Full Contact Christianity

One of the things that’s really striking about the North American church is its near-total lack of interest in what the Bible says about local church life and worship. The Bible doesn’t give us a specific order of service, tunes to sing, or a template for the church event calendar, but it does give us a series of instructions to obey and examples to follow. When we get all the puzzle pieces on the table at the same time, we learn quite a lot about what we ought to do. I recently had occasion to correspond with a fellow pastor on the topic, with a specific focus on the role of women in the local church. Here’s some of what came out:

Biblical Basics

1. Women are not forbidden to preach, but preaching is for the public square, not the church. (See https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/proclaim/ on this)

2. Women are explicitly encouraged to prophesy with their heads covered. (1 Cor. 11, 14:26,31)

3. Women with the pastoral gift should practice it in ways appropriate to their sex (see #5). Since “pastor” is not actually a title, using the word that way just creates confusion. (The Bible never says God only gives that gift to men, and explicitly calls women to teaching/shepherding functions in Titus 2:3-5.)

4. Women do not serve as elders; it’s a fatherly role. (1 Tim. 3:2//Titus 1:6, 1 Tim. 3:4-5)

5. Women are not allowed to teach or exercise authority (or judge prophecy; an exercise of authority) in the church service. (1 Tim. 2:12, 1 Cor. 14:34-35)

Problems with the way we currently do church

1. We don’t permit women to be pastors since it is seen as a subset of being an elder, but this means we often bar women from shepherding when the Bible does not. Or when women do exercise the gift of shepherding, we have to invent another category for it, lest we confuse it with being a “pastor.”

2. In strictly biblical terms, our typical Sunday morning “preaching” is actually a combination of teaching and prophecy exercised within the church. In conservative churches, women are usually barred from “preaching” since it is correctly seen as a teaching role, but as a consequence they are also barred from exercising their prophetic gifts within the church. Furthermore, since we wrongly define “preaching” as something for the church, rarely will anyone (man or woman) preach in the public square, which is a problem. Public proclamation is one of our basic responsibilities.

3. 1 Corinthians 11-14 allows women to do than your typical conservative church will allow because of the way we bundle functions together (especially with a single long sermon and no opportunity to share or exercise gifts in the service). It is natural for male leaders to feel this lack and try to find a way to mend it by making room for women to do more. The problem is, in most of our services, the only thing for them to do is give a sermon—which is typically heavy on authority and teaching, and so crosses the line.

Toward a solution

We don’t know everything we’d like to know about early church praxis, but if we trust in the sufficiency of biblical revelation, then we don’t need to. Where the Bible doesn’t specifically tell us what to do, we have liberty. That’s a feature, not a bug: God is giving us the responsibility to adapt to the needs and circumstances of our neighbors and communities. However, where God does give us specific instructions, we have the duty to submit to them, trusting that God really does know best. So for example, elders should be male because the Bible says so, but we need not meet in homes—even though we know they did—because the Bible doesn’t tell us that we have to. We’re free to meet in homes if we like, or build a building, or rent space somewhere.

Male eldership was directly commanded; plurality of elders was normal. We know there were deaconesses and prophetesses and church widows (likely a subset of deaconess). We know services were highly participatory (1 Cor. 12-14) and included the Lord’s Table (1 Cor. 11) and a meal, but the meal’s not commanded. We know services could include extended teaching (nobody thinks Eutychus died during a TED talk), but we don’t know that it was normal practice. In fact, from 1 Cor. 12-14, it seems that long-form teaching from a single speaker was not normal, at least not in the Corinthian church. “Pastor” was a spiritual gift in the early church, but whether it was a church office is highly debatable (probably the best argument is based on Eph. 4:11, but mostly the people who make that argument don’t apply the passage consistently). Given what we know for sure about church offices, we can confidently say that if pastor were an office in the early church, it certainly was not the modern office of pastor (=CEO). They were certainly singing the biblical psalms, and there’s good indication they were writing new songs (Paul quotes some of them in his letters). The NT tells us three times to be a psalm-singing people. The Psalms themselves tell us to sing a new song, so we need new songs to sing too. We know they devoted time to Scripture reading and prayer, and we know that prophetesses prophesied with their heads appropriately covered.

The modern church files virtually all of that under “descriptive, not prescriptive” and moves on to just do whatever it prefers. They rely on accrued tradition (although in most churches, those traditions are much younger than people think) or on marketing consultants that tell us what will sell. By contrast, we have long thought that we should take the biblical revelation more seriously than that. After 10+ years of brainstorming and development, covid presented us with a need to begin holding worship services…so we’re busily putting all that into practice as best we can.

