Updated September 8, 2024

Does the Bible teach distinct roles for men and women in the church? This debate has often been a heated one. We recognize the sensitive nature of this question. It’s understandably an emotional issue, and one that touches Christians personally. Naturally, this subject deeply impacts women in ways it doesn’t affect men.  And a great many men are also culturally uncomfortable with any gender restrictions in the church.

As evangelical Christians, our criterion isn’t cultural comfort, but biblical faithfulness. We shouldn’t unthinkingly follow teachings just because they’re traditional, and we shouldn’t seek to unnecessarily offend cultural sensitivities. But neither should we accept an alternative view just because it seems more appealing. We have to search the Scriptures to determine what the Bible really teaches. And we must be prepared to adopt any viewpoint we find clearly taught in Scripture.

We commit ourselves to two related principles:

1. We will faithfully honor any line clearly drawn for us by God.

2. We won’t draw any line ourselves that isn’t scripturally necessary.

In the normal course of our study of books of the Bible, we’ve looked in depth at most of the key passages related to this subject. And we worked through an intensive topical study of gender roles in a midweek Bible study a couple of years ago. We can’t condense all these studies into one brief paper, of course. But here’s a brief summary of some conclusions we reached in these studies:

• From the beginning, God entrusted leadership to both men and women (Genesis 1:27-28). The idea that men lead and women do not isn’t biblical.

• But we also see distinctions in God’s creation of men and women, and in the roles he gave to each (Genesis 2-3). These don’t provide a detailed description of “men’s work” and “women’s work,” and they have nothing to do with competence, maturity or wisdom. Instead they flow out of God’s design of marriage as a living illustration of the relationship between Christ and the church, with one spouse representing Christ  and one spouse representing the church (Ephesians 5:21-33).

• Men and women are both to be active in leadership in the home and church, and men are, in some sense, to lead in this collaborative leadership.

• In our studies of each of the relevant passages, we didn’t find any convincing biblical or historical case these distinctions are tied exclusively to a particular time or context. So we accept them as biblical standards for the church today, and seek to live out the core principles from each passage as wisely and faithfully as we can in our historical and cultural context.

This brings us to the scriptural passage that’s most clear, direct and relevant—but also one requiring real wisdom in how to best live out these biblical principles in the church today: 1 Timothy 2:11-12.

Women should learn quietly and submissively. I do not let women teach men or have authority over them. Let them listen quietly.

Most scholars agree the word “quietly” in this verse doesn’t mean absolute silence, but is contrasted with teaching and having authority. There are two things this Scripture says are inappropriate for women in ministry: teaching men, and having (or exercising) authority over men.

In context, this is obviously speaking of teaching and authority in the church. This doesn’t say anything, for instance, about women teaching men in college, or about female CEOs or presidents. It wouldn’t even apply to a Christian woman teaching a Christian man to play piano. This is spiritual teaching and spiritual authority in the church.

The teaching part of this instruction seems fairly clear. This wouldn’t preclude women speaking to the assembled church. There’s nothing biblically questionable about a woman giving her testimony, reporting on a mission trip, encouraging a certain course of action, or even sharing a scriptural insight. But it seems clear God wants the regular teaching ministry of the whole church to be handled by men—in order to be faithful to our “parts” in our illustration of Christ and the church.

This distinction of roles regarding teaching, along with the instruction that women are not to have authority over men in the church, has led many to conclude women can’t serve as church elders. (We also previously shared this conclusion.) Now, there is no passage of Scripture that specifically forbids women from serving as elders in the church. The passages in 1 Timothy 3:1-7 and Titus 1:5-9 assume male elders, this is true—but they also assume elders who are married and have children. Since most elder-led churches don’t require elders to be married or be parents (understanding this to be culturally normal at that time, but not a biblically normative requirement), we can’t use this assumption to forbid female elders. 

So the question is: What does “having authority” or “exercising authority over men” mean in practice? Does it include even sharing in the making of decisions that impact men in the congregation? If this is so, we’re faced with a strange contradiction. 

In many churches that restrict women from serving as elders, these same women are already involved in making decisions at a congregational level, decisions that impact men in the church. A good example of this involvement would be the congregation’s role in church discipline, which requires a certain form of spiritual authority in the life of church members, including men. Another example would be the church’s role in affirming—or not affirming—a man as a pastor of the church! These examples constitute female church members sharing equally in authoritative church decisions that have serious impact on men in the church, even male pastors.

Either female members should not participate in these congregational decisions, or we’ve misunderstood the restriction in 1 Timothy 2:11-12. This would mean we’ve drawn a line Scripture does not. Since women can participate in making binding decisions as part of the congregation, it’s difficult to justify why they shouldn’t be allowed to share in making these same decisions as part of the pastoral team. In both cases, they can be fully part of the decision-making process without taking personal, direct authority over any man in the church.

The church is a kind of family, and it should reflect to some extent God’s pattern for the leadership of the family. We see in Scripture both the husband and the wife are to be actively involved in the leadership of the home, but the husband should lead in this co-leadership. For a husband to relegate to the wife matters having only to do with the children—and to only discuss family decisions with the wife when he deemed her input necessary—would be unbiblically patriarchal in our view. But this is surprisingly close to the church leadership model many churches now have (and how we functioned in the past). If the wife should be fully a part of discussions with the husband about family issues, but with the husband exercising leadership within this joint leadership, we would view this as a healthy model for church leadership as well.

We see no scriptural reason to not allow women to serve in pastoral leadership as church elders (what we call our “pastoral team” at The Orchard). We strive to be completely faithful to the biblical principles in 1 Timothy 2:11-12. Our female pastors do not have roles of teaching men in the church, nor do they exercise direct, personal authority over men in the church. But our female pastoral leaders fully share in pastoral ministry to the church through analysis, discussion and making decisions as part of our pastoral team.

There is much more we could explore about this, of course, and we’re happy to continue the discussion in the comments below.