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 they have men who are unhappy with even the limited roles given to women in the PCA. All in all, there are lots of questions and contradictions about how this complementarian view works out in practice.

Females are not allowed to take preaching courses at Covenant Seminary, the PCA seminary. Quote: “Women register for communication courses instead of homiletics practicum courses in keeping with Presbyterian Church in America policy restricting the office of teaching elder or preacher to men.”

There are two recent articles about PCA women in the PCA online magazine from December 2005.

1. Women Theologians: A Spiritual Goldmine for the Church by Carolyn Custis James.

In this article, James discusses how women who graduate from seminary are confused about what to do in the PCA. She gives some biblical arguments that women can do more than housework. She encourages churches to find ways for these women’s gifts to be utilized. She mentions Joni Eareckson Tada (speaker and writer), Nancy Pearcey (writer), Diane Langberg (psychologist), and Susan Hunt (PCA women’s ministry leader) as good examples of PCA women who are using their theological training to do good theological work.

2. The Authority of the Word and the Wisdom of the Church by Dr. L. Roy Taylor.

In this article, Taylor summarizes the biblical argument against women. The first half of the article he explains his position as opposed to those who don’t believe in Scripture. Towards the end, he addresses the evangelical egalitarian biblical arguments for women in ministry as argued by Gilbert Belezikan. This is a decent summary of complementarian arguments. In the last sentence, he encourages churches to allow women to do things within the boundaries.

Addressing this last question mentioned by both James and Taylor, I find Wayne Grudem’s article But What Should Women Do in the Church
the most helpful complementarian article on the subject because the complementarian position gets most difficult when you actually try to put it into practice.

This is one look into official PCA procedures. Still, there is much unofficial resistance to even these limited roles by women. Tim Bayly, pastor of Good Shepherd Church in Bloomington, IN and associated with World Magazine, is a particularly outspoken critic of even this type of dialogue by James within the PCA. See this reaction to the James article. This article has quite an “energetic” discussion among complementarians. Interestingly, the discussion gets a bit more civil, rational and practical at the end once some women start weighing in to the discussion and asking about how this actually looks in practice.

They also reference an accidental 40 seconds of “sermonic material” by a woman in chapel at Covenant Seminary one day. I gotta say I thought the stir created by this incident was hilarious.

Tim Bayly’s Feb 11 post on “Woe to those who call good evil . . .” is again about James who is apparently traveling around spreading egalitarian-like views in PCA circles.

And here is another post by a PCA pastor who complains that James’s article does not mention mothering.

Andy

Jesus seems like a pretty out-front guy, not particularly enamored with the status quo or afraid to do something new and shocking. Why didn’t he choose a woman to be among his twelve?

This is a fair question because Jesus related to women as equals and women were certainly among his most devoted disciples and most fervent monetary supporters. Luke 8:1-3 indicates that women did follow him around as he traveled, helping him with his support. They definitely were around enough to “get it,” and often understood what Jesus was saying when the men didn’t. Mary, for example, seemed to understand that Jesus had to die when she took a large amount of very expensive perfume and anointed Jesus’ feet for burial and was complemented by Jesus for it (Matthew 26:6-13 and John 12:3-8). We think of Peter “getting it” that Jesus was the Messiah (Matthew 16:16), but Martha of Bethany is also recorded making a similar Christological Confession (John 11:27). Certainly nowhere in Jesus’ teaching is there anything about women being unable to serve Him in authoritative ways. In Matthew 20:20-28 Jesus is quite clear that appetite for authority and position did not impress him and he warned his disciples about it.

It may be that the twelve disciples were seen as representative of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and therefore had to be male, but more likely it was a practical decision on Jesus’ part to avoid rumors of sex scandals of having his closest disciples female — persons he was alone with the most. But then Jesus did not have any Gentile disciples in the Twelve either, so if being male is a prerequisite for Christian leadership, according to this argument, most pastors and elders today aren’t qualified either because they’re not Jewish.

