“It may have bothered me a little bit…” How Sara changed her mind about female pastors.

Today, I’m thrilled to feature a post by Sara Ronnevik on her journey with female pastors, as a mission-minded woman who is part of a denomination that does not ordain women. This is a great story, and she wrote it to encourage women who are considering going into ministry. Would you like to share your story of how you changed your mind about women in ministry? Shoot me an email at jennyraearmstrong@gmail.com.

SKEPTICAL

I believe that Scripture permits and even encourages women to be pastors, teachers, and leaders in the church by giving us many great examples of such. But I did not always think so. I grew up in a denomination that does not ordain women as pastors or allow them to serve as elders. I used to be fine with that. As I understood it, Paul’s “I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man” meant that women should not be pastors. I had a respect for God’s Word that meant that I would agree with it even if I did not understand it. It may have bothered me a little bit when I knew for sure that if I were a boy and not a girl I would have headed straight for seminary after college. And it may have bothered me a little bit when my pastor kept saying that he was praying for someone to be called as a missionary from our congregation and I knew that he meant a young man and not me even though I was crazy interested in missions and the Bible and theology and all of that. Not that the church discouraged single women who wanted to be missionaries in other organizations. But the specific model for our church’s mission organization is church planting. In order to plant a church you need to be ordained, and in order to be ordained, you need to be a man.

As a teenager, I had little reason to question whether or not we were right about this. I had encountered female pastors in more liberal churches. But these churches and their pastors made me feel uncomfortable. They had fluffy, feel-good theology. I was not sure that they believed in hell. Or the book of Genesis. The idea of going to a foreign country and trying to persuade people to convert to Christianity made them queasy. I did not fit in with these churches. So I was fine with “Women should not be pastors”.

Eventually, because I did want to go to other countries and tell people about Jesus, I ended up spending two years teaching English and Bible classes with our churches in Japan. And while I was there I learned that there was a woman pastoring one of our tiny Japanese churches. I was pleasantly shocked when I learned this. But I did not know what to make of it. Could women really be pastors? Or only in certain circumstances? In this particular case there was a shortage of pastors (male), but there was a seminary-trained woman available to be the pastor, and so she was.

MULLING

This definitely got me thinking. If something is forbidden in Scripture, it is always wrong. Even in small amounts. There is never a ‘good reason’ for adultery. It is just always wrong. Jesus said that even looking at a woman lustfully was adultery, and Paul said that there should be “not even a hint” of sexual impurity among us. So here we had in my church this general belief that “Women should not be Pastors”. And yet, in a situation where there was no one else, it was okay for a woman to be a pastor…? If it was okay a little, then it wasn’t it just plain okay?

I also began to notice the many inevitable inconsistencies that exist in the church when you try to live out the belief that women should not be pastors. No one is arguing that women cannot teach other women. The reason people think women cannot be pastors is because they believe that the Bible teaches us that women should not teach men. However, most people who believe this have no problem sending their 18 year old son (unquestionably a man) to a Christian college where they may have a female theology professor. And in the rare cases where they do have a problem with that, they do not seem to mind if their son takes math or biology from a female professor. What’s the difference? If a woman can teach biology, why can she not teach theology? Also, I noticed that if there was a church position such as “youth pastor” or “children’s pastor” and the church wanted to hire a woman for the role, they simply changed the name of the role to “Youth Leader” or “Children’s Ministry Director”.

It seemed to me that many people did not really have a problem with women teaching or leading men. We were all just really afraid of breaking a Bible rule – or afraid that others would think we were breaking a Bible rule. So we made ourselves feel better by changing the words. That way, we did not end up with the taboo of a Woman Pastor or a Woman Preaching or a Woman giving a Sermon. Instead we have Instructors, and Directors, and Sharing, and “Talks”. We felt better about that. But the substance was not changed! These women were still in positions of leadership with men learning or taking orders from them!

