Complimentarianism, Egalitarianism, and Presbyterianism

A popular blogger and Christian writer in Dayton, Tennessee, Rachel Held Evans is the author of Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions and A Year of Biblical Womanhood and offers wonderful insight with care and patience around issues of Christian life today.  I enjoy reading her work because she creates a helpful bridge between mainline Protestant circles and more non-denominational Christian evangelicalism. 

The last week was a time of great learning for me in the midst of Rachel Held Evans's blogging as she took on the issue of "complimentarianism" and "egalitarianism" when it came to male and femal relationships and Christian faith.  In her own posts and guest posts throughout the week, she looked at scripture, tradition, and we heard personal stories of experience about gender relations in Christian faith, and while I did not read every post, I found the argument fascinating.

I found it paritcularly fascinating, because in my mainline Presbyterian background words like "complimentarian" and "egalitarian" are foreign to me.  Primarily because the role of women in the Presbyterian Church (USA), while a subject of debate for many years, really moved toward equal understanding eighty years ago when the first women Ruling Elders were ordained (beginning with Elder Sarah E. Dickson on June 2, 1930 in Milwaukee).  Margaret Towner was later ordained as the first PC(USA) pastor in 1956 (Now it was 1965 before the first female pastor was ordained in the southern Presbyterian Church, but that is still over fifty-five years ago).

In my own upbringing, women were always in equal number serving communion in worship, collecting the offering, and reading scripture.  My aunt was a two-term Clerk of Session, my grandmother was the first woman elder ordained in her congregation, and my mother has served as both a deacon and an elder.  When I was in high school, our associate pastor for youth was a woman, and I regularly heard women preach on youth retreat and at conferences.  Women as made equal to men in the image of God and called to all the ministries of the Church was a regular part of my life experience.

Now many of the posts on Mutuality that were on Rachel Held Evans's blog this last week dealt with issues regarding gender and family relationships and church leadership in the Bible.  You see, there are passages where women are told to be silent in church (1 Cor. 14:34-36), and where the office of elder is described as, "above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, sensible, respctable, hospitable, an apt teacher" (1 Tim. 3:2).  Many interpret the creation of Eve out of Adam's rib to establish male superiority, and there are also the Household Codes of Ephesians 5.

I was raised to read and know the Bible, so it was not that I was ignorant of these passages growing up, but more importantly it was how I was taught to read and understand the Bible that shaped how I was taught to interpret them.  Presbyterians have for ages believed that the Bible is God's word to us, passed down through the ages to help us to discern how God would have us live as disciples of Jesus Christ.  We have accepted for a long time now, however, that the Bible was composed by sinful human beings who were products of their culture and historical location , whose writings were compiled over time.  There are timeless lessons in the scripture for us all, but there are also cultuarlly specific elements of the scripture that are particular to the time in which the text was written.

And so this is where the great challenge of interpretation arises, what in scripture helps us to encounter the living Word of God that lasts for all time and what elements of the scripture are culturally bound.  Presbyterians have believed for almost eighty years now that when it comes to relationships of men and women, the Bible offers at best a mixed view on gender roles, leaving us to believe that descriptions of women as property or subservient or somehow less human than men are a product of a culture and not the will of God.

We have faithful women leaders raised up in scripture.  Miriam, the sister of Moses, is called a prophet as is the Judge Deborah.  In the New Testament, we must not forget that the first evangelists to tell the Good News were women who went to the tomb.  In Paul's letters, we find him speaking of a Christian leader named Chloe, he sends the Deacon Phoebe with the letter to the Romans, and at the end of the letter he asks the Romans to greet Junia whom he calls an apostle, thus equating her with himself and Peter and John and James in terms of authority in the church.  Then we also must not forget Galatians 3:27-28, "As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.  There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus."

Friends, I celebrate that I belong to a church that recognizes that truly equality between women and men means that women and men must serve God equally in our society, in our families, and in our churches.  I am glad to serve in a congregation that has called a woman to be their pastor in the past.  I rejoice that we do not have to try and create cateogries of God's call based on gender differences, but we recognize that our baptism calls us all to serve God with all the gifts we have, in servant leadership to a servant Lord.