Full Contact Christianity

If you’re not familiar with the missional movement, it’s probably best just to ignore this post.  You could google it and read a couple of things, but I’m speaking here to a problem within the movement, and if you’re still wondering what “missional” might mean, you’ll just be borrowing trouble.

Still here?  Well, then here we go.  The ‘good for the church’ part is easy.  On the one hand, we have churches with varying degrees of good, solid teaching who really think that if they just keep doing that, people will come to them.  It’s not happening, and it’s not going to — at least not fast enough to replace the ones that are leaving, moving away, dying off.  A renewed missional emphasis will get the church out of its siege mentality and return it to being an army on the march.  You can’t prevail against the gates of Hades from inside a castle; you’ve got to get out there and swing the battering ram. The missional movement brings this emphasis in spades.  This is a Good Thing, a return to the concerns and character of Jesus Christ, and through it, the missional movement will be one of God’s instruments for returning His church to greater effectiveness in the world.

On the other hand, the missional movement insists on defining itself as over against ‘Christendom.’  Various caveats attach to the use of the word in an attempt to avoid getting skewered for being sloppy, but…the use of the term is sloppy, and worse.  It’s fundamentally wrongheaded, and the caveats are an attempt to patch a ship that ought to be scuttled and replaced.

The first century church was on mission, but as the Roman world became Christian, the church got a little complacent.  God moved in the unwashed Germanic hordes next door, which woke the Roman Christians to their responsibility, and started one of the largest and most successful missions efforts in Christian history.  At the end of that mission effort, Europe was Christian for 1000 years: the phenomenon we know of as Christendom.  Even by a fairly minimal definition — the Church in the central position of power and influence in society, say — THIS WAS A GREAT THING!!!!  When a missions effort is successful, you get Christendom, the church at the center of power and influence in society, because all the people of power and influence are Christians.  This is an anticipation and partial realization of the Kingdom, and again, we pray for His Kingdom to come, so there’s no reason to complain when God answers our prayers.  (Sure, the people in question are fallible and the realization of Kingdom is only partial — but so what?  Your personal realization of eschatological perfection is only partial, too, but you don’t on that account stop walking with God.  No, you celebrate the successes, repent of the failures, and move on as best you can.  As with individuals, so with societies.)

Moreover, Christendom became the launch pad for the great missions movements of more recent history, which carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the uttermost parts of the earth.  That was a triumph, and we have Christendom to thank for it.  The North American church in particular ought to be aware of this, because we live in the uttermost parts of the earth.

Using ‘Christendom’ as a word to describe what’s gone wrong with the church is just lunacy, and this is where the missional movement is dropping the bowling ball on its own toes.  A missionary opposing Christendom is a missionary opposing the success of his own mission.  Seriously, think about how you would respond if you heard a bunch of Buddhist missionaries going on and on about how the whole Buddhist thing went off the rails when entire societies converted to Buddhism.  Huh?

Jesus took Europe by storm, and here we have a part of His Bride that’s unhappy about it.  Come again?  At best this is just cluelessness; at worst, it’s sedition against the Kingdom, and the only good thing I have to say about it is that it’s well-intentioned and utterly unwitting.

But it’s still sin; specifically, it’s ingratitude.

Yahweh don’t dig ingratitude, and this is where my prediction for the future of the missional movement comes in.  It will die off, because, unable to celebrate the victories of the past, it will in the end be unable to celebrate its own success.  What does not get celebrated, as Reggie McNeal is fond of pointing out, does not get done — and so one way or another, real success will not be forthcoming, because it is not valued.

Not that this is a huge problem.  Like many other movements that have come and gone in the Body over the last couple of millennia, this one will leave its residue — good and bad — and pass.  The children or grandchildren of the missional folks will take commitment to mission as a matter of bedrock necessity, and also begin asking how they can seek the redemption of the power structures of human society, rather than just railing against Christians who are involved in them. If the Lord tarries, we will yet have more earthly and imperfect portraits of how good a Christian kingdom can be.  And in the end, no matter how much some of us oppose big government and Christian involvement in same, Christ’s kingdom will come, and of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end.  Maranatha!

