Category Archives: Theological Issues

Posts on theological issues not in other categories

Women as Bishops: Reflections

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The meeting Women as Bishops which I advertised in my last post here was very interesting. We were pleased to have about 60 people present for the discussion led by the Bishop of Lewes, Wallace Benn, and Rev Lis Goddard of AWESOME. At the request of several people on this blog and elsewhere, the meeting was recorded. The recording, over two hours long, and Lis Goddard’s PowerPoint presentation will soon be available on my church’s website, for convenience as our building was the venue. As soon as I can give you a URL I will post it here.

What follows is not intended as a summary of the meeting (I’m afraid you will have to wait then listen to the recording for that), but as my personal reflections following it.

Lis Goddard is known as a proponent of the ordination of women, although AWESOME of which she is the Chair is not a campaigning organisation and has no official position on the issue. Indeed the ordained evangelical women it supports include “permanent deacons” who have chosen not to be ordained as priests. She made clear that some of what she said was her personal position.

By contrast, Bishop Benn is a council member of Reform which takes a clear stand against women in church leadership. At the meeting he outlined briefly why he believes this: he holds a complementarian position on the role of women, as equal but different.

But the point of yesterday’s meeting was not to debate the main issue of whether women should be made bishops. It was to explore how evangelicals in the Church of England can remain united in a situation where their Church is clearly moving towards having women as bishops. On this there was a surprising and welcome unity of opinion between these people who disagree fundamentally on the underlying issue.

Benn and Goddard agreed that definite special arrangements should be made for those in the Church who cannot fully accept women as bishops – against the radical egalitarians who would make no concessions and might privately welcome the defection of conservative evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics. They also agreed in rejecting arrangements like a separate diocese for traditionalists, which would tend to divide the Church into separate camps, and would have some serious practical and financial consequences.

Their preferred solutions were almost the same. Goddard preferred a statutory code of practice whereby women bishops would be obliged to delegate their authority to male colleagues under certain circumstances. Benn’s preference was for Transferred Episcopal Arrangements (TEA) whereby this delegation would be more formalised, but would also accept a statutory code of practice.

The decision on what arrangements will be made is likely to be taken at the General Synod in July this year. It seems likely that some kind of statutory code of practice will be proposed by the committee working on this, but this solution will meet opposition from those who reject any formal concessions. So, to avoid massive divisions in the Church of England and especially in the evangelical part of it, we should hope and pray that something like a statutory code of practice will be accepted. I say this although I object to the “statutory” aspect of this, as I explained in this post.

I think it was Wallace Benn who suggested that a wrong decision on this matter might lead to the Church of England losing both its evangelical and Anglo-Catholic wings. I couldn’t help thinking of the Church as an airliner in the air – a slight change from last week’s image of flying like wild ducks. The airliner has lost power, perhaps from flying through an ash cloud, and is gradually losing height. If it wants to continue to fly it needs to restart its engines – and it can do that only by turning to God. But the worst decision it could make is to cut off both its wings. Without them it cannot even glide to a relatively soft crash landing; its only hope is to plunge straight to disaster. So please, Church, let’s avoid that, stop bickering about side issues, and look to God to regain the power to fly.

Women as Bishops

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This post is not more of my own thoughts. It is an announcement of an opportunity to hear some other thoughts on the subject “Women as Bishops: what next for Evangelicals, what
do we need from each other?” (Here “Evangelicals” should be understood as “Evangelicals in the Church of England”.) This is a meeting of the Chelmsford Diocesan Evangelical Association, like the last one I advertised here, and will be held at the same venue, which is my home church, on this coming Saturday morning.

Again this will be a chance for you, my readers, to meet me. It will also be a chance to meet two leading activists for and against women bishops. But the intention is not so much a debate on the issues as a discussion of how evangelicals can remain united on the fundamental issues while being divided on this one.

Pullman's Good Man Jesus, or the Church's Scoundrel Christ?

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Bishop Alan Wilson has an interesting review of Philip Pullman’s new book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which sounds like bad history but interesting fiction. The author is of course a well known atheist.

