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So now let's start to get into this. We're going to apply scripture to these kinds of questions right here. Can women be, say, an elder or pastor, a deaconess, a worship leader, a podcaster? What about an employer or a business owner, a boss with male employees, women politicians, theological authors, college professors, seminary teachers? Should you vote for a woman president? I just want to do the work of bringing scripture specifically to bear on these types of questions, because that is the thing when it comes to application, where I think that the answers are very thin on all sides.

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I've spent much of the last two plus years working on a project on women in ministry. Uh, countless hours of work going into it. And this video right here today is the culmination of all of that work. This is the big video on how we apply what the Bible actually says about women in ministry. And I would also add in marriage and in greater society, and the role differences with authority between men and women. What really is the application? So we're going to get into that in a lot of detail. Uh, speaking of detail, I've gone into all the tons of detail, the greater detail in my project on women in ministry, of which this is the final video. I've got 13 videos you guys could actually check out for free. And you can look at in depth all of the debates on this issue. Scholarly debates, right. Um, I'm weighing what the scholars say on both sides, trying to make it accessible to you and help you to make decisions about it, but not pulling punches on what I think is actually true on the topic. You don't have to watch all these other videos, though. These other twelve videos I've got on your screen, this is number 13. In order to understand my teaching on this stuff, you need to watch the videos if you want to understand all the reasoning behind it, all the debates about it and all that stuff. But this video is for application, right. What I've done is, in those other twelve videos, I looked at all the puzzle pieces. It's like I would grab one issue like, what about women prophets, and unpack it for hours, and then what about one Timothy 212? I do not allow women to teach or have authority over man. Unpack it for 11 hours and then put it in video form, make it available for you guys to look at. This is rather taking all those puzzle pieces and putting them together in a cohesive understanding of what the Bible says about women and men and their roles in not just marriage. We'll talk about marriage a little bit, but mostly ministry and greater society and what should our views there be? So, this video is the culmination of a research project that's taken over two years to do. But I want to explain briefly why I wouldn't talk about this topic for years. For years, I would not touch the issue. I would even tell my assistant, Sarah, when people sent questions in for the Q, as I do every Friday on my YouTube channel or, um, on podcast, wherever you're watching, I would tell her, don't send me questions about women in ministry. Like, specifically, don't give me these questions. I was genuinely afraid, uh, scared to answer questions about the topic, but not probably for the reason that you might be thinking. I wasn't afraid of, uh, people getting mad at me. I wasn't afraid of the controversy in that sense, of getting denounced or called bad things by others, or even afraid of them saying, that's it. I hate Christianity, um, because I realized that we can't give up biblical truths because people overreact to them. That's just not something we're allowed to do. Here's the reason why I would get questions like this. Hey, Mike, I'm a woman, and I just want to serve the Lord. And this is a real question. I got people in my church are telling me I should go to seminary and become a pastor. I'm really just not sure what to do. Can you give me some guidance? Is it biblical for me to pursue that ministry?

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And I just felt the weight of this for three reasons. Right? Not because I fear controversy, but for three reasons. One, this is a major, major life choice. And I realize I give out counsel and advice and encouragement to people all the time, but I try to be careful how I do it because I am accountable for the decisions they make based on my advice. And that gives me a great sense of trepidation. So that was one issue, was just that. This is a huge issue, and I'm just concerned that I might get it wrong and give the bad advice to someone and then be accountable for that, of course, as well as harming their life potentially. I take that very seriously. I don't flippantly tell people what to do with their lives.

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I'll tell them, but not flippantly. Only when I can really be confident about that answer. Also, um, I'm accountable. This is the second reason is I'm accountable. I'll stand before God with an accountability for my ministry and for the things I say and do. And just because I have a big YouTube reach doesn't make me more right about anything. Just because I have a podcast or the Lord has blessed me and given me, uh, the accountability increase of larger reach and larger impact in other people's lives. That just makes me more scared. And I think that's a godly fear. I think that's a healthy fear. I'm going to hold on to that fear. I can't afford to be wrong. That's the bottom line. And so that leads me to the third reason why I didn't wait. I didn't talk about this issue and waited until now after doing this two plus year research project. There were unknowns, right? I grew up in a complementarian christian setting. Oddly enough, I grew up in an egalitarian social setting, my family and all that, but a complementarian church setting. And so I had both of those sort of clashing. Plus, I live in California, so there you go. Egalitarian. Very much so in this cultural setting we're in right now.

