Threads from Henry's Web

Tag: Women in Ministry

  • Can a Liberal Learn from Mark Driscoll?

    I’m using the dreaded “L” word for myself again, because if I was put up against [tag]Mark Driscoll[/tag] I would certainly come out as liberal, no matter how moderate I think I am. Regular readers of this blog know that I disagree with him on a substantial range of issues.

    There’s a profile of Driscoll available on the Christianity Today web site (HT: Adrian Warnock). There’s some interesting things here, including most of the stuff on which I differ. Occasionally I stir people up through what I write on this blog, but in real life, I put much of my effort into reconciliation. I try to be a peacemaker in church. I’m not a [tag]Calvinist[/tag] by any stretch. Even good [tag]Arminian[/tag]s suspect me of heresy in the pelagian direction. I’m [tag]egalitarian[/tag], not [tag]complementarian[/tag], and if the bad guy is threatening the playground, I’m going to call 911 before mixing it up with them myself.

    Yet there are a number of things one can learn here. Driscoll really believes what he is teaching, and I think the evidence is good that he cares about his church and the people of his community. He’s willing to meet them culturally, something that other church people ranging from right to left are not willing to do. To many of us church is our culture, and others have to leave the “world’s culture” and become part of the “church’s culture.” But we have no particular reason to assume that the church’s culture as we practice it is actually better than the world’s culture. Driscoll seems to have caught on to the fact that from the point of view of the church, especially the mainline church, reaching the person down the street is just as much cross-cultural ministry in many cases as is going overseas.

    Nonetheless, I deplore Driscoll’s position on women in leadership and in ministry. I believe it would be quite possible for the church to articulate and practice a strong theology of family and of leadership without wedding itself to the single model of the dominant male. At the same time, egalitarians sometimes behave as though men don’t need to learn any leadership and even foster the “let women take care of spiritual things” attitude. We need to learn to respond to those attitudes.

    Too often what we practice is not the empowerment of all people to use the gifts God has given them and to follow God’s call on their lives, but it is rather a “let those who will do it go ahead.” We’re afraid to challenge men in spiritual leadership because we might sound too much like Driscoll. I am willing to confess to weakness when it’s there, but in this case, I’m not myself confessing to this practice. I have regularly preached that men need to be ready to get up on Sunday morning and lead their families to church. They need to be actively involved in both church life and in the moral life of their family and community.

    A family can only be properly led when both father and mother take up their appropriate gifts. But this does not allow looking down on supposedly “feminized” men either. That male leadership can involve the man cleaning the house, doing the dishes, changing diapers and helping get the children dressed. It might involve a husband getting the children to Wednesday night activities because the wife is working or out of town on a business trip.

    In other words this is another part of modern culture that we could meet with the gospel, rather than try to change into a first century image that exists largely in our own minds.

    I would suggest reading the Christianity Today article asking yourself this: “How can I make my spiritual life connect more with the age? What are the essentials of my spiritual and ethical beliefs, and what are just my church culture?” All of us could do with such a checkup.

  • Defining Explicit Teaching

    Wayne Leman has published the first part of his report on the survey he has been taking on Biblical teachings about headship. While this was not a scientific poll it did point to some interesting things. I’d suggest reading it with a primary focus on what people understand as an “explicit teaching” of scripture. What does that phrase mean?

    It appears to me that people use the phrase without any concrete meaning, but that’s just my general, unscientific observation!

  • Which Paradigm to Check

    David Lang has written an interesting post at Better Bibles dealing with the complementarian/egalitarian debate. Readers of this blog will realize that I’m not terribly moderate on this particular issue–I’m passionately egalitarian.

    David does make a good point about polarizing arguments, however:

    . . . In the process of trying to persuade those who disagree with us, we often become even more polarized in our views. We get so frustrated with the other person for not agreeing with us and so flustered by their arguments, that we begin to shore up our own arguments and press the text to say something more clearly or explicitly than it really does. This is especially true when we see the stakes as being high. . . .

    It’s quite true that overstating one’s case can both drive neutral parties away and alienate opponents so that dialog becomes much more difficult if not impossible. I would say on the other hand, speaking from personal experience, that one can be so careful not to overstate one’s position that it becomes unclear just what the position is.

    People will then congratulate you for being a peacemaker, but the problem continues. You can spend so much time framing a debate, that the debate itself gets lost.

