How I Changed My Mind About Women in Leadership

I spent my first 15 years of pastoral ministry believing that women should not be pastors or elders in churches. I’ve spent the last 20 years of my ministry advocating for women in church leadership.

What changed?

This post is my account of how I went from being an opponent to an advocate of women serving in church leadership.¹

Early Formation

I was raised by a single mom, so seeing a woman lead was nothing new to me. I watched my mom complete her education, advance in her job, and start her own businesses. When I was growing up, the idea that she might be unequal never would have occurred to me.

I came to faith in Christ during my second semester of community college. The nondenominational church I joined promoted a theology of gender roles that I later learned is called complementarian. Complementarians believe that in the realm of church and home. men should lead and women should follow.² In practical terms, this means that complementarians believe women should not be ordained as pastors, appointed as church elders, and teach the Bible in a setting where men are present.³

This is in contrast to egalitarian theology, an approach to theology I would not learn about until later.⁴ Egalitarians believe the Bible teaches that men and women are fully equal in God’s sight, and, because of this equality, they ought to function as equal partners in the church and the home. Egalitarians believe that gender hierarchy of men over women (also called patriarchy) is a result of sin (Genesis 3:16), not part of God’s original plan. Through Christ, the curse of sin has been broken, and God calls Christians to embody God’s originally intended full equality between men and women. Thus, egalitarians support the ordination of women as pastors, women serving as elders, and women teaching the Bible.

In my nondenominational church, verses from the Bible such as 1 Timothy 2:12-15 and 1 Corinthians 14:34 were cited to support the church’s complementarian theology. I embraced this theology as correct for over 25 years, including my first 15 years of pastoral ministry. I transferred from community college to the complementarian Christian university that my pastors recommended. In my theology courses I was taught that feminism was dangerous and that Christians should distrust gender equality as compromise with the world. Men and women are equal in Christ, I was taught, but they have different roles to fulfill in the church and home. Men lead, women follow.

My senior year, I took an upper division theology course on gender roles. Like all the theology faculty at my college, the professor who taught this course was a complementarian. However, to balance out his own bias, he had us read some journal articles and books written by Christian egalitarians. We also spent considerable time looking at Genesis 1:26-28; Acts 2:17-18; and Galatians 3:28, as well as the passages I mentioned earlier that appear to restrict women from leading and teaching in churches.

For the first time, I realized that a biblical case could be made for the egalitarian view.

I had assumed that all egalitarians rejected the Bible’s authority. Reading these books and articles revealed that many egalitarians affirm biblical authority. Even though I was still deeply entrenched in my complementarian theology, I developed a newfound (though begrudging) respect for egalitarians during this course.

After graduating from college, I attended the same seminary that my pastors attended. After completing my M.Div, I was approved for ordination at my church by an all male ordination committee, which included the professor who taught my gender roles course. After being ordained, I served briefly as an associate pastor, and then in 1991 I was installed as my home church’s lead pastor.

First Years of Ministry

During my first year as the lead pastor, one of the congregation’s female volunteers wrote a letter to the elder board requesting to be licensed as a pastor. A long-time volunteer, she had gone to seminary (the same seminary I and the other pastors attended) and earned her M.A. in Christian Education.

The all-male board was unsure of what to do about her request. Since this was not affiliated with a denomination or association, the church had no official policy regarding women’s ordination. The elders assumed women could not be ordained; however, there was nothing written to codify that policy.

The elders asked me to lead them in a study of the topic, so I assembled a list of books and articles on the relevant scriptures, drawing many from my college course on gender roles. After our study, which took about four months, I proposed a policy that I would now characterize as “soft complementarian.” The new policy restricted women from serving as elders on the board and being the lead pastor. However, it permitted the church to ordain women to other pastoral roles, serve communion, and teach when men were present under the authority of the all male elder board. Consequently, the board licensed the female volunteer as a pastor and brought her on staff as a Pastor of Christian Education, the first woman in this church’s history to have the word "pastor" in her title. One elder resigned from the board and left the church over this new policy. The rest of the elders voted for the new policy.

This was a big step for the church, as previously women weren't allowed to serve communion or teach with men present, let alone carry the title pastor.

And that settled the issue for me…at least for a while.

Later Questioning

After that policy was approved by the board, I embarked on 15 years of ministry as the lead pastor at that church. The church grew from 200 people to about 1,200 people in average attendance. Cracks began to appear in my complementarian theology about ten years into my tenure there.

