How I changed my mind on women’s ordination

In April of 2005, during my sophomore year at Moody Bible Institute, I wrote a paper entitled: “Female Authority in the Church: a hermeneutical(sic) Look at 1 Timothy 2:11-12.” It was the first time I dug into passages in the New Testament about women in church leadership, and it was the formation of a position that I would hold for many years. Namely: that while men and women were both made in the image of God and were of equal value, God intended for men, not women, to lead in the home and the church.

I’ve since then changed my mind. And I figured it might be interesting to explain how that happened.

But first, a few important caveats:

1. This post is not an argument for women in leadership in the church. I will not be giving a comprehensive or thorough look at all the relevant passages and questions related to women in the church. There are plenty of people who have done a better and more thorough job of doing that. Anglican Pastor has put together a handy collection of those resources. I will be simply laying out my own intellectual and spiritual journey here; this post is autobiographical.

2. I recognize that this issue is near and dear to many people, and any discussion of it can feel inflammatory. I get it. Up until recently, I belonged to a diocese that did not permit clergy to publicly endorse women’s ordination to the priesthood. So I am going to be doing my best not to stoke any fires here. This is just how I came to the conclusions that I did, and by no means a stone thrown at anyone who believes otherwise.

Rooted in Creation

I dug up my old hermeneutics paper in order to try and get a better understanding of why I was so utterly convinced of my complementarian position. ¹ The main arguments could be distilled down to the following:

1. The ways in which egalitarians ² read New Testament passages is by and large to take them out of their context and use them to justify preconceived ideas. Re-reading my paper, I recognize that I did not represent either side well, but I especially didn’t represent and engage with an actual egalitarian argument. This was, in my defense, for my first hermeneutics class. But I went as far as giving pushback to the translation of New Testament Greek in a scholarly journal by appealing to Vine’s Expository Dictionary.³

2. One specific passage I believed to be regularly misused was Galatians 3:28 “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (NIV). In that passage (I wrote in 2005), Paul is talking about salvation, not equality as we moderns understand it. To appeal to it in favor of women’s ordination was, I believed, a violation of the text.

3. While the verses prior to 1 Timothy 2:12 (“I do not permit a woman to teach of have authority”) seem like cultural issues unique to the context in which Paul is writing (jewelry, braided hair, etc.), I argued that the prohibition of women in leadership is connected to the creation order itself in the verses afterwards. This meant, as I understood it, that the patriarchy was built into the DNA of God’s good creation. This wasn’t a consequence of the Fall, it was how God intended the world to be.

This final point was the cornerstone of my position. You could make whatever argument you wanted about the historical, contextual nature of Paul’s advice to Timothy, but since the “I do not permit” was anchored in the creation order, it was unshakeable. It also came before the fall, which meant that male headship wasn’t a consequence of the Fall.

It is important, I think, to note that my position (like many complementarians) wasn’t that women were less suited to preach or lead. It wasn’t to deny that women were capable of leading. My position was that irrespective of the gifts that we see among women, that God (in his infinite wisdom) has said that male headship was how things ought to function. And as a student of the Bible, I wanted to do what God wanted.

The first point falls

Two years later, I was in a class called “Marriage and Family Systems,” which addressed a number of pastoral questions, including men and women in the church. And as a part of that class, I read Dr. Sarah Sumner’s book Men and Women in the Church. It has been a number of years since I have read it, but as I recall, what she did in that book was what I was either unwilling or unable to find in my hermeneutics paper two years prior: a thorough look at each of the Biblical texts that have to do with men and women through a different interpretive framework. Her framework wasn’t dismissive of the text (as I assumed all egalitarian readings were, by definition), but thoroughly engaged with each passage, diving much deeper than I had. I specifically remember the ways in which she examined the metaphor of ‘headship’ as it is used in all of Paul’s letters.

The book didn’t change my mind, but it did knock down the first assumption I had: that the only faithful way to read the Bible was to believe in male leadership of church and home. This was my senior year in college, and I am thankful for that book and that class for how it introduced me to a bigger and better and more complex understanding of what it meant to read the Bible as authoritative. On contentious issues, it was possible to both treat the Bible as authoritative and come to different conclusions about what it is telling us to do.