    David’s comments are not without merit, however. And I will keep them in mind as I state things fairly forcefully. But perhaps I will restrain myself from time to time!

    But the key point to which I wanted to respond is this:

    As I’ve observed the gender role debate, I’ve seen this dynamic played out over and over again. There is a finite set of Biblical passages which the two camps must deal with. . . .

    It’s a simple statement and is perhaps not David’s main point, but it becomes my main point. Why? Because I do not believe that this debate is a matter of dealing with a finite set of Biblical passages. We are warned to check presuppositions, so the presupposition I want to check is this very one.

    To me, the issue is not a finite set of Biblical passages. I happen to believe, for example, that at least in some of his churches, Paul did not permit women to teach. I don’t think Paul would, in his context, have advocated ordination of women. The “finite set of passages” position seems to rest on the idea that the Bible is primarily a set of theological propositions, and if we can just straighten it out so that all of them say one thing, that is the theological answer.

    I would suggest instead looking for the principles on which the various individual judgments were based. To me particular counter-examples to male leadership, such as Deborah in the Old Testament and Junia in the New are that much more significant because of the fact that they occurred in overwhelmingly male dominated societies. That is an interesting factor, whether or not there are particular texts that speak against women in leadership or not.

    This leads me to believe that I don’t have to “deal with” all of these passages, at least in the sense of explaining that they really express an egalitarian ideal. What I’m looking for is what are truly the basic principles of the kingdom.

    When I have found those I try to apply them to living in a modern society. What worked in Paul’s churches may not work in today’s churches and vice-versa. What I must be careful to do is to make sure that my behavior today is based on the same principles.

    I take this a bit further, however. It is not merely Biblical passages that are involved, but also church traditions, and most importantly the present day guidance of the Holy Spirit. Now I don’t believe that the Holy Spirit will guide us into violating the principles that are expressed in scripture, but he certainly can guide us into seeing how those principles are to be applied in a modern context. All of this is accomplished using our reasoning powers–always under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, or so we’d all like to assume.

    The paradigm that I would like to see shift is one that expects us to explain all of the texts one way or the other, and takes a look at the general trend of scripture–the trajectory, if you please–to see where God is leading us.

    I do believe passionately that God is leading us to more equality in ministry. I believe this because I see it happening in scripture–some of the time. I believe it because women have stepped up throughout church history. I believe it because I see genuine calls and gifting amongst women in areas the complementarians would reject. But most importantly, I see anything less than equality in the church as unworthy of the incarnation. The Word becoming flesh dwarfs these kinds of human barriers.

  • Complementarianism and Suppressing Women

    There have been numerous really wonderful articles on women in ministry lately, and I have been so busy both with my own writing and editing, proofing, and formatting my very unsuppressed wife’s new book on grief, that I have not been able to get involved.

    I’m going to point to a couple of posts on Dave Warnock’s blog, and add just a few short words of my own so that if any of my readers have been missing all this, they’ll have a place to start.

    I dove back into the issue with Dave’s most recent post on the issue, Responding to comment storm, in which he deals with the storm of comments that resulted from this post in which he mentions that his wife refused to make a certain person her friend on Facebook.

    My attention was caught especially by just a couple of lines:

    . . . It is not and cannot be up to you to judge whether your actions make women feel inferior. You cannot do that, I cannot do that, no man can do that. Only women can judge whether complementarianism and male headship does that to them, in that way the evidence is clear.

    I have also frequently heard the refrain that certain men’s wives and daughters and totally happy and nobody feels suppressed in their churches. I also do know women who are complementarians, and would say the same thing. But I find it interesting that this apparent happiness is to be denied to others. There are many reasons why a woman might not feel suppressed in a church where leadership is confined to males. She might not be called to leadership herself. She might truly believe complementarian doctrine and thus stay away from such positions out of obedience to God as she sees it. I do think there is a certain peace in obedience to what you truly believe is God’s will, even if you are wrong.

    But then there is the other side, reflected in Dave’s comment that I quoted. We truly can’t speak for others. We can’t know how our attitudes and our speech impacts other people. I recently was able to rejoice as a woman with whom I am acquainted was sent out to pastor a church. She had felt God’s call when she was 10 years old, I believe, but her grandfather told her that women could not be pastors and she should forget about it. She did, but then with her children grown the call came again, and now she has the peace and joy of obeying that call. What impact did that grandfather’s denial have on God’s kingdom?

