Women’s Ministry in the Local Church | J. Ligon Duncan & Susan Hunt

J. Ligon Duncan & Susan Hunt. Women’s Ministry in the Local Church. Crossway, 2006. 176 pp.

A Biblical Analysis of Women’s Vital Role in the Church
The purpose of this book is to strengthen Christ’s Church by presenting a practical theology of women’s ministry in the local church.

The book will answer five fundamental questions:

• Why should a church have a women’s ministry–what is the biblical apologetic?
• Who is responsible for the women’s ministry in a church?
• How does a women’s ministry relate to the other ministries in a church?
• What are the tasks of a women’s ministry?
• How does a church implement a biblical approach to women’s ministry?

The Need

The role of women in God’s Church is a vital and volatile question in every age, but the increased visibility of this topic in our time demands that the Church develop a theology of, and a functioning model for, women’s ministry in the local church. Even among evangelicals who hold to male headship, there is widespread difference in practice regarding women’s ministry.

• In some churches the women’s ministry is event-, task-, or personality-driven. An inherent danger is that any ministry that is not biblically informed will eventually become competitive and divisive.
• Some churches do not have a women’s ministry because of a concern or even experience that if women are organized, they will make demands and seek power. In this vacuum of isolation and underutilization of women there is the potential for frustration and anger-birthed leadership to erupt among the women, and the very thing the church is attempting to avoid becomes a reality.
• Some churches assert that women can do anything that unordained men can do. The proponents of this approach say that since women are mainstreamed into the total ministry of the church, a women’s ministry is irrelevant or redundant. The vulnerability of this position is that it denies the uniqueness of woman’s design and role and leaves men and women susceptible to egalitarianism. Without a biblical apologetic of womanhood, and a mechanism for women to be discipled by godly women, the church will imbibe the world’s apologetic, and this distortion will create confusion and conflict among men and women.

A common weakness of these approaches is a failure to affirm and celebrate the value of God’s creation design and redemptive calling of women and the necessity for woman’s design and calling to be employed in the life and work of the church. Our concern is that many approaches to women’s ministry are expedient and pragmatic responses to culture rather than thoughtful and intentional applications of Scripture.

Five Reasons Why Women’s Ministry is Important in Every Healthy Evangelical Church

First, women’s ministry is important because through it we have the opportunity to address helpfully the issue of the nature of manhood and womanhood, an issue that is very much at the heart of the cultural transition that we find ourselves in the midst of right now. Male/female role relationships, the definition of the family, homosexual rights—all of these are bellwether issues of our culture. Behind the shifts in our society’s attitude to these issues is a worldview megashift moving from a Judeo-Christian or biblical framework to a pagan worldview. Until about 1970 we had been operating from the residue of a Christian worldview; since that time we have seen a dramatic and rapid shift to an essentially pagan worldview. Unfortunately, one way this pagan framework is being actively imported into the church by self-avowed Christian leaders is through their compromise on the subject of biblical manhood and womanhood. . . .

Ethical compromise comes first, then the doctrinal sellout follows. We evangelicals care about doctrine. The cultural progressives don’t. But if we capitulate to their ethical reordering, doctrinal unfaithfulness is certain to follow.

Second, it is important that we have a deliberate, intentional ministry to women in the church because the Bible teaches so much and so clearly on manhood and womanhood. It is never, ever safe to act unbiblically or to ignore biblical teaching, and the Bible says so much about the way that men and women are to relate, especially in the home and in the church. A church that wants to be biblical, then, will want to make sure the women of the congregation embrace and implement this teaching. And there is no better way for us to discreetly and appropriately address those nitty-gritty issues than in the context of a women’s ministry. Without in any way discounting the regular pulpit ministry of the church, we should recognize that there are certain matters more aptly addressed and applied in the context of a specific discipleship of women, whether in large groups, in small groups, or in situations of confidentiality, as women minister to women.