I haven’t read the book, so I am relying here on the bishop’s review. As far as I can tell from that, Pullman has taken the 19th century speculation about the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith and turned them into two separate people, brothers but very different. Indeed there seem to be elements of the Prodigal Son story mixed in. But it seems that Pullman’s good man Jesus represents the real original man from Nazareth, and his scoundrel Christ is a caricature of what the church has turned Jesus into.

Bishop Alan quotes at length Pullman’s version of Jesus’ prayer in the garden:

Lord, if I thought you were listening, I’d pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, and powerless, and modest. That it should weild no authority except that of love. That it should never cast anyone out. That it should own no property and make no laws. That it should not condemn but only forgive. That it should not be like a palace, with marble walls and polished floors, and guards standing at the door, but like a tree with its roots deep in the soil, that shelters every kind of bird and beast and gives blossom in the spring and shade in the hot sun and fruit in the season, and in time gives up its good sound wood to the carpenter, but that sheds many thousands of seeds so that new trees can grow in its place. Does the tree say to the sparrow “Get out, you don’t belong here?” Does the tree say to the hungry man, “That fruit is not for you?” Does the tree test the loyalty of the beasts before it allows them into the shade?’

So far, so good. But I was disappointed at the Anglican bishop’s response to this:

Amen! This is a rather C of E ecclesology; The Church is anything but perfect, but always in need of necessary reformation. This comes from its interaction with the society it serves, not some infallible magisterium. …

No, Bishop Alan, Pullman’s Jesus is not commending the Church of England. It may not have an “infallible magisterium”. It may have become relatively poor, recently, but not by renouncing riches or giving generously, only by being inept at holding on to its wealth. But it still owns huge amounts of property, and makes its own laws or gets the government to do so for it. Many of its buildings are precisely “like a palace, with marble walls and polished floors”. Its bishops (not Bishop Alan, at least yet) still wield secular authority in the House of Lords. And if its official leaders are no longer quick to condemn, that lack is more than made up for by the pronouncements of some of its clergy and lay people.

If the church wants to show the love of the real Jesus to atheists like Pullman, it won’t do it by boasting that it is not as bad as those Roman Catholics with their “infallible magisterium”, but by doing something about the points which Pullman actually puts on the lips of Jesus. May the church indeed become

like a tree with its roots deep in the soil, that shelters every kind of bird and beast and gives blossom in the spring and shade in the hot sun and fruit in the season, and in time gives up its good sound wood to the carpenter, but that sheds many thousands of seeds so that new trees can grow in its place.

New Testament Scandals: Female church leaders

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I just received by e-mail a link to an article by David Instone-Brewer, of Tyndale House in Cambridge, entitled New Testament Scandals: Female church leaders. This is part of a new “e-newsletter” from Christianity magazine. Regular readers of this blog will remember that I linked last year to Instone-Brewer’s teaching on divorce and remarriage – his site on this subject is now working.

Instone-Brewer gives interesting insights on the position of women in the early church. Here is a sample:

The guilty secret of the early Church was that it did rely to some extent on female leaders. In public women had to keep quiet, literally. Paul allowed them to attend teaching sessions (which would be frowned on by Jews and Romans) but he didn’t allow them to join in the discussion (1 Corinthians 14 vs34-35). Timothy was warned not to let women teach because, like Eve, they weren’t sufficiently educated (1 Timothy 2 vs12-14). But quietly, in the background, some women got on with leadership roles in spite of these restrictions.

Now I’m not sure that I agree with his understanding of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35; after all, elsewhere in the same letter Paul explicitly permits women to speak out loud in Christian gatherings. But he is surely right in interpreting 1 Timothy 2:12-14 in the light of the situation of women at that time.

It is interesting to see how he deals with the biblical material on women apparently in leadership positions in the church. Concerning how the names Junia and Nympha were changed to Junias and Nymphas, he writes:

Why did later scribes make these laughable attempts to hide the female leaders in the early church? Because it was a shameful – but true. The truth is confirmed by two other early documents. The heroine in a 2nd Century novel ‘Paul and Thecla’ is told to ‘Go and teach the word of the Lord’. Although this is a novel, the author assumed his audience would regard this as normal. He elaborated at length how Thecla was saved from execution by burning and by wild animals (which he expected his audience to be awed at) but he merely mentioned in passing that she became a Christian teacher, because he didn’t expect his readers to be surprised by this. The normality of female church leaders is confirmed in Pliny’s report about Christians in 112 AD. His report was for the emperor, so he collected information from the highest available source – he arrested two local church ministers and tortured them. The fact that he tortured them means they were slaves, and his word for ‘ministers’ is ‘ministrae’ – ie female. So two female slaves led the church in that area!