    But I really want to share my own personal perspective. My wife and I attended a service at a much more conservative church than we normally attend. At that service, the minister expressed the complementarian view rather forcefully, and then offered communion. It was open communion. I was simply amused at the sermon. I thought it was theologically and Biblically naive, though presented by someone who has a PhD in Biblical studies. It wasn’t just the complementarianism but the related church structures that he improperly inferred from scripture. Basically, I saw it as a theological debate.

    My wife, however, felt differently. I could tell that she was hesitant and a bit withdrawn during communion. She told me afterward that she had questioned even taking communion, but had finally forced herself to do so. The man was still a Christian brother. But what was a theological debate to me was a personal affront to her. What’s more, she was right, and if I had been fully sensitive to her perspective, I would have heard it as an affront. It said, “You are not what you claim to be.” She is called to be a teacher. She is a teacher of exceptional skill. Denying that role is an affront. Complementarians don’t see it. They think it’s some kind of pride issue. But of course the only people who are to humble themselves are women.

    For my wife to “humble herself” under those circumstances, however, would be an affront to God, because she truly believes she is called by God. It’s not something she can just put aside and ignore because some bigoted church leaders say it isn’t so. There’s a prophetic action against injustice that is called for, a proclamation: “I am called of God.”

    Does she need to disrupt someone else’s service? No. It’s their church. She doesn’t need or want to do that. But she isn’t going back there, and she will be very clear in other circumstances as to what her call is and to the fact that she rejects any claim that denies it.

    But let me get more personal about myself. I also cannot claim to define how others will feel about what I say and how I act. I have been egalitarian since at least my college years. I support ordination of women in ministry. I believe my wife’s call is at least as important as my own, and quite possibly more so. (I have no standard of measure, so who knows?)

    But when my wife felt she was supposed to submit a resume for a job in another city, she took some time to bring the issue to me. Why? She felt that I would not consider the move because of my own work circumstances. What had I done to give her this impression? I’d made some negative comments about the job option involved, amongst other comments that seemed minor to me. And I would note that my wife is not particularly shy. That particular job didn’t happen, but I thank God for the opportunity it gave for me to speak positively and precisely about how I viewed her calling. I made assumptions about that, and I should not have done so. (Note that we married when we were both in our 40s. There hadn’t been a large amount of time for her to evaluate my response.)

    There’s a certain amount of man vs. woman stuff here. I tend to breeze by things about feelings; she doesn’t. But at the same time, none of us should assume that we can speak for someone else on what will seem oppressive and what will hurt. We need to give consideration to what they express themselves and make as certain as we can that they are free to make such expressions.

    Final note: Dave has a number of good links related to this issue here

  • Incarnation and Women in Ministry

    I am a strong supporter of the inclusion of women in all aspects of Christian ministry. Sometimes I skip over the theology. Monastic Mumblings has a good post that covers some of the theological aspects very effectively.

    Check it out!

  • Enthusiastic for Everything

    Adrian Warnock has written an interesting and challenging post titled I DON’T WANT BALANCE, I WANT IT ALL!. There is a great deal in that post with which I not only sympathize, I empathize–I’ve been there.

    For me one place I want both is in the intensity of much charismatic worship. I have experienced that in many places, including the Brownsville Revival here in Pensacola. It’s an interesting feeling, however, to realize that many of the people with whom you are worshiping would regard you as questionable at best for your theological views.

    I also have enjoyed the theological footwork of the reformed. Since I mentioned a charismatic place by name, let me just mention McIlwain Memorial Presbyterian Church (PCA) here in Pensacola. At a conference they hosted I enjoyed listening to folks like James Boice and John Blanchard, and even sang Charles Wesley’s “Oh for a Thousand Tongues” with that reformed congregation. It was both intellectually and spiritually stimulating. Their pastoral staff has been friendly over the years, and I’ve enjoyed working with them. Yet at the same time I knew I would be questionable as a church member and would certainly never teach there because of their doctrinal standards.

    That’s why when an opponent dubbed me a “liberal charismatic” I adopted the term, at least partially. I prefer “passionate moderate,” but “liberal charismatic” has always seemed to catch something of that which drives me.

