Archives: 'The Local Church'

Here’s some interesting information about the PCA and women in leadership from my friend Andy.
The bottom line is that PCA denomination is solidly complementarian — restricting women from being elders and preaching — but they have theologically trained women from their own seminaries who do not know how and where to use their gifts, and […]

I Timothy 3:1-4: “Here is a trustworthy saying: If anyone sets his heart on being an overseer [elder], he desires a noble task. Now the overseer must be above reproach, the husband of but one wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not […]

Believers in Christian manhood and womanhood would like us all to believe that there is something about masculinity as it is lived out in America that is crucial to Christianity. What it means to be masculine, however, varies from culture to culture, and has no business being inserted into Christian theology. There are […]

I can imagine that this question is not liked by many people, but it is a great question. It’s at the center of what this blog site is about. Could God really be at the center of slights that women suffer all over the world just because He, the ultimate authority, said […]

My son-in-law sent me a Web link to the Assemblies of God Women in Ministry page. While pentacostals and charismatics also struggle with the truth of egalitarian approaches to church and family, there has for a very long time been a strong support of women within their churches and theology that many evangelical churches […]

Chapter 3 in Julie Ingersoll’s book Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles is called “Conflict in the Lives of Individual Women.” Even women, she says here, who have been groomed and carefully nurtured to be put on the faculty of conservative educational institutions come to believe that’s it’s only an […]

It has been a great encouragement to the biblical egalitarian movement to have Willow Creek Community Church demonstrate having women on the leadership team and as teaching pastors. There are also a number of outstanding evangelical PCUSA churches. The issue with PCUSA churches is not whether they are egalitarian but whether they are […]

Well, I go off the church board next week, and I leave with mixed emotions. When they asked me to join it three years ago, I told them that church eldership was never anything I ever sought — in fact, was something I rather dreaded. They wanted me anyway. I suppose an organization […]

I’ve had Kathleen Norris’ work recommended to me a number of times, but hadn’t picked up any of her books until this weekend. Her Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith is her struggle with the jargon of Christianity, of what she calls the “scary words.” Her process of conversion involved the reading of […]

Figuring out the direction of a marriage takes cooperation and grace, and when there is serious disagreement, the ability of both partners to listen and hear the other is of crucial importance. The argument that the male should always have the deciding vote if the disagreement is particularly difficult is the worst possible tactic […]