of the cages that guaranteed deadly addiction in rats as I can imagine. And when those prisoners get out, they will be unemployable because of their criminal record -- guaranteeing they with be cut off even more. I watched this playing out in the human stories I met across the world. There is an alternative. You can build a system that is designed to help drug addicts to reconnect with the world -- and so leave behind their addictions. This isn't theoretical. It is happening. I have seen it. Nearly fifteen years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe, with 1 percent of the population addicted to heroin. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse. So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs, and transfer all the money they used to spend on arresting and jailing drug addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them -- to their own feelings, and to the wider society. The most crucial step is to get them secure housing, and subsidized jobs so they have a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for. I watched as they are helped, in warm and welcoming clinics, to learn how to reconnect with their feelings, after years of trauma and stunning them into silence with drugs. One example I learned about was a group of addicts who were given a loan to set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they were a group, all bonded to each other, and to the society, and responsible for each other's care. The results of all this are now in. An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. I'll repeat that: injecting drug use is down by 50 percent. Decriminalization has been such a manifest success that very few people in Portugal want to go back to the old system. The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country's top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings that we would expect from the Daily Mail or Fox News. But when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass -- and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal's example. This isn't only relevant to the addicts I love. It is relevant to all of us, because it forces us to think differently about ourselves. Human beings are bonding animals. We need to connect and love. The wisest sentence of the twentieth century was E.M. Forster's -- "only connect." But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection, or offer only the parody of it offered by the Internet. The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live -- constantly directing our gaze towards the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us. The writer George Monbiot has called this "the age of loneliness." We have created human societies where it is easier for people to become cut off from all human connections than ever before. Bruce Alexander -- the creator of Rat Park -- told me that for too long, we have talked exclusively about individual recovery from addiction. We need now to talk about social recovery -- how we all recover, together, from the sickness of isolation that is sinking on us like a thick fog. But this new evidence isn't just a challenge to us politically. It doesn't just force us to change our minds. It forces us to change our hearts. Loving an addict is really hard. When I looked at the addicts I love, it was always tempting to follow the tough love advice doled out by reality shows like Intervention -- tell the addict to shape up, or cut them off. Their message is that an addict who won't stop should be shunned. It's the logic of the drug war, imported into our private lives. But in fact, I learned, that will only deepen their addiction -- and you may lose them altogether. I came home determined to tie the addicts in my life closer to me than ever -- to let them know I love them unconditionally, whether they stop, or whether they can't. When I returned from my long journey, I looked at my ex-boyfriend, in withdrawal, trembling on my spare bed, and I thought about him differently. For a century now, we have been singing war songs about addicts. It occurred to me as I wiped his brow, we should have been singing love songs to them all along. The full story of Johann Hari's journey -- told through the stories of the people he met -- can be read in Chasing The Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, published by Bloomsbury. The book has been praised by everyone from Elton John to Glenn Greenwald to Naomi Klein. You can buy it at all good bookstores and read more at www.chasingthescream.com. Johann Hari will be talking about his book at 7pm at Politics and Prose in Washington DC on the 29th of January, at lunchtime at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on the 30th January, and in the evening at Red Emma's in Baltimore on the 4th February. The full references and sources for all the information cited in this article can be found in the book's extensive end-notes. If you would like more updates on the book and this issue, you can like the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/chasingthescream ................... If we, The Church, can be truly safely connected and transparent Like JESUS modeled and call us to be We can't help but grow and heal together! If I be lifted up I will draw all

An Ordained/Commissioned clergyperson has a greater freedom to baptize than does a licensed person. A licensed person cannot hold certain elected offices. An ordained person may be elected President of the General Conference, a Commissioned/licensed person cannot serve as GC President. There are other issues. Ordained clergy are at the top of the denominational totem pole as to what they can do. Commissioned clergy are a step below as to what they can do. Licensed clergy are a step below Commissioned as to what they can do, but a step above Commissioned as to what they can be elevated to do, as they can become ordained. Commissioned clergy are not expected to be ordained. NOTE: Both males and females in the SDA Church are Commissioned. However, the majority of Commissioned people are female. NOTE: Females can fill Federal chaplaincy positions without being ordained. The Federal courts have thrown out ordination as a criteria for working as a Federal chaplain on the grounds that such a requirement discriminates both against women and also against denominations that do not ordain anyone. NOTE: I played a tangential role in the Federal decision that ordered the Department of Veterans' affairs to remove its requirement that VA Chaplains be ordained. A female filed a lawsuit against the VA over my selection for a 16 hour per week position as a VA chaplain and alleged that my selection amounted to discrimination against her. The Court decided that the ordination requirement discriminated, as I have stated above. but, it decided, in her case that she was not selected due to the fact that she did not meet valid requirements to serve in that position. So, the Court ordered the VA to remove the ordination requirement, as had previously been done in a military case. Now the uniform requirement, on this issue, is that denominations "endorse" their candidates. With this change "ordination" is considered to be an internal denominational matter in which the government does not have any interest.

