1 Corinthians 12:12-27

Transcription

1 Lesson #21: Role of Women in the Church 1 Corinthians 12: For as the body is one and has many members, but all the members of that one body, being many, are one body, so also is Christ. 13 For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free and have all been made to drink into[c] one Spirit. 14 For in fact the body is not one member but many. 15 If the foot should say, Because I am not a hand, I am not of the body, is it therefore not of the body? 16 And if the ear should say, Because I am not an eye, I am not of the body, is it therefore not of the body? 17 If the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where would be the smelling? 18 But now God has set the members, each one of them, in the body just as He pleased. 19 And if they were all one member, where would the body be? 20 But now indeed there are many members, yet one body. 21 And the eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you ; nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. 22 No, much rather, those members of the body which seem to be weaker are necessary. 23 And those members of the body which we think to be less honorable, on these we bestow greater honor; and our unpresentable parts have greater modesty, 24 but our presentable parts have no need. But God composed the body, having given greater honor to that part which lacks it, 25 that there should be no schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care for one another. 26 And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; or if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it. 27 Now you are the body of Christ, and members individually. While women may not have visible leadership roles in the church, they are integral and essential to the success of the church! 1

2 Value of Women Women are equal to men in the eyes of God. Galatians 3:28, There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 1 Peter 3:7, Husbands, likewise, dwell with them with understanding, giving honor to the wife, as to the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life, that your prayers may not be hindered. Women are worthy of honor and praise. Proverbs 12:4, An excellent wife is the crown of her husband, But she who causes shame is like rottenness in his bones. Proverbs 31:10, Who can find a virtuous wife? For her worth is far above rubies. Proverbs 31:30, Charm is deceitful and beauty is passing, But a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised. Consider these great examples of Godly women: Acts 18:26, So he began to speak boldly in the synagogue. When Aquila and Priscilla heard him, they took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately. 2 Timothy 1:5, when I call to remembrance the genuine faith that is in you, which dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice, and I am persuaded is in you also. Hebrews 11:11, By faith Sarah herself also received strength to conceive seed, and she bore a child when she was past the age, because she judged Him faithful who had promised. Hebrews 11:31, By faith the harlot Rahab did not perish with those who did not believe, when she had received the spies with peace. Role of Women Women were created to complement man. Genesis 2:18, And the Lord God said, It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him. God has assigned women to a subordinate role. 1 Corinthians 11:3, But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. 2

3 Wives are to submit to their husbands. Ephesians 5:22-24, Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body. Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. Ephesians 5:33, Nevertheless let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. Colossians 3:18, Wives, submit to your own husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. 1 Peter 3:1-6, Wives, likewise, be submissive to your own husbands, that even if some do not obey the word, they, without a word, may be won by the conduct of their wives, when they observe your chaste conduct accompanied by fear. Do not let your adornment be merely outward arranging the hair, wearing gold, or putting on fine apparel rather let it be the hidden person of the heart, with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God. For in this manner, in former times, the holy women who trusted in God also adorned themselves, being submissive to their own husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord, whose daughters you are if you do good and are not afraid with any terror. Women are observed as private teachers of the Gospel in Scripture. Titus 2:2-5, that the older men be sober, reverent, temperate, sound in faith, in love, in patience; the older women likewise, that they be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed. 2 Timothy 1:5, when I call to remembrance the genuine faith that is in you, which dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice, and I am persuaded is in you also. 2 Timothy 3:15, and that from childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. Acts 18:26, So he began to speak boldly in the synagogue. When Aquila and Priscilla heard him, they took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately. What about Phoebe? Was she a deaconess? Romans 16:1-2, I commend to you Phoebe our sister, who is a servant of the church in Cenchrea, that you may receive her in the Lord in a manner worthy of the saints, and assist her in whatever business she has need of you; for indeed she has been a helper of many and of myself also. The text does not clarify the role of Phoebe. This verse hardly proves that women were in leadership positions in the early church. At best, it raises a question. Thus, what do other Scriptures say about the subject? o Elders were men. 1 Timothy 3:1-7; Titus 1:5-9 o Deacons were men. 1 Timothy 3:8-13; Acts 6:1-6 3

