Tag Archives: When she preaches

Women's voices in ministry

Women’s voices, or, how to avoid spiritual malnutrition

Last week a reader pointed something out to me: all my “Best of 2015” awards went to women. At the time, I honestly hadn’t noticed. But it got me thinking. What is it about this past year that should have caused me to gravitate so strongly towards a female perspective on the gospel? I read plenty of male writers and bloggers. Why was it all the women’s voices that had stuck with me come January?

Malnutrition: leaving something out

For the past three years, my wife and I had been going to a small church, there are two full-time pastors, and they’re both men, so if most of the teaching is done by men, that’s only natural. So I thought! But then as the months went by, and one guest speaker after another were all men as well, it slowly dawned on me, like the Blues Brothers playing at Bob’s Country Bunker: “I don’t think so, man: those lights are off on purpose.”

I grew up in the Presbyterian church, which has been ordaining women since the 1890s, so these are literally the first three years of my life that I have gone more than a month without hearing a woman preach. (Being honest, the idea of all-male teaching had never even occurred to me before.) The pastors at our recent church were, and are, devout men of God, with passionate hearts to serve and a profound desire to provide a weekly diet of wholesome scriptural teaching. And yet, it occurred to me: I am starving.

Think of the British Navy, c. 1750. Wholesome food for their sailors— leading to good health and high morale that were advantageous in battle— was a major concern of the British Admiralty. And yet malnutrition was the greatest enemy of the fleet; it killed more British sailors than enemy action. The chief culprit was scurvy, caused by a lack of fresh fruit. In their profound desire to nourish their crews, the Admiralty were unwittingly poisoning them instead, simply by leaving something out.

How not to read scripture

So it is with me. Many cite 1 Timothy 2:12 as  “proof text” that no woman should preach, ever. For the moment, let us leave aside the questions of legalism that would require slavish obedience to this particular “law” while simultaneously living in freedom from hundreds of others— the fundamental question here is, was a lasting injunction for all times and all places even Paul’s intent to begin with

I dropped out of seminary, but one thing I did learn there: Biblical inerrancy does not mean you can simply open the Bible to any page, choose any verse, and apply what you find there directly to your life. For example, this is from Gordon Fee’s classic text on scriptural analysis, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth:

But if the plain meaning is what interpretation is all about, then why interpret? Why not just read? Like Christ, the Bible is both human and divine. Every book in the Bible is conditioned by the language, time, and culture in which it was originally written. Interpretation is demanded by the “tension” between its eternal relevance and its historical particularity. (emphasis original)

This is doubly true with Paul’s epistles. They are full of sections that can have direct literal application only to the original readers: greetings to particular persons and seasonal travel advice. As we read letters like that, we are in constant peril of mixing up what Paul intended for the immediate situation with what he intended for all time. I am second to none in my reverence for scripture, and I think Paul— as the original advocate of adapting to culture— would be horrified by the way his intent is being misapplied under circumstances vastly different from those in which he wrote.

Why I need women’s voices

Paul and Timothy lived in a world much like modern-day Saudi Arabia. Nearly all of their public interactions were with other men. In fact, the Christian church, which had just begun to accept women into their ranks, was the first place in that society where men might regularly encounter women who were not family members. That was enough of a stretch. Paul knew it would be a bridge too far, culturally, for those men to also find that, at church, they were suddenly asked to submit to a woman’s authority as well. They simply wouldn’t go.

My world isn’t like that. I interact with women in every capacity all day every day—as supervisors, as subordinates, as grocers and bankers and doctors. The notion that I am not to learn anything from women is ludicrous in our society: everything I know about women, and much of what I know about the world, has been learned from female family members, friends, teachers, and professors over the entire course of my life.

As a Christian, all of that worldly knowledge pales in importance to the insights of the gospel. Yet that one most important area is the only one where some would keep me in ignorance, leave my understanding incomplete, leave me bereft of any insight as to a woman’s perspective and how it might complement my own.

If I lived in a society of all men, that gap in my knowledge wouldn’t have any adverse effect on my life. But I don’t, and it does. I believe that, in general, there are some real differences between men and women. And as such, a man who is called to be the light of Christ may likely be “spiritually dark” to every woman he meets if he does not understand the gospel from her perspective. So I am all the more thankful for those Godly women’s voices in the blogosphere— to provide that Bible-focused perspective in my manifold daily interactions with women— for the times I can’t get it at church.