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 quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him with proper respect.” [NIV]

These verses are used to bolster the idea that women cannot be elders. The question to ask is whether being the husband of one wife is a qualification or whether Paul is actually making an assumption that the person desiring the office is a man who is married and who has children. It’s not likely everything listed are qualifications because Paul himself was not married and likely had no children and therefore would not have been eligible himself. Most if not all churches today do not require every item in this list as a requirement for eldership, such as “able to teach.” If they insist on maleness as a qualification, then to be consistent, they should also insist on marriage and parenthood as well.

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 three major myths about boys in our culture that are so imbedded that most of us don’t realise they should even be questioned.

Myth #1: Boys Will Be Boys
Scientific studies show (including studies done by Dr William Pollack, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1998), pp. 52-77), that boys are not prisoners of their biology. Just because they have testosterone, it does not follow automatically that behavior is predetermined, that because of their hormones, insensitivity, risk-taking, aggression and violence must automatically follow. “The great danger,” according to Dr. Pollack, “in subscribing to [this] myth is that it tends to make people assume that they have less power to affect a boy’s personality, behavior, or emotional development than in fact they do.” Surely it must relieve any Christian couple with a son that boys’ behavior is shaped more by their loved ones than by nature.

Myth #2: Boys Should Be Boys
This myth says that boys must fulfill the stereotype of the testosterone-saturated dominant, macho male who is always tough, demands respect, and never acts “like a girl.” If he acts outside this Boy Code or in any way behaves in a way that is not considered “manly,” he will meet incredibly strong resistence from society — including whisperings, stares, verbal humiliation, physical attacks, shaming behaviors, or quiet redirection by physical force. This makes it difficult for any boy who is interested in things other than sports, computers and hard, physical labor — things like literature, music, art, drama, cooking or any intellectual pursuits that take fine gradations of understanding. In many quarters, showing too much interest in school itself will reap severe attacks upon boys. These stereotypical behaviors should certainly disturb Christians, since attending church is hardly a macho thing to do either. Therapists’ offices are full of men who tell stories of stereotypical attacks against them as boys when they showed interest in a subject that was not “OK” or who threw a ball “like a girl.” It’s no wonder that boys toughen themselves up into little men and cut themselves off from their feelings. The reduced capability of boys and men to do anything sensitive at all, like care and love, has got to have devastating effects upon marriages and upon the process of becoming mature Christians.

Myth #3: Boys Are Toxic
The third myth follows on the other two saying that boys are dangerous by nature, psychologically unaware and emotionally unsocialized. So some parents send their daughters to single-sex schools and their sons to coed schools for the “civilizing influence” of the girls there. A seven-year-old boy who impulsively plants a kiss on a somewhat reluctant girl is branded a “sexual delinquent and suspended from school. A fifth-grade boy coming directly from a ’sex education’ class jokes with a girl that her sagging belt looks like a penis and gets accused of ’sexual harassment.’ …Ask why we have confused boys’ childish exploratory play with adult predatory behavior…. Such views must be seen as discriminatory to boys” [Pollack, pp. 62-3] and yet similar behavior by girls is not.

It has been my experience that the societal institution that is the most ferocious and insistent on reinforcing these gender stereotypes (with a thought-out philosophy and structured behavioral social code) is the church. This is the exact body that should be the most morally in tune and not conformed to the pattern of this world (see Romans 12:2). And yet the church traditionalists keep on insisting that the heavy responsibility for church and family are solely his and not hers, that “headship” demands it no matter what his or her skill sets are, and that the gender stereotypes are crucial to maintain whether it decreases intimacy and happiness in church and family or not. We end up with women who are demeaned and put down and men who are isolated in corners with even more feelings they’re not allowed to express.

Helping boys to open up about what they are feeling takes effort and education on the part of supervising adults. Step one is to recognize the early signs of masking feelings, such as bad grades, rowdy behavior, overly quiet behavior, verbal denials that anything is wrong when other behaviors say otherwise, drugs or alcohol, or becoming a perpetrator or victim of violence.

