Faith.In.Life

Evangelicalism is not Sexist

When I was growing up my siblings and I were given the option to stop going to church around third grade.  One of the first churches I attended when I was first getting back into Christianity was a small Southern Baptist Church in my home town, Wray, CO.  At that point, I was introduced to what I later learned to be “Complementarian” where the gender role of women complimented the men’s primary role of leadership.  I was able to get to know the pastor of this small congregation who was one of the most confident men I had ever met.  However, his wife was your quintessential pastor’s wife and his two daughters helped lead worship.  I didn’t think much of the nature of the roles within this congregation until I started getting more involved with their families.  First, I was invited to this pastor’s household in which his confidence turned into a sense of cockiness where his wife and daughter were spoken down to in some odd form of chauvinism. I never felt good about that interaction.

Over the years, I have found that this experience may have only been a surface level interaction with a form of complementarianism.  Over the years I found that the belief system created the potential for poor practice and even abusive interactions between men and women in ministry.  I started seeing the poor practice when there were only certain things that women could do, and whether they said it out loud or it was simply assumed there was a certain ceiling for how women could serve in the church.  This has recently come into the public eye in the SBC with the way men challenged Beth Moore because her platform of leadership and teaching was growing.  From what began as primarily Bible studies for women built a massive platform for Beth Moore.  Other male pastor’s started questioning and even calling out Moore for teaching more and more men and doing more of the role of what was traditionally reserved for an ordained pastor.  To be fair, as I followed this interaction, Beth Moore was certainly pushing what the SBC had adopted around women in leadership and many of the criticisms were fair.  Still, it turned into a type battlefield where the overly confident men started speaking down to Beth in incredibly demeaning ways.  At “The Truth Matters Conference” in a panel discussion that John MacArthur was a part of, the moderator set up the following scenario:

“I will say a word and then you need to give a pithy response to that one word.” 

The word that MacArthur is asked to comment on?

Beth Moore.

MacArthur’s response is swift: “Go home.”

The response was met with cheers and applause from the audience.

Regardless of your view on women in ministry, this type of response is anything but pastoral and indicates that women should essentially accept their assumed responsibility as some type of concubine or housewife.

This only scratches the surface of the abuse of women within churches and ministry.  While it is a hard listen, the podcast “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill” showed Mark Driscoll using his platform to teach the men under his leadership to dominate their spouse.  The lengths to which the podcast exposes how Driscoll taught sexuality does err on the side of what culture is calling toxic masculinity under some disguise of Christian teaching.  And yet, what Driscoll taught still does not err in sexual abuse, even if it may have been encouraging a type of domineering. Bill Hybels, on the other hand, at the end of his ministry had several sexual misconduct accusations brought up against him effectively ending his pastorate at Willowcreek in disgrace.  Reports said that Hybels regularly entertained women especially on his trips in his different hotel rooms.  While Hybels was not convicted of any crime, the concerns were brought up to the leadership board which lead to quite the fallout.  What should stand out to us in the Willowcreek fallout happened after the movement in culture known as the #Metoo movement giving voice to women that had been trending.  In speaking of a trending movement, Evangelicals should detest how many the church’s leaders and those who claim to be Christians fall into sexual temptation and even are sexually abusive.

Those who claim to be Evangelicals should not be following such a movement, but leading it.  Jesus framed sexual sin as a battle ground in which we are to flee from sexual immorality to the point of if you are lead into stumbling it would be better to pluck one’s own eyes out.  Job said he made a covenant with his eyes in terms of what he would allow himself to look at and when he would look away.  David probably shows us the extreme fallout of sexual sin when he looks upon the nude Bathsheba by covering up his affair in murdering her husband.  Nathan calls David out, but even in David’s sin the consequences lead to the death of the child born of the affair.     In other words, we need to repent of such behavior.  In doing so, we need to be aware that there will be natural consequences.  If nothing else, people will become hesitant to trust the institution of the church.  Equally there will be overcorrections that create impossible boundaries for ministry.  For instance, there is such a thing known as the Billy Graham rule where Billy would not do any one on one ministry with any female to avoid even the slightest suggestion that anything might happen between he and any female.  While there is a need for accountability within leadership, there is equally a need for openness.  The two can live hand in hand with one another.  

I believe there are healthy ways to apply complementarian so that it does not somehow become sexist.  The view comes from primarily two verses in 1st Corinthians 14:33-34 that says woman should be silent in worship for it is shameful for a woman to speak in church while 1st Timothy equally says  that Paul does not allow for any woman to teach or have authority over men.  Even if you hold to a traditional view of Scripture, this does not give men permission to somehow use their status as something to take advantage of or even abuse.  For we are told in Ephesians 5:22-33 that husbands are to be willing to die for their wives as Christ died for the church.  Equally Philippians tells us that we should all have the same mind as Christ who did not take advantage of his Lordship, but gave up his pride to lay his life down for the many.  Even a notion of complementarianism can only work if we live according to Romans 12:10 where we out do others in showing honor.

