Ethics News
Role of Women in Church
>> = Important Articles; ** = Major Articles
Supplemental Articles in a separate file (click here to read)
**Church Says Women Shouldn’t Teach Sunday School Classes To Men, Cites Bible (Foxnews, 060821)
**US Baptists ban women pastors (Washington Times, 000615)
**LCMS Guidelines on Women Leadership Complete (Christian Post, 041230)
**Paul, Women, and the Church (Christian News, 040509)
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WATERTOWN, N.Y. — The minister of a church that dismissed a female Sunday School teacher after adopting what it called a literal interpretation of the Bible says a woman can perform any job — outside of the church.
The First Baptist Church dismissed Mary Lambert on Aug. 9 with a letter explaining that the church had adopted an interpretation that prohibits women from teaching men. She had taught there for 54 years.
The letter quoted the first epistle to Timothy: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.”
The Rev. Timothy LaBouf, who also serves on the Watertown City Council, issued a statement saying his stance against women teaching men in Sunday school would not affect his decisions as a city leader in Watertown, where all five members of the council are men but the city manager who runs the city’s day-to-day operations is a woman.
“I believe that a woman can perform any job and fulfill any responsibility that she desires to” outside of the church, LaBouf wrote Saturday.
Mayor Jeffrey Graham, however, was bothered by the reasons given Lambert’s dismissal.
“If what’s said in that letter reflects the councilman’s views, those are disturbing remarks in this day and age,” Graham said. “Maybe they wouldn’t have been disturbing 500 years ago, but they are now.”
Lambert has publicly criticized the decision, but the church did not publicly address the matter until Saturday, a day after its board met.
In a statement, the board said other issues were behind Lambert’s dismissal, but it did not say what they were.
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THE Southern Baptist Convention, which counts President Clinton among its 16 million members and is America’s largest Protestant denomination, has declared that women should be forbidden from serving as pastors.
Leaders of the convention voted for a rare revision of the Baptist faith and message statement in order to oppose women leading any of its 41,000 congregations. “While men and women are gifted for service in the Church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture,” the new statement said.
The vote is not binding on congregations and it is uncertain how it will affect the Southern Baptists’ 1,600 or so women clergy, of whom about 100 are pastors leading congregations.
However, the symbolism is important. It is likely to prove hard for women clergy to move within the Church and opponents of the decision fear that women will now be discouraged from becoming pastors.
“I think more churches will leave,” said the Rev Martha Phillips, interim pastor at Mount Vernon Baptist Church in Arlington, Virginia, where Vice-President Al Gore is a member. “I’m very sad. Women ministers are not going to have a place in Southern Baptist life any more.”
The newly elected president of the Southern Baptists, James G. Merritt, a 47-year-old conservative who is a trustee of the Christian university run by Jerry Falwell, the television evangelist, said that he did not fear a split. “I don’t even fear a splinter,” he said.
The revised statement also urges Christians to oppose racism and reject abortion and homosexuality.
For the first time in many years the convention also approved a resolution supporting capital punishment.
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The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS) released guidelines on women leadership within the conservative denomination. The guidelines, prepared by a special task force, will be included in an appendix to a decade-old report on the “Service of Women in Congregational and Synodical Offices” and will be mailed to individual congregations for review.
The LCMS, a conservative evangelical denomination with over 2 million members, prohibits the ordination of women. The 1994 report, penned by the Commission on Theology and Church Relations, specifies that women cannot lead a congregation spiritually. Specifically, the report limits both the pastor and elder position to men on the basis that both those positions are divinely inspired.
Elders historically “work closely with the pastor in his divinely assigned responsibility to feed the whole congregation with the Word of God and to watch over it for the sake of its spiritual welfare.” In such situations, the report says, “women may not serve in this office.”
In regards to “humanly established offices,” the new appendix says women can lead them as long as those positions to not require “public exercise of the ministry of Word and sacraments.”
