Batchelor Preaches with an Ordained Woman Pastor

by Monte Sahlin

By Adventist Today News Team, July 17, 2014

Pastor Doug Batchelor, senior pastor at the Granite Bay Seventh-day Adventist Church and director of the Amazing Facts media ministry, visited China in May. Despite his opposition to the ordination of women pastors, he met with Pastor Xiaomei Hong, one of many Seventh-day Adventist ordained ministers in China who happen to be women. Adventists there have been ordaining women to the gospel ministry since the 1980s.

On February 6, 2010, he preached a sermon (in the U.S.) against the extension of ordination to women serving as pastors. Video recordings of the sermon have been distributed on the Web and through DVDs. He taught that for a woman pastor to be ordained is not biblical, that there are "distinctions that God has made regarding the roles of men and women."

Because of how well known Batchelor's opposition to women in ministry has become, he was one of the members of the study committee on ordination the denomination's General Conference appointed in order to provide "balance." Adventist Today has been told that in the committee meetings he argued against women being recognized as ordained ministers.