Women, Calling, and the Body of Christ

I want to write this post carefully, because it is a topic where people on every side of the conversation can feel unheard, dismissed, or talked over. So let me start with what I am not trying to do.

I am not going to settle the debate about women in church leadership. Godly, biblically serious, Spirit-filled Christians have read the same texts and come to genuinely different conclusions, and I do not think a single blog post is going to, or should, resolve that. This is not that post.

What I do want to talk about is something I observe on all sides of the debate, which I think is doing damage regardless of where you land theologically. And it is this: the contempt.

The contempt that flows in both directions, from people who believe the church has suppressed women's gifting toward those who hold complementarian convictions, and from people with complementarian convictions toward those who read the texts differently. The suspicion. The caricatures. The tendency to assume that people who disagree are either misogynists or compromisers, depending on which direction the charge is being levelled.

Whatever your theology, that contempt is not the fruit of the Spirit. And it is weakening the Body in ways that I think we are not taking seriously enough.

What the New Testament Actually Does

Here is something that is clear regardless of where you land on the leadership question. The New Testament is full of women doing remarkable things for the Kingdom. Mary was the first person to carry the Gospel into the world, literally, in her body. Mary Magdalene was the first person commissioned to announce the resurrection. Lydia was the first European convert, and the church in Philippi appears to have met in her house. Priscilla, always named alongside her husband, often first, is described as a co-worker of Paul who corrected the theology of a gifted preacher named Apollos.

Phoebe is described in Romans 16:1-2 as a deacon, the same word used for male deacons, and as a prostatis, a word that in every other usage in Greek literature means patron or leader. Junia is greeted in Romans 16:7 as outstanding among the apostles, a designation that had Paul's scholars arguing about whether she was actually in the apostolic category for centuries before the weight of evidence became too clear to resist.

Whatever conclusion you draw from the debated passages in Paul's letters, this much is beyond reasonable dispute: women were actively present, actively gifted, and actively recognized in the earliest Christian communities in ways that were startling for their cultural context.

This verse does not resolve every question about order and role in the church. But it does establish something important: in Christ, the old categories of status and hierarchy have been fundamentally disrupted. The question is always what that disruption looks like in practice, and that is where sincere Christians have reached different conclusions.

The Complementarian Position, Charitably Stated

A complementarian reading of Scripture holds that men and women are equally image-bearers, equally valuable, equally recipients of the Spirit's gifts, and that God has also established a pattern of male leadership in the home and in the church that reflects something about the nature of the relationship between Christ and the church. On this view, the relevant passages in Paul are not cultural accommodation but theological design, and faithfulness to Scripture means maintaining those distinctions even when culture pushes against them.

This is a position held by serious, thoughtful, genuinely humble people who love women, who honour women's gifts, and who are not motivated by a desire to diminish anyone. Treating it as equivalent to misogyny is not only unfair: it closes the conversation before it has a chance to happen.

The Egalitarian Position, Charitably Stated

An egalitarian reading of Scripture holds that the passages in Paul which seem to limit women's roles are best understood in their cultural context, addressing specific problems in specific congregations, and that the broader arc of Scripture, particularly the evidence of women functioning in leadership and prophetic roles throughout both testaments, points toward a community in which Spirit-gifting rather than gender determines role. On this view, restricting women from leadership positions leaves gifts the Spirit has given to the Body unused, and does not reflect the trajectory of the New Testament.

This too is a position held by serious, thoughtful, genuinely humble people who take Scripture seriously and are not motivated by a desire to accommodate culture at the expense of faithfulness. Treating it as simple capitulation to feminism is equally unfair.

What We Can All Agree On

Here is where I want to land, because I think there is genuinely common ground that is not being occupied as fully as it should be.

Whatever your position on church leadership structures, the New Testament is unambiguous about the dignity, honour, and spiritual significance of every member of the Body. The command to honour one another, to outdo each other in showing honour, to consider others better than yourselves, these are not gender-conditional. The fruit of the Spirit is not gender-conditional. The call to use the gifts the Spirit has given for the building up of the Body is not gender-conditional.

Churches on both sides of the theological debate have sometimes failed at this. Complementarian churches have sometimes enforced their structures with a harshness that dishonoured women and treated their gifts as inconvenient. Egalitarian churches have sometimes treated their complementarian brothers and sisters with a condescension that dishonoured genuine conviction. Both failures belong to us.

What the Body Actually Needs

Whatever structure your church operates within, there are women around you with gifts that the Body needs. Gifts of wisdom, of prophetic insight, of teaching, of leadership, of intercession, of administration, of pastoral care. These gifts are not ornamental. They are necessary. A body that does not use its parts is not a healthy body, whatever the structure that governs how those parts operate.

The question worth asking in every church community, regardless of theology, is: are the women here genuinely known, genuinely honoured, genuinely drawn into the life of the community in ways that reflect their actual worth to God? Or have they been handed a set of permitted activities and told to stay in their lane?

The first produces flourishing. The second produces either passivity or exodus. And neither of those serves the Kingdom.

We can disagree about structures. We cannot afford to disagree about honour. The Body needs all of its parts, and it needs them to treat each other well.