The new addition was made in response to questions from the Minnesota South District regarding women serving as executive director, president, assistant director, or vice president of congregation.
“Scripture does not prohibit women who possess the requisite gifts from holding these humanly established offices, assuming that the occupants of these offices do not ‘perform those functions that are distinctive to the public exercise of the ministry of Word and sacraments,’” the CTCR responded to Minnesota South’s questions.
According to Samuel H. Nafzger, the CTCR Executive Director, the commission decided to append the 1994 report at the request of the LCMS President Gerald Kieschnick. Both the 1994 report and the appendix will be published in the form of a booklet, and will be mailed in early January to help congregations implement a 2004 LCMS convention resolution on women.
The guidelines include a sample paragraph for the constitutions of individual LCMS congregations that might want a section on women in church offices. The sample paragraph suggests the following wording:
“Women who have reached the age of _____ may serve as officers and as members of all boards and committees of this congregation which do not call upon them to carry out the specific functions of the pastoral office (preaching in or serving as the leader of the public worship service, the public administration of the sacraments, the public exercise of church discipline). Accordingly, a woman shall not serve as pastor of this congregation or as ______.”
The age in the first blank slot can vary by congregation, but must be at least the minimum age required by state laws for non-profit organizations. The second blank gives the congregation the power to list any office that is divinely inspired or holds “specific functions of the pastoral office as listed in this sample paragraph.”
Despite the leeway offered by the blank slots, Nafzger said the guidelines “simply pull together what the Synod already said about the service of women,” according to the LCMS news service.
Current LCMS policy dictates that the term “elder” be reserved for the congregational office assigned to assisting the pastor “in the public exercise of the distinctive functions” of the pastoral office; in this case, women are not allowed to serve as elders.
The policy also states that “to avoid confusion regarding the office of the public ministry and to avoid giving offense to the church,” only lay men assist in distributing the elements in the Lord’s Supper, and that while women leadership may be desirable, “men be encouraged to continue to exercise leadership in their congregations even as they are encouraged to exercise their God-given leadership in a God-pleasing manner in their homes.”
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The Apostle Paul, and the Bible in general, teach an equality between the sexes expressed by how they complete each other.
When 21st-century Christians approach the Apostle Paul’s teachings concerning wives submitting graciously to their husbands (Eph. 5:22) and women being silent in church (I Cor. 14:34), they must remind themselves that Paul’s teachings were as controversial in the first century as they are today.
The first-century biblical world of Judaism and Greco-Roman culture was characterized by male dominance and chauvinism. But 21st-century North American and European culture is dominated by a politically correct sexual equalitarianism that refuses to accept any distinction between males and females.
For example, when the Apostle Paul writes to the church in Ephesus, he tells all the Christians (regardless of ethnicity, social rank, or sex, cf. Gal. 3:28) to submit themselves mutually to one another (Eph. 5:21). Then, beginning in Ephesians 5:22, he explains in some detail how that submission and a servant’s heart are to be expressed within marriage.
In a culture where wives were considered the property of their husbands, Paul commands Christian husbands to submit to their wives by loving them as Christ loved the church and to fulfill his God-given responsibility to protect, provide for, and lead the family in a godly manner. How did Christ love the church? With agape love--the Greek word for spiritual love--which He modeled by giving His life for the church. It is this agape love that transforms worldly ideas of submission from dominance and subservience to those of humility and service.
In writing to the Corinthian church, Paul penned a divinely inspired essay on this agape love with which husbands are commanded to love their wives: “Love is patient and kind, love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. Love does not demand its own way. Love is not irritable, and it keeps no record of when it has been wronged. It is never glad about injustice....Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. Love will last forever....” (I Cor. 13:4-8a, New Living Bible). Such agape love requires the husband always to put his wife’s needs above his own and to give himself in self-sacrificial service to her.