Here’s how it happened:

First, I heard that the mentor and college professor who taught my gender roles course had become an egalitarian. This was a minor scandal at my college. He joined Christians for Biblical Equality and co-edited a new book called Discovering Biblical Equality. I reached out and we met for lunch so I could hear firsthand about his change. He was the only egalitarian on the Bible and theology faculty at my alma mater.

Second, I began to notice what complementarian theology was doing to women. In the church I pastored, strong, capable women rarely stuck around. Women who were leaders in their communities or their workplaces struggled to find a place in our congregation. And often members of the congregation viewed women who had leadership gifts with distrust.

Third, I recommitted the matter to prayer and study. I never want to be the kind of leader who’s frozen in my beliefs. Consequently, I revisited all the passages in the Bible related to gender roles. I read and re-read Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, a comprehensive defense of the complementarian position co-edited by John Piper and Wayne Grudem. I also read and re-read Discovering Biblical Equality, which was co-edited by my college professor. And I committed the matter to prayer, seeking God’s wisdom and direction.

The intellectual tipping point for me came when I read William Webb’s book Slaves, Women and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis. In this book, Webb suggests that we interpret the Bible with a “redemptive movement hermeneutic.” Webb discerns a movement in how the Bible’s message unfolds regarding the status of slaves and women, moving from affirmation of slavery to abolition of slavery and from patriarchy to egalitarian equality between men and women. He does not discern this same movement on the topic of homosexuality.

After reading Webb’s book, I realized that the way I was interpreting and applying the Bible on the topic of gender roles was troublingly similar to how pro-slavery Christians had interpreted and applied the Bible to support slavery .

The path Christians had taken to embrace an abolitionist position (which is nearly universally held among evangelicals today) is nearly identical to the path toward an egalitarian position on gender roles.

That realization moved the needle for me.

Embracing the Change

During my last few years at that church, I was having serious struggles with the church's position on gender roles, a position that I had ironically written. Leaving there in 2007, though painful, was also a relief. I was free to follow where I sensed God was leading on this topic.

After leaving that church, I attended a nondenominational church that had a women in their preaching rotation. Shortly thereafter I took a full time pastoral role at an egalitarian Christian university, joining a pastoral team of both men and women. I started writing for an egalitarian blog called the Junia Project. In 2018, I transferred my ordination to the Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians, a Reformed denomination that is decidedly egalitarian. In the ECO Presbyterian denomination I have been involved in mentoring and guiding both men and women in the ordination process. In my last pastoral call, I served alongside three called female pastors (two associate pastors and one assistant pastor), mentoring one of them through the ordination process.

As an egalitarian:

• I am convinced that the Bible affirms the full equality of men and women in creation, redemption, and new creation.

• I am convinced that patriarchy is a result of the fall of humanity, not part of God’s original created order. As such, patriarchy is not something Christians should endorse, support, defend, or seek to maintain.

• I am convinced that both men and women are both victims in patriarchy, and that egalitarian theology promotes reconciliation and wholeness for both men and women.

• I am convinced that men and women need to learn to be co-leaders and equal partners in ministry and in marriage.

We can and must do better.

Other egalitarian sources:

Ronald Pierce and Cynthia Long Westfall (eds), Discovering Biblical Equality: Biblical, Theological, Cultural, and Practical Perspectives Third Edition (InterVarsity Press, 2021).

Craig Keener, Paul, Women, and Wives: Marriage and Women's Ministry in the Letters of Paul (Baker 1992).

William Witt, Icons of Christ: A Biblical and Systematic Theology for Women’s Ordination (Baylor University Press, 2021).

The Junia Project

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1. This post was inspired by the book How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals (Zondervan, 2010).

2. For a full explanation and defense of the complementarian position, see Wayne Grudem and John Piper (editors), Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood revised edition (Crossway Books, 2021).

3. Complementarians also believe that there is hierarchy in marriage, where the husband’s primary role is to lead and the wife’s primary role is to submit. I’ll address this in a future post.

4. For a full explanation and defense of the egalitarian position, see Ronald Pierce and Cynthia Long Westfall (editors), Discovering Biblical Equality: Biblical, Theological, Cultural, and Practical Perspectives Third Edition (InterVarsity Press, 2021).