So for those of you who are just joining us, the title says most of what you need to know.  In the first installment, we discussed the biblical case for deaconesses and prophetesses — which we will revisit shortly in order to discuss the differences in the ways men and women minister.  But the pressing question, for most of the conservatives, is whether we’re going to have women preachers.  If I wait six installments before I address that question, that’s going to annoy some of the neighbors I’m supposed to love — so let’s go ahead and start that ball rolling this week.

The first thing we need to think about here is what we typically mean by “ordaining a preacher.”  Within my tribe and the model I grew up with, we ordain a “minister of the gospel” to go out and take that lead pastor position.  We know, of course, that not everyone we ordain will, in fact, be a lead pastor one day, but the lead pastor position is seen as the paradigm case, the example par excellence of what we’re ordaining the man (and in this tribe, it is always a man) for.  The job description includes deciding on the vision and direction for the church, leading that church, counseling the congregation, overseeing the services of the church, preaching every Sunday, representing the church to the community and so on.  There’s effectively only one office we do a full-blown ordination exam for, and this is it.

So here’s how the “we can only ordain men” thing works: That job description above is what we’re ordaining people for.  Add in a dash of 1 Timothy 2:12, notice that the job description calls for exercising authority over the whole church, men most definitely included, and there you are.  Can’t ordain women; the Bible says so.

But what’s biblically necessary about that job description?  Is that job description what ‘pastor’ means in the New Testament, or have we just taken the biblical word and superimposed our own definition on it?

Yes, indeed we have.  So is it okay for us to put a woman in that position?  Of course not.  But I’ve got a better question: Is it okay for us to put anybody in that position?

Let’s back up.  How do we know there’s even such a thing as a “pastor?”  Because it’s right there in Ephesians 4:11, right?  Let’s look at that.  Paul says in chapter 3 that the grace given to him is to proclaim Christ to the Gentiles, but then adds in 4:7 that grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of the gift Christ gave.  What’s that?  Christ rose up from His throne in heaven, descended to earth, won the victory, and ascended again, taking the spoils of His victory (i.e., the people He redeemed) with Him.  He then gave these people as gifts to the Church: some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers (hereinafter APEPTs, just to save me some typing).  The purpose of giving APEPTs is in order that they in turn equip the saints, so that the saints can do the work of the ministry, through which work Christ builds His whole body up into adulthood.  So just as proclaiming Christ to the Gentiles is the grace given to Paul, we all have some function in the Body that is the unique grace given to each of us.  Christ has given gifted people to His Body, and in turn the Spirit has given those gifted people their capacities to serve within that Body.

The ‘fivefold ministry’ school of thought would say that everybody’s gifting fits into the APEPT schema somehow, but that’s a discussion we can bypass for now.  The gender question is what concerns us at the moment, so let’s look at the APEPT classifications with that in mind.  Apostleship is not limited to the Twelve, nor even the Twelve plus Paul (see Acts 14:14), so there’s certainly a possibility that it’s a more expansive category, but I’m not aware off the cuff of any attested female apostles in the New Testament.  However, there were certainly prophetesses, as we’ve already established.  Nobody thinks gifted evangelists are exclusively male, nor does anyone think the gift of teaching is reserved for men alone.  So why would the shepherding gift be reserved only for men?

“Because,” sputters my complementarian friend, “a woman can’t teach or have authority over a man.  So how’s she supposed to be a gifted shepherd without doing those things?”

Gee, I dunno.  How’s a gifted female teacher — and we all acknowledge they exist — do her thing without violating the same scripture?  Not being a female teacher, I couldn’t say for sure, but I suspect she does it by not accepting teaching authority over men.  Not exactly rocket surgery, is it?