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But my church setting was primarily just complementarian. I had not been exposed to the egalitarian thinking on these issues. And I've learned over time that when you go in to dig into other people's views you disagree with, you often find they had reasons you never knew about for their views. And I was like, what if I'm wrong? Because it's not just like, uh, the resurrection deniers who are egalitarians, right? There are solid, godly christians that are fully egalitarian in their views. I'll explain egalitarian in a minute. The terminology there, if you're not with me, but the more liberal side of the view there, there's really godly, wonderful believers that are on that side. There are whole schools of scholarly thought that are egalitarian that are out there saying, look at all this evidence for our views that these complementarian guys just aren't aware of. And I thought, what if I'm wrong? Respected guys like, say, craig Keener, who I very much like on a personal level, but also respect his work.

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His, uh, bible background commentary stuff is, like, super great. It gives you great access. I don't agree with it all the time, but it gives you great access into all sorts of tidbits about history that otherwise I wouldn't know. What if some of those tidbits prove that I'm wrong about my complimentarian beliefs and I'm giving advice based on ignorance instead of based on knowledge? So, yeah, I said, no questions on that, sarah. Don't send him over to me. Um, but now I'm ready to talk about it. Now I have that level of confidence, and I sort of feel that maybe I made a wrong choice to not speak more openly about it before, that it was sort of a smoke and mirrors thing, and that the simple biblical truths that are easily accessible even if you don't read scholarship, that's all we really need. But the scholarship then comes in and confirms them. I'm going to get into all that today. But first, let me tell you about the debate, the three sides of the debate, so that all the terminology I use today will make sense to anybody who's not up to speed. Maybe there's the first video of you click. That's fine, you'll get it. It'll all make sense to you. And maybe it'll stir up, uh, your desire to go watch some other videos. I'll tell you which ones you can look at for the whole playlist, which is all linked below, tons of links below for you guys who are interested in digging in more on this topic. So egalitarian. That's one of the three sides of this debate. Egalitarian. These are the people who believe there's no role differences, uh, between men and women. There's no role distinctions between them. So if you're a woman, you could be the elder of a church. Uh, if you're in marriage, basically you have the same exact leadership status as the husband does. And the husband does not have that leadership in respect to his wife. M any job or ministry that a man can do, a woman can rightly do that as well. That's perfectly fine. Most egalitarians apply this to marriage. Some do not. I think that's the minority, from what I can tell. Most of them will say what's true in ministry, what's true with jobs is also true in marriage. There's no role differences. They extend human equality to mean also, um, equal status in regards to any role or function that a person can have that relates to authority. I'm trying to use my words carefully there, so you might want to replay that part if you want to think about what I'm saying. But they generally think this is kind of important. Egalitarians generally think that anything less than that ideal, the egalitarian equality ideal, anything less than that, is oppressive and immoral. So they generally treat this as a mission. They're not, just like I have a view, but rather I have a mission to change other people, to bring them over to this view, because they think they're championing a morally good thing. So, um, you can understand that, like, if that would be something that would make you passionate. So the egalitarian scholars aren't just interested in sharing their views. They're often interested in changing things because they think that they're bringing justice and equity, and nothing's wrong with those desires. So I focused in my study on egalitarian scholars because these are the people I hadn't read before. These are the individuals whose arguments I didn't know. And now I know them. I know a lot of them, and there are a lot. Um, and I've gone through them all in detail. I won't go through them all today. I'll just summarize my conclusions. But that's the egalitarian side. Then you've got the other two camps, complementarian and patriarchal. Let me explain complementarian first. Complementarian. Uh, they'll usually emphasize that there's two sides to the coin here. On one side, men and women are equal in dignity. They're both created in the image of God, men and women. That's a huge status uptick there, with men and women having equal status as image bearers. Um, they're also equal in salvation as coheirs in Christ. And so men and women are both equal in a sense. But then there's a difference in roles. Men and women have different roles. And so minimally complementarians, there's a big, broad spectrum of them, from really soft ones to more hard ones or strong ones. Then you've got, um, the agreement, the thing that they all agree on, complementarians, which is minimally in marriage and eldership or pastoral roles in the traditional biblical sense called elders, that is only for men.