Photo credit: Schlesinger Library, RIAS, Harvard University via Foter.com / No known copyright restrictions

women torn off

For God’s sake: let a woman preach

One day I flew to Texas and I met a cute girl. I asked her to dinner, and that night, my whole life changed. That was the night I learned about Jesus. I’d grown up in a Christian church, but I’d never heard about a Jesus like this. Her Jesus was alive and real and revolutionary and transformative. Her Jesus didn’t nibble around the edges of your life; he was pervasive through the entire thing. That night she spoke words into me that breathed with life like nothing I’d ever known before.

Was she wrong? Should she have done that? Many churches quote scripture that says “I do not permit a woman to teach, or to have authority over a man.” So should she have simply left me where I was for fear of teaching me something?

In reality, most Christians would quote other scriptures to limit, restrict, or reinterpret this verse and make an exception for this case. So why not a larger exception? Why not allow our society’s many well educated, gifted, female writers and speakers an unrestricted hall pass to teach what they know? As a high schooler, best-selling author Rachel Held Evans was once told, “‘Rachel you’re such a great speaker; it’s too bad you’re a girl.” Blogger Jory Micah was told, at age 18, that her desire to serve God as a pastor was sinful.

On the question, “Should a woman preach?” I would submit that such answers :

  1. Result more from evangelical culture than Biblical truth
  2. Are inconsistent with our practice, even in the most conservative of congregations
  3. May turn a blind eye to the actual reality of what God is doing
Culture vs. Truth

The Bible is long, and there’s a lot in there. How do we choose which parts of it to talk about the most? Ideally, our discussion of topics from the Bible would be in exact proportion the the frequency of those topics within the text itself. To do otherwise is to risk a distortion of the actual Biblical message. Christ himself addresses this tendency when he says, “What sorrow awaits you. Hypocrites! For you are careful to tithe even the tiniest income from your herb gardens, but you ignore the more important aspects of the law—justice, mercy, and faith” (Matthew 23:23). We can fall into sin, even in perfect obedience to God’s law, when obsessive legalism  leads us away from the real point.

Yet this is the reality of our time. We attack certain topics with an energy and enthusiasm out of all proportion with the Bible’s text, yet remain oddly silent on other topics of greater Biblical importance. If the need to suppress women’s teaching gifts were an important doctrine, then why— with just the one mention in 1 Timothy— does the Bible devote only 0.016% of its verses to the topic? That would work out to a full Sunday sermon a little less than once a century. Some argue that the particular obsessions of American culture require more frequent responses from Christians in those areas. Yet in this, too, we Christians reveal our cultural biases by what we omit from such scrutiny: everything from covering women’s hair to honoring our leaders to refraining from anger.

Practicing what we preach?

The fact is, even in conservative congregations that would never hire a female pastor, women are teaching men every week. Just walk into the Sunday school.

The injunction in 1 Timothy explains Paul’s resistance to women teaching on the grounds that Eve was deceived, and sin was the result. In Paul’s eyes, we may conclude, a female teacher is more likely to lead us into sin. Yet if we are to protect ourselves from deceptiveness, who is more vulnerable than a young child? If our genuine concern were for sound doctrine, the Sunday school should be the first line of defense. That it is not reveals a different motivation is at work.

The same inconsistency appears in other areas as well. Of the same church where her potential as a teacher was so casually dismissed, Rachel Held Evans writes, “The only time women spoke in church was when they were missionaries. I didn’t understand why that was allowed, but teaching from the pulpit was not.” Again, if our true concern were the validity of what women have to say, should we not be equally passionate for the protection of men abroad?

Rather, it seems to me, our insistence on male pastors results more from simple bias against women in certain roles than from some kind of principled stand on Biblical truth.

Which side is which?

What emerges again and again from women in ministry is the conviction that they are called to it by God, that the scriptures used to dissuade them have somehow been misunderstood. What if they are right?

Misunderstanding scripture is possible. While scripture is infallible, we are not, and in the history of the Church, conventional wisdom has often been wrong. That can happen to us as well. For a non-controversial example, it would be a gross error to read 1 Timothy 4:12 as a blanket negation of the need to respect our elders; in fact, many other places in scripture urge us to respect our elders. What if we have made the same mistake in using 1 Timothy 2:12 to overrule all the many Biblical teachings about the importance of recognizing our gifts and putting them to work for the kingdom?

Consider this thought experiment: imagine a God who might break out of expectations (that has happened before), who might choose a vessel for his message that confounds conventional wisdom (that has happened before too). Imagine that messenger is sent among a people who refuse to listen (also has happened). What would God’s judgment on those people be for their failure to listen and receive? When someone claims she has a message from God, if we dismiss her out of hand because she doesn’t match our expectations, we do so only at our own mortal peril. She may be right; we may even find ourselves fighting against God.

Other recommended posts:

Photo credit: Foreign and Commonwealth Office / Foter.com / CC BY