Focusing On Authority Misses the Point (How Do Women Serve in the Church?)

I recently read a social media discussion centered on the issue of women in ministry. Without going into too much detail, the original post criticized the idea of “women pastors,” and subsequent comments went in the direction of debating whether or not women had any authority roles in the church. As I read these comments, I started feeling uncomfortable. It’s not as if I’m unfamiliar with this topic or I don’t have my own ideas on whether women are “allowed” to teach, speak, pray, prophecy, or lead in churches (one example: my post “Women Who Speak in Scripture”). But the focus on who gets to have authority struck me as wrong. If we focus discussions like this on who is in charge, I think we’re missing one of the New Testament’s big points about how all Christians are supposed to relate to one another.

Jesus’s Take on Authority

Authority is not a bad thing. Jesus taught with authority, used the authority His father gave Him for good (such as to forgive sins), and currently has “all authority in heaven and on earth” (Matt. 7:29; 9:6; 28:18; John 5:27; 10:18). He also clarifies that His authority comes from God–it’s legitimate authority conferred upon Him by the highest authority (John 12:49). As someone with authority, He could and did give His disciples certain authority, such as over unclean spirits (Matt. 10:1).

In these verses, the Greek word translated “authority” is exousia (G1849). Thayer’s dictionary lists several primary meanings: “1. power of choice, liberty of doing as one pleases … 2. physical or mental power … 3. the power of authority (influence) or right (privilege) 4. the power of rule or government.” Like the English word “authority,” it can refer to legitimate, well-wielded authority or it can have a darker side. We see that in a discussion Jesus had with His disciples at least twice: once after James and John asked for authority in His kingdom and once at the Passover when all the disciples debated who would be the greatest after Jesus died.

Now when the other ten heard this, they were angry with the two brothers.  But Jesus called them and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those in high positions use their authority over them. It must not be this way among you! Instead whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Matthew 20:24-28, NET

 A dispute also started among them over which of them was to be regarded as the greatest. So Jesus said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those in authority over them are called ‘benefactors.’ Not so with you; instead the one who is greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like the one who serves. For who is greater, the one who is seated at the table, or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is seated at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.

Luke 22:24-27, NET

“Authority” in these verses is exousia (or it is in Luke 22; Matthew 20 uses katexousiazo, a derivative meaning “to exercise authority, wield power” [G2715, Thayer]). In this case, it’s talking about people among the nations who have worldly authority. The phrase “lord it over” is another word: kurieuo in Luke 22, which means “to be lord of, to rule, have dominion over” (G2961, Thayer) and katakurieu in Matthew, a related word meaning “to bring under one’s power … to hold in subjection to be master of, exercise lordship over” (G2634, Thayer). It’s definitely not a good thing in this context, and Jesus clearly tells his disciples not to act this way. If you want to be great in His church, then you serve.

When I saw people arguing things like, “How dare women try to get authority over men?” or “I can’t stand that only men get authority, why can’t women like me be in charge?” I thought about these verses. There are certain kinds of authority given to people in the church (and legitimate roles instituted by Jesus or those He taught directly, such as apostle, pastor, and deacon), but if we’re concerned about who gets to lord it over other people then we’re missing the point. No one is supposed to be lording it over other people or coveting a position where they could do that. We’re supposed to be humble and focus on service.

Who Can Serve and How?

Maybe instead of asking, “Can women have authority in the church?” we should ask, “Can women serve in the church?” The answer to that is a resounding “Yes!” supported by the examples of many women in the Old and New Testaments. What gets more to the heart of the original debate, though, is the question, “How do women serve in the church?” We have examples to answer that question as well. We know for certain that women in the Bible served God’s people in these ways:

• Prophetess (Miriam, Ex. 15:20; Deborah, Jud. 4:4; Huldah, 2 Kings 22:14; 2 Chr. 34:22; Isaiah’s wife, Is. 8:3; Anna, Luke 2:36; Philip’s four daughters, Acts 21:9).
• Teacher (King Lemuel’s mother, Prov. 31:1; Priscilla, Acts 18:26; Timothy’s grandmother Lois and mother Eunice [assumed based on context], 2 Tim. 1:5).
• Judge/leader (Deborah, Jud. 4:4-9).
• Deacon/servant (Phoebe, Rom. 16:1),
• Practical caretaker–cooking, sewing, etc. (Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna, and “many others,” Luke 8:2-3; Martha, Luke 10:40; Tabitha, Acts 9:36-39).
• Church host (Priscilla [with husband Aquilla], Rom. 16:3-5; 1 Cor. 16:19; Nympha, Col. 4:15; Apphia [with husband Philemon, assumed based on context], Phile. 1:2)
• Worker/laborer (Mary, Rom. 16:6; Tryphena, Tryphosa, and Persis Rom. 16:12).

