Let the Women Preach

Reprinted with permission from Charisma Magazine

It's a lie to say that women are not equipped to assume leadership roles in the church. Cultural norms as well as religious mind-sets have helped spread and given credence to this lie, but in spite of arguments to the contrary, it is not supported by scripture.

Too many years have passed for most of us to remember that Christian leaders in the late 19th and early 20th centuries aggressively opposed the effort to grant women the right to vote in the United States. In 1920, Roman Catholic bishops in Massachusetts ruled that women would be considered "fallen" if they entered the political arena. Other denominations passed rulings decrying the suffrage movement, predicting that if women began voting they would forsake their domestic duties and trigger the downfall of civilization.

Some preachers jumped on the anti-woman bandwagon and launched an effort to "re-masculinize" the church out of fear that women would somehow come to dominate it. One of them, Horace Bushnell, a Congregationalist, predicted in his book "Women's Suffrage" that if women started voting, their brains would swell, and they would eventually lose their femininity--and their morals.

For the most part, those who fight the idea of women's ordination today are still using the same cultural arguments and misinterpreted Bible passages that were used by medieval church patriarchs. Old lies don't die easily.

This was most obvious in June 2000, when the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the nation's largest Protestant denomination, passed a policy that states: "While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture." One Baptist leader who opposed the measure, Robert Parham of the Baptist Center for Ethics in Nashville, told a reporter from The Orlando Sentinel that the 15-million-member SBC "has pulled up the drawbridge to the 21st century and locked its members into a 19th-century cultural castle."

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