13: EXPERIENCE TRUMPS SCRIPTURE 127(2) Other members will stay even though they disagree with the egal-
itarian stance of their leaders. They will think that the leaders
they respect are encouraging disobedience to Scripture, and this
will tend to erode their confidence in Scripture in other areas as
well.
(3) Those who are persuaded that the Bible allows women as pastors
will usually accept one or more of the methods of interpretation
I discuss in this book, methods that tend to erode and undermine
the effective authority of Scripture in our lives. Therefore, they
will be likely to adopt such methods in evading the force of other
passages of Scripture or other topics in the future.
(4) A church with female elders or pastors will tend to become more
and more “feminized” over time, with women holding most of the
major leadership positions and men constituting a smaller and
smaller percentage of the congregation.^16
(5) Male leadership in the home will also be eroded, for people will
reason instinctively if not explicitly that if women can function as
leaders in the family of God, the church, then why should women
not be able to function as well as men in leadership roles in the
home? This influence will not be sudden or immediate, but will
increase over time.
(6) The boys and girls growing up in the congregation will experience
increasing gender identity confusion, since nobody in the church
will be teaching them what it means to be a man instead of a
woman, or to be a woman instead of a man (see chapter 30,
below, for this trend among evangelical feminists). They will just
be taught to grow up as Christian “persons” (with all instruction
being gender-neutral, or even geared to teach boys how not to betive, most active families in the church left and joined the other main evangelical church in
town, a Southern Baptist Church where I was an elder and where the pastor and church con-
stitution clearly supported a complementarian position.
(^16) See Leon Podles, The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity (Dallas: Spence,
1999), who notes that in 1952 the adult attenders on Sunday morning in typical Protestant
churches were 53 percent female and 47 percent male, which was almost exactly the same as
the proportion of women and men in the adult population in the U.S. But by 1986 (after sev-
eral decades of feminist influence in liberal denominations) the ratios were closer to 60 percent
female and 40 percent male, with many congregations reporting a ratio of 65 percent to 35
percent (11-12). Podles focuses primarily on Roman Catholic and liberal Protestant churches
in his study, and he concludes that, if present trends continue, the “Protestant clergy will be
characteristically a female occupation, like nursing, within a generation” (xiii).
See also, Why Men Hate Going to Church, by David Murrow (Nashville: Thomas Nelson,
2005). Murrow describes in detail the increasing “feminization” of many churches, a trend that
is driving men away.