At Christ the Anchor, we try to include all the elements commanded or modeled in Scripture. We sing the Psalms (Eph. 5:18-19, Col. 3:16). We have four long Scripture readings (Psalm, Old Testament, New Testament, and Gospel) totalling about 20 minutes (1 Tim. 4:13). Following the Scripture readings, an elder will deliver a brief (7-10 minute) homily, then open the floor for sharing and reflection (1 Cor. 14:26), wrapped up by an elder summing up what’s been said and correcting what needs correcting (1 Cor. 14:29-35). Then comes a time of prayer (again, open floor- 1 Timothy 2, 1 Corinthians 11:3-16) before moving into confession, passing of the peace (1 Peter 5:14), Eucharist (1 Cor. 11:17-34), and a meal (Acts 2:42).

In our church, women participate in the open forum (especially to exercise the gift of prophecy) and in prayer (1 Cor. 11:3-16, 14:24,31). As a matter of practice (not a Biblical requirement), to distinguish between the roles of men and women in the church, a man (as a representative of Christ) will read the Gospel, and an woman (as an image of the Bride) will lead the corporate prayers of the people.

There are more than a couple of kinks to work out, but as a baseline, this approach to our church service has allowed us to be strongly father/elder led while encouraging our women to step up to what Scripture calls them to do in the service.

“Spiritual intimacy leads to physical intimacy.” I was told that a number of times growing up, by various parties in and around my church, but especially (and repeatedly) by a godly older couple I highly respected. Their practical application of that idea was a corollary to the Billy Graham rule: a man and a woman ought not to have serious conversations about deep spiritual things. Aside from your spouse, men ought to talk with men, and women with women, (or maybe couples with couples) and that’s that. (I’ve both written and said my piece about that error elsewhere, and won’t belabor it here.)

More recently, I had an unbelieving colleague with whom I did some very high-quality, very careful bodywork over a period of about a year. Everything was going well until one day, out of the blue, she began a conversation that turned into an invitation to adultery. To her dubious credit, she was very forthright: for her, being seen well and known well created sexual tension, which she wanted to relieve by taking our working relationship into the bedroom. I declined, which she certainly expected — the invitation was framed in a “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” kind of way — then I declined further contact, which seems to have surprised her; and when she continued to reach out to me, ultimately asked her not to contact me again.

Now, the same type of work I did with her, I’ve done with others of both genders over the years with no such difficulty. So what caused her to have such a problem? The same misbelief that the godly older couple in the first paragraph was suffering from: thinking that all intimacy is ultimately the same thing.

Let’s go back to the beginning. The world was formless and empty. God forms the world by dividing a series of contrasting pairs one from the other: light and darkness, sea and sky, dry land and sea. Then He fills the newly-divided world: the greater lights to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night, fish in the sea and birds in the sky, and land-dwelling animals. Then He signs the portrait: “male and female He created them.”

God created genuine variety, not a world of monist mush. Many of the different things He made are perichoretically related in surprising ways, but they are different things, each with its own glory. One of the fundamental truths about God and His creation (as Francis Schaeffer famously observed) is that all things are not the same to Him. He doesn’t just recognize distinctions; He literally makes distinctions. Christians ought to be automatically suspicious of any claim that starts out, “It’s all the same thing, man!”

One of the distinctions we ought to recognize is between a marriage and every other human relationship. Different kinds of relationships are different, each with its own unique glory. There’s not a single staircase of human relationship with casual interaction at the bottom and a marriage bed at the top, the only variable being how far up the stairs you climb with a particular person. Relationships differ in kind as well as degree. There’s more than one staircase, and they don’t all go to the same place.

This is something that Christians ought to already know: we will have eternity—literally all the time in the world—to know each other better. There’s not a single person on the New Earth that you won’t meet, and with that kind of time on our hands, we’ll all get to know each other very well indeed. As well as you can get to know your spouse in 50 or 60 years of successful marriage, that’s nothing to how well you’re going to know, say, Deborah or Samuel one day. And you still won’t end up married to them. “In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage,” like Jesus said.

Similarly, same-sex friendships like Jonathan and David, Ruth and Naomi, are held out as examples of close friendship and love: a different kind, not a lesser degree, of relationship. Contemporary revisionist takes on those relationships (wrongheaded for reasons I’ve gone into elsewhere) are actually a symptom of the very error we’re addressing. The revisionists’ inability to imagine a close relationship that’s not sexual is precisely the problem, and they’re projecting their own lack of imagination on everyone else.