Instone-Brewer concludes with:

The whole world has now caught up with Paul’s teaching that all humans, however different, are equal. This teaching enabled the early church to do what it didn’t want to admit in public – it allowed some women to work quietly as leaders and teachers. It is therefore ironic that the few modern institutions that don’t follow this early church practice are mainly churches.

Indeed!

C.S. Lewis got it wrong on women priests

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A couple of days ago I noted C.S. Lewis’ criticism of the arguments used by complementarians. But of course that does not imply that he was an egalitarian. Indeed I now have proof that he was not. I thank my commenter Iconoclast for a link to an interesting essay by Lewis apparently entitled Priestesses in the Church?, posted last year by Alice C. Linsley on her blog. According to this page the essay was originally written in 1948. In it Lewis makes clear his opposition to the ordination of women in the Church of England.

Lewis certainly would not have approved of Barbie becoming an Episcopal priest, as pictured here. Thanks to Dave Walker at the Church Times blog for the link (although it’s broken) to the Facebook group Friends of Episcopal Priest Barbie (not sure if my link will work any better). It is a real group, so this is not just an April fool, and I took the picture from it.

To start with, C.S. Lewis got one thing quite wrong: no one was asking for a separate “order of priestesses”, but for women to be admitted to the existing order of priests, as has now happened. But I think he is on the ball to say that

the opposers (many of them women) can produce at first nothing but an inarticulate distaste, a sense of discomfort which they themselves find it hard to analyse

– to which some would add a shallow and tendentious interpretation of certain Bible passages.

When it comes down to it, the argument which Lewis makes is that God is male, not female. That implies that for him women are less the image of God than men. He admits that it is “masculine imagery” which is used of God, but he confuses the imagery with the reality when he makes God really masculine. When Robert Burns wrote “My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose”, his beautiful poetic imagery was not supposed to mean that the woman he loved was in fact not a woman but a rose. I’m not really qualified to lecture a professor of literature like Lewis, but he seems to have forgotten the basics of how poetry works. Poetic images are figures of speech not to be taken literally. So if calling God Father is indeed “masculine imagery” of the poetic kind, it precisely does not imply that God is really and essentially male.

Lewis gets to the most basic issue when he writes:

The innovators are really implying that sex is something superficial, irrelevant to the spiritual life. To say that men and women are equally eligible for a certain profession is to say that for the purposes of that profession their sex is irrelevant. We are, within that context, treating both as neuters. As the State grows more like a hive or an ant-hill it needs an increasing number of workers who can be treated as neuters. This may be inevitable for our secular life. But in our Christian life we must return to reality. There we are not homogeneous units, but different and complimentary organs of a mystical body.

Here “complimentary” is a transcriber’s error for “complementary”; Lewis certainly wouldn’t have confused the two words, and the latter appears in this version of the text. So he upholds the principle of complementary roles for men and women, while in this essay being careful to avoid the kinds of arguments which he put in the mouth of the Ape in The Last Battle.

In the paragraph I just quoted Lewis has hit the nail on the head. Indeed I would hold, along with most egalitarians I imagine, that distinctions of sex are “irrelevant to the spiritual life”. But Lewis seems to disagree. So how can we resolve this? Lewis, having rejected reason earlier in the essay, turns to church tradition. As an evangelical I prefer to turn to Scripture. And there I read:

So God created human beings in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:27 (TNIV)

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Galatians 3:28 (TNIV)

Thus the Bible makes it clear that males and females are equally made in the image of God, and that the distinction between them is precisely “irrelevant to the spiritual life” in Christ. Thus the clear biblical position is that God is neither male nor female, and that neither gender is better fitted than the other to represent him to humanity.

Of course C.S. Lewis was right and prescient to write that

the Church of England herself would be torn in shreds

by allowing women priests. In the 1990s the shreds were inexpertly patched together by such means as the infamous “flying bishops”. Now that women bishops are in prospect the whole patchwork is falling apart again. But the reason this has been so contentious is that a large minority in the church has been taken in by the kinds of bad arguments about the essential masculinity of God which Lewis put forward.