There may even have been a woman apostle, Junia (Rom. 16:7), but her exact role is so hotly debated that I didn’t put “apostle” on my list (scholars pretty much agree that she was a woman, but not on whether the phrase used in this verse indicates she could have been an apostle). Clearly, women were heavily involved in the church, both in what we think of as “behind the scenes” roles and (apparently more rarely, though female prophets are relatively common) in the more public leading, serving, teaching, preaching roles. When God uses a woman to do something in scripture, we really can’t argue that the church shouldn’t allow women to do those same things today.

Things Women (Probably) Don’t Do

It’s worth noting some of the roles that we don’t see examples of women in. If we look at the lists of ministry gifts/roles in 1 Corinthians 12:28 and Ephesians 4:11, we see “first apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then miracles, gifts of healing, helps, gifts of leadership, different kinds of tongues” (1 Cor. 12:28, NET) and “some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers” (Eph. 4:11). Let’s use those lists as a guide for examining women’s possible roles in the church.

We might have one possible example of a woman as an apostle, but no specific examples of them as pastors (from the same Greek word translated “shepherd”) or evangelists (Greek word only used 3 times). However, “evangelist” is a title that comes from the Greek verb euaggelizo (G2097), “to bring good news” or preach the gospel (Thayer). It is likely that women did participate in that activity (Acts 8:1-4; Phil 4:2-3). We also don’t have specific examples of women performing miracles or healings. But we know for certain that women can be prophets, that women teach even if not called “teacher” as a title, that they fill helper roles, that they can have leadership-related gifts, and that those at Pentecost spoke in different languages just like the apostles and other men (Acts 1:14; 2:1-4).

It seems, then, that we can say women did not serve as pastors/shepherds in the Bible and that they were not typically apostles or evangelists. The only other church “authority” roles I can think of in the New Testament are elder, bishop/overseer, and deacon/servant. We have a concrete example of a woman as a deaconess/servant, but no women in the overseer role. “Elder” seems to refer to men most of the time, but the feminine version of the Greek word is used in 1 Tim. 5:2. I suspect that when “elder” is used to refer to respected older people in the church it often includes men and women, but when it’s used to refer to an ordained role in the church it typically or exclusively refers to men. That said, we also don’t have any verses directly saying, “women cannot be pastors.”

You might be uncomfortable with how ambiguous I’m being here, but it is deliberate. The need to have hard rules defining what women and men can and cannot do is a product of Western cultural mindset being applied to the Biblical text. We want specific and inflexible rules for things, but Eastern cultures (like those of Biblical writers) see rules differently: “rules apply except when the one in charge says otherwise. Westerners might consider this arbitrary; many non-Western Christians consider this grace” (Misreading Scripture With Western Eyes, Richards & O’Brien, p. 174). As an example, one of the authors of this book recounts a time when he was invited to speak to a group of pastors in Indonesia. He was shocked, knowing the group’s bylaws say pastors must be male, to see a few women in the audience. When he asked about it, he was calmly told, “Yes, and most of them are [male]” (p. 169). The Indonesian man he spoke with saw nothing strange about an exception to the rule. Perhaps Christians at the time Paul wrote Romans would have heard us say, “Women can’t be apostles,” and responded by saying, “That’s right, except for the times when they are apostles.”

But What About 1 Timothy 2?

Because we’ve been talking about authority, we need to address 1 Timothy 2:12, where Paul wrote, “I don’t permit a woman to teach, nor to exercise authority over a man” (WEB). Seems straightforward enough, until we start looking at the context and Greek words. Paul doesn’t use any of the typical words for authority here, but rather the incredibly rare word authenteō. This word may refer to wrongly used authority and/or could be connected to astrology practiced by some pagan women at the time, but it’s hard to say for sure since this is the only time it’s used in the Bible and it’s rarely used in contemporary writings (“The Strangeness of 1 Timothy 2:12,” Andrew Bartlett). Paul also uses a different phrase, “I don’t permit,” than he typically uses when laying down rules for the churches.