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Okay, so that's clearly different than egalitarian. There are like different, completely different spectrums. If you're even a minimal complementarian, in my view, you are antithetical to the egalitarian perspective. The focus that complementarians tend to have is on making sure both sides of these issues are enforced, that not only is complementarity in role differences enforced, men and women having different roles in marriage and eldership, and potentially some of them extended out further different roles in other areas, too. Um, but they also tend to emphasize the stopping of abuse and the equality that we have as image bearers and co heirs in Christ. And I'm complimentarian, okay? That's my camp, that's where I'm at, and that's where I think you should be at. I think that's the biblical view, and I'll explain how that plays out in real life, in my opinion, into all various questions of life. The third one is patriarchal. Now patriarchal, they tend to focus more on male authority. It's even in the name patriarchal means like father rule, right? The arque, the one in charge is the father. They're, um, just breaking the word down. Uh, christian patriarchalists. Notice I said christian ones. They have similarities to complementarians because they'll also say that women and men share the image of God and they're also equal in salvation. Most christian, I mean, every christian patriarchalist I'm aware of would say that at least people who are alive now, so that's good. But they have more restrictions on society in general. How does that play out? Maybe within the marriage, it more often plays out with more role differences. Like, those role differences extend into greater areas, and it tends to play out into society in general in a much stronger way. Like, we take the rule about marriage and eldership and we're like, hey, that's just a basic rule that applies kind of across all of society about men being in charge. And that's the tendency of patriarchalists. So there are obviously a spectrum of people that call themselves patriarchalists. There are some patriarchalists who will be different in name only in a sense, at least to you. Okay, we're talking about practical application. You'll be like, oh, you're basically complementarian, but you like the term patriarchal. Uh, when it comes to how it plays out in real life, there are other patriarchalists who go swing way, way hard over and they become like the strongest patriarchalists. And some of them are downright abusive and oppressive. And it's that old cliche of male chauvinism and insecurity played out in every relationship with every woman. That does happen, too, and I think most patriarchalists would acknowledge those guys exist and girls, that they exist on that camp, but that, that isn't what the camp has to be. So I just want to say there's a spectrum there. But generally, patriarchal is the strongest. Over here is the strongest. Um, men are in charge kind of view. Complementarian is, hey, it's men are in charge in some sectors in some ways, but that we try to emphasize the ending of abuse and stuff like that is more often going on there and then egalitarian, which just says, hey, everything you guys are doing is abusive. You need to come over here and say, there's no role differences at all regarding authority in particular. Obviously, woman is a mother, a man is a father, but neither has a greater authority than the other in their opinion. Now, uh, for example, some patriarchalists, they want to restrict women from say voting, teaching, uh, at a Bible college, uh, being a senator, some of them go stronger and say, teaching at a college at all because you're teaching men, you can't be teaching men. That's not something we think is appropriate. Uh, you couldn't vote in an election because now you're using representative authority in some sense to govern men, and that's not something that we would allow. Um, you couldn't walk into a Bible college class and have a female teacher there. Some of them, I wonder if they would also have a problem with women being a boss, like having male employees, or how they would play that out. Other ones would be okay with all three of those things, but on the more extreme, they're going to be limiting all that on the spectrum. And it is a spectrum, you could say egalitarians over here, super no differences kind of position. And then both complementarian and patriarchal, they're in the same camp, really, but they have very significant differences. And the spectrum of how much they draw that out does become either. You're just ignoring role differences kind of to, hey, you're actually being abusive. The last thing I'll point out about the names that you've got here, the egalitarian, complementary and patriarchal, is that egalitarian, um, can refer to, uh, Christians or non Christians. Uh, patriarchal can be Christians or non Christians. Right. There are, for instance, Muslims are patriarchal, but they're a version of it that I would say is very much unbiblical. And no Christian could affirm the things that they're affirming. Um, uh, the atheist could be patriarchal, right. Um, all sorts of different groups can be patriarchal, but there is a christian patriarchal perspective that some say, hey, this is what we think is biblical. However, complementarian is like an explicitly christian view. As far as I know. This is one of the reasons why I like this name, because this name distinguishes this christian view from all other views. Um, some patriarchalists will be like, hey, I'm going to call myself a christian patriarchalist. And that's how I'll distinguish myself from these abusive views that I think are wrong. Um, but in reality, like in normal conversation, people don't usually hear that, but whereas complementarian, the uniqueness of it being, hey, this is a christian view, is sort of baked into the name. I think that's useful and one reason why I like the term and use it. So that being said, I've got now 40 hours of content explaining all this stuff in a much greater detail, going through every debate I could find that I thought was worth spending time on. Now there's 40 plus hours of content on this freely available to you. No, you don't have to watch it all, but you can look through the playlist down below and see if there's something that interests you. Or you could just watch today's video that focuses on application. I've been actually just on a side note, um, for those of you who follow my content, you might care to this. I'm so excited for the impact that this is having. This has been kind of a very unrewarding, kind of grueling sort of, sort of thing to study. It's not like Jesus in the Old Testament. Very rewarding, teaching the book of Romans. Very rewarding. This is not rewarding in that personal sense. Not like you teach for your own personal pleasure. You, uh, do it to serve others. But what's a blessing to me is knowing that, um, this series has already received, uh, over 4 million views across the videos and getting more every day. And it's having an impact not only amongst congregations and individuals, uh, but even among scholarship to some extent. And that's been exciting to me, to hear that, get feedback from people, that it's actually having an impact there. And I'm very excited about that. It's also brought a lot of hate my way, and it will continue to do that, no worries. That's just what comes to the territory dealing with controversial stuff. Um, today, though, I feel confident about the topic. I will never again say, don't ever send me questions about this, because I feel as though I've got pretty solid answers. And that for much of these issues that I'm about to talk about, I can give you.

