This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On 8 July 2015, delegates at the Seventh-day Adventist Church's General Conference Session gathered at the Alamodome in San Antonio, Texas, to vote by secret ballot on a single question, whether division executive committees could decide for themselves whether to ordain women to the gospel ministry within their own territories.
The motion reaching the floor that day had a long path behind it. General Conference officers and division presidents prepared it, and the 2014 Annual Council approved it for a vote at the next General Conference Session, closing a five year debate that had run across the whole denomination rather than in one region alone.
Roughly six hours of floor debate followed, with forty delegates speaking before the ballots were cast. When the count was read, the motion had been defeated 1,381 to 977, with five abstentions among the delegates present.
The vote left ordination itself reserved to men across every division, with no region gaining the authority to decide otherwise for its own territory. Women continued to serve the church as commissioned ministers, the role the denomination had extended to them short of ordination.
What the San Antonio vote changed for Adventism's spread was closing five years of denomination wide debate over whether regional authority could vary the answer to ordination by territory, settling it with one uniform no rather than a patchwork of separate regional decisions.