4 o All evangelists we see in the NT were men. o Women are instructed to be silent in the church. 1 Corinthians 14:34-35; 1 Timothy 2:11-12 Speaking in the Church Women are not permitted to speak in the church nor are they allowed to have authority over a man. 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they are to be submissive, as the law also says. And if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is shameful for women to speak in church. 1 Timothy 2:11-12, Let a woman learn in silence with all submission. And I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression. Nevertheless she will be saved in childbearing if they continue in faith, love, and holiness, with self-control. What about prophetesses? 1 Corinthians 11:5, But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, for that is one and the same as if her head were shaved. Acts 2:17-18, And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, That I will pour out of My Spirit on all flesh; Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, Your young men shall see visions, Your old men shall dream dreams. And on My menservants and on My maidservants I will pour out My Spirit in those days; And they shall prophesy. Acts 21:9, Now this man had four virgin daughters who prophesied. Two points: o We do not live in the age of spiritual gifts today (1 Corinthians 13); thus, the point regarding prophetesses is moot. o Does the fact that there were prophetesses give them the authority to speak in the church when Paul instructs them to be silent? Are women allowed to speak in Bible class? Bible study periods are distinct from the worship assembly of the church. The prohibition of women speaking in the church is in relation to the assembly of the church to worship (pray, sing, teach, give, Lord s Supper). See context of 1 Cor Are women allowed to sing in the assemblies? Singing is commanded of all Christians. Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3:16 Singing does not usurp the authority of men nor is it not submissive. 4

5 What the Bible Says about Women in Ministry Betty Miller Excerpt from article from retrieved on 10/18/14 How does all of this lead up to women ministers? Perhaps you are thinking that although we have laid a biblical foundation for neither male nor female in Christ, certain verses in the New Testament still seem to ban women from ministry positions in the church. Let s examine these verses for the true interpretation: Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. 1 Corinthians 14:34 Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. 1 Timothy 2:11-12 In these verses, Paul cannot be addressing women who were in the ministry, but rather those in the congregation who were out of order. How do we know this? We have many such proofs, many from Paul himself. Here is a partial list of women who were all in influential positions of leadership in the early church. Pheobe (Romans 16:1-2): This woman was a deaconess of the church in Cenchrea, who was beloved of Paul and many other Christians for the help she gave to them. She filled an important position of leadership. It would be a difficult stretch of the imagination to say that this woman fulfilled her duties without ever speaking in the church! Priscilla (Acts 18:26): Priscilla and her husband Aquila are often mentioned with great respect by Paul. Together they were pastors of a church in Ephesus, and were responsible for teaching the full gospel to Apollos. We are informed that they both taught Apollos, and pastored the church together. In fact, Priscilla is sometimes listed ahead of Aquila when their names come up. This has led some to speculate that of the two, she was the primary teacher and her husband oversaw the ministry. At any rate, we see here a woman in a very prominent position of teaching and pastoring. (Other references to Priscilla and Aquila are Acts 18:2, 18; Romans 16:3, and 1 Corinthians 16:19). Euodia and Syntyche (Philippians 4:2-3): Here we see reference to two women who were true yokefellow and who labored with Paul in the advancement of the gospel. Junia (Romans 16:7): In this verse we see Paul sending greetings to Andronicus and Junia, his fellow-prisoners who are of note among the apostles. Junia is a woman s name. In some modern translations, an s has been added (Junias) because the translators were so sure a woman could not be an apostle, that they assumed a copyist has accidentally dropped the s. However the proper male ending would have been ius, not ias. No church commentator earlier than the Middle Ages questioned that Junia was both a woman and an apostle. Though there were other women throughout the Bible in positions of leadership, such as prophetesses, evangelists, judges, leaders, etc., the above references should be enough to establish that women were indeed a vital and normal part of church leadership. Paul expected women to speak in the church, or else why would he have given the following directive? It would have been useless to give directions for women who were speaking in the church, if they were never allowed to do so. But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head: for that is even all one as if she were shaven. 1 Corinthians 11:5 Furthermore, if Paul believed that all women should never teach or speak in church, why does he commend many women who did just that? With all this in mind, what then do we make of the troubling verses that command women to be silent in the churches? First of all, we must interpret those 5

