Amy Summerfield asked male and female theologians a simple but deeply contested question: should women lead in the Church? Their answers challenged her assumptions and invited her to look again at Scripture, tradition and what it means to faithfully recognise women’s calling to lead.
The questions around women in leadership are hardly new. For many decades, Christians have studied the biblical texts, wrestled with theological traditions and debated what Scripture means for the calling and leadership of women. And yet, despite the wealth of scholarship available to us, the debate remains remarkably unresolved, with some apparent traction developing around a traditional and more restrictive doctrine.
Why? Perhaps part of the answer is that this conversation has never been simply about a handful of difficult biblical passages. It is more about how we read Scripture, how we understand history and authority, how tradition shapes our interpretation, and, ultimately, what we believe God is doing when he calls someone to lead.
This is one of the reasons we at the Kyria Network created Think Again – a resource designed to help us all take another look at biblical texts and traditions relating to women and leadership.
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Think Again brings together a range of theological voices, both men and women, who explore big themes and passages throughout the Bible that have often been used to define and restrict women’s leadership.
Think Again brings together a range of theological voices, both men and women, who explore big themes and passages throughout the Bible that have often been used to define and restrict women’s leadership. What new understanding could we gain if we slow down and examine those passages again in their historical, literary and theological context? What if some of the texts we have traditionally understood as prohibiting women from leadership are not saying what we have assumed they say?
As Dr Lucy Peppiatt shares in our Think Again series: “Reading the Bible as a whole shows us that from the beginning of the story of God and his people, women have leadership gifting untethered to male permission or supervision… the statements that seem to control and limit women to needing to be quiet and under male authority can only be understood as universally true for all women at all times if they are deliberately taken out of their historical and textual context, outside of the context within the Bible itself, and outside of the context of how they’ve been understood and lived out throughout church history.”
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Dr Steve Holmes, in his concluding piece, speaks directly to the tension between Scripture and the cultural assumptions that shape how we read it.
Dr Steve Holmes, in his concluding piece, speaks directly to the tension between Scripture and the cultural assumptions that shape how we read it. Reflecting on why people throughout history have struggled on this issue, he writes: “History teaches that to be Biblical is to affirm the ministry of women. To deny the ministry of women is to surrender Biblical truth for cultural acceptability… Protestant history since the Reformation demonstrates that those who strive to be faithful to the Bible explore, accept, even celebrate, the equal ministry of women in the church.”
That is an important challenge for all of us. We can be sincere in our desire to be faithful to Scripture without reflecting fully on how our own culture, traditions or communities have also shaped our thinking and practice. We may never have experienced women leading in church or we may have grown up in traditions where women have preached, taught and led for generations. Perhaps, then, a key question is not simply, “What have we always believed?” but, “Are we willing to keep thinking and learning?”
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The growing number of women leading across churches, charities, theological institutions and movements does not, by itself, settle the biblical debate. But it does invite us to pay attention and to consider the impact when women exercise the gifts, calling, wisdom and leadership God has given them. Think Again is not therefore an invitation to side-step particular passages of Scripture. It is rather an invitation to take all Scripture seriously enough to revisit and reconsider the issue again.
Terran Williams summarises it well in his opening piece for Think Again, stating: “The invitation before us is simple, but costly: to look again, to listen again, and to allow the Word of God – read in the light of God’s redemptive story – to form communities where women and men lead together for the sake of the world God loves.”
That is exactly what Think Again invites us to do: not to abandon conviction, but to examine it; not to diminish Scripture, but to read it more carefully; and not to be afraid of where faithful engagement with Scripture might lead us. To look again. To listen again. And to have the courage to think again.
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