Step two is to take a low-key approach to male crises. Keep the voice calm, low, and fault neutral. Express interest in talking about it (the black eye, the discovered drugs, etc.).

Step three is to accept the boy’s emotional schedule. Boys have a need for silence and take longer to share feelings than girls do. The boy needs to set his own timed silence clock and cannot be rushed.

Step four is what Dr. William Pollack calls connection through action. When an adult does something along side of the boy — working or playing or hanging out — the boy may get to feel safe enough to share what’s really bothering him.

Step five is to share one’s own stories of challenge as it is appropriate and how one worked through it, emphasizing how one felt throughout the process. Dr. Pollack: “By discovering that, yes, we too have felt scared, embarrassed, or disappointed, the boy begins to feel less ashamed of his own vulnerable feelings. He feels our empathy and discovers that we understand, love, and respect the real boy in him.” [Real Boys, p. 8]

Educators are becoming increasingly concerned about boys. Much attention has been given to girls recently and they are improving in their access to opportunities and are improving in math and science achievement. Boys, on the other hand, continue to lag in reading, their self-esteem is now more fragile than girls’ self-esteem, are twice as likely to be labeled as learning disabled, and are ten times more likely to be diagnosed with a serious emotional disorder, especially “attention deficit” disorders for which potent medications with serious side effects are forced on them. Boys are three times more likely than girls to be the victim of violent crime and four to six times more likely to commit suicide. So says Dr. William Pollack in his Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (1998), a work based on his research at Harvard Medical School.

Families are supposed to introduce their children to the outer world, but don’t tolerate any whining or stalling from their boys. Boys are supposed to “make the break” to “become a man.” Feeling ashamed of their vulnerability, they mask their emotions and ultimately their true selves. “Everything is just fine,” is all you’ll get out of them after that. Ask a boy or even a man how he feels about something, and he’ll often not know. Not only will he not know how he feels about it, he’ll probably not even have categories within which to know or think about such things (how he feels). Boys are getting a bad break, and we need to learn better how to teach them.

Over the past two decades, an extremely aggressive and clamorous battle of Biblical scholars has occurred over the meaning of one word in I Timothy 2:12: the Greek word authentein, which is translated as “usurp authority” in the KJV, as “have authority” in the NIV, as “assume authority” in the TNIV, and as “domineer over” in the New English Bible. This extremely rare word appears only here in the entire NT and is key because this verse is the one used most often by heirarchicalists to shut women up in churches and to doom them to a life of sole (as opposed to mutual) “Christian” gendered submission.

In an article called Dealing with Abuse, Dr. David H. Scholer shows some of the historical evidence that ties abuse against women directly to Christian teaching. He also takes up the recent Biblical scholar battles over the Greek words kephale (headship vs source) and authentein (have authority vs to murder or to domineer). He gives credit to Dr. Catherine Clark Kroeger for starting the authentein debate in a 1979 article in the Reformed Journal, but believes that the most important article was Leland Edward Wilshire’s “The TIG Computer and Further Reference to authentein in 1 Timothy 2:12,” New Testament Studies 34 (1988): 120-34. In it, Wilshire is the first to use the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) computer database, which contains virtually all three thousand ancient Greek authors from Homer to A.D. 600. The database showed that authentein and its cognates occurred about 330 times and over a large number of centuries almost exclusively meant “a perpetrator of a violent act, either murder or suicide.” If this Greek word has this negative meaning, then Paul is advising the widows of 1 Timothy 5 who were speaking on behalf of the false teachers to not instigate violence in the church, but to be silent. This would be evidence for the position that many denominations hold that Paul’s commands in this passage are for the local Ephesian church only and not to be extended for centuries into the future and to all cultures everywhere.

Just think of all the women’s spirits who have been murdered due to this power/authority teaching.