    I was thinking of one of my normal long posts in response, when I encountered this post by Dave Warnock, which says what I wanted to say, and does it better. Check it out.

    I’ll add just a note to commenter GlennSP, who accuses Dave of bring in a subject that has no reference in the post. To me, however, it does. I want all those things Adrian wants, and I also want them for my wife, my daughter, and for all the women I’ve encountered in the church, many of whom are struggling to find a place they can use the gifts God has given them. I want it for a newly ordained United Methodist pastor whom I’ll leave nameless, who only entered ministerial candidacy when she was into middle age because when, as a young child, she heard God’s call to be a pastor, and was told by a respected elder, “Girls can’t be pastors.” It does have reference, because when I say I want it all, I mean that I want it all for everybody.

  • More on Junia the Apostle

    Suzanne McCarthy has now responded to the latest objections to her work on Junia (Romans 16:7), a distinguished apostle and a woman. He whole series has been excellent, and I recommend it highly. You can go there for links to the various stages of this debate, including postings by her various critics.

    The more I look at this issue the more I am convinced that were some people not determined that there simply must not be a female apostle, the linguistic aspects of the passage would not arouse significant debate. After reviewing what Suzanne has written, looking at the passage and my own reference sources, and then reading several of the articles on the other side, the strongest argument I see against Junia being an apostle is the fact that people don’t want her to be.

    I hate to say this, because even when I disagree with him, I regard Dan Wallace as one of the most careful scholars of the Greek New Testament around. I generally appreciate his summaries of his opponents’ views, which are normally accurate and fair. I have found that I can argue against him using his own citations of the facts in opposition to his own position. But in this case I think he has allowed theology to trump exegesis.

    Why is this one woman’s leadership in the church so hard to accept? We have the example of folks like Deborah, who clearly took a high position of leadership amongst God’s people. But in that case there isn’t any way to get around it. It’s clear as day, and not even the most determined person can create an argument that Deborah was either not a woman or not in leadership. But with Junia both of those approaches have been attempted. Either she isn’t really a woman, or she isn’t really an apostle. Both attempts have failed.

    Perhaps now we can get down to the more important point that God today calls women into ministry in a variety of ways, and this call is just a small fulfillment of that scriptural goal that “in Christ there is . . . neither male nor female” (Galatians 3:28). This true celebration of all of God’s gifts no matter where they are bestowed by the Holy Spirit is long overdue in the church. Let’s seek it with all our hearts!

    PS: Through a comment on Suzanne’s post, I discovered Jay Davis’s blog which is new, but looks promising. He’s a Salvation Army officer. I’d particularly commend his recent two posts on women in ministry, so creatively titled Women and Women Part Two. The latter post discusses women in the Salvation Army.

  • Affirming Feminine Spirituality

    My Christianity Today Connection news e-mail connected me to an article in Today’s Christian Woman titled The Goddess Unmasked. It’s a Christian response to Wicca, looking at reasons why women who have grown up Christian become Wiccans, and discusses ministry to them.

    It’s not my intention to discuss the issue of responses to various religions or specifically to Wicca here. This article caught my attention due to the topic, and it kept my attention because of the reasons, as summarized in this quote:

    What lies behind the allure of goddess worship and its sister religion, witchcraft/Wicca? For many—especially those women who feel marginalized or devalued by what they perceive as the traditional, male-dominated church—its appeal is found in its affirmation of female spirituality.

    It is very common in my experience that people who change religions from the faith in which they were brought up do so more because of the way they were treated than because they have been convinced that their old religion was false and the new one true. I’m going to guess that it is easier to recruit new converts amongst those who are loosely attached to their own faith or have been separated from it in some way, and that is usually going to be the result of a relationship problem of some sort, not just family, but community.

    They may well become convinced of the tenets of the new religion, but that wasn’t the starting point. I don’t mean here to call converts dishonest. I’m sure they are, in general, following their consciences. I also apply this same principle both to converts to and from Christianity or any other faith.

    I see a tragedy in this story in that so much of the church can be seen as male dominated. In some groups I know of, single women with children have been warned that if they don’t get married, and have a male in the home covering them, they are leaving the door open to Satan’s attacks, since they are not following the God-ordained plan for the home. That plan, according to these folks, is that a woman is always under the authority of some man.

