Striving for Warm Complementarianism in a Cold, Mostly Egalitarian World
Our church recently posted a job opening for another associate pastor. I’ve thought a lot about the church hiring process, even writing a whole book about the topic. And in my experience, most job descriptions sound vanilla. They’re boilerplate. Sure, churches will write a bunch of details about what they want from their new youth pastor, lead pastor, or what have you—but in the end, most job descriptions for a men’s ministry pastor look an awful lot like all the other job descriptions for a men’s ministry pastor. Churches say they want applicants to have theological education and previous church experience. They also want, cliched as they are, self-starters and people skills.
Churches looking for pastors—not unlike the pastors looking for churches—typically have few opportunities to distinguish themselves from the rest. This is why in our job description we have one particular bullet point that, we hope, makes us stand out.
In the job requirements section we mention that a candidate should have “a shared theological and philosophical DNA with the pastor-elders,” and then we add, “including warm complementarianism, a humble embrace of Reformed soteriology, and a gospel-centeredness in all of ministry.” That threefold set of phrases is not vanilla. Depending on the candidate, “complementarianism” and “Reformed soteriology” will not taste vanilla but either as repulsive as a shot of vinegar or as delightful as a slice of red velvet cake.
But we’re also hoping a candidate who reads those words will pause for a bit. We hope that stringing together these particular theological concepts with those particular modifiers—warm complementarianism, humble Reformed soteriology—will cause intrigue to arise in the candidate’s mind. We want a candidate to think, “I like the sound of that, but I wonder if they mean what I would mean by those terms.”
In fact, we not only want them to wonder about the phrases but to actually ask us what we mean. And so far, some have.
I don’t want to take time in this post to explain what we mean by “humble Reformed soteriology” or “gospel-centeredness.” For those, I’ll flag J.A. Medder’s book Humble Calvinism and Jared C. Wilson’s book Gospel-Driven Church as helpful resources. I do want to explain what we mean—and what we do not mean—by the phrase warm complementarianism.
Warm complementarianism strives to actually be complementarian. Most pastors looking at our job description will be familiar with this term, but I’ll begin with a brief definition for those newer to the discussion. Broadly speaking, two theological positions exist on men’s and women’s roles in the home and church. They go by the names of “complementarianism” and “egalitarianism.” Both views affirm that God created men and women in his own image and, consequently, that both men and women have equal dignity, value, and worth. Here we all agree.
“God created men and women in his own image and, consequently, that both men and women have equal dignity, value, and worth.”
And yet, there are differences. Egalitarians believe that there should be no distinctions in roles in the home and the church that are based on the innate qualities of gender but rather that all roles should be decided on the basis of competency. In other words, if you can do a task well, regardless of your gender, then you should do it.
Complementarians don’t believe the Bible teaches this. They believe that while there is tremendous overlap between what it means to be a man and a woman, they also believe that manhood, in distinction from womanhood, means something—something beautiful. And complementarians believe that womanhood, in distinction from manhood, means something—something beautiful. In short, men and women are both fearfully and wonderfully made, but they are not interchangeable.
What, then, are the distinctions? Space does not allow me to explore this in detail, but I’ll mention one area. Our church believes God desires godly men to take the role of spiritual leadership in the home and the church, and that the office of pastor-elder is open only to qualified men.
This view is, of course, controversial. So let me mention a few of the places we see this taught in the Bible. Support for male eldership is seen in the following:
the responsibilities given by God to Adam before and after the fall (Gen. 2–3; Rom. 5:12ff);
the pattern of Old Testament and New Testament spiritual leadership being placed mainly among men (e.g., Jesus had many women who ministered with him, and he was no stranger to poking socially taboo topics when necessary, such as the religious leader’s man-made rules about the sabbath, but Jesus chose men to be his twelve apostles);
the parallels between male leadership in the church and the headship of men in the home as taught in places like Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, and Titus 2;
no explicit mention of female pastor-elders in the New Testament; and, finally,
specific passages like 1 Timothy 2:8–3:7 and Titus 1:5–9 which require male pastor-elders.
Now, back to where I started. By saying we strive to be complementarian, we want to actually be complementarian. But what we mean by this is something quite different from the stereotype of simply keeping women from doing certain roles.
Warm complementarianism encourages women to passionately pursue ministry. The perception of many churches that hold complementarian views is that they don’t encourage women to pursue ministry, even that they stifle women from significant leadership roles.
I concede that the perception is the perception because it can often be true. Indeed, in our own church I’m sure that at times, no matter how hard I might try not to do so, my leadership in this area has left certain women feeling deflated. For all those times in the past and all those that will come in the future, please know that I’m sorry. Our hope—indeed my hope—is to see women passionately use the varied ministry gifts God has given them. Over and over again in the Bible we read of women serving in wonderful, significant, and courageous ways. There are well-known examples like Mary and Esther, but also lesser-known ones like the little girl who cared for Naaman (2 Kings 5).
To explain this better, I’ll use an anti-analogy analogy. Most student ministry leaders have been asked some version of the question “how far is too far” when it comes to the physical relationship that the student has with his girlfriend or the girlfriend has with her boyfriend. The proper response to this question is that God desires sexual purity, and thus the goal shouldn’t be to get as close as you can to “the line.” The line of sexual sin is a line you want to stay pretty far away from.