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Here's text, here's bible, chapter and verse on these topics and how we can answer them in our lives today. And I would say, I think egalitarians are fundamentally wrong. I think patriarchalists are, uh, peripherally wrong, um, and sometimes fundamentally wrong. Uh, but the more christianized version of it is more peripherally wrong. And that complementarian even has some things to learn. There's errors on both sides, is the point. Doesn't mean I'm right about everything, but why don't you listen to my case and see what you think and make up your own mind about this stuff? So now let's start to get into this. We're going to apply scripture to these kinds of questions right here. Can women be, say, an elder or pastor, a deaconess, a worship leader, a podcaster? What about an employer or a business owner, a boss with male employees, women, politicians, theological authors, college professors, seminary teachers. Should you vote for a woman president?

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Should women serve communion? Those types of questions, we're going to be digging into that today, and a lot more, actually. And some of these, I think, seem like no brainers. Other ones seem like they're more challenging. But my point is, I just want to do the work of bringing scripture specifically to bear on these types of questions, because that is the thing when it comes to application, where I think that the answers are very thin on all sides, um, especially complementary and patriarchal, these views tend to be very thin on how it practically plays out. When you read the books, when you look at the stuff, they'll talk about marriage, they'll talk about being an elder. And then the other stuff, it just starts to get very muddy. And many times, intuition is being used. My intuitions, which often are formed by culture, are being used to make decisions about these types of questions. Yet there are gifted women all over the place who are christian, who can see that the plain teaching of scripture limits eldership and marriage roles. But they're not sure how limited should they be in other aspects. They're given great ministry opportunities and wondering, should I say yes to that? They have, like, a mind for political stuff, and they're like, should I pursue that or not? Like, I want to honor the Lord. I just don't exactly know how to do it in this position. So let's dig into this again. A reminder, this is not my case. This is my application of my case. If you want my case, my evidence, my arguments for all these views. That's in the previous 39 hours of content, and I've got links to the playlist below if you want the application. That's what this video is for, the summary and application. All right, let's get into this. What surprised me most, that's what I want to talk about. Now, before I go, uh, further, I want to say the one thing that surprised me the most, and this is kind of important, what surprised me the most about this entire study is how bad egalitarian arguments are. It, uh, genuinely surprised me. This is not a childish insult. This is, I think I just want to put out there the reality of the situation. I wanted heading in. I wanted to become egalitarian. Um, was I willing to twist scripture for it? Of course not. But a lot of egalitarians would say they aren't either. They don't think they're twisting scripture.

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But I wanted to be that.

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Whatever my motives are, my reasons are I sat and thought about this for long hours, and I was like, man, I kind of hope that the Bible is egalitarian going into this study and that these arguments are convincing to me. And as I read through the scholars works and checked their footnotes and looked at the evidence, I was shocked. I was shocked at how bad the arguments were. Now, don't get me wrong. There are many saved and wonderful, godly, egalitarian christians. This is not a personal attack against them. They're not bad in that sense. Their reasoning for their view in this area is bad. That's what's bad. The arguments are bad. When you get to the bedrock of the view and you go, oh, the pastor's quoting the scholar, and the scholar is quoting this ancient source, and the ancient source doesn't say what they said it says. It's like that a lot of the time. And so it's a house of cards, in a sense. The egalitarian arguments, and I've demonstrated this through the previous 39 hours of content, they use sometimes fake history, like historical reconstructions, that just aren't true, that are distortions in the important ways in which they're leaning on them. They use bad use of Greek in Hebrew. It does happen. Bad use of Greek in Hebrew, like reinterpreting Genesis. Uh, your desire shall be for your husband, but he shall rule over you in some wild ways. Um, or treating one Timothy 212 authenteo. This word of, I don't allow woman to have authority, teacher, have authority over a man, and then just reinterpreting this word authority in some very strange ways that don't fit the data.

