The church was always cold. That is what I remember most. The AC was cranked too high and fans directed the air right into my face, regardless of where I sat. Week after week, I shivered in the standard-issue church chairs, the polyester fabric digging into my legs, while I tried to pay attention. In a way, it was good that the sanctuary was frigid. Because the sermons were not so memorable, and it was otherwise hard to stay awake.
The pastor was a nice guy, but it didn’t take too many Sundays to start questioning his theological education in general and sermon preparation in particular. He fumbled through each message, offering illustrations that were non sequiturs to the text. Passages like Paul’s conversion on the Damascus Road were compared to family trips to the zoo. Personal battles with jealousy were shared as analogous to Jonah’s reticence to go to Nineveh. While not necessarily heretical, the sermons were hard to follow. And even when he’d clearly downloaded something from an online sermon repository, it seemed like he hadn’t read through the material ahead of time.
Despite all of this, I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt. I don’t expect great orations from ministers and I don’t need to be entertained. He was only a few years into his pastoral career. I figured you have to start somewhere, and I was rooting for him. So I showed up every Sunday for months. Freezing in my seat, trying to follow along and hoping he made it through.
During a particularly painful Sunday, my husband leaned over and whispered, “Tammie, they could wake you from a dead sleep, stand you up and ask you to preach on the spot and you’d do a better job.” I kept my eyes fixed straight ahead, biting my lip to stifle an onset of the church giggles, barely able to keep a straight face.
The thing is, my husband was objectively correct. There was no denying that this pastor was not walking in his gifts. And it is true that I have been teaching and public speaking in various capacities for over two decades. I also have more theological training than this particular pastor, having completed both a masters and a doctorate in seminary. But I knew I could never preach in this particular church. Or many other churches for that matter.
Because I am a woman.
It was a funny feeling sitting there that Sunday as awareness washed over me that I was automatically disqualified from using my gifts and training in that church. I looked around and thought about how any man in that church would have been considered more fit than I was to relieve the struggling pastor. It didn’t matter if they knew how to teach or do a proper exegesis. It didn’t matter if they had any theological training or experience at all. It only mattered that they were men. The women were to remain silent. Because the Bible says so. Or so they think.
The sheer ridiculousness of the situation hit me hard. This was the first time it struck me that I couldn’t use my training and gifts to help a church out even if I wanted to. I guess I was late to this realization because I didn’t go to seminary hoping to become a pastor. I went because I love God’s Word and felt led to study theology. I also write and speak about faith on a regular basis and knew this would better equip me to do so.
Until that Sunday, I hadn’t considered how the only thing keeping me from using my theological training, teaching and leading gifts at church – the space where we are called to share our gifts for the edification of the body – was the fact that I was a woman. If this was true for me, someone who wasn’t seeking the pulpit, it was true for my daughters. It was true for my sisters in Christ who are gifted and called to ministry. It was true for half of the Body of Christ.
The system works overtime to keep it that way.
Like many Evangelical Christians, for most of my adult life I believed women should not preach or serve in senior pastor roles in church. I uncritically assumed this view was orthodox and was willing to accept a subordinate role, even if I always sensed that something was amiss.
That all changed after I heard Rick Warren interviewed about his newfound affirmation of women in church leadership. I was as surprised as I was curious after hearing his take. I had to admit to myself that I had never really studied the issue. So I started exploring, mostly to affirm the biblical support for my deeply ingrained complementarian position. To be honest, I just wanted to confirm my assumption he was a heretic.
That isn’t what happened.
I spent the next several years reading and hearing from multiple scholars on all sides of the issue of women’s roles in church. I came to view complementarianism not as a theology so much as an ideology. In studying church history, I realized it isn’t as orthodox or ancient as I once believed, unless you consider the 1980’s ancient. Women were leading and preaching alongside men in the early church. And while it is true that patriarchal cultures restricted women throughout church history, I was surprised to learn that the push to codify and enshrine women’s subordination into many mainline denominational documents didn’t happen until the 1980’s. The term complementarian didn’t even exist before then.
I read dozens of books and journal articles and evaluated the biblical evidence for each view. I became convinced that the biblical support for complementarian views is not as compelling as that of a mutualist view. Not even close. In fact, there seems to be a hermeneutical double standard when it comes to texts related to women teaching and leading versus those for most other doctrines.