However, here at Faith Church and within our denomination (ECO), we believe a core tenet of the faith is Egalitarianism where men and woman do ministry together through promoting shared leadership models.  Faith’s staff just finished going through the book “Together in Ministry,” which I highly recommend.  The book goes through a Biblical model for shared leadership between men and women, and also recognizes both things that the church needs to repent of while also giving a list of prescriptions we can be aware of to remove any type of ceiling for ministry and maintaining healthy boundaries and accountability.  In short, it seems to me that the two verses Paul tells women to be silent are the exception to the rule not the actual rule of how we should do church.  That is, Paul oversees at least two female Apostles through Junia and Priscilla (whose husband was Aquilla) (Romans 16:3-7).  Equally, the Old Testament lifts up woman time and time again through even books named after women, leaders like Ruth and Naomi, or the Judge Ruth.  Thus any legitimate Biblical scholar is left with an interesting problem:  There were women in leadership and that Paul even works with and acknowledges, but Paul still says he does not allow woman to teach.  While one could potentially make an argument from the Contemplentarian camp that no one else was stepping up, so God made some exception to use women or maybe you suggest the women didn’t teach men, however this seems like a cop out.  Deborah most certainly lead all of Israel, including men, woman and children, while the Apostles are given the full authority as commissioners of Jesus Christ to perform signs, miracles, as well as preach and teach to the ‘ends of the earth.’  There seems to be contextual things going on for both the church in Corinth and in Timothy’s own personal situation that the women were somehow speaking out of turn (but not because of their sex).  Corinthians adds the teaching about women as a type of afterthought (the NRSV puts the clause about woman in parenthesis) to the teaching about proper prophecy.  Where Timothy on the other hand places his directions about women teaching in connection with modest dress.  The language Paul uses around modesty is relating to prostitution, and if that is the context for what type of woman he is referring to that changes our understanding of the application of this text.  In other words, if someone is actively living in sin, we would not allow them to teach on the very topic they are living into.  Additionally, if someone is not trained in preaching and teaching, you equally would not allow them a place to speak unintelligently.  Paul seems to be teaching that if a woman is called, trained, and equipped to do ministry then all authority is given to them as well as men (for we are all one in Christ Jesus).  

In terms of church history, there are places where the church and Evangelicals have practiced unbiblical ideas and application.  For instance, there was a time where the majority of the church was calling for pre-civil war type of slavery ever using the Bible to support their claim.  One would be hard pressed to find any arm of the church that has any merit what-so-ever that still supports such a claim.  In that case the Bible was weaponized to somehow isolate a particular people group.  The same is true for woman in ministry.  The Bible cannot be weaponized against women to somehow be used as an instrument to silence or abuse woman, but rather it is through Christ Jesus that we have been restored to before the fall - where, by the way, God created the woman as a helper for Adam, the same terms used for the Holy Spirit.  While there are always ways to be tempted and even fall into sin, the church and Evangelicals need to repent for how we have treated women and return to the very model of creation - where both men and woman were made in the Imago Dei, and it is only through both women and men, husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, that we best represent our Triune God.

In closing to what Evangelicalism is and what it is not, I will point out that when people complain about Christianity I have come to ask “what do you think Christianity is?”  I once asked an openly self proclaimed atheist who was going through a very traumatic situation “What faith looked like in their lives?”  The person then spent the next (I kid you not) 30-45 minutes telling me everything that was wrong with the faith.  To which, I agreed with much of what the person said.  Once he took a break, I said “That’s great.  But I didn’t ask you what you thought the church, I asked you what faith looks like in your life?”

In other words, I feel like when we talk to people who may be in the process of deconstructing their faith or are militantly opposed to the faith we first must understand their experience of the faith, Evangelism, and the church at large.  In that way, the discerning person will actually go through a process of deconstructing what is largely poor understandings of what Christianity believes, or listening to the ways they were hurt in terrible ways.  We must take the posture of empathy expressing grace and mercy into the other ways.  And most of the time, it starts with the Evangelical saying “I am sorry that you had to go through that.”  Their may be times where the next sentence could be correcting a poor world view, but what I have found is most of the time it will take the willingness to walk with that person’s doubt, fear, and hurt in order to help them walk the journey the Holy Spirit might be taking them back to the foot of Jesus Christ.