To be fair to C.S. Lewis, he was a man of his time and so shared “an inarticulate distaste, a sense of discomfort” with the idea of women priests. In 1948 he was not young (he turned 50 that year) but still unmarried. He had little experience of women apart from his odd relationship with his surrogate mother Jane Moore. It is perhaps hardly surprising that he treated them more or less as a separate species. But, fortunately for half of humanity, that is not how God treats them.

C.S. Lewis on complementarianism

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C.S. Lewis didn’t have anything to say about the kind of complementarianism that is being promoted by CBMW among others, according to which men and women are allocated complementary, but allegedly equal roles in the family and in the church – and it is men who decide which these roles are. That is because the concept had not been invented when he died.

But Lewis did have an idea of what it meant to speak of complementary roles where the allocation of these roles is all done by one side. In the first chapter of The Last Battle he writes of how the ape Shift, a clear figure of evil in his story, and the donkey Puzzle

both said they were friends, but from the way things went on you might have thought that Puzzle was more like Shift’s servant than his friend. He did all the work. … Puzzle never complained, because he knew that Shift was far cleverer than himself and he thought it was very kind of Shift to be friends with him at all. (p.7 of my Puffin edition)

After getting the reluctant Puzzle to fish a lion’s skin out of Caldron Pool, Shift says:

You know you’re no good at thinking, Puzzle, so why don’t you let me do your thinking for you? Why don’t you treat me as I treat you? I don’t think I can do everything. I know you’re better at some things than I am. That’s why I let you go into the Pool; I knew you’d do it better than me. But why can’t I have my turn when it comes to something I can do and you can’t? Am I never allowed to do anything? Do be fair. Turn and turn about. (p.12, emphasis as in the original)

With arguments like these Shift asserts his leadership over the poor Puzzle and exploits him as his servant, to do all the dirty jobs while Shift reserves for himself all the nice ones. These arguments sound remarkably like the ones which complementarians use to justify men getting all the desirable roles in church and in family, while all the ones which the men don’t want end up being given to women.

Now Shift probably was cleverer than Puzzle, so he could justify being the one who did the thinking – although not the evil he brought from it. But there is plenty of proof that men are no better at thinking or at leading than women are, and so no justification for men allocating to themselves all the leadership roles and any other tasks that they take a fancy to.

Authority, power and rights in the New Testament, part 3

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This post continues (after rather too long a delay) and concludes the series in part 1 and part 2, in which I looked at the New Testament use of exousia and related words concerning authority and rights. I included “power” in the series title, but in fact this would seem to be a good rendering only in a few cases in Revelation (6:8, 9:3,10,19), and perhaps also in references to Roman authority (e.g. John 19:10,11), as only here does the word have any real connotations of physical ability or coercive power.

I will continue by looking at the “authority” given to believers in Jesus.

First we note that the most basic exousia given to believers is to become the children of God (John 1:12).

Then we see that Jesus, while he was still alive on earth, gave exousia to his disciples, not just the Twelve, and that this authority was to cast out evil spirits (Matthew 10:1; Mark 3:15, 6:7; Luke 9:1, 10:19). In two of these places, in fact referring only to the Twelve, this is linked with the exousia to heal (Matthew 10:1; Luke 9:1). In parables this was likened to the exousia of servants to do the work assigned to them (Mark 13:34; Luke 19:17).

In the post-Resurrection parts of the New Testament it is rare for exousia to be attributed to believers, apart from the sense “right” found mainly in 1 Corinthians (also Acts 5:4; 2 Thessalonians 3:9; Hebrews 13:10; Revelation 22:14). Simon the magician desires the exousia which he sees in Peter and John, referring to how they could confer the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:19). Faithful believers at Thyatira are promised exousia over the nations (Revelation 2:26). The two witnesses have exousia to shut the sky and over the waters (Revelation 11:6). And besides these three we have only the two cases where Paul claims exousia concerning the Corinthian church (2 Corinthians 10:8, 13:10), which are the only cases in the New Testament of one believer having any kind of exousia relating to specific other believers.

