Women Ministers and the Evangelical Future

Over a decade ago, I wrote in First Things that the debates surrounding complementarianism and egalitarianism in evangelical circles were not going away. One reason was that almost all denominations connected to the Wesleyan tradition ordain women ministers. I also noted at the time that there were over fifteen thousand credentialed women ministers in five Pentecostal denominations. Given the rise of non-denominationalism, those numbers have only grown. The fastest-growing segments of evangelicalism have embraced women ministers.

The growth in women ministers may be one reason Albert Mohler recommended an amendment to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) constitution that tightens the prohibition of women serving as pastors. As this newsletter arrives, the SBC is conducting its annual convention in Orlando, Florida, and Mohler introduced his amendment this morning. The amendment would block churches from acting “to affirm, appoint, or endorse a woman serving in the office or function of a pastor/elder/overseer, such as preaching to the assembled congregation.” After subsequent conversations, Mohler changed “such as” to the more precise “specifically.” 

Given Baptist ecclesiology, the SBC cannot compel belief or function in any local congregation, but it does set the parameters for association within the convention. If the amendment passes the two-thirds majority over two years, it would make it possible to remove a congregation for violating the terms of cooperation. 

While Mohler has couched this amendment in the language of biblical fidelity, it has more to do with theological decisions than biblical exegesis. Even if one concludes that 1 Timothy 2:12 (“I do not permit a woman to teach”) means that only men can hold the pastoral office, questions remain on its application in modern denominations, parachurch organizations, and networks of churches. It’s here that theological judgments on a host of issues are made. 

There are two challenges to the future of Protestantism in the U.S. stemming from debate over women in ministry. The first concerns the growth and tensions among various parts of evangelicalism, and the second demonstrates how sola scriptura never really means “only Scripture.” Theological judgments invariably draw on a particular theological tradition. Since evangelicalism and Protestantism as a whole involve multiple theological traditions, it creates tensions as one part seeks to influence the whole. 

Theological judgments begin with the theology of church offices. For Baptists, the church has two offices: presbyter/overseer and deacon. The SBC has chosen to equate the modern use of pastor with presbyter/overseer, even though one could argue that there is no office of pastor in the New Testament. Stemming from the Latin, the term pastor is a metaphor for shepherding and the pastoral care that leaders exercise. Moreover, New Testament writers endorse a team approach to ministry stemming from Jesus’s sending of the twelve or the seventy and Paul’s myriad co-workers, who include men and women. Neither complementarians nor egalitarians would exclude women from the broad task of pastoral care.

In evangelicalism, the broader meaning of pastoral care has led to designating as pastor any person on the pastoral team leading a local congregation. The difference between positions on the pastoral staff resides in the adjective rather than the noun (senior/lead pastor, discipleship pastor, children’s pastor). Most Southern Baptists have held that women can serve as ministers who direct youth or children’s ministry, but this does not mean that they should be designated as “pastor.” 

A recent documentary, Battle for the Bible: Female Pastors in the SBC, released by Jon Harris and Church Reform Initiative, shows how some SBC congregations were using pastor to refer to men and women. Mohler’s position represents a larger concern over women ministers using the title pastor, even though they may still “shepherd” those under their pastoral care. 

The issue, however, goes beyond the use of a title. Mohler inserted the term “function” because he wants to remove the possibility of women functioning like a pastor while using a different title like “shepherd.” This function concerns the task of preaching/teaching in front of the congregation as a whole rather than the general administration of pastoral care. The makers of Battle for the Bible track several SBC congregations where women regularly preach.

This leads to the second issue about church offices. What is their purpose? In non-liturgical churches, the primary function of the office of presbyter/overseer is teaching. This is not a sacramental view of church offices such as one might see in Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican, or even Methodist churches. It’s not even primarily Reformed, in which teaching, ruling, and sacraments go together, although it derives from Puritanism’s focus on the preached word. If the primary purpose were sacramental, one could have women speaking before the congregation in a variety of contexts so long as they were not engaged in sacramental ministry. There is more than one way to affirm a complementarian approach to church offices.