This is not the way God wants us to view “the line,” if you will, for what is biblically appropriate for women and men in various ministry roles. There are some ministry roles that God has given only to qualified males, such as being a pastor-elder, but this doesn’t mean churches should take the approach of staying away from that line as far as possible. Actually, I’d suggest we should want to get as close as we can. In every ministry role that God intends for women and men to do, we should have men and women doing ministry. In the case of “the line” of sexual intimacy between unmarried people, getting too close to the line becomes sin, while in the case of men’s and women’s roles, backing away from the line is sin.
I should probably give a few concrete examples where women lead in our church. We have women teach on Sunday mornings in some classes. Our staff worship pastor is a man, but we typically share the leading of individual Sunday mornings with different leaders, and sometimes a woman leads us in song, and almost every week on the stage, women play instruments, sing, and read Scripture. I know complementarians debate whether women should be deacons; we believe they should, and we have several.
I’ll mention one more example. At our church we wrote a prospectus for a two-year “pastoral residency program.” It’s a program for men who are currently in seminary or have completed seminary and want more church experience before they launch into a full-time vocation. But we also wrote a “mentored ministry program” for any ministry-minded person, whether male or female, who wants to prepare for local church ministry. We haven’t made these programs open to the public yet, but as we’re beta testing the mentored ministry program, we currently have one man and one woman receiving pastoral care from me, the lead pastor of our church. I think our church currently has more women than men enrolled in seminary courses. And in the coming years, I hope and pray God uses our small church to raise up dozens of women who love the local church and have the ability to teach God’s word faithfully.
“In every ministry role that God intends for women and men to do, we should have men and women doing ministry.”
So where is the line? We understand Scripture to teach that in church settings where the sacraments would be practiced (i.e., Sunday morning worship services), teaching is preaching and should be done by elder-qualified men. However, in church settings where the sacraments would not be practiced (i.e., Bible studies and youth group), teaching is not necessarily preaching and can be done by both qualified men and women. I get to this conclusion seeing the verses near the end of 1 Timothy 2 intricately connected to 1 Timothy 3.
Much of this focus on a line, however, can shift undue focus to Sunday mornings. There are, of course, six more days of the week. Pastors often get teased about working only one hour a week, but we know best that the ministry of a church consists in far more. Which is to say that so much of what women (and non-elder men, for that matter) contribute to a church can’t necessarily be seen while sitting in a pew during a service and watching the stage, as though it were the only place of ministry. As Paul writes to the church in Corinth, “Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man nor man of woman” (1 Cor. 11:11). Though we often forget this truth, we need each other and are interdependent, as the very name complementarity implies.
Almost monthly I get comments from newcomers about the beauty of the interior design of our building, which is largely overseen by one gifted woman. And I get regular requests to host weddings, funerals, baby showers, and other events here because it’s such a welcoming place. We have a few women at our church studying counseling, and these women meet informally with those young and old and with those in our church and those outside. And this is not to mention the host of friendship and discipleship relationships among our women that cultivate faith, hope, and love. Also, we have a meals ministry for those with a health challenge or after the arrival of a baby. It’s a ministry much appreciated by those who receive it, and a ministry led almost exclusively by women.
I could go on and on, but this post is long already, so I’ll close by speaking about our posture as leaders toward this doctrine.
Warm complementarianism humbly and openly embraces God’s design as good. There are plenty of ways for a man to be a lousy complementarian. He can be angry about it, wearing the doctrine like a chip on his shoulder, always ready to take offense and pick a fight. He can also be boastful, a prideful windbag who fails to see God’s calling first as a responsibility, not a privilege. I wish these were only straw man caricatures. But they really exist.
“There are plenty of ways for a man to be a lousy complementarian.”
A man could also be indifferent or cold to complementarianism. In this scenario, he might believe complementarianism comes from the Bible but fail to see how the doctrine is actually for our good. So he hides his complementarianism under the proverbial bushel. He keeps the doctrine out of his sermons, and the church keeps it off its website. We may believe this, they think, but it’s better that we not tell anyone.
Warm complementarianism, instead, embraces God’s truth humbly and openly. Warm complementarianism believes that if God is actually good and he gives good gifts, then whatever the Bible actually teaches—to allude to Jesus’s words in Matthew—is him giving bread to his children and not stones.
This is why we write about complementarianism in our membership material. We want our perspective members to know where we stand and why we stand there. We want to model the apostle Paul’s approach when he wrote to the church in Corinth, saying, “We have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways. We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to everyone’s conscience in the sight of God” (2 Cor. 4:2). To quote from our denomination’s statement of faith, the Bible “is to be believed in all that it teaches, obeyed in all that it requires, and trusted in all that it promises” (Evangelical Free Church of America Statement of Faith, Article 2, “The Bible”).
And this is why, to come full circle, we not only write about our complementarian convictions in our membership booklet, but we put it in our job description.
Now, may God our Father, help our belief of these doctrines to be more than mere aspirational belief, more than words on paper. And may he help us be the kind of warm complementarians who adorn the doctrine in such a way that people taste red velvet, not vinegar.
* Photo by Amanda Congiuv on Unsplash