“I believe we have seriously misread the relevant passages in the New Testament, no doubt not least through a long process of assumption, tradition, and all kinds of post-biblical and sub-biblical attitudes that have crept in to Christianity.” – NT Wright
Note: The biblical case deserves more than I have room for here, so I’m not going to attempt it in this post. Entire books have been written on the subject and I list some of my favorites below.
Doctrinal confessions on secondary issues vary among denominations. But it has become a shibboleth of American conservative evangelicalism to affirm hierarchical church structures with men at the top. Proof texting, lazy theology about slippery slopes and name calling restrain discourse about women in church leadership. And far too often, biblical illiteracy, tribalism and fear keep people from asking questions or speaking up.
I understand how this became the default view in the church, but I struggled to understand why. Why are there so many men – and women – invested in restricting women? Why do so many women follow along like lambs? Why do people get worked into a lather over it? And why do pastors and leaders who don’t even believe in complementarian ideology capitulate to it in their churches?
What are people so afraid of?
Whenever fear and spiritual language are leveraged to squelch opposition to an ideology, you have to ask who benefits from the status quo. For years, I couldn’t put my finger on it. But in a recent Holy Post podcast episode, when interviewing Preston Sprinkle about his latest book, Skye Jethani offered a provocative theory about who benefits from complementarianism. And I think he is on to something.
“The greatest beneficiary of complementarianism are mediocre men. Because if you’re mediocre as a speaker, as a teacher, as a leader, you’re more likely to find a position if half the population is barred from that position. But the moment you allow women into the mix, mediocre men lose.
And so gifted men, called men, mature men, have nothing to fear from women in leadership and ministry. Mediocre men have a lot to fear. And until that issue is dealt with, I think they’re going to fight tooth and nail to hang on to this.” – Skye Jethani
His theory snapped me right back to that Sunday in the cold sanctuary. What I was experiencing at that moment was exactly the kind of thing Skye was referencing. A mediocre teacher was doing little to edify his congregation and nobody was questioning the system that allowed it to continue. He is just one of many, many mediocre pastors who benefit from complementarian ideology. I have learned from and been shepherded by countless gifted, called men. But I have also sat through umpteen messages by middling men in rooms filled with women more qualified to teach. Women have been so thoroughly sidelined, it doesn’t even occur to anyone to ask for their help.
Under the current system, churches miss out on gifted teachers, credible scholarship and the full expression of the Spirit’s distribution of gifts. It needs to change.
I don’t consider myself a progressive. I argue that I am more conservative on this issue and less influenced by culture than my complementarian friends. Nor am I aiming to become a pastor. My conviction that ministry roles should be fully open to women is rooted in fidelity to Scripture. I know and love people who hold a different conviction. Many of them assume, like I did, that complementarianism is a biblically faithful view. But I am not alone as one who carefully studied and came away unconvinced by the complementarian case for restricting women in church leadership. The list is growing. Rick Warren, NT Wright, Phillip Payne and now Preston Sprinkle are among a growing number of scholars who agree that Scripture affirms women serving in all ministry roles.
But don’t take my word for it. I urge you to do your own homework. Not just as a matter of curiosity, but for the good of the church.
I don’t expect churches to fix their HVAC issues any time soon. But I pray someday we can sit shivering in cold sanctuaries benefiting from gifts as freely as they were given. I pray for a day my daughters and sisters in Christ won’t be disqualified before they open their mouths. And I pray those who know better find the courage to speak.
Some resources I found interesting are listed below. This isn’t exhaustive but it is a good start.
- Becoming the Pastor’s Wife – Beth Allison Barr (PhD)
- The Making of Biblical Womanhood – Beth Allison Barr (PhD)
- Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church – Nijay Gupta (PhD)
- The Bible vs. Biblical Womanhood: How God’s Word Consistently Affirms Gender Equality – Phillip Payne (PhD)
- Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women: Fresh Perspectives on Disputed Texts – Lucy Peppiatt (PhD)
- From Genesis to Junia – Preston Sprinkle (PhD)
- Women in Ministry (The Biblical Case) – video lecture by Sandra Richter (PhD)
- Council for Biblical Equity (CBE International) – nonprofit that shares resources on this topic
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