Women in the Church: What about teaching and preaching?

This past month we were reminded that, truly, there is nothing new under the sun. An online conversation and debate precipitated after John Piper answered a question from one of his listeners on his popular podcast, “Ask Pastor John.” Piper’s answer to the question, “Is There a Place for Female Professors at Seminary?” elicited many reactions—mostly on social media, and mostly negative—from both egalitarians and complementarians alike. It was a good occasion to remember what has historically defined complementarianism, and also to recommit ourselves as complementarians to the ongoing—as Tim Challies recently reminded us—intramural debate over what complementarianism looks like in the life of the home and the church, and what it looks like as we live and move in the world as male and female.

One of the questions that both implicitly and explicitly came up in the aftermath of the debate about female seminary professors was what complementarians should understand the role of women to be in the teaching and preaching ministry of the local church. This is an important and immediately practical question that every local church committed to confessional complementarianism must address, and it is a debate that we have seen crop up before even in the not-so-distant past.

Back the Spring of 2015, Andrew Wilson, a complementarian Teaching Pastor at King’s Church in London, England, wrote an article responding to another “Ask Pastor John” episode. This time Piper was answering about 1 Timothy 2:12, “Can a woman preach if elders affirm it?” Piper’s answer was “no.” Wilson disagreed:

“I disagree with John Piper’s answer. I think women can (and should) preach sermons in local churches, even as I maintain that the elders who guard and protect the church from harm (and ensure its doctrine remains faithful) are intended to be qualified men. I think Paul thought that, too.”

Wilson’s argument essentially hinges on three points: (1) not all preaching is teaching; (2) “teaching” in 1 Timothy 2:12 probably refers to “the preservation and transmission of the authentic apostolic witness to Jesus, in the era before the New Testament was written down”; and (3) there are two kinds of teaching, big-T and little-t, and women are only prohibited from the former in the New Testament.

In an article responding to Wilson’s response to Piper, Tom Schreiner, professor of New Testament and Biblical Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, addressed each of Wilson’s three points and concluded in defense of Piper,

“Piper rightly says that if the elders allow a woman to preach, they permit what God forbids. Indeed, Piper is careful. He says that there are some contexts where women can address a mixed audience, but they should never preach, nor should they regularly teach a Sunday School class of adults where there is a mixed audience.”

In his article, Schreiner refers the publication of the 3rd edition of Women in the Church, which is edited by Schreiner and Andreas Köstenberger. I highly recommend this book—even to compelementarians who may disagree with it—as it takes a deep dive into the exegetical arguments surrounding 1 Timothy 2:9–15, both for and against the view that women are permitted to teach men in the local church.

These conversations are extremely important. We need to continue the debate, but let’s not forget the important work that has gone before. And let us all heed the wisdom that comes at the end of Schreiner’s article:

“[T]he issue matters, for as churches we must order our practices in accord with the word of God and not our own wisdom. When we deviate from the biblical pattern, there are always consequences. God has given us his instructions for our flourishing and our happiness, and when we follow his instructions we show that we trust him.”