I have never understood the fascination with being ordained. To me it seems like it's an ego trip. The rewards that come with bringing someone to Christ so far outweigh whatever a person could get from ordination that there is no comparison. Working for God is its own reward. The joy that comes from it cannot be found in anything else on this earth.

OK. Show me some scriptures that name a specific denomination with "scriptural authority". Show me some scriptures that tie WO with ordination of gays and non-believers. You need to change your handle from "brotherly love" to something else. I see no brotherly love in most of your posts.

Conversion - fast or slow? Yes!

One great book.

Racism is an aspect/manifestation of sin, and the only thing in human experience that can combat sin is the heart change that comes from conversion, or in other words surrendering one's heart to God.

Missing the point...

England was on the Julian calendar, and Spain was on the Gregorian calendar...at the point of 23 Apr 1616, England's Julian calendar (for Shakespeare's death) was 10 days behind Spain's Gregorian calendar where Cervantes died. England didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752.. (a well-known fact amongst genealogists )

I was 27 and my wife was 24 when we married. Statistically we had almost everything going for us. However I was unaware of a personality disorder she had until it changed venue after about 13 years into the marriage. We lasted until 18 years but as many of you know, the marriage failed. With diet and lifestyle, there are things we can do which boost our chances of staying healthy. Likewise, with romance there are thing we can do to boost our chances of a successful marriage. However marriage takes two people saying yes and divorce takes only one person saying no.

this is simply more rhetoric from another wannabe prophet... The website owner, Ron Buhler (of Toronto, Canada) isn't an SDA, completed or otherwise. Reading some of his other writings, it is quite obvious that not only is he pushing false teachings, but he's also pushing false medical claims and endorsing phony and harmful cancer "cures" - one of which involves the drinking of a bleach solution (perhaps the cancer "cure" involves suicide). He writes that cancer is actually "mold".... He also claims that there are 4 members of the Godhead: Father, Mother, Son, and Daughter. His opinations on this idea rather remind me of goddess worship. He endorses Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church's hate ideology, and goes so far as to claim that the Westboro Church is akin to Noah in the days before the flood. Buhler wants everyone to participate in "imprecatory" prayer, meaning, praying for curses on people, institutions, and particularly on the United States. I have no use whatsoever for the views of this person. He needs to find a new hobby, apart from sending out his unsolicited detritus...

Did you watch the sermon? Did you listen to her story?

I suppose some may notice or wonder why I am posting so many videos of women pastors. My motivation is simply a reflection of what I have recognized as the hard part of this ongoing debate in the Adventist Church over WO. The strongest resistance often comes from a position of lack of exposure to or experience with women pastors. We ordain that which we have witnessed and experienced. Ordination calls for the living testimony of the calling of the one to be ordained that demonstrates the fruit of that calling. I realize that sadly most members around the world have been deprived of even the most basic opportunities that I have, and that even many here in North America have not been exposed to enough women in ministry demonstrating the fruit of the calling to overcome their doubts about this issue. Perhaps it is hard to blame them for not accepting something that they really have little or no experiential knowledge about. So the stories of women pastors are very important to get before the people. They give witness to the reality that these women are genuinely called and should be recognized without reservation or partiality or distinction.

Suicide is not the unforgiven sin that keeps people out of an eternity with Christ! God's plan of salvation includes mentally ill people! Your list of mental health conditions clearly places you in a place where you will have struggles. The message of the gospel is NOT that you will never have any of these. Rather it is that God will walk with you as your path through life takes you into those situations. It will probably be that you will find more relief from some than you do from others. In any case, keep up the work with mental health professionals, take your medications as proscribed and work on maintaining your relationship with God. He will not leave you.

​ On one of my recent trips to Africa, I was with an African girl in a shopping mall. Africans generally dress modestly. We saw a girl who dressed more North American upscale mall outfit, I hope you understand what I mean. This beautiful girl walking with me said "She will never get a good husband' it was once of those statements that just made so much sense when she said it.