The ways people interpret the Bible cause unneeded suffering and avoidable stupidities. I’ve often said that if I believed everything I’ve heard from preachers, I’d be a raving lunatic. Just read the Bible for its plain sense, some people say. Yet a 21st-century view of a passage can be very different from what was intended from within 1st-century cultures and understanding of the world. Correctly interpreting the Bible takes some effort, and that is why I’ve always been suspicious of devotional approaches to reading the Bible because Christians get thinking that the Holy Spirit is leading them to do all kinds of crazy things. “No, the Bible is not saying that,” is sometimes the best response to them.

Another fallacy is the notion that one must interpret the Bible literally unless there is a reason not to. This is a major problem of fundamentalists and sometimes even evangelicals that is so important to them that they even use it to define who is in their ballpark and who isn’t. Sometimes there are several layers of meanings to passages, none of which may be literal. Why would one ever want to interpret poetry literally even if it’s possible? Saying that literal interpretations of the Bible should be primary, is simply an assertion, an opinion, only one of several ways to interpret.

Those who think that feminist hermeneutics started in the 1960’s only have to look at the several denominations like the Nazarenes who have held gender equality in high esteem for their full existence.

Guess who recently said this: “Male chauvinism has been the major problem through much of history. For most cultures through most of history the most serious deviation from biblical standards regarding men and women has not been feminism, but harsh and oppressive male chauvinism. It still exists today, not only in some families in the United States, but also in number of cultures throughout the world…. I believe that one of God’s purposes in this present controversy is to correct some wrongful traditions and some wrongful assumptions of male superiority that have existed within churches and families in the evangelical world.” Well, then. Perhaps a major change in the Christian Church is in order.

Don’t know who wrote it? Wayne Grudem in his recent book, Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, Inc., 2004) p. 524. Most of you will have come across his name, but for those of you who haven’t, he is the number one, most aggressive theologian defending hierarchical/complementarian, anti-egalitarian positions on women in church and family issues.

What’s interesting is that a few pages later Grudem opines a big long list of destructive consequences if Christian egalitarianism succeeds — from increasing self-hatred, greater internal frustration (particularly in men!), even further breakdown of families to the total breakdown of the authority of Scripture. Talk about a disconnect. Could it be that patriarchal church structures and teachings had anything to do with the rampant male chauvinism? How could a little more balance between the sexes within family and church authority structures be anything but beneficial?

The new complementarians claim that their new soft patrarchialism will create the most Godly churches and families (and the least, I assume, male chauvinism). Well, if so, then let’s measure it. I call on social scientists to study male chauvinism within both evangelical camps, both the complementarians and the egalitarians, and let’s measure marital happiness, church attendance, Bible study and education, prayer, good deeds performed, patterns of communication, how decisions are made, patterns of church and family abuse, and whatever else can be proved to be convincingly appropriate to the survey at hand. It might also be advantageous to compare these results to control groups of different kinds, such as believers in non-Christian religions, Christian “liberals,” and nonbelievers of various stripes. George Barna has done some of this, and perhaps there are others as well, but no one as far as I know who has studied this convincingly. If any of you think so, please pass along the research citations.

Some heirarchicalists teach that male headship was instituted by God as a part of creation and must therefore be permanent for all times and places. Even if headship were mentioned in the creation story of Genesis, it does not follow that it must be permanent. In Genesis 2:2-3 God creates a seventh day Sabbath day of rest, and yet most Christian denominations celebrate a different day of the week and do not follow the Seventh Day Adventists’ claim that the seventh day sabbath was for all times and places, that it was creational and cannot be repealed.

There is, however, no mention of male headship over the female throughout the Genesis account. With the clear account of the hierarchy of human over animal, one would think that the heirarchy of male over female would be emphasized there if not at least mentioned, if it were true, but it is not. “Nowhere is it stated that man was intended to rule over woman within God’s creation design.” [Gilbert Bilezikian, Beyond Sex Roles (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, 1985), p. 25.]