(This post is a response to a post on Lydia's blog about women serving in the church. The response is too long, in my mind, to justifiably be placed as a comment on her blog. Though the entry seems like a long one for my blog, follow the headings if you only want to read the essentials.)
Suppose that you have an isolated group of Christians, one well trained woman and some men who are unready for ministry. What is she to do knowing that God has ordained a separate role for women within the church than the men?
Maybe all that needs to be said is to listen to this talk given by Randy Stinson. The whole of the talk is him explaining what a husband and father's leadership in the family looks like. It should be very similar for an elder in a church. The talk is helpful for this discussion because in listening to what the man should be doing (i.e., leading), you get an idea of where a woman can justifiably step in (i.e., leading does not equate with doing everything so she can help when the leaders ask for that help, as long as it's within the bounds of Scripture [e.g., the leaders can't ask for her help to rob the bank when the church treasury is in the red]).
(The following paragraph is an encouragement to prepare for the long haul that does not contribute to the main thought of answering the question.)
Before saying anything, I think that it would take a lot of time to build a healthy church out of this. Church planting is tough. A woman, by herself, raising up unskilled men to plant a church: tougher. Furthermore, she might not even be getting them to plant a church. She might be going against their old paradigms, such as, possibly, Someone else will do it. When MacArthur went to shepherd Grace Community they had female elders there. It took quite some time to bring a biblical vision of church administration and leadership to his church. Dever, who also went to shepherd a church in need of a private reformation (when I use "reformation" in the context of a single local church, I mean one, where if you walked in, it might seem like they're playing church, they don't have a biblical structure for church leadership, the church doesn't deal with public sin, the preaching is unsystematic and possibly only loosely based on a text of Scripture, where they need to change a lot of the ways that they do ministry, thus, it needs a reformation), now pleads with pastors shepherding churches in need of reformation not to do it quickly, nor with a totalitarian style to it. So, if she's dealing with some men with baggage, it might take a long time. Fortunately, a church has that amount of time, five to ten years. A campus ministry, where your leaders are around for at most four years (i.e., a degree for five years minus the frosh year), is not a likely place for this reformation to be able to happen.
(Back to answering the issue.)
I was about to use the word "unqualified" where I wrote "unready" in the first sentence of the question paragraph, but I chose to use "unready" because I don't think that in every case it takes too much to be qualified. For example D.A. Carson said in a talk on elders that the churchmen in Derbe, Lystra, Iconium and Antioch of Pisidia couldn't have been believers very long before Paul and Barnabas "had appointed elders for them in every church" (Ac. 14:23). This suggests to me that they were simply relatively spiritually mature (i.e., they were spiritually mature in comparison to some of their brothers within the church).
With this in mind, I think that the woman should select two or three of the men who she sees are the (relatively) stronger believers. Then she should (gently) encourage that they be appointed the elders of that church. (This is where I think that the Stinson talk would prove helpful.) These men obviously want the church to exist (otherwise they wouldn't be in the picture). After she suggests that they should be part of it they'll leave, desiring to remain in complacency, or they'll stay, and, with fear and trembling, accept the task of building the church. These men can resource the woman and ask her help in setting church direction, as long as the responsibility and outcome rests on the shoulders of the men. The individual men can ask her help when doing Bible study preparation, or even in their quiet times in finding out what the Bible means.
Hopefully with much prayer and patience, the Lord would bless this entreprise.
(That's it for my suggestions. All of the following is my attempt to explain why I'm thinking in this way, from the Bible.)
The reason this is difficult is because we need to apply 1 Timothy 2:11-15 in a God-honouring, people-building way. The first observation that I would make is that the passage in question is referring to the local church and corporate worship within the body (read Grudem for the argument behind this claim). More specifically, I think that it's saying that elders (or pastors; same thing [cf. 1P. 5:1, 2]) may not be women (read Piper for his argument behind this claim). Otherwise, it's not very specific. I think that Paul deliberately left lots of room to work within. The woman, then, would be balancing giving as much help as possible to build the church, while neither giving the church the appearance of being led by a woman, nor of giving the members the feeling of reliance on female leadership that would become systemic and difficult to heal later on. For example, I think that the woman could legitimately do a lot, but she needs to be concerned about what the future outcome of her current actions will be: With what I am doing right now, will the church in the future be more feminine (and thus, less healthy) than if I take a step back now, slowing down the progress of the church, but investing in the long term health of the church? That might be the case.
For this reason, if there were other churches around in the area, or even in the next city over, I think that the wisest choice for the woman (for the sake of clarity, from, say, church A) would be to discern from among them a healthy church (say, church B) that would be able to help church A. She could then ask the elders of church B to offer the men of church A some guidance and help in building up their body (i.e., church A). This would show the importance of relying on male leadership, but would also give her church real and valuable help.
As a note, Mohler, for example, would say that 1 Timothy 2:12 prohibits women from speaking at C4C functions. Since Paul was specifically referring to the local church, I don't entirely agree. Paul was not specific, so, in trusting that the Scriptures are sufficient in their restrictions, we must believe that God is not opposed to women speaking at C4C meetings. (If you disagree with this, then, essentially, you're saying that 1 Timothy has wider applications than just within the church. Are there to be deacons in every C4C group? Are there to be weddings? Lists of widows? All in all, I don't think Paul is referring to outside of the local church, and I don't think that C4C is a church.) So it comes down to a question of beneficial and unwise, as opposed to right and wrong. So, while I think that it's beneficial to have as many male speakers as possible at C4C, I don't think that it's wrong to fill in the gaps with female speakers. (That was my attempt as Weekly Meeting Coordinator at Carleton.)
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I introduced three characters in this post. Randy Stinson is the president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and Dean of the School of Leadership and Church Growth at Southern. Sometimes he reminds me of Driscoll, making fun of guys who don't fit the Wild At Heart paradigm for men (i.e., guys who might cry, or wear pink – though Stinson is more apologetic in this case than Driscoll typically is, or who drink decaf coffee). Other than that, I find him helpful. He must be brilliant to serve under Mohler at Southern, though.
D.A. Carson is a professor at TEDS (i.e., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, but I call it by the rhyme of "peds" for short, while most of its students, I think, call it Trinity for short). He was born in Quebec, shepherded a Baptist church in B.C. and now lives in Chicago. (Well, not quite, Deerfield, Illinois.) The biography of him that I linked to above was written by Andreas Köstenberger and is thoroughly enjoyable. It's short, descriptive and enlightening. Piper once said that he recommends choosing one author and devoting yourself to reading everything he's written. (Piper's chosen Jonathan Edwards.) I might choose Carson. Carson is so well renowned that he became the subject of a satire blog on the subject of him. (Of which, I particularly enjoyed, this entry involving Paige Patterson.) I could go on about Dr. Carson, but I'll stop here.
Finally, I come to Dr. Wayne Grudem. The two things that I think Grudem is known best for are his Systematic Theology textbook and his fight for a complementarian view of gender presented from the Bible. Allow me to tell one quick story about him. He too, along with Carson, used to teach at TEDS. Then his wife, Margaret, got in a bad car accident and she was in severe pain, much of the time. He spoke at a few conferences in Phoenix and his wife noted that the pain wasn't nearly as bad in the heat of Arizona, as it was in the Windy City. So, he stepped down from his post at TEDS and took a post at the much less prestigious seminary, Phoenix Seminary. I really admire him for putting his wife's care above his own reputation.
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Wednesday, October 22, 2008
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