Compromise Fails to Settle Ordaining Women Debate : Ministers: Christian Reformed Church leaders put limits on what females can do in the denomination. The decision fails to satisfy either side.

Leaders of the Christian Reformed Church, reversing an earlier decision to ordain women, tried Wednesday to take a middle road on the issue. But their compromise, it seems, pleased neither side.

Delegates to the small, conservative denomination’s 1992 synod here voted 109 to 73 against final approval of a 1990 decision to open the ministry to women.

Instead, the synod, the church’s top policy-making body, said women should be allowed to preach, teach and provide pastoral care--without being ordained. Without ordination, they will not be able to preside at baptisms or at communion.

“The true trauma of the church has only begun,” said the Rev. Melvin Hugen, a professor at church-related Calvin Theological Seminary here and a promoter of women in the ministry. He predicted that the church “will find out what true anguish and pain and anger is” as proponents of female ordination continue to fight for their cause.

Over the past three years, about 2,700 conservatives in 13 congregations in the United States and Canada have left the 225,000-member church, upset over the possibility of female ordination and what they see as other signs of drift toward the theological left.

After Wednesday’s vote, the Rev. Paul Murphy, president of a group of 5,000 conservatives aligned with Concerned Members of the Christian Reformed Church, predicted that the compromise measure would not placate conservatives who were waiting for the 1992 meeting of the synod before deciding what to do.

“I think they’ll say: ‘I was leaving and this has given me no reason not to leave,’ ” said Murphy. “Obviously, this was an attempt to satisfy everybody and it satisfied nobody.”

The 1990 synod had tentatively approved the ordination of women, pending a two-year period of reflection at the congregational level. That vote had raised the hopes of supporters and had even caused some women to enroll in seminary in hopes that pulpits would be open to them by the time they graduated.

One of those women, Sandra Langeveld, 24, a second-year student at Calvin Seminary, said of the vote: “It’s discouraging enough to make me want to go to a denomination where you’re given the respect you deserve.”

Her fiance, Raymond Blocketer, who just graduated from the seminary, said: “I’m ashamed of this decision. It’s nonsensical. That’s what makes me disgusted.”

In debating the place of women in the church, the denomination is going through much of the same turmoil that accompanied debate about ordaining women in other churches. All of the country’s major Protestant denominations ordain women--and thousands of women have been ordained--but it was not until the second half of the century that most major churches opened ordination to women.