6 verses in light of what we have just established that there were women in leadership positions of the church. Obviously, Paul is not writing to them. He must be addressing another issue entirely the women who were loud and unruly during the service, causing disorder and confusion. When he wrote the Corinthians, he was dealing with a church that was very disorderly in their services. Much of the letter was spent correcting excesses and abuses. Some of these pertained to women in particular and some were to the entire church. Paul is not being prejudiced against women when he instructs the Corinthian women to keep silence. In the early church the seating arrangement was quite different from our modern day churches. Men were seated on one side of the church while the women and children were seated on the opposite side. This is still practiced in many cultures today. The women of Christ s day were generally uneducated and usually only the men were privileged with an education. Due to this situation, when the church met the women were tempted to shout across the room and ask their husbands the meaning of whatever was being taught. This disturbed the service. Paul was simply saying during the service, Women, keep your children quiet and you be quiet, and if you have anything to ask your husbands, wait until you get home. Because of the new equality that Christianity brought to women, it could be that some of them were taking their freedom too far, to the point of being obnoxious. When Paul wrote to Timothy, he gave him a similar directive. Again, it is important to understand the context in which the letter was written. In 1 Timothy, a careful reader becomes aware that many severe heresies and false teachings that were being dealt with. We can draw a conclusion here that many of the proponents and victims of the false teachings were women. Timothy pastored in Ephesus, and it has been suggested that goddess worship might have played a large part in Paul dealing so severely with the women. Ephesus was a primary center of the worship of Diana or Artemis. The heresies being taught might have suggested that women were authoritative over men and had higher access to spiritual knowledge than men did. Regardless of the particulars, in both cases we can see that Paul is dealing with specific incidents in specific churches for very particular reasons. We must understand that many of Paul s epistles dealt with local problems and his commandments are not meant to be taken as commandments across the board for all situations. Rather, we are to seek the Lord for the basic principal that needs to be incorporated in our churches. Because of Old Testament precedents that had already been set, apparently it never occurred to Paul to re-establish the case for women in ministry. Why would he need to? The early church took it as a matter of course that Jesus would call and ordain anyone He chose and that settled it! As a matter of fact, the Bible mentions a prophetess who was in the Temple when Jesus was brought there as a baby. Her name was Anna (Luke 2:25-35), and she was one of two people who recognized Jesus as the Messiah because of her sensitivity to the Holy Spirit. Paul s writings are sometimes misunderstood today because we do not know all the details that led him to write as he did. We must rely on the Holy Spirit, and the rest of the testimony of Scripture to interpret how we are to apply these things to our everyday lives. Scripture should always be compared with other Scripture and the context taken into consideration. Even in Paul s day, there were those who tried to twist the meaning of his words. His (Paul s) letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do other Scriptures, to their own destruction. 2 Peter 3:16 It is a fair conclusion that the testimony of the bulk of Scripture, church history and God s anointing upon them, all speak plainly for women being able to fulfill all positions of the five-fold offices of apostle, prophet, pastor, evangelist and teacher. 6

7 Number of women as clergy jumps for some denominations 8/30/14 Some individual church denominations are reporting greater gains in the representation of women clergy and other ministers, but challenges remain. Women ministers outnumber men in the Unitarian Universalist faith. They account for more than 58 percent of active ministers, up from 41 percent in 1994, according to a spokeswoman. Statistics were not available on the percent who serve in the lead role at their churches. In the Episcopal Church, 48 percent of newly ordained clergy are women, according to a 2012 report by Church Pension Group. But employment among the newly ordained stands at 38 percent for women, compared with 62 percent for men. Women also lag among the newly ordained in pay across age demographics in the faith. The biggest disparities were among pastors age 55 and older, with male clergy making 16 percent more than woman; and among 35- to 45-year-olds, with male clergy making nearly 13 percent more. The Chicago-based Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which installed its first female presiding bishop last year, reports more than 75 percent of its clergy is male, but the percent of women clergy more than doubled from 10 percent in 1994 to 24 percent last year. Among United Church of Christ pastors, more than 35 percent are female, according to a 2012 report. That s up from about 27 percent 10 years earlier. More than 46 percent of its ministers are women. Women make up more than 30 percent of rabbis in the Reform Judaism faith, according to the Central Conference of American Rabbis. About 15 percent of Conservative synagogues employ a woman rabbi, according to the Rabbinical Assembly. Women at work: Female ministers find obstacles on path to pulpit 8/30/14 Carol Jamieson Brown was in her early 20s when she told her pastor she had answered a call from God to pursue ministry and enrolled in seminary. But he put the brakes on her plans he didn t acknowledge women ministers. He had been my pastor since I was 5 years old, Brown said. So it was like your father telling you that God didn t call you. He had to be right, and I had to be wrong. There was no room for him to be wrong in my life. Many years later, she found room. Today she is pastor of First Baptist Church of Park Forest and among those who ve made cracks in a stained-glass ceiling that continues to block women clergy and is nowhere close to being shattered. Only 11 percent of American congregations were led by women in 2012, said Duke University Sociology Professor Mark Chaves, who shared data from a National Congregations Study survey that will be fully released in September. It was about 11 percent in 1998, he said. Nationally, it doesn t look like it s going up. The survey was conducted by Chaves in collaboration with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Progress is greater in more liberal Protestant denominations that have more women ministers. Across such faiths, it was about 20 percent in 1998, and it s just roughly 22 percent today, Chaves said. It is creeping up there, but slowly. 7

