A challenge to the Adventist church.

The gentleman who wrote this threw out a challenge.  He doesn’t know it but I believe that this challenge applies especially to our church.  Consider the following :-

—

We swim in a sea of feminism. Gynocentrism applies in many areas of life. And that leads to a testable hypothesis, although I dunno how to do it:

Hypothesis: the more strictly a denomination hews to Bible precepts of marriage and church leadership, the fewer divorces will be seen.

Null: Divorce numbers from different denominations would show no difference, for example the number of divorced Episcopalians per 100,000 would be no different than the number of divorced Church of Christ per 100,000. Repeat for multiple denominations.

How do partition the set of churches into “Bible following” and “not so much”? Start with women as pastors/teachers/leaders/elders/bishops/deacons/etc. Any church that allows women to lead and/or teach men is liberal, under this partition. Any church that bars women from preaching, from leadership positions, etc. is not liberal.

Problems: many. First of all, it’s a moving target. As the mainline Protestant churches crash in numbers, congregations either move to other denominations or form new ones. Some are tinkering with changes – such as allowing individual churches to have some women as officers, on their on decision – as I write this. So a denomination that was not liberal 40 years ago is now sliding rapidly. Others are shifting differently, there are Episcopal churches that have removed themselves from the US leadership and placed themselves under the authority of bishops in Africa, in order to shield themselves from the whole homosexual marriate / priest / bishop issue. Thus a congregation might have been part of a liberal church 5 years ago, and now is not.

Second of all, some of the most conservative denominations are small, on the order of 50,000 people in toto. That denominator will make them more sensitive to even a handful of divorces, and thus could skew results.

And this is just for the Protestant churches. The RCC and the Orthodox have the same problems, but they tend to be more difficult to see due to organizational structure. Latin Mass churches might have fewer divorces than the 100-guitar-african-drum-Buddhist-gong mass churches, for example.

Then there is the “boiling off” problem. Consider Jenny Erickson, who was kicked out of an obviously conservative Protestant church for good reason. How many women left that church afterwards, in a huff over “misogyny”, I wonder? And where did they go, to a storefront, a mega, or something else? There’s obviously going to be self-selection that would tend to push divorce-prone out of conservative churches, and towards more liberal ones.

However, with all the caveats above, this would be a worthwhile study to do, except that I fear no denomination – not one – actually keeps the stats. There’s not much to be gained in doing so, and a fair amount to lose.

If one denomination would lead the way, as you, Dalrock, have championed: “We, the Strict Bible Church, have the lowest divorce rate of ANY denomination”, perhaps the challenge would lure other conservative churches to follow. And the silence of the mainlines would speak for itself.