The wife is to express her mutual submission in marriage by submitting herself to her husband “as unto the Lord” or for the Lord’s sake (Eph. 5:22). There is no hint in this passage or any other Pauline passage that women are in any way inferior to men, although that was the dominant rabbinic and cultural tradition of the time. The first-century men who received Paul’s letter to Ephesus must have been profoundly shocked by the new, sacrificial demands placed upon them.
When the Apostle Paul turns his attention to women’s behavior in church, he once again discusses the issue within the context of the Genesis creation account, which clearly teaches that men and women are of equal value and worth to the Creator (Gen. 1:26-27). Two passages (I Cor. 11:2-16 and I Cor. 14:34-36) concerning women’s proper role in worship have been the source of much controversy in recent decades. In the first passage, Paul is dealing with numerous abuses in worship and matters of propriety in the Corinthian church. In I Cor. 11, Paul grants women the freedom to speak or pray in worship, as long as they are veiled or have their heads covered (11:5). To be unveiled is “dishonorable” (vs. 4-5), “disgraceful” (vs. 6,14), “improper” (v. 13), and “contentious” (v. 16). While the mandate of how things are to be done in the church has a cultural context, the appeal to the creation account as the foundation requires a our application beyond cultural diversity. A woman speaking or praying with head uncovered in Corinth would equate with a braless woman in a shear, see-through blouse speaking or praying in church today. The underlying doctrinal principle is that when a woman prays or speaks, she should do so with modesty, godliness and respect for her husband.
In I Cor. 14:34-36, Paul states that women should be silent in church, which at first glance appears to contradict the teaching that women may pray and speak (I Cor. 11:5). However, context is the key here as well. Paul’s overarching emphasis in chapter 14 is found in the chapter’s final verse, which declares that all things “should be done in a fitting and orderly way” (v. 40). Within this context, Paul is dealing with a specific difficulty of some female Corinthian church members interrupting church services with either untimely questions or outbursts of glossalalia. Some of these church members, by openly disputing with men and demanding their freedom to speak in public worship, were bringing disgrace upon the church before God and the wider community of Corinth (cf. R. C. Prohl, Women in the Church. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957, pp. 27-28).
Once again, the appeal to the law or Torah (v. 34) makes the command for women’s submissive spirit in church normative, not mere culture or custom. The church service is to be orderly, and women are to be submissive to their husbands. As with the passage in I Cor. 11, modesty and submission, not head coverings or silence, are the true apostolic teachings.
The last passage where Paul deals with women’s role in church is I Tim. 2:11-15. Once again, the context of the teaching is crucial. I Timothy 3:15, which states that chapters two and three are to instruct the people how they “ought to conduct themselves in God’s household, which is the church of the living God,” provides the context of the passage: Within the church, women are not to assume authority over men, just as a wife is to put herself under the authority of her own husband in her marriage. This teaching does not say that all women are to be under the authority of all men or in all institutions, but rather that women are to be in submission to their own husbands and are not to be in an authoritative position in the local church. Once again, the reference to the Creation account makes this a normative theological teaching, not a cultural one. Since the pastoral office is a position of authority (Hebrews 13:7,17), this would preclude a woman from serving a pastoral function in the local church, but would not require silence.
In conclusion, the Apostle Paul’s teachings were as controversial in challenging first-century prejudices against women as they are in challenging 21st-century prejudices against any teaching that doesn’t genuflect to the altar of political correctness. The Apostle Paul, and the Bible in general, teach an equality between the sexes that is expressed through the way in which they complete (Gen. 2:18-25) each other, as opposed to a gender neutrality that would obliterate distinctive male and female roles.
We should all remember that there are many kinds of submission. There is submission to the divine authority of the Bible, and then there is submission to the pervasive pressure of a secular culture which rejects Scripture’s authority when it finds itself in disagreement with biblical teaching. God inspired Paul to warn Christians: “Do not conform yourselves to the standard of this world, but let God transform you inwardly by a complete change of your mind. Then you will be able to know the will of God--what is good and is pleasing to him and is perfect.” (Rom. 12:2, Today’s English Version).
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Supplemental Articles in a separate file (click here to read)