Baptist ecclesiology forces a vision of the pastoral office as primarily teaching because the local congregation has complete autonomy and authority. All baptized members govern the church through their collective decisions. It is functionally a democratic view of the church where every baptized member has a vote. Authority resides in the whole body, male and female. The offices of presbyter/overseer and deacon derive their authority from the local congregation, not from a group of elders like Presbyterianism or from the bishop as in episcopal forms of government. 

This view of the church opens the door to lay ministry for men and women at the local church and beyond. The result is a blurring of the lines between clergy and laity. It is why SBC women can have podcasts and engage in other kinds of ministry outside the local church that “function” in a pastoral manner. Allie Beth Stuckey is a Reformed Baptist who grew up in the SBC. She has a rather large online following through her podcast. She is arguably teaching, but in her capacity as a lay person. 

The way around a broader view of teaching is to constrain the teaching office to the “assembled congregation,” which is why that language occurs in Mohler’s amendment. Even this language has its challenges. What defines the “assembled congregation”? Is it what happens on Sunday morning? Does it include midweek teaching and discipleship? Is it only the entire congregation, or does it include smaller groups of adult men and women? 

These questions may seem pedantic, but they point toward the blurring between laity and clergy in evangelical history. Evangelicalism originated in the first Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. Central to this movement was maximizing lay participation as the means of bringing renewal to churches and of engaging in mission. A good example of this is John Wesley’s use of bands and classes to spread scriptural holiness. These bands and classes were led primarily by lay men and women. Wesley justified it because Methodist women did not pastor or occupy the sacramental office of Anglican ministry.

This extensive use of lay ministers raised the question of what it meant to preach a sermon. Could women give their own testimony in the context of a church or a service? Was giving a testimony the same as preaching an expository sermon? These debates from the eighteenth century sound like the uproar in 2019 when a small number of SBC women, including Beth Moore, preached in front of a congregation on Mother’s Day. The problem was not Moore’s teaching per se, but her doing so in front of the “assembled congregation.” Some SBC churches have continued this practice of allowing women ministers to teach and preach even while affirming that they do not hold the office of pastor. 

The rise of women ministers in the nineteenth century began with maximizing lay participation and then moved into evangelization. Many Methodist and Baptist women ministers of the nineteenth century were evangelists who shared pulpit and podium with their male counterparts. Wesley allowed this because of the sacramental view of the threefold office of bishop, presbyter, and deacon. Female preachers were lay evangelists, which gave rise to a lay ministerial license within Methodism. The first tier of credentialed ministry in many Pentecostal denominations is an exhorter, who is authorized to preach and teach. It is the Methodist lay minister redescribed. 

The Day of Pentecost is often invoked in these debates, as the Spirit unleashed spiritual gifts into the church through both men and women. It was a Pentecostal view of ministry before there were Pentecostals. Early Pentecostals simply adopted and expanded it so that women could minister at all levels. If authority from Christ comes to his church through Pentecost and that authority resides in the church as a whole, then it extends to men and women. This “logic” of Pentecost worked even more in a congregationalist view of the church. 

At the 2022 SBC convention, the credentials committee initially recommended a study group to explore the meaning of pastor. This was shortly after Rick Warren’s Saddleback Community Church began ordaining women as pastors. Their reasoning  was that some SBC churches saw pastoring as a spiritual gift rather than an office. After pushback, the committee withdrew its recommendation.

This reference to spiritual gift hints at the impact that the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement has had on church growth. This Pentecostal view of ministry conflicts with the traditional Baptist view of ministry as an office, established in scripture and authorized by the local church. 

Stemming from different Protestant traditions, these theological judgments about the Church and her offices inform the way particular denominations understand the ministry of men and women. Mohler’s effort to refine the SBC’s cooperation exposes  the push and pull among the factions of evangelicalism, as each part tries to define the whole. Evangelicals are in constant debate with one another because of this dynamic. Since Baptist ecclesiology is central to non-denominationalism, in which the authority of the local church is taken to its logical conclusion, it creates ongoing tension over theological matters. 

One example of these push/pull factors is church planting. Complaints have been made about SBC church planting initiatives through their North American Mission Board (NAMB). Some of the churches planted through NAMB have allowed women to preach and use the title of pastor. The Association of Related Churches (ARC) is a large church-planting network that crosses denominational lines. A local church can belong to a denomination and be part of ARC. ARC generally supports women pastors, and some SBC congregations have had relationships with ARC and its churches. 

