Jim,

Don't forget Acts 14 -" And when they had ordained them elders in every church, and had prayed with fasting, they commended them to the Lord, on whom they believed."

The business of selecting, appointing, ordaining, elders takes up enough of the New Testament you are bordering on being duplicitous to be so dismissive of the practice.  Quibbling about nomenclature, not to reveal practice, but to obscure it would be duplicitous.

Of course I can't show you in the New Testament a separated clergy, a clerical class.  That is why there is only a single ecclesiastical title of consequence in the Adventist church: Elder.  We are imitating the bible.  And in the bible they never ordained, appointed, selected women to serve as elders.  They explicitly said so.  They told us why.  

So are we agreed:  Shall we join with St. Paul in not letting woman usurp authority over a man?