8 Women have made greater inroads serving in lesser ministerial roles, with nearly a third of congregations reporting they have clergy women on their staff, but not necessarily serving as the head person, he said. Just because denominations have policies allowing women s ordination as clergy doesn t mean individual congregations embrace them as pastors, noted Adair Lummis, faculty associate in research at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research in Hartford, Connecticut. In churches that are more congregationally centered versus those with more denominational leadership control, congregations can sort of make up their own minds, Lummis said. Age demographics account for some of the limited progress, contends Chaves, who also is professor of religion and divinity at Duke. There s still the generation of clergy that are almost entirely male, he said. They will be leaving the scene, [but] when you have a process that requires generational change in the occupation, that takes time. Women also leave the clergy at a higher rate than men, and it s still clearly true that there are churches out there who prefer a male, he said. It took 27 years for Brown to decide her pastor had erred. She concluded that after sharing her experience with an orthodox rabbi friend. He said, If you re right, how are you going to explain that you didn t do what you believed God called you to do because somebody else told you you were wrong? she shared. Within six months of that conversation I was in seminary. Brown, who is African-American, has been pastor for 11 years at First Baptist Church of Park Forest, which had been racially diverse when she arrived. The church lost roughly 20 percent of its membership after she came, and she attributes that to her race and gender. The Rev. Jo Ann Deasy initially was reluctant to pursue the pastoral path. She is the former pastor of Evanstonbased Sojourner Covenant Church. I d always been in communities that were divided over the issue, and as somebody that does not like conflict, it was hard to make a decision that you knew was going to challenge or upset people, even the people that supported you, she said. It s really difficult to feel like if you become a woman pastor, you can walk into any church community and there s a potential that somebody is going to get really angry at you just for being who you are. She got over that attitude after spending one year at Chicago-based North Park Theological Seminary. That was probably the first time I was in a community where the entire discussion was in support of women pastors, and I felt really free to begin to explore whether or not I was called to be a pastor without having to carry the baggage of the debate, Deasy said. Today she works as director of Institutional Initiatives and Student Research at the Association of Theological Schools. She resigned as pastor of Sojourner this year in part because of the challenge of balancing work and family. She has a toddler son she adopted and is raising as a single parent. Pastoral work requires a lot of evenings and weekends. Just finding child care was really tough, she said. It was hard to figure out how to raise him and do my pastoral work. Other female pastors concur that the family/work balancing act is difficult. It s definitely a women s issue, said Brown, who s available 24/7. Regardless of how many times you preach, how many hospital visits or counseling sessions, there s still an expectation that I m going to cook dinner, do housework, get the laundry done. And I have grandchildren. I ve got to find time for [them]. Over the years, Brown said she has had a mixed reception to her female pastor role from male clergy. Some have received me as a colleague and there have been no problems, she said. Others not only have not received me as a colleague, they have not allowed me to make remarks at funeral services [when a] family has invited me to come for a father s funeral, a mother s funeral. Their understanding of Scripture is that God does not call women, she said, adding that she responds to those viewpoints at times with Scripture. When women have questioned her role, she has asked them, Why is this such a problem for you? Women have led the Sunday school, they ve led the choir, the nurse s board. They re the ushers. Why is this such a problem that God could use us to do more? 8