Contemporary people think they live in a world of monist mush, and they’ve deified their lusts to the point that many of them will bed virtually anybody under a highly flexible ‘right’ set of circumstances. Many really do only have one relational staircase. That staircase leads inexorably to sexual intimacy, and every step below it is some combination of audition and foreplay, all the way down to a casual conversation with a stranger on the sidewalk. Which is kinda gross, if you think about it for a moment.

Framed that way, the failure of imagination is easy to see, and it ought not to surprise us that pagans would struggle in this way. It’s baked into their basic premises about the world; the mystery is that they don’t struggle more often. But what in the world would possess Christians to get tripped up like that?

If you’re not familiar with Rob Henderson’s work on luxury beliefs, it would benefit you to get acquainted. The essay above will develop the idea in more depth, but here’s the quick-and-dirty version: “Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” A common example would be the “defund the police” concept. People who live in gated communities with private security can afford to hold such a belief; people who live in a rough neighborhood where they need to call 911 a few times a month can ill afford to hamstring the police.

As luxury goods of all types (or credible knock-offs of same) become more attainable for anybody with a credit card and an Ebay account, it’s become increasingly difficult to tell who’s a member of the upper- (or upper-middle) class club by someone’s dress or accessories. Henderson suggests that fashionable ideas—luxury beliefs—are taking up that slack.

Both in general society and in certain quarters of the church, egalitarianism functions as a luxury belief. In general society, very few framing carpenters or concrete guys are women, and this is not because of some sort of systemic sexism. In jobs where physical strength and durability really matter, the workers are overwhelmingly male. Dangerous jobs are overwhelmingly male, as are workplace fatalities. More prosaically — and speaking from several years’ experience as the only male employee of a particular retail establishment — when the big, heavy box needs to go on the high shelf, the women look around for the guy to do it.

By contrast, people with laptop-class careers are much less likely to encounter circumstances on the job where they are forced to reckon with the biological differences between men and women. Anybody can sit at a desk and push buttons on a keyboard. These folks can afford a correspondingly higher level of fantasy about how much biology matters, because they don’t have to live with the consequences of that counterfactual belief. The head of a network administration department can entertain the notion that men and women are largely interchangeable; the foreman of a concrete crew had better not.

In other words, the key differentiator here is whether you face any plausible danger of having to eat your own cooking.

There’s a church near me that exemplifies this trend. On gender issues, good number of members profess to be strongly egalitarian as a matter of basic justice. However, the polity of the church they attend is such that they cannot have a female lead pastor, and they do in fact have a very strong, masculine man leading the church. One of the worst upheavals the church ever had happened because egalitarian staffers, most of them female, tried to steer the organization in a more progressive direction, and badly overplayed their hand. The strongly complementarian direction of the church was confirmed; many of the egalitarian congregants nonetheless stayed. Today, those egalitarian congregants–mostly middle- to upper-middle class, mostly driving 10-15 minutes or more to attend–drive past multiple churches with far more egalitarian convictions, some of them with female pastors, in order to attend this particular church. How many of these people would actually be happy with the results, were their fashionably avowed convictions actually put into practice? We’ll never know — and that’s exactly the point of a luxury belief.

Can a woman be a pastor? Back in the day when we were formulating a response to second-wave (and early third-wave) feminism, that question was the practical dividing line within the evangelical world.

It was a heady time: suburban megachurches were growing, and even though the far majority of churches were not remotely that big, most churches and pastors looked to the megachurches for leadership. We were paying a lot of attention to leadership, org charts, and such things in those days, so it was only natural to formulate the questions around the church org chart. Which genders can hold which positions? You define the duties for a particular box on the chart, define the skills and attributes that go with those duties, and then put out a call for resumes.  

So in that setting, the question everyone wanted an answer to was, “Can a woman serve as a pastor?” One group said no: men and women have complementary responsibilities in the church, and serving as the pastor is a man’s job. Another group said yes: men and women have equal responsibilities in the church. This is where our two terms (complementarianism and egalitarianism) came from – two different answers to a question about a church org chart. 

But it’s a stupid question. The office of pastor as generally practiced in the American church has no New Testament precedent whatsoever. It doesn’t exist. The right question is not “Can a woman have that job?” The right question is “Should anyone should have that job?