So what if — and I’m just throwing out a wild idea here — we step up to the challenge of acknowledging women’s shepherding ministries as fully worthy of the dignity, celebration and recognition that attends men’s shepherding ministries?  In other words, what if we male shepherds get up off our blessed assurance and treat female shepherds as “fellow heirs of the grace of life”?  What might that look like?

Different than what we’re doing, to be sure.  We’ll pick up the discussion of some of the differences next week.

Because men and women are different, and that difference is expressed in they way we minister.

Got it?

No?

Lemme unpack that a bit.  Two things we need to think about here: How do men and women minister, and what does ordination mean?

Let’s not mince words on this: there are some roles that a woman ought not to play, just as there are some roles a man ought not to play.  Scripture describes some of these.

The description “husband of one wife” in the qualifications of elders (Titus 1:6) and overseers (1 Timothy 3:2) would seem to require that a male fill those positions.  People try to finesse this by arguing that filling these positions with a man was an accommodation to the culture of the time, but since the apostles and prophets do not seem to have ever been interested in catering to the culture of the time in essential matters of church order (note what Paul did to their dining customs in 1 Corinthians 11), I see no reason to believe that they caved in at this one point.  No, they had only men in the position of elder/overseer because that’s what God wants His church to look like.

Of course, for the same reason, they had deaconesses and prophetesses.  Now, I’m aware of a couple of lame arguments against deaconesses, but let’s be realistic.  If Romans 16:1 contained a man’s name instead of a woman’s, there would be no discussion at all: the verse would be taken as proof positive that he was a deacon in the church at Cenchrea.  The reason we doubt that Phoebe was a deaconess is only because of an underlying prior theological commitment.  Those who share that commitment will regard the translation “deaconess” as a priori unlikely, and will insist that the burden of proof is on their opponents.  I say that anyone who presumes to interpret the Word of God had better have a good reason for their understanding, and “burden of proof” arguments are about evading the necessity to do some actual work.  I don’t think that theological construct can hold up, but I welcome any theological dance partner with a work ethic who wants to take up the project.  Let’s discuss it.

More of that anon — for the moment, let’s move on to prophetesses.  The existence of prophetesses, Old and New Testament, is well attested.  Miriam was a prophetess, as were Deborah, Huldah, and the wife of Isaiah.  In the time of Jesus, Anna (Luke 2:36); in the time of Paul, Philip’s four daughters (Acts 21:8) and the women of Corinth (1 Corinthians 11:5, who needed only cover their heads).  In the time to come, both sons and daughters shall prophesy (Joel 2//Acts 2:17).

Now, what is the normal biblical pattern for a prophet’s ministry?  Elijah was commanded to anoint Elisha as his successor (1 Kings 19:7).  It appears that the anointing can be literal, with oil, or metaphorical, through some other type of consecration ritual.  For the latter, consider Psalm 105:15, in which the entire nation of Israel is considered as God’s anointed prophets.

Now, if one ought to anoint a prophet, who could complain if we anointed a prophetess?  Shouldn’t we?

If we would lay our hands on a deacon to consecrate him (Acts 6:6), then what would stop us from laying our hands on a deaconess to consecrate her for the ministry to which God has called her?

Prejudice, that’s what.  Prettied up in theological language, to be sure, but simple prejudice nonetheless.  What we’re dealing with here is an institutionalized conviction that the ministries of women need not be treated with the same dignity, nor attended by the same celebration, as the ministries of men.  That’s an offense to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and it needs to be denounced high, wide, and publicly.

My stance here will be denounced as “blurring gender distinctions.”  It isn’t.  It’s a search for good answers to hard questions — and the people who accuse me of blurring the lines are just mad because they haven’t got any.

Want me to prove it?  In a number of churches in my tribe, we’ll cheerfully lay hands on a missionary couple (husband and wife) and commission them to their ministry; we’ll even do that for a single woman — if she’s going to cross an ocean to teach little brown children.  If she’s staying here to be a Sunday School teacher to little white children, not so much.  Hm.  Does it take a greater anointing to minister to brown children, or is it just that Jesus loves them more?