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Very strange ways. I don't allow women to incite violence over a man. Like, really weird stuff that, when I've spent the countless hours of work, was like, wow, that was kind of. I never would have needed to do this work if you hadn't made up all that weird stuff. That's how it feels. There are far fetched interpretations of scripture, and they're just all over egalitarian writings. The egalitarian appearance of correctness through having a group of scholars that are supporting the view, when you dig into their actual reasons for their views, it falls apart. It's, uh, a school of scholarly thought that shouldn't be. I'm saying this very strongly. I know these are very strong words. That's my conclusion after my work. Now, if you think I'm wrong, go back and look at my work. I'm sharing with people my takeaways from this project.

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Many of the claims about stuff that egalitarians, uh, make, the claims they make to support their views are very hard for normal people to research. And it'll do to you what it did to me where you're like, well, I thought I was right about this, but as I looked into these actual views, they make these claims about the ancient cult of Artemis in Ephesus, and I don't know anything about the cult of Artemis. I don't even know how to research that sort of thing. So I guess I'll just slow down and I'll just keep it to myself because I don't want to be wrong. And yet, when you double check, and I did double check these claims, you're like, all this stuff is bunk. It's not good. The egalitarian view. The egalitarian view is fundamentally, foundationally built on and sustained by incorrect use of history and language and even sometimes philosophy. And these things are a real problem. And here's what happens. Here's what I think is happening in lots of churches all over the place, because there is a tide of egalitarianism moving through the churches right now. Right? Even churches that historically have been complementarian that are becoming egalitarian. We've got lots of egalitarian, uh, denominations right now. This is a list, egalitarian denominations on your screen. Is this all of them? No, I'm sure it's not. Here's a bunch, though, that are egalitarian.

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The people in these churches aren't researching these views, really. They trust their leaders. They trust their pastors. So here's what I think happens, and this doesn't mean that they're all non Christian. In fact, if you read the list and you know the denominations, you'll see that many of them are the more liberal, uh, theology, which is a bad thing. Uh, they're leaning more like liberal theology.

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And that's unfortunate. Not all of them, though. Not all of them are doing that. Some of them are still very conservative, at least in regards to the gospel and the nature of scripture and stuff like that.

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But here's what I think happens pragmatically. Scholars write these views where they use obscure historical and linguistic research to say, see, you've misunderstood the Bible. Then a pastor reads that view, and he goes, hey, cool. They've given me the summary. Then he summarizes, gives kind of some of the main bullet points and some of the sort of propaganda type stuff that usually you hear from these types of discussions. And then he shares that to his congregation. And the congregation is like, we're egalitarian. Like, come on, Paul. Paul was only really writing about his own opinion there. Or, hey, one corinthians 14 that was added later. He didn't even say that. Or he was just quoting the corinthians. He was disagreeing with them. You guys don't understand the quotation, refutation, um, structure, and literary perspectives that my pastor told me he read from some other scholar. And this kind of stuff spreads. And so we have a lot of well intentioned christians who are falling to a lot of wrong arguments. And so that's why I dug into the scholars, because that's the bedrock of it, of the view.

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Anybody who has seriously studied anything knows that there are times when schools of thought, such as egalitarian perspectives on the Bible, schools of thought in a given subject are basically wrong, and then they get overturned, and a whole school of thought gives way to a new way of thinking. There was a time in german scholarship where it was commonly thought that the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were based off of, like, greek myths and stuff like that, and so that it was fabricated histories based off greek myths. And part of the reason for this, this is so weird in scholarly history, part of the reason for this was the anti semitism that was present in Germany at the time. So cultural anti semitism turned into scholarly blinders on seeing the jewishness of the gospels. And because of this, they didn't see the jewishness of it. They actually came up with all these weird, far fetched theories about the origins of the gospels. Now, that's been overturned. That is not scholarly thought anymore, but someone had to raise the flag. And I'm suggesting that there is scholarly thought that is based on wrong views, whatever the motives for it are, is kind of irrelevant to me. It's based on wrong interpretations of history and language and all that. And that's moving the egalitarian ball forward, and in a way that fits perfectly with the movement