Ellen White and the Role of Women in the Church

5. Women Engaged in the Ministry

Some have thought a passage from Testimonies for the Church 8:229-230 provided such a different, confirming statement about women serving as ministers in the same capacity as men: “Young men and young women who should be engaged in the ministry, in Bible work, and in the canvassing work should not be bound down to mechanical employment.” The context is a call for our institutions to train the young people for evangelistic work. Here it seems that “the ministry” is distinguished from “Bible work,” a distinction that seems somewhat blurred in other major statements. EWRWC 9.1

One could argue that in this statement Mrs. White is urging both young men and women to go into all three lines of labor. But that is not necessarily the case. The statement may be understood simply to be urging young people to go into whatever line of evangelistic work is suitable to them, without trying to specify what is appropriate to each gender. To make such a distinction clear is difficult without the sentence becoming wordy and ungainly. And one should note that the burden of the message is not to change church polity to make room for women to serve in the same capacities as men, but rather to encourage the employment of both men and women in soul-winning work rather than in manual labor. EWRWC 9.2