Pastors who grant women the pulpit while withholding the office haven’t found a middle third way. They’ve surrendered the function Scripture guards and kept a title it never mentions.
This pattern frustrates me.
Dishonesty is wearing the language of nuance. Cultural capitulation is dressed up as theological sophistication. And I keep asking: how do pastors who claim to champion truth end up here?
A pastor, earnest and well-read, announces that after years of prayerful study he has landed on the question of women in ministry. He distances himself carefully from patriarchy on one side and radical feminism on the other. He uses all the right vocabulary: complementarian, servant leadership, ezer. Then he hands women the pulpit on Sunday morning and files the whole question under “secondary convictions.”
Southern Baptists spent this June answering that pattern. Al Mohler’s Truth and Unity Amendment, which states that a cooperating church does not affirm a woman “serving in the office or function of a pastor/elder/overseer,” passed its first constitutional vote in Orlando with nearly 75 percent support. Mohler explained why both words had to be there. One church, pressed on the issue, had simply renamed its women pastors “shepherds.” His summary from the convention floor was one sentence: “When it comes to the office, comprehensive. When it comes to the function, specified.”
That sentence is the whole debate. So ask the question plainly: is the office/function distinction a Baptist invention, or is it Paul’s?
How the Lines Get Drawn
In 1 Timothy 2:12, Paul writes, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man.” He does not leave us to guess at his reasoning. He supplies it himself in the next two verses: Adam was formed first, then Eve, and the woman was deceived. Creation and fall. Two events that belong to every culture and every congregation that will ever read the letter.
Getting around that rationale requires a series of interpretive moves, and once you learn them, you will see them everywhere.
The first move relocates the rationale to a local crisis, usually the Artemis cult in Ephesus. There’s a problem: Artemis never appears in 1 Timothy, and the false teaching Paul describes carries Jewish fingerprints, not pagan ones. Myths, genealogies, quarrels about the law. Even Lyn Kidson, an egalitarian scholar, concedes as much. The backdrop this argument needs, the text doesn’t supply.
Then the prohibition itself gets merged into one idea. On this reading, “teach or exercise authority” really means something like “teach in a domineering way,” so Paul only forbids a toxic hybrid, not ordinary preaching. This is precisely the argument Andreas Köstenberger dismantled in Women in the Church, the technical study he produced with Thomas Schreiner. His research on the Greek connector “oude” showed that constructions like this join two activities of the same kind: both positive, or both negative. “Exercise authority” is a legitimate activity in this context, not a corrupted one. That means “teach” must be read the same way. Paul is restricting two good activities, not one bad hybrid. Pastors who lean on the merged reading sometimes list Köstenberger and Schreiner in their own recommended resources anyway. They are citing as authoritative the very book that takes their central argument apart.
Third, they split office from function. Some of the men who make this move are brothers I respect. Sam Storms has argued that “pastor” names a spiritual gift rather than an office, so a woman may carry the title. J.D. Greear has suggested that many apparent violations are really a “nomenclature problem.” But Denny Burk’s warning to Storms holds: whatever the intent, the effect is women doing what 1 Timothy 2:12 restricts. The Danvers Statement, the founding document of the complementarian movement, never framed the restriction as a title to withhold. It named roles to withhold: governing and teaching. Paul’s restriction in 1 Timothy 2 works the same way. He never mentions what a woman may be called. He restricts what she may do.
Last, the passage itself gets reclassified as secondary. Too complex, too contested, too culturally tangled to bind anyone. Yet the same pastors who find chapter 2 hopelessly murky treat “husband of one wife” in chapter 3 as a clear, cross-cultural norm. Same letter. Same author. Same congregation in Ephesus. A hermeneutic that manufactures ambiguity wherever the text creates friction is not a hermeneutic. It is a permission slip and, in this case, permission to cultural conformity rather than obedience to what God wants.
The Line Paul Draws
Naming the drift honestly requires naming the boundary honestly, because Paul draws it with more precision than either extreme allows.
Paul does not silence women. In 1 Corinthians 11, he regulates, and therefore assumes, women praying and prophesying in the gathered assembly. Priscilla, alongside Aquila, privately corrected Apollos, one of the most gifted preachers of the early church, and Scripture records it without a whisper of rebuke. Women reading Scripture, leading in prayer, sharing testimony, teaching women, discipling in homes and small groups: none of this is in Paul’s restriction, and churches that forbid it are swinging at a pitch Paul never threw.
What Paul restricts is specific: the authoritative, didactic proclamation of the Word to the assembled congregation, the formal teaching act that belongs to the elder. That is the function the office exists to carry. Hand it to someone barred from the office, and you haven’t protected anything. You’ve decided the office matters less than the function and surrendered the function while keeping the title.
How Good Men Step Over the Line
I coach pastors for a living. Between a clinical counseling caseload, assisting with ABWE Member Care, and my church planting work with ABWE/EveryEthne, I have sat with a lot of men and ministry leaders who never intended to abandon their most sacred convictions.
The road there is paved with real good intentions. A pastor who shepherds gifted, godly women who are loving their husbands, wise in the faith, and building their households, and wants women to expand their influence. Leaders have cleaned up after churches that wielded leadership like a club or have given in to cultural values, and they brought the congregation back to new life. A pastor who is bone-tired of skeptics waving the caricature of Scripture as a misogynist’s handbook. So, he reaches for a reading that seems to honor everyone.
I have compassion for that man. As a pastor, I’ve experienced that tension and leadership loneliness. But compassion cannot rewrite an epistle. The instinct to remove barriers to the gospel is not the problem. The problem begins when that instinct starts driving the interpretation of Scripture instead of submitting to it. At that point, the church hasn’t become more credible. It has traded its birthright for cultural acceptance and called the transaction faithfulness, and we need faithful men to act courageously and proclaim what the Scripture teaches.
Bad Hermeneutics Harm the Church and Missions
Conrad Mbewe watched the prosperity gospel ride American packaging through missionary networks into African soil that had no resistance to it. The mechanism hasn’t changed. Only the cargo has. Interpretive methods travel with the missionaries who carry them, which is exactly why a missions agency should care.
The central task of any church plant is raising indigenous pastors and elders who can replicate without us. Hand a planter a function-and-title distinction with no coherent biblical foundation, and he has nothing stable to disciple the next generation of elders with. As my colleague Thad Bergmeier wrote on this blog just this week, “A confused church will not send clearly.”
Paul was not confused. He grounded his instruction in creation, expected Timothy to obey, and wrote his reasons down. Every pastor we coach eventually sits with the same question we ask every leadership team before anything else: What does God want? Not what the culture expects, not what keeps the peace in the church, but what God wants. Scripture already answered that question for the pastoral office. The question left to us is whether we have the exegetical courage to let Paul say what Paul said, and to trust that the God who ordered creation is still wise enough to order his church.
Ray Brandon serves as Director of Church Planting for EveryEthne, ABWE’s North American ministry division, where he coaches pastors through the Journey, a multiplication leadership coaching system for local churches.