What about other public ministries besides teaching Sunday School?  Youth leader?  Young Life worker?  Counselor?  Intercessor?  House mother in an orphanage?  R.A. in a dorm?  How do we recognize these ministries?  How should we?

But someone will say, “That’s not ordination.  Ordination is for preachers.”

Ah yes.  Preachers.  We’ll be talking about that next week…

I am about to tell a true story, and I want to make it clear that I am not trying to pick on the speaker in the story.  He clearly has the problem I’m seeking to point out, but he is very far from being alone in this.  The vast majority of conservative evangelicals in the circles I run in have the exact same problem, and they’ve got it just as bad.  A few years ago, this same story could have happened to me, too.  This poor fellow just happened to be the guy with the microphone when someone asked an awkward question…

So I was at a conference, listening to a lecture on decision-making in Acts — essentially a brief and competent sketch of Friesen’s approach from Decision-Making and the Will of God, as worked out in Acts in particular.  The speaker, following the typical conservative anti-charismatic line, said that you can’t really develop doctrine for today from Acts, because it’s a transitional period.  To his (partial) credit, he immediately backed off that and qualified it a little by adding that he supposed you could develop doctrine from Acts, but you wouldn’t want Acts to be your main support; you’d want to corroborate anything you got from Acts in the Epistles, because, again, Acts is transitional.

Now this is the old descriptive vs. prescriptive canard I’ve already discussed here, but another angle on it came up during the Q&A time that I’m embarrassed to say I’d never considered.  Someone asked, “If Acts is transitional and therefore at best a secondary support for doctrine today, then how can we rely on epistles written during that same transitional period?”

The speaker didn’t really know what to say (and here I might add, nobody else was jumping in to help him, either).  After hemming and hawing a bit, he fell back on stating that the book of Acts is a historical narrative — which was apparently supposed to answer the question.

***

It doesn’t, though, does it?  If Acts is a transitional period and what they said and did during that time in Acts can’t be trusted for application today, then the letters written during that time are as suspect as the words spoken and deeds done.  That dumps most of the church epistles at the very least — if not the whole New Testament.  I mean, wasn’t the whole first century something of a transitional era?

Now, certain people will immediately notice an upside:

With the NT as a mere description of what was done in the first century, we are free to decide that things have changed.  Perhaps we need no longer pay any attention to the biblical patterns of observing baptism, or the Lord’s Table.  Perhaps we can reinvent church without regard to what our first-century fathers did.  Perhaps ordaining women and homosexuals isn’t so bad; a lot of time has passed, and those old Jewish prejudices just don’t really have a place in the contemporary world any more.  And what’s this obsession with a single sexual partner, anyhow?  Doesn’t the Bible teach us to love everybody?  Sounds like a contradiction to me…

Which is to say, once you get started, how do you stop that thing?  In our zeal to prevent abuse of the biblical narrative, my fellow conservatives have gotten on the sailboat of undermining biblical authority, and now the wind is blowing so loudly that I can barely hear them assuring me that they know where to find the brake pedal.

Hard to believe, for some reason.

Learn how to read a story or die, guys.  Your personal prejudices will stop you from going all the way, but do you think for a moment that your grandchildren won’t notice that for what it is?  Your (lack of) narrative hermeneutics will devour your grandchildren, just as the Reformers’ theology devoured their grandchildren, in their turn.  Fix it; the discomfort is momentary, and the benefits will last generations.

Some people will feel that I’m just griping about a problem without offering any solutions, and be justly annoyed by that. But although I haven’t made this post any longer, I’ve been hard at work on the solution to this one for some time: some of it I’ve discussed in my past Descriptive/Prescriptive posts.  Other bits I intend to discuss in future posts.  And there’s always my course in hermeneutics.