We also should take note of the fact that Timothy was in Ephesus when he received this letter, a church that Paul specifically brought Priscilla and Aquilla into and where he left them to serve (including teaching Apollos when they arrived [Acts 18:18-28]). It makes a whole lot more sense to interpret this as a prohibition against women usurping (KJV), dominating (ASV), or lording it over (TLB) a man (note that “man” is singular in the Greek, not the plural “men”) rather than a general rule that women never speak or have any authority, particularly given how involved some women were in ministry in the New Testament.

This analysis might seem pedantic or as if we’re trying to “get around” this scripture, but when you come across something in Paul’s writings that is hard to understand (and a lot of things are [2 Pet. 3:16-17]) we need to look at how it fits with the rest of scripture. Our interpretation of what he says has to match other things in the Bible. In this case, if scripture shows women consistently involved in various types of ministry work–including, occasionally, what we’d think of as “authority” roles like prophet or church host–then Paul’s words here can’t be a prohibition on women serving in the body of believers. It would go against precedent in the entire Bible–including Jesus’s radical treatment of women as equals and Paul’s own writings about how God views converted men and women on a cosmic scale (1 Cor. 11:11-12; Gal. 3:28)–if Paul were making a blanket declaration against women serving in the church. It is much more likely that he is telling Timothy not to let women in Ephesus do things that men wouldn’t be allowed to do either (e.g. lord it over others in the church or teach things related to astrology).

It seems very strange to me that we pull out a few isolated phrases Paul uses (1 Cor. 11:3; 14:34; 1 Tim. 2:12) and come up with this whole doctrine that women can’t ever teach, speak, or have public roles in the church. What about the whole rest of the Bible? What about how Jesus treated women? It seems just as misguided to me as those who take Paul’s statement, “you are not under law but under grace” (Rom. 6:14, NET) to mean that New Covenant Christians don’t have to obey God. We need to be careful about things like this, and test our assumptions (even if they’ve been assumptions for centuries of church history) to make sure they actually fit what God teaches through His word.

Motivated by Service and Humility

As we look at the roles we see women in the Bible filling or not filling, we need to be careful how we conceptualize authority related to those roles. The point isn’t to figure out who is most important (e.g. is it the male pastor or the female prophet?) but to serve God with the gifts He provides in the role He supplies. If God calls a woman to host the church in her home, that’s what she does. If He gives a woman the gift of prophecy, then she’s supposed to prophecy.

Likewise, if He chooses not to place women in the role of ordained pastor, elder, or overseer, that is God’s choice and the New Testament makes it seem like this is indeed the case (at least most of the time). Most men don’t fill those roles either; other roles are more commonly needed in the church. We’re not supposed to be jealous of or resent people who have roles that we think of as more authoritative than us any more than Jesus resents His Father for being greater than Him (to be clear, there is no resentment or competition between Jesus and the Father [John 10:29-30; Phil. 2:5-11]).

 Instead of being motivated by selfish ambition or vanity, each of you should, in humility, be moved to treat one another as more important than yourself. Each of you should be concerned not only about your own interests, but about the interests of others as well. You should have the same attitude toward one another that Christ Jesus had,

who though he existed in the form of God
did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself
by taking on the form of a slave

Philippians 2:3-7, NET

No one in God’s church is supposed to seek authority roles for the prestige or the power. We should seek to serve with humility, the same way that Jesus modeled. In a healthy church following God’s lead, we’ll filter into the roles most suited to the gifts He has given us (ideally without doctrinal misinterpretation or other people’s “selfish ambition or vanity” blocking someone from what they’re supposed to be doing). It doesn’t always work that way because the church is composed of people–redeemed people working on becoming more like God, but still people who can make mistakes. We need to have patience with each other in that. For example, it is not wrong for me to want churches I’m involved with to let me exercise my teaching gifts (and other women to exercise their gifts), but it is wrong when I feel as if I deserve more recognition and responsibility than I get or when I resent other people who have the opportunity to use their gifts differently than I do.

Two of the things that we’re called to do is submit “to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Eph. 5:21, NET) and “through love serve one another” (Gal. 5:13, NET). We’re not called to seek authority or argue about who gets to be in charge. Ultimately, Jesus is the one in charge as head of the church (Eph. 1:22; Col. 1:18). The rest of us are here to serve in a variety of different capacities, but all of them characterized by encouragement, love, and humility (see, for example, John 13:35; 2 Cor. 1:24; Eph. 4:1-3; Col. 3:12-13). If we think any of this is about being in charge, claiming authority over others, or getting what we think we’re owed, then we’ve missed the whole point.

---

Featured image by Shaun Menary via Lightstock