Navigating Female Leadership in the Church

Photo by Jordan Madrid on Unsplash

This article is excerpted from Carolyn Moore’s upcoming book, When Women Lead: Embrace Your Authority, Move Beyond Barriers, and Find Joy in Leading Others (published by Zondervan Reflective). 

“The plural of anecdote is not data.” So states a modern proverb, which sounds pithy and wise. Except that when you put enough anecdotes together, you not only have data, you’ve got a trend. 

Consider this anecdote, for instance. I can’t count the number of times in more than two decades of ministry that a newcomer to our church has come to me asking to talk about my place  as a woman pastor. Of course, they don’t ask me about this directly. Often, it happens after they’ve been visiting for a few weeks, and they’ll stop me on the way out of Sunday worship or in the hallway as they pass by on the way to a group meeting. “Can I get an appointment with  you?” they’ll ask, casually, as if they’ve just thought of it. 

But they haven’t. They’ve been thinking about it nervously for a while. Based on what I know about them, I can almost always predict what’s coming. They’re wrestling inside, gathering evidence to settle what is unsettled. They want to like the church they’ve started attending, and they want to accept my place as their pastor. But something inside them can’t make peace with this one piece of the puzzle. Or maybe, as they’ve raved about their new church to friends and family, something in the reactions of others has stirred up something inside them. When we meet to talk, they’ll spend the first few minutes telling me how much they love the  church. They’ll compliment my preaching, and they might even say something like, “You guys don’t seem Methodist at all!” (Sadly, they mean that as a compliment; we get that a lot from  people who don’t expect to encounter lively worship and an evangelistic style in a Methodist  setting.) Then, they get to their point. “I have no problem with women pastors,” they’ll say, “and I think you’re awesome. But my mother/ coworker/ last pastor/ book I read/ thing I’ve always believed since childhood has me thinking about it, and I guess I just need to know how it all works for you, you know—with what’s in the Bible and all. Can you explain the part about  women pastors to me?” 

Nine times out of ten, they don’t actually know what’s in the Bible. They haven’t done any real research on their own. They just know what they’ve heard, and until now, they’ve had no reason to question it. But here we are, and now my job is to help them think through something they desperately want to be true, even if they can’t shake the funny feeling that something is wrong. I’ve had enough of these conversations to know there is an inner hesitancy to accept the place of women in leadership, especially spiritual leadership. In my conversations with women pastors and leaders around the country, I’ve collected dozens of stories just like mine. Women report noticeable pushback based on the theological opinions of those they seek to lead. It isn’t always immediately voiced, but over time and upon reflection, almost every female pastor I’ve talked to has anecdotal evidence of brushing up against those who disagree theologically (sometimes ethically) with their place as spiritual leaders in the church. Sometimes it is as innocuous as the story I’ve just told. Sometimes it is accompanied by passive or not-so-passive aggression as folks vie for power in church leadership. 

Meanwhile, there are people whom women pastors will never meet simply because of their gender, even if those same people have not fully explored the biblical underpinnings of an egalitarian position. Why? Because they’ll never walk into a church led by a woman. 

What You Believe Matters 

Most folks center the debate about women in church leadership around two New Testament  passages written by Paul to the early church—1 Corinthians 14:34–36 and 1 Timothy 2:12: 

Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to  speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. Or did the word of God originate with you? Or are you the only people it has reached? (1 Cor. 14:34–36)  

I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she  must be quiet. (1 Tim. 2:12) 

These passages must be taken within the context of the overall message of the Bible. They must  be read through the lens of Deborah’s story (Judg. 4–5) and through the lens of Mary’s charge (John 20:18); through the lens of Galatians 3:28 (“there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female”) and the stories of Phoebe, Priscilla, Tryphena, Tryphosa, and the great host of women who co-labored in the gospel with Paul (Rom. 16). God has not called all women into vocational, pastoral leadership (nor has he called all men into ministry leadership), but he has surely called us all to serve the kingdom in the ways we are gifted. That women were mentioned at all in the Bible is a testament to their dynamic contribution to the early church and gospel story. 

