What “Can” Women Do? – An Excerpt from Nice Churchy Patriarchy by Liz Cooledge Jenkins

In an essay called Sister, You Can Be Anything God Desires You to Be,^[1] Kara Triboulet recalls a discussion in her theology class at her Christian college. When the professor opened up the floor and invited students to express their views on women in leadership, these are some of the things her classmates said:

“I believe women can be in leadership, just not as pastors.”

“Allowing women to teach other women and children isn’t limiting. At least they have a place to serve.”

“Women can be directors, but not pastors.”

“The Bible is very clear . . . women can’t teach or lead men because men were created first. It’s just the way God ordained it, and we all just need to accept that.”

All the language of “can” and “can’t” sticks out to me like a sore, maddening thumb. Women can be in leadership, but they can’t be pastors. Women can be directors, but they can’t be pastors. Women can’t teach. Women can’t lead. That’s just how God ordained it.

My beef with these statements is not just that I disagree with them. It’s also that, regardless of my own opinions, these statements are simply not true.

It might sound odd to put it like that. But this is the truth: Women can be pastors. Women can teach mixed-gender groups of adults. Women can be in church leadership. If you look in the right places, women are doing all of these things. There are female pastors. There are women who teach mixed-gender groups of adults. There are women in church leadership.

I know women can do these things, because they already are doing these things.

When people make statements about what women “can” and “can’t” do, I think what they really mean is often something more like this: “I am not comfortable with women preaching.” Or perhaps: “My understanding of gender roles in the Bible places women under men’s authority.”

They are not really speaking about what women are or are not able to do. They are speaking about their own comfort, their own familiarity, their own current understanding of the New Testament and its interpretation.

Fortunately―for women, and for anyone who thinks we’re all better off when everyone is free to express their gifts fully―the way I see it, only God can decide what people “can” or “can’t” do. God gives gifts. God puts passions in people’s hearts. God gives people a desire to lead and serve in particular ways. Churches and denominations choose whether or not to recognize, encourage, support, acknowledge, and embrace these things. But only God determines the can and can’t.

This might seem like semantic nitpicking. But I think it’s important. It’s important for the women involved in these discussions to know that the opinions of their classmates, colleagues, friends, professors, and pastors have absolutely nothing to do with what they can or can’t do. These women can do whatever they sense God calling them to do. It’s just a matter of finding a faith community that supports this calling rather than opposing it.

These days, when someone says “I don’t think women can lead,” or “I don’t think women can preach,” I want to press them to be more precise. What exactly are they trying to say?

Maybe they feel uncomfortable following a female leader or listening to a female preacher. If so, that’s something we can talk about. We can explore what exactly makes them feel uneasy. Maybe they grew up in a church without female leaders, and that makes it hard to imagine what it might be like to follow one. Maybe the pastors they look up to have expressed discomfort, and they hesitate to form a different opinion. Maybe they had a bad experience with a female leader.

Or, maybe it’s more of an aversion to change. Maybe their church has always done things a certain way, and they don’t see a need to try something different. I get that. Change is hard. It’s often unpleasant, even scary. Change involves loss―even just the loss of a kind of comforting familiarity. These, too, are things we can process together. We can explore our feelings about change and why we might be resistant to it. We can also talk about some of the ways the status quo may not actually be working.

Or, for others, maybe it’s all about the Bible. Maybe they’ve been unable to find a way to read scripture that affirms women in ministry. Maybe they don’t really have a personal issue with female leaders, but they aren’t sure how to square their egalitarian intuitions with what scripture says about women. If so, we can talk about that. The Bible is full of women who can lead and preach and minister; we can talk together about how we might reconcile this with the handful of passages that seem limiting. We can dig deeper into questions of culture and context and see what we might find together.

There is no shame in acknowledging these kinds of questions, feelings, thoughts, and hangups. We can talk about them. But when we fail to acknowledge them—when we hide behind the “can”s and “can’t”s—it’s impossible to have an honest conversation about the real issues at play.

Conversations about women in ministry—about whether or not women should be subordinated to men in the life and leadership of faith communities—are an ongoing reality. They can be exhausting, frustrating, contentious, church-splitting, friendship-breaking, demoralizing. But as long as religious communities continue to exclude women from leadership, these conversations will continue to happen.

I hope to see a day when women’s leadership is no longer up for debate. Until then, though, women deserve for these discussions to be courageous ones, fair ones, honest ones. We deserve conversations that get at the real issues involved, the real things that keep some Christians from fully supporting women in leadership. We deserve better than language that subordinates by implication before the discussion has even begun. We deserve better than the vague authoritarianism of “can” and “can’t.”

You can read more about the book and order it here.

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^[1] Published in the Christians for Biblical Equality newsletter, Jan 16, 2020.