    We give some lip service in many churches to the idea that God encompasses both genders, and thus is no more “male” than “female.” That is a good theological view, but try referring to God as “she,” even in many churches who would accept women as pastors, and the reaction will be negative. Using “parent” instead of “father” in reference to God is even controversial. I greatly appreciate Andrew Greeley’s mixture of gender language in his novels, which I regard as excellent presentations of the gospel in the form of fiction. But for many, referring to God as heavenly mother is just too jarring.

    On the other hand we can just as easily put down feminine spirituality in a condescending way, by talking about women being more spiritual because of emotional responses. “Isn’t it nice that the women are praying and crying at the altar,” someone says, with the obvious implication that such prayer is women’s work. This cuts both ways, by the implication that being male says you can’t have emotions, and that all women are totally subject to theirs.

    How about both men and women can be spiritual people, but they may be differently spiritual. Not less or more, but different. Just how different and in what way? That’s not my problem. All I need to do is follow my own spiritual walk and avoid criticizing that of others.

    If our concern is to keep people in our community of faith, the best approach, it seems to me, is to get about fulfilling spiritual needs. People who are put on the fringes, subjected to an amused tolerance, or even suppressed are likely to look for a place where those things don’t happen. Shocking, isn’t it?

  • Update on Driscoll Video

    A couple of updates on this controversy. I may have spoken too soon on the matter of the duties of the conference hosts. It appears that people may have gotten the videos there. I’m still not sure precisely what happened, so I will still maintain that handing out the video would be the right thing to do, though it seems it’s possible that’s precisely what did happen.

    Commenters on my previous post Peter Kirk and Charity had questioned me on this point, and Charity says that many people left with the video. Thanks for these updates.

    There are also two further posts to which I would like to call attention because they provide some additional perspective:

  • Church Planting Body Count

    I regularly find myself surprised at how surprised some folks are at the unsurprising. We should, after all, expect people to be the people they are, and Mark Driscoll is Mark Driscoll. Shocking, isn’t it?

    Well, Mark Driscoll prepared a video for a conference on church planting in which he was very much himself, and some folks were shocked. They criticized the video, and they didn’t hand out copies as promised.

    I first saw this video on Adrian Warnock’s blog. Adrian comments:

    I am praying for him right now as I write this as I am sure this was the last thing he was expecting or wanting. Personally I love the video and I think he is right on with what he says. Well done Mark for standing for God and more power to your elbow!

    Well, it should surprise nobody that I don’t particularly like the video, and I think there are substantial issues there beyond the exclusively man-oriented view of the world. Driscoll comments repeatedly on the things Jesus is not, and often in fairly derogatory terms. I particularly noted “tell the lady with the tambourine who shows up to church to park it” though I’m sure we’ve all been there with people who are doing things that we’d prefer they didn’t. So I disagree with the clearly male authority dominated approach.

    But I’m more disturbed by the picture of Jesus that is presented. The picture of “gentle Jesus meek and mild” is not a terribly accurate one, and it does need to be balanced. But the rough, overbearing Jesus, the hunting buddy Jesus who despises people who drink herbal tea and aren’t masculine enough, is also a false and dangerous caricature. (Bias alert: I drink herbal tea. 🙂 )

    There is also a good message hidden in there, though it has been buried under mounds of extraneous junk. Church planting isn’t easy. And despite almost disparaging remarks in the video about pastors of existing churches, pastoring isn’t all that easy either. (I sincerely hope that Driscoll didn’t intend to be a dismissive of the ordinary role of pastoring as he seemed to be. I think he was just very strongly focused on the church planters role, but I would suggest more care.) There will be people one cannot help, and there are people who need to be told to find another place to worship. Often that is to their benefit as well as to the benefit of the local church. But that is hidden by the shock value of the tone and of the setting for the video.

    Nonetheless I would have told the leadership of the conference to have the video handed out. First, they should do so because they asked Mark Driscoll for a video, and they have some obligation not to make him spend money and then send his people home. Being people of their word should be important. Second, I don’t think moderate and liberal Christians should fear conservative ideas. That video provides me with more material to use in illustrating precisely what I don’t like about the complementarian approach and certain uses of the spiritual warfare metaphor.

    I do have to ask my complementarian brethren, however, whether they would give equal time to a video presenting the egalitarian position. Is this about an open exchange of ideas, or are you just offended that a video espousing your view was not welcomed?