So what is this exousia which Paul had? It was not authority over the Corinthians, but it was authority “for building you up, not for tearing you down” (13:10, TNIV). In fact in Greek the phrase is almost the same in 10:8 and 13:10, literally “for building and not for destroying”, with “of you” added only in 10:8, so perhaps Paul’s exousia here is to be understood as more general, to build up the church as a whole.. Paul does not claim any absolute authority over the Corinthians, to choose for himself whether to build them up or tear them down, but only the specific authority or commission which God gave him to build them up. Even so he is reluctant to invoke this authority, choosing to encourage or beg (parakaleo) his listeners to do what is right and refraining from ordering them to do anything.

Thus Paul’s attitude to authority in the church is entirely consistent with that of Jesus, who told his disciples not to be like the rulers of the Gentiles who exercise authority (exousiazo) but to lead by serving (Luke 22:25-26).

To summarise, in the New Testament we see a hierarchy of authority only among secular leaders. Gentile rulers like Pilate have exousia over their subjects, given to them by the emperor (and ultimately by God); military officers are under their ruler’s exousia and have others under them. But there is no trace of this kind of hierarchy of authority in the New Testament picture of how Christian believers should relate to one another.

Certain Christians, complementarians, try to teach some kind of hierarchy for the church: God the Father > God the Son > the Church > church leaders > husbands > wives > children. But there is hardly a trace of this picture in the Bible. The only places where words in the exousia group are used in this connection are when Jesus explains how he is turning this picture upside down:

You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority (katexousiazo) over them. 43 Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. 45 For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Mark 10:42-45 (TNIV)

N.T. Wright on synergism as a bogey word

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James Spinti quotes N.T. Wright, in his 2009 book Justification (not sure why it is listed as “Not Yet Published” at this Eisenbrauns page which he links to), including the following parenthesis:

(what damage to genuine pastoral theology has been done by making a bogey-word out of the Pauline term synergism, “working together with God”)

I don’t know if Wright has explained this in more depth. But he is right that “synergism” is a term and concept used by the Apostle Paul.

In fact Paul uses sunergos “co-worker” twelve times and sunergeo “work together” three times, and there are respectively one and two other New Testament occurrences of these words. Some of these refer to human co-workers. But in 1 Corinthians 3:9, 2 Corinthians 6:1 and 2 Thessalonians 3:2 a human is a sunergos of God. And even more startlingly, in Romans 8:28, also in the textually doubtful Mark 16:20, we apparently read that God works together (sunergeo) with humans. Compare also Philippians 2:12-13, where the same concept is expressed in different terms.

Now when Paul and Mark write of this working together, they are not referring to salvation. So they are not teaching the doctrine of “synergism” disparaged at the Calvinistic site Theopedia as

the view that God and humanity work together, each contributing their part to accomplish salvation in and for the individual. This is the view of salvation found in Arminianism and its theological predecessor Semi-Pelagianism.

(This is by the way a misunderstanding of Arminianism, which does not in general teach that human works have any part in salvation.)

I’m not sure why Wright singles out “pastoral theology”. But certainly “synergism” is being used as a bogey word among Calvinists. And I can only agree that this kind of usage is theologically damaging by the way it is commonly misunderstood as denying the responsibility of Christians, already saved, to do works together with God as he calls us to.

Authority, power and rights in the New Testament, part 2

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In part 1 of this series I looked at the various occurrences of words for “authority” in the New Testament, primarily exousia and exestin. I only began to consider their significance for wider biblical teaching. In this post I am continuing that process.

As I noted, exestin is commonly used in the gospels and in Acts of an activity which is permitted, by religious or secular law. This also seems to be the sense in which the noun derived from this verb, exousia, is sometimes used in those books. For example, Saul of Tarsus was given exousia, permission or the right, to arrest Jewish believers in Jesus (Acts 9:14, 26:10,12). And the opponents of Jesus asked him who gave him the exousia, permission or the right, to do what he was doing (Matthew 21:23; Mark 11:28; Luke 20:2).

This use of exousia and exestin leads naturally into the usage, mainly in 1 Corinthians, concerning the rights of Christians. Paul appears to be teaching that God has given to those in Christ permission, or the right, to do anything they want – but that doesn’t mean that they should do what is unhelpful. To put it another way, we are no longer bound by a whole lot of “Thou shalt not” laws, but we are expected to behave in ways which build up others and glorify God. Understood in this way this exousia is at the heart of Paul’s gospel message.