The church at which I have been serving since graduation in 2007 has itself been on an interesting journey with regards to this issue. For readers who aren’t familiar with Anglican church polity, our current denomination (the Anglican Church in North America, or ACNA) is set up in such a way that each bishop and diocese (regional or affinity-based collection of churches) gets to determine whether they will ordain women as deacons, deacons and priests, or neither. In 2011, our church joined a diocese that does not ordain women to the priesthood, and at that time I was totally on board with that decision. As I mentioned before, I discovered that even public affirmation of the ordination of women to the priesthood was not allowed by clergy in this diocese. In the Fall of 2019, though, the congregation voted to transfer to another diocese in the ACNA where there could be discussion, because the clergy of our church were all open to, and by and large affirming of, women as priests. ⁴

In the summer of 2012, when a godly woman whom I admire was being ordained to the priesthood, I had the impression that my diocese prohibited me from receiving communion from women ordained as priests. ⁵ I sat down to talk with her to lay out what was being asked of me, and to see if my presence at her ordination would hurt or grieve her. In that conversation, she did ask me of my own position, and I remember fumbling my way through what I might call a charitable complementarianism: that if I were a bishop I wouldn’t do it, but that I recognized it as a sticky issue and I wanted nothing but fruitfulness in her ministry.

I share these to give you a timeline, and to show you that for many years I existed in a place where I was working with ordained women, and people who disagreed with my position, but that I was still intellectually committed to complementarianism for biblical reasons. I was seeing more and more fruit from the ministry of women in holy orders. As I continued to study Scripture, I gradually found more and more reasons why an egalitarian reading of the New Testament made sense. But the whole time, the foundational text that I could not get around was 1 Timothy 2.

The crucial conjunction

It is something of an irony, I think, that it was through Galatians 3:28 (the passage that I believed had nothing to do with women’s ordination) that I began to see 1 Timothy 2 in a different light. Over the years I encountered plenty of good arguments that gave me a different way to understand some of the more patriarchal (I use this word without heat – I only mean it as “male-led”) passages in the New Testament. And I found them increasingly convincing as better readings of the text. But no matter how 1 Corinthians 11 or Ephesians 5 could be understood in more egalitarians ways, I was still left with God’s intent in the creation order as expressed in 1 Timothy 2.

I don’t remember an exact moment when it all shifted. It may have been in a friend’s sermon on Galatians 3, or in conversations he and I had about the passage. It might have been in my own reading on the passage. But I came across an important note about what Paul does in Galatians 3:28. In the verse, there are three pairs of people who are no longer at odds with each other in the messiah: Jew / Greek, slave / free, male / female. And for the longest time I thought that he used the same word pattern in each pair, there is neither x nor y. But he changes his language for the third pair. He said that there is no more male and female.

Why does that matter? Because by switching the conjunction, Paul uses the language of creation: “male and female he created them.”

Suddenly, the clear hierarchy that I believed Paul wrote about in 1 Timothy 2, based in creation, had a rebuttal from Paul himself. The letter to the Galatians is all about divisions that exist in the church. His example of a gospel contrary to the Gospel he preached is Peter sitting at a different table from the Gentile Christians. The point Paul is making is about the tearing down of existing divisions within the body of Christ. And so there must have been something about the division between men and women that existed before, but no longer existed for those who are in Christ. I could no longer imagine why it would make sense for church structures to have hierarchical differences between men and women.

While Galatians isn’t the go-to letter for arguing for the ordination of women to the priesthood, properly understood, the letter to the Galatians dismantled my previously unshakeable interpretation of 1 Timothy 2.

But it was even more than that. I began to ask myself more questions: how could this verse only apply to salvation if Gentiles, women, and slaves all had access to God before Jesus as well? Paul’s whole point is that things have changed because of Jesus in these relationships. Gentiles had new access (they no longer needed to submit to the OT law), and while Paul doesn’t outright abolish slavery, slaves are given unprecedented status in churches ⁶, so in what ways was the division between men and women changed for those who are in Christ?

In fact, as I have read more people point out that this section in Galatians doesn’t have anything to do with women’s ordination, I find Paul’s inclusion of men and women in verse 28 even more conspicuous. He didn’t write the letter to make the case for women as elders in the 1st century church, but why would he invoke men and women at all if he didn’t at least believe that there was a new and unique way for God’s people to live in light of the death and resurrection of Jesus?

So that is my story. There are more pieces; more little moments in my own story, more New Testament passages that I understood differently, and historical arguments that have been part of my shift in thinking. There are counter arguments to how I have read these texts. I understand that some view the different roles for men and women in the church not as hierarchical, but as complementary (hence the name “complementarianism.”) But, for me, the New Testament argument about a male only priesthood was one of leadership and authority, and this was how the last pieces of that understanding came down. There are plenty of better arguments for women’s ordination (see the Anglican Pastor link above). In fact, what I’ve written is not nearly enough to fully understand 1 Timothy 2⁷. But this is my story, of how I changed my mind on women in pastoral leadership in the church.

The church, as the manifestation of the kingdom of God, ought to structurally represent what is true about humanity. That’s why I have become convinced that women in positions of leadership are necessary for the church. To show the world that in Christ, the divisions that naturally separate us (class, nationality, gender) are no longer significant. We are all one in Christ.