More importantly, I was asking, “What does the Bible say about this?” It seemed to me that 1 Timothy 2:11-12 was the only place in the Bible that appears to direct women not to teach men. But three verses later, 2 Timothy 2:15 appears to say that “women will be saved through childbearing”. But no one was claiming that barren or single women could not be saved. So in one case, a very dogmatic church doctrine and tradition had been built upon v. 12, and in the other case v. 15 was brushed aside and never taken to mean what it says.

Numerous books and papers have been written about what the Bible says about women in ministry, and I cannot do the issue justice here. But I want to share what for me were the most meaningful Scriptures on the topic. While the 1 Timothy verse is muddled in a rather bewildering passage, 2 Kings (22:14-20) and 2 Chronicles (34:22-28) quite clearly records an instance of a woman speaking God’s Word to a group of men who sought out her instruction. The clear passage needs to shed light on the murky one and not the other way around. Huldah was preaching to the administrators that Josiah sent, and her timely words helped initiate a national revival. But was it because she was the only one who would or could? Are women prophets and preachers and teachers to wait quietly in the corner until there are no men to do the job? Could church tradition have really been wrong for so many centuries?

I knew the problem had a lot to do with language, tradition, and what made people comfortable more than anything else. I had, myself, been in countless situations where I had been “teaching” men God’s Word in acceptable ways within my church; in young adult Bible studies, teaching chapel and Bible classes to my students in Japan and in conversations with male friends who appreciated sharing ideas. I knew what I was doing in those situations was not wrong, and no one was even suggesting it was. But could a woman be a pastor? Should she? I had just never seen this, so how could I know?

EXPERIENCING

And then, during my college years, I met Pastor Kathleen. I met her because my friend who was not a Christian, but was dating a Christian, invited me to go to church with her. And hey, when your non-Christian friend invites you to church, you go, right? My previous experience told me that this would be one of those churches with the fluffy feel-good sermons. But I was in for a surprise. For the first time I encountered a woman who was a pastor and who really knew how to teach the Bible. The church was tremendously missional as it reached out primarily to international students. I began attending regularly and became active in the life and ministry of the church over the next year and a half. I watched as this church became the birth place of many new believers who have returned to countries around the globe with the light of Jesus. This lovely church remains in my heart the dearest representation of what the Body of Christ is supposed to look like and what it is supposed to do. It was not an emasculated church. Men and women were fully involved at every level of the church. It was a body of co-laborers. It was an exceptionally healthy church that was actively and effectively bringing new people to Christ, and their lead Shepherd was a woman. Not only did it work, but it worked better than any church I have ever been a part of.

MY CHURCH

There is sufficient evidence from Scriptures that women can teach God’s Word, even to men. But many people will need to see this in the Bible, and experience it in order to believe it. It is so important to remember that when people do not believe that a woman should be a pastor, or elder, or whatever it is, it is because they believe that the Bible teaches that they should not. So if you just say, “I believe women can be pastors!” They may be hearing: “I don’t take the Bible seriously!” The approach must be, “I believe that Scriptures teach us that women can teach, preach, and hold positions of authority. Let’s look at our Bibles together.” And then you talk about Deborah, and Huldah, and Anna and the four daughters of Phillip, and Junia, and Priscilla. And let us not forget about Mary and the other women who were given orders directly from Jesus himself to go and tell (which in effect is teaching!) a group of men the most important and fundamental truth of the Christian faith: That Jesus had risen from the dead!

My church still does not ordain women as pastors, or elders and that is okay with me for now. I am fine with a cautious and gradual approach to change rather than a revolution. Revolutions are bloody affairs, and we do not want them in the church. I am very grateful that some evangelical churches fully embrace women at all levels of ministry, and others are taking a good hard look at the issues together as a church. In the end it may come down to a discussion about the words we use and what they mean: prophetess, pastor, teacher, preacher, apostle, or elder. And we must look carefully at all of the women in the Bible, especially in the early church, and make sure that these women have counterparts in our churches today.

Sara is a wife, mother of three, and artist. When not pursuing those vocations, she spends every free moment with her nose in a book, most likely on history or geology. You can view some of her artwork on her public facebook page at Sara Ronnevik, Artist.

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