The Christian Reformed Church, voted last week to remove the word “male” from its requirements for church office, thus allowing women to serve in all roles. I do not know much about the Christian Reformed church, but they seem like a fairly conservative organization.
The debate over the role of women in church leadership has been a contentious one in Evangelical circles for several decades. There are two major groups on the issue. Complementarians hold that women should not be ordained as pastors and should be excluded from certain leadership roles in the Church. Some complementarians hold that it is wrong for women to give religious instruction to men. Egalitarians believe that roles in the Church should not be restricted on the bias of gender. There are of course those who conceive of the issue in different terms, or hold to something of a mediating position (such as those who hold that women can teach men but that they need to be under the authority of a male senior pastor).
Probably the two best known organizations formed about this issue are The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (complementarian), and Christians for Biblical Equality (egalitarian).
Recent years have seen an increase in divisiveness between the two sides as groups such as Together for the Gospel, have pushed the issue to one of essential status, holding that churches cannot accept women in certain roles “without damaging its witness to the gospel” (pdf). A common concern of such groups is that the allowing of women in the church leadership necessitates a slippery slope that will lead to the denial of the authority of scripture and in the acceptance of homosexuality. (This despite churches such as the Church of the Nazarene and the Salvation Army, which have both accepted women in all leadership positions for over a hundred years without any further steps down the slippery slope).
Given the confusion over the term Evangelical in recent years, it will be interesting to see if the role of women in church leadership will play a factor in defining what it means to be an Evangelical. Next week I will give a brief defense of the biblical egalitarian position.
The tradition of not putting women in positions of leadership is as much a Western cultural artifact as it is a biblical influence. I grew up attending Salvation Army churches in Indonesia, and nobody thought twice about women in church leadership. Officers (that’s what the Salvation Army calls pastors) are usually husband and wife teams. But I think it’s much easier for Asians (some parts of Asia, anyway) to accept women as leaders in the church. Women play a different cultural role than they do in the West. It isn’t surprising that both Indonesia and the Philippines have elected women as president, while America has never even nominated a serious woman candidate.
David Murrow talks a little about this in his book Why Men Hate Going to Church: “Given a choice, men rarely follow female leadership. One church I know experimented with all-female youth leadership; within six months 75 percent of the boys had disappeared. Pastor Dan Jarrell puts it this way, ‘When women lead, men leave.’ … Maybe this is one reason the Scriptures presuppose male leadership in the church.”
Murrow focuses on the American church, although he does look at some European statistics, so his conclusions are necessarily limited to the church in the West.
We are going to have a fun week. Because I happen to be married to tomorrow’s author, I know what she’s been working on for the past two weeks.
I’ve been hearing this discussion for 25 years now, and so much of it goes on over the undercurrents of what is going on with male and female roles in the larger society.
At the end of the day, it comes down to one’s interpretation of scripture. The passages in I Corinthians 11 and 14 and I Timothy 2 are pretty stark at face value. I say this as a woman who was brought to faith as a child by a woman preacher whose husband played the piano in their little pentecostal church (about 100 years ago).
And it isn’t just evangelicals struggling with this issue–you should see the difficulty the Catholic church has in societies where unmarried men are unheard of so there aren’t enough priests to go around.
p.s. Jasen, I think it would be good to briefly define egalitarian and complementarian as used in this article. Not everyone is familiar with those terms.
I thought I did define them in the 2nd paragraph.
Good points Jew. Churches adopted to culture (which isn’t necessarily wrong to do) much more than they think they do. A classic example is various church government structures.
The CRC would not be considered a conservative organization. Although more conservative then say the RCA, they would still be at the more liberal end in most people’s mind.
True, you summarize what each group believes. I was thinking more of a definition of the actual words as used in this context, for those of us who aren’t familiar with gender geometry: “complementary” means the woman completes the man to make a perfect whole in service to God (and it doesn’t mean women “compliment” men, as that should be the other way around
“Egalitarian” means that men and women are equal in all ways in service to God.
(Is there a way to make italics here?)
You can make italics with HTML tags.
Well, duh.
Bryan, like I said I don’t know much about them. Aren’t they the group that has stuck to signing Psalms? Otherwise they seemed fairly normal Evangelical according to their website.
Thainamu, you’re right that would have been defining complementarian more in terms that they would use (which I consider a good idea for things like this).
There may be individual churches within their denomination that are exclusive psalmists, I’m not sure, but from first hand experience I know that the local CRC church in my area sings all kinds of more modern songs to classic hymns.
Bryan is right, the CRC is pretty liberal. I’m actually surprised that this is happening now, because one of the absolute best defenses of reformation Christianity was a speech given to the CRC yearly conference in 1988, by the pastor of one of their most influential congregations. He was concerned with this exact issue, the opening of all church offices to women, and his congregation left the denomination over it. You can read the speech here: http://www.reformed.org/webfiles/antithesis/index.html?mainframe=/bible/ant_v2n1_unchanging.html
“Please, don’t think that just because someone says “I believe the confessions” that they, therefore, believe them. You have to watch how they are put into practice.”
I wonder if anyone has tried to throw that statement at the Federal Visionists yet. Not that I understand the FV controversy fully, only enough to know how ironic that would be.
Anyways, that piece gives me some thoughts on what I should write about next week. Thanks for posting it Chang!
What always irks me about this issue is how easily some complementarians reverse their opinions - so long as it is out of sheer necessity due to the lack of a man to fill the role.
Chang He, I’m afraid I don’t think much of Schlissel’s speech. He thinks Arminianism is an enemy of the church. He says that if you deny a six-day creation you deny the authority of scripture. He compares disputes over women in office and the Psalter hymnal to the Galatian heretics and the money changers in the Temple.
It comes off as a classic example of taking one’s opinions about scripture as scripture itself. There is room for disagreement amongst those who hold to the authority of scripture.
Samwise, that’s an interesting point. Do you think they should stick to their position and simply have unfilled roles?
I think that with authority comes responsibility - if complementarians believe women shouldn’t be in those positions of authority then they have a responsibilty to fill them.
Samwise, I agree. We see this clearly in the bible in examples such as Deborah - who led when there were no men willing to obey God.
Well, Jasen, I would agree that Arminianism is an enemy of the church, and I think he’s right on as far as women in offices of leadership in church are concerned. Neither of those are his main point though. His main point is that we do not take the Bible seriously enough, and we set our cultural constructs above it in our interpretation. This can be done haphazardly, as in the Emergent church, or eloquently, as with cchrisr. All the items you mentioned may be points of contention, and I’m not totally on board with Schlissel on everything he says, but he does take the Scripture seriously, and that level of consideration ought to be our model, rather than idolizing our vague feelings of egalitarianism.
I should rephrase, or perhaps it may seem, change my mind about Arminianism. Arminianism at its core misses one of the dimensions of God’s saving love that Calvinism understands. In J. I. Packer’s words “Calvinism recognizes a dimension of the saving love of God which Arminianism misses, namely God’s sovereignty in bringing to faith and keeping in faith all who are actually saved. Arminianism gives Christians much to thank God for, and Calvinism gives them more.”
The issue is not so much that Arminianism is an enemy of the church, but an incomplete understanding of grace and faith, which provides fertile ground for ideas which are anathema to the church.