While the SBC has the right to define its own doctrinal distinctives, Mohler’s amendment sets in relief the growing divide over this issue and the fact that strict complementarianism is shrinking. Ryan Burge reports that over the past two decades the SBC has dropped almost four million members to its current size of 12.3 million. Over the same period, non-denominational churches grew to between twenty-one and forty million. A large percentage of these churches have women ministers who teach and preach. 

My guess is that those leaving the SBC are going to non-denominational churches rather than leaving Protestantism. Networks like ARC provide an easy transition into non-denominationalism. Similar ecclesiology means that non-denominationalism will continue to pose a challenge for the SBC. 

The tension with non-denominationalism is made worse by the rise of Calvinism within the SBC. There is a tendency among some in conservative Reformed circles to move toward greater degrees of doctrinal precision. While Pentecostals split because someone claims that “God told me to leave,” conservative Reformed folks do so over refined doctrinal points in the name of biblical fidelity. Baptist Calvinists sometimes exhibit the same predilection for greater degrees of doctrinal precision. 

These tensions are present underneath Mohler’s concerns over the ongoing debate within the SBC about women ministers and the office of pastor. Mohler, however, thinks otherwise. He has blamed the issue on the influence of Protestant liberalism. 

On the CBMW (Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood) Podcast with Denny Burk and Colin Smothers, Mohler said that his amendment was necessary to keep the SBC from going the way of mainline Protestantism. He then issued a challenge: “I would just dare anyone to show to me a denomination that maintained its theological distinctives, its understanding of scripture, its hermeneutic consistent with that scripture, and its fellowship after accepting women serving as pastors. I don’t believe there is such a thing.” 

The statement suggests that Mohler continues to live in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the twentieth century. Pentecostal denominations have ordained women since the beginning of the movement in the first decade of the twentieth century. 

Even Wayne Grudem was forced to admit in Evangelical Feminism that he had egalitarian friends who had not moved toward liberalism in doctrinal convictions. One of those friends was the Pentecostal pastor and church leader Jack Hayford. Hayford not only pastored Church on the Way in Van Nuys, California, he also led the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, which was founded by Aimee Semple McPherson and had been ordaining women from the beginning. 

Mohler’s worry about a slippery slope into Protestant liberalism stems from a longer battle over second-wave feminism within evangelicalism. Beginning in the 1970s, evangelical feminists pushed for women ministers among those forms of evangelicalism that did not accept them. Wayne Grudem and John Piper led the backlash with the formation of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and the coining of the term complementarian. They blamed evangelical feminism for the problems, even giving the subtitle of their 1991 co-edited volume A Response to Evangelical Feminism.

This backlash occurred during the same decade as the SBC conservative resurgence. It led to a host of debates that still rage over how to define complementarianism, egalitarianism, and feminism. The heat of these debates prompted Carl Trueman to complain that evangelical complementarianism “is in danger of becoming simply a reactionary movement, defining itself over against feminism, and apparently seeing any criticism of the party line as a fundamental betrayal of the cause.” 

When he wrote this, Trueman had been accused of rejecting gender differences in a debate with John Piper over whether female police officers are compromising their womanhood. Trueman’s point was that evangelical complementarians were in danger of turning a position on the family or the church into a comprehensive view of the world. He was criticizing the strict complementarians, not complementarianism as a whole. 

The Trueman affair occurred before the rise of Trump stirred up an entirely new set of tensions. His point is even more accurate today. Mohler wants to settle the issue once and for all in the SBC. He will not. The battle over women in ministry is driven by the tensions in evangelicalism, not a slide into liberal theology. The SBC sits between the conservative Reformed world and the non-denominational Pentecostal-Charismatic world. These two worlds are pulling in opposite directions and causing the debate over complementarianism. It’s less about biblical exegesis and more about its theological application within Baptist ecclesiology. Will the strict or moderate complementarians win? Time will tell.

Wayne Grudem and John Piper, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism (1991)

Wayne Grudem, Evangelical Feminism: A New Path to Liberalism? (2006)