The first creation story in Genesis describes the work of man and woman together. God blessed them and directed them to multiply and care for his creation (Genesis 1:28). This was their work together—to steward the rest of creation in partnership with one another. The clear hierarchy established in both creation stories of Genesis is the hierarchy of humans over animals, not male over female. Men and women are cut from the same cloth, as it were; their creation story is not a text of hierarchy or value but of unity and interrelatedness. 

In his remarkable treatise on the theology of the body, Pope John Paul II explains that the word that spoke man and woman into existence is a word rooted in their being, rather than in their doing. What is good, John Paul II seems to imply, is that man “is,” and not what he “does.”  The created goodness of men and women is not found in the roles they play but in their very existence, and it is the combination of the two sexes—male and female—that reflects the image of God. Moreover, their relationship reflects an ontological equality as well as a functional equality. To say this simply, men and women are both created in the image of God, and both are given the task of stewarding creation (Pope John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body). 

The fall, when humanity sins in Genesis 3, turns this partnership of equals into an antagonistic relationship. Adam and Eve, condemned by their failure to obey God, will now experience suffering in this life. Adam will fight against the ground, even as he works it for his existence. Eve will no longer have a partnership with Adam; he will rule over her. Rebecca Groothuis, co-editor of Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity Without Hierarchy, calls this “the failure of mankind, not the design of our Creator.” Genesis 3 describes what happens when the Enemy of God and humanity attempts and succeeds at distorting the created design. This narrative is descriptive, not prescriptive, and that makes all the difference. The great sadness is that our created purpose was weakened at the fall of humankind. We were meant to fight in partnership together against evil, but in his attempt to throw us off our game, the Enemy of God divided us so he could conquer us, and we’ve been trying to recover that unity and partnership between the sexes ever since. 

Our embrace of gender hierarchy is a product of the fall. And if our embrace of a hierarchical worldview is the product of the fall, and not God’s design, then the hard fact is that teaching alone will not “fix” it. This bias is a mark on the entire human race, a stain and a curse that has fallen on every cell of our world. Our grief over everything that is not as it should be is rooted in a deep longing to get back to the other side of Genesis 3. But try as we might, human effort alone cannot fix the fall. 

Still, we try. We try with information. We want to educate everyone around a woman who leads, so they’ll respond more positively to her leadership. This is how we’ve been conditioned to respond to injustice. But perhaps a more effective strategy is to start with the woman herself. Equip her with a solid creation-based theology, then give her the tools she needs so she can be confident in her call and take authority over the work for which she is anointed. Support her in forming partnerships where she can take on the worthy mission of transforming the world with Jesus. Only transformation can move this world back to the other side of Genesis 3, and only the Holy Spirit can do this transforming work. In this regard, Jesus’s words are significant. His commands after the resurrection are gender-neutral: “Go make disciples” (Matt. 28:29), “You will be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8), “Take up your cross and follow me” (Matt. 16:24). These commands and commissions were not given just to men. They were given to all his disciples—both men and women. For women who lead, a strong egalitarian and orthodox theology, combined with a solid sense of Christ-rooted identity, is critical to withstanding the opposition and resisting the tides of uneducated opinionating.

I began by sharing a typical scenario wherein folks come to me, asking for my take on women in ministry, noting that a majority have not done their own research. Very few can quote the Bible on this topic; fewer still have read commentaries or done the exegetical work to form their own opinions. They just know what they’ve heard, and they find themselves questioning whether their participation in our church is in line with their hunches. The world is full of people I’ll never talk to who are not convinced that women ought to be leading. What they are likely responding to (though they don’t even know this is what is happening in the recesses of their mind) is their own fallenness—fallenness that makes us all prone to want hierarchies over partnerships. They have arrived at a position, but not by following a reasonable, researched path. 

Felicity Dale, author, pastor and house-church advocate, asks a poignant question: “There have been times when everyone knew God did not want women to lead in the church. Could there be a time when everyone knows the opposite is true?” The first-century church proved that when men and women work together to build the kingdom of God, operating in freedom and in the power and giftedness of the Holy Spirit, the effects of the fall can be reversed, and the  glories of the gospel will be exposed. I believe that can happen again. 

Carolyn Moore is Lead Pastor of Mosaic Church in Evans, GA. She blogs at artofholiness.com.