About half way through the trip, the two of us had both finished the book and began discussing some of the claims and arguments made by McKnight in The Blue Parakeet. As the two of us were talking, another member of our team chimed in, "Women can't be pastors. It says so in the Bible."
Now, I am prone to being wrapped a little too tight, with too short a fuse; so, when our misinformed teammate parroted the same complimentarian line he had heard growing up I was rearing back to rhetorically pummel him--luckily the other guy who read the book was far more even tempered and simply asked, "where does it say that?" Of course, our teammate didn't know (probably because it doesn't actually say that anywhere in the Bible),* but he made some assertions about Paul's letters, which were quickly defeated by my teammate who had read the book with me.
But then, my complimentarian teammate said, "Well, that may be true, but I don't think I could respect a female pastor." And this, I believe, is the actual central tenet of an ecclesial view that limits the places where women can serve and lead. Once one wades through all the weeds of theological and biblical arguments for the limiting of women in the church and home, at the very center of the complimentarian project is a fear/lack of respect for women, which drives some to abuse the Biblical text to satisfy their sexist disposition. "But Caleb," some might say, "Jesus' 12 original disciples are all men." Yep, and if you go to Jerusalem today, and visit the western wall, you will discover that to this day, men pray on one side of a fence and women on the other. The first 12 were all men, like every other rabbi in Israel, but notice how many women surround Jesus as his ministry progresses, enough that the Gospel writers feel it appropriate to make special mention of the women present at the crucifixion, resurrection, and the day of Pentecost.
In the words of Colin Cowherd, if you don't want a female in church leadership, "that is a you problem." Throughout church history, women have played vital roles in the leadership of the church; oftentimes relegated to the margins by men who hid behind weakly formed theological and biblical arguments. But at the margins, these women were at the center of some of the church's most interesting and world changing renewal movements. At this point, one can only deny that God is calling both women and men into the ministry and mission of church leadership if they close their eyes, stick their fingers in their ears and pretend like God hasn't been using female pastors, elders, deacons, seminary presidents, professors, missionaries, monastics, and authors to renew the church and transform the world.
If I have missed a relevant piece of information, feel free to leave a comment and we can practice intellectually virtuous dialogue.
*I can already hear the interlocutors key strokes ready to say that I am overlooking 1 Corinthians 14, Titus1, 1 Timothy 2, and 2 Timothy 3: four cases where Paul advises specific communities of faith to "silence" the women and/or describes male leadership. While there is no doubt that in these four occurences, which are all canonical documents, that Paul calls for the silencing of a particular group of women, we don't know why for sure, but clearly he does so; however, it is foolishness to assume that the four times that Paul advises churches to silence the women carries more authority than the half dozen times he praises female apostles and deacons in the same letters (see Junia, Priscilla, Phoebe, etc.). Additionally, the modern notion of 'pastor' is not seen anywhere in the Bible, but has been developed over the church's 2000 year history, so that much like the modern family is not the same as the ancient household, one shouldn't assume contextual similarity between the 21st century west and the 1st century near-east.
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