This kind of exousia is hierarchical in a sense, in that it derives ultimately from God and is mediated through the people and institutions called authorities, exousia in the plural. But it is not a hierarchy of command on the military model, but the opposite – a hierarchy of giving up the right to command by granting permission and rights.

In the New Testament we also see another kind of exousia, authority, that of people who are recognised as having authority in themselves. This is what, according to John Richardson, John Goldingay calls Authority B, distinct from Authority A which is conferred by a hierarchy. This Authority B is what the crowds in Galilee saw in Jesus (Matthew 7:29; Mark 1:22; Luke 4:32). But these are the only clear cases in the New Testament of exousia being used of this kind of authority, and related words are never used in this sense. Whereas there clearly is a sense in which some believers are recognised as charismatically empowered to teach and lead, the exousia word group is never used of this. Whenever exousia is attributed to believers, it is given to them by the Lord and so of the hierarchical type.

Indeed most commonly when exousia is attributed to Jesus it is something he has inherently or as the gift of God the Father. This is the basis of his authority to forgive sins (Matthew 9:6,8; Mark 2:10; Luke 5:24), to drive out evil spirits (Mark 1:27; Luke 4:36), to judge (John 5:27), and to die and rise again (John 10:18). It is not humans, or evil forces, who gave him the authority referred to in the famous Great Commission passage: “All authority [exousia] in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18, TNIV; cf. John 17:2).

But here we must avoid any misunderstanding by noting that this Christian authority is never over other people. It is interesting to analyse the phrases used with exousia which might mean this. Most frequently exousia is specified by an infinitive of an activity, suggesting a basically dynamic concept, permission or right to do something, not the static concept of authority over something or someone. But in some cases a prepositional phrase is used, and there is a wide variation:

With genitive alone:

  • Matthew 10:1 and Mark 6:7: Jesus’ disciples are given exousia “of” evil spirits.
  • John 17:2: Jesus has exousia “of” all flesh.
  • Romans 9:21: the potter has exousia “of” the clay.
  • 1 Corinthians 7:4: a husband and a wife exousiazo “of” one another’s bodies.

With epi + genitive:

  • 1 Corinthians 11:10: a woman has exousia “on” or over her head.
  • Revelation 2:26: believers receive exousia “on” the nations.
  • Revelation 11:6: the two witnesses have exousia “on” the waters.
  • Revelation 14:18: an angel has exousia “on” the fire.

With epi + accusative:

  • Luke 9:1: Jesus’ disciples have exousia “on” evil spirits.
  • Revelation 6:8: death has exousia “on” a quarter of the earth.
  • Revelation 13:7: the beast receives exousia “on” everyone.
  • Revelation 22:14: the blessed have exousia “on” the tree of life.

With peri + genitive:

  • 1 Corinthians 7:37: a man has exousia “about” his desire.

With epano + genitive:

  • Luke 19:17: the faithful servant is given exousia “over” ten cities.

Similarly a variety of prepositions are used with exousia:

en + dative:

  • Acts 5:4: Ananias’ property was “in” his exousia.

hupo + accusative

  • Matthew 8:9 and Luke 7:8: the officer is “under” exousia, secular authority.

ek + genitive:

  • Luke 23:7: Jesus is “from” Herod’s exousia (perhaps here meaning the territory Herod ruled).

Finally we have the only place in the whole New Testament (with the possible exception of Revelation 2:26, a clear allusion to Psalm 2:8 – a careful read of 2 Corinthians 10:8 and 13:10 will show that these are not exceptions) where it is said that any one human has exousia over any other one:

kata + genitive:

  • John 19:11: Jesus recognises that Pilate has secular exousia “against” him.

So what of the authority given to believers in Jesus? This post is already too long, so I will go on to that in the next part.

Continued and concluded in part 3.

The last bastion of complementarianism collapses!

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I was astonished this morning. At my church the last bastion of complementarianism, of separate roles for men and women has collapsed. No, we haven’t appointed a woman pastor yet – although we probably have a 50/50 chance of getting one next time round. It’s something far more radical, perhaps even unique. We have appointed a MAN to be in charge of the flowers in church!

I’m sure my friend James, who grows flowers as a hobby, will do an excellent job.