Third, women’s ministry is important because when biblical manhood and womanhood are denied or altered or unpracticed, that results in disasters for marriages, families, and churches. Unbiblical husband/wife relations can lead not only to marital failures but to gender confusion in children and first-order societal problems. We see this everywhere today. Women’s ministry provides a safe and secure environment where those kinds of things can be addressed. For instance, many marriages suffer continuous tension because the husband and wife lack an understanding of (or perhaps have a positive disagreement about) the biblical teaching on role relationships in the home. Women’s ministry gives us a unique opportunity to grapple with these things in the kind of practical detail that will help the health and welfare of Christian marriages, and thus local churches.

Fourth, we ought to have an intentional, deliberate approach to female discipleship because men and women are different, and these differences need to be recognized, taken into account, and addressed in the course of Christian discipleship. This, as we have already noted, is something with which egalitarians cannot come helpfully to grips. The difference, the distinctness of men and women, is not only obviously displayed to us physiologically, biologically, and psychologically, it is written plainly for us on the opening pages of the Bible. When God created man, Moses tells us, He created them “male and female” (Genesis 1:27). This universal, creational reality has implications for discipleship.

It means that the distinction between male and female is something that is part of a human’s (and especially a Christian’s) being a bearer of the image of God. Think about it. Our God is one and yet eternally exists in three persons-Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Our triune God is both equal and distinct, the archetype of the true individual and true community. Mankind, without living out the God-given distinction of male and female, relating to one another as God intended them to relate, cannot give adequate expression to this aspect of what it means to be created in the image of God. This truth needs to be explained and understood in the discipleship of the local church. . . .

Fifth, the denial or the twisting of the Bible’s clear teaching on manhood and womanhood is one of the central ways that biblical authority is being undermined in our times. . . .

The church has been called to shape culture, not ape it. But very often our churches reflect rather than constructively influence worldly culture. Even worse, some church leaders tell us that if we want to reach the culture, we must become like the culture. . . . That’s precisely the challenge we face in the area of biblical manhood and womanhood. Will the church conform her values to the prevailing cultural mores and norms, or will we impact and influence and shape our culture?

Of course, behind and underneath this is the fundamental issue of biblical authority. If you can write off, ignore, or distort the Bible’s teaching in this area, as crystal-clear as it is, then you can do so with anything the Bible teaches. Indeed, the Bible is so clear and blunt on this that sometimes it is hard for ministers to stand in the pulpit and read aloud certain biblical passages, knowing the kind of reaction they may provoke in hearers who have been steeped in a feminist culture alien to the biblical-complementarian thought-world of the Scriptures. But if you can change what the Bible says on this, you can make the Bible say whatever you want it to say. Thus the manhood-womanhood issue becomes a scriptural authority issue. Is our pattern in the church going to be a hermeneutical twist whenever the Bible’s teaching makes us culturally uncomfortable about an issue, or are we going to let the lion loose, let God be God, and let his Word speak and rule in our lives? So, fundamentally this is a scriptural authority issue. . . .

The Dangerous Silence of the Church

The crisis of womanhood is too critical for the church to be passive. Scores of evangelical women are functional feminists, because the world’s paradigm for womanhood is the only one they have heard. The church should lead the way in equipping God’s people to think biblically about all of life, including a biblical perspective of gender roles and relationships.

It is not sufficient for churches that hold to male headship simply to compile a list of things that are permissible for women to do. We must go to the Scriptures and determine what is needful for women to do. God pronounced gender-aloneness “not good” in the Garden, and the same is true in the church. He did not give His benediction of “It is very good” until man and woman stood side by side, equal but different.

The church must boldly articulate a robustly positive perspective of womanhood and of woman’s role in the church, and the church must equip godly older women to disciple younger women to think and live according to this perspective. If a local church remains silent on this issue, women are unequipped to fulfill their covenantal calling.

Taken from Women’s Ministry in the Local Church by J. Ligon Duncan and Susan Hunt, copyright ©2006, pp. 16, 31-33, 38-42. Used by permission of Crossway Books, Wheaton, IL 60187. For more information, visit www.crossway.com.

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