Showing posts with label Women. Show all posts

This is a wonderfully enticing ad for a conference in Atlanta, featuring some of the hot shots in the evangelical movement. 

I'm familiar with a couple of these guys.

I'm also familiar with how many of them view the role of women in ministry: to support their husbands but to have very little official authority in the life of the church.  Take a look at the "Pastor's Wives Track." I have been served and taught and led by a number of outstanding women in ministry and am thankful that I belong to a denomination that would face much internal criticism if it tried to pull off a conference that was segregated in this way.  I'm not quite sure how Trisha Davis gets to speak alongside her husband.

Mind you, I'm sure there will be a lot of great teaching at the conference. I'd love to hear Pete Wilson, Ed Stetzer, and Chris Seay.  But I can't believe what gets said on the main floor and in that wonderful "Pastor's Wives Track" wouldn't be beneficial for all.

I try to read a bunch of different stuff.  Granted most of it's online at this point, but I dabble in some pretty conservative blogs alongside the more moderate and progressive stuff.  And so I'm familiar with John Piper, a Baptist pastor in Minnesota.  He's written a lot and is influential in some of the more Calvinistic circles.  And, frankly, he has a lot of good stuff to say.

However, we differ on a lot of points as well.   I had heard about some comments he had made last week in a transcript over at Christian Post.  They were comments about men listening to female teachers.  Could a man learn from, say, Beth Moore?  Could a man have a female pastor?  And, yesterday, after reading more about it over at Internet Monk (one of my favorite places to visit), I thought I just might write a blog post on it.

Now, I know that there are many churches which say women can't be ordained.  And I know that there are churches where you wouldn't have women teaching men in the church.  However, I never took it to be a problem that men might learn from a Beth Moore study or from some other women.  But, apparently it can be a problem...according to John Piper.

Here's what he had to say when asked if it's wrong for a guy to listen to Beth Moore:

No. Unless you begin to become dependent on her as your shepherd-your pastor.

...The Bible is clear that women shouldn't teach and have authority over men. In context, I think this means that women shouldn't be the authoritative teachers of the church-they shouldn't be elders.

This doesn't mean you can't learn from a woman, or that she is incompetent and can't think. It means that there is a certain dynamic between maleness and femaleness that when a woman begins to assume an authoritative teaching role in your life the manhood of a man and the womanhood of a woman is compromised.

What I just said is unbelievably controversial. There are thousands, even millions of people that think this idea is absolutely obscene...

So the answer is, no it is not wrong for you to listen to Beth Moore, but it could become wrong. 

Well, I guess you can count me among those who think this is "absolutely obscene."  I just can't even fathom this.

And I'm left to wonder why the reverse isn't true.  If it's wrong for a man to have a woman pastor, why isn't it wrong for a woman to have a man pastor?  Lord knows I have a lot of women in our congregation that I'm trying to pastor the best I can.  I'm wondering what it is about "manhood" and "womanhood" that makes it problematic for men to learn from women...at any time.

I know my upbringing is different and I'm very well aware that my interpretation of Scripture would be different, but I really have no clue about this one.

It makes absolutely no sense.