9: JUST IGNORE THE “DISPUTED” PASSAGES? 97do we think that God does not really care what we do about this ques-
tion and therefore he has not spoken clearly about it?
This is no minor issue. The issue of roles of men and women in the
church affects, to some degree, every Christian in the world, for it affects
whom we choose as leaders in our churches, and it has a significant effect
on what kinds of ministries the men and women in our churches carry
out. If we say, “It is impossible to decide what the Bible teaches on this,”
we imply that God did not think this to be an important enough issue
to give us clear guidance in his Word. We imply that God has left us
instructions that are unclear or confusing on this issue.
Do we really want to say this about God and his Word, on a topic
that affects every church in the world every week of the year, for the
entire church age until Christ returns? Is it really true that God has left
us unclear instructions on this topic?
(6) The role of women in the church is not an issue on which the
church has been divided for centuries. If we look back at the history of the
church, there have been controversies about the end times since the very
early centuries of the church’s history. There have also been controversies
for centuries about the millennium, about Calvinism and Arminianism, and
about baptism, for example. But there have not been controversies about
whether the roles of pastor and elder are reserved for men.
Apart from a few sectarian movements, the entire Christian church
from the first century until the 1850s agreed that only men could be pas-
tors and elders, and the vast majority agreed that only men could do
public Bible teaching of both men and women.^20 From the 1850s until
the 1950s in the United States, women pastors were a tiny minority, but
over 98 percent of evangelical churches (over 99 percent of the broader
Christian church if Roman Catholic and Orthodox groups are included)
had only men as pastors.^21 Allowing women to be ordained in signifi-
cant numbers began with some liberal Protestant denominations in the
1950s and spread to a number of evangelical groups under the influence
of evangelical feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. Before the advent of
(^20) See the historical evidence for this paragraph in Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth,
457-469.
(^21) Even among those evangelical denominations that had women pastors, such as the
Assemblies of God, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, and the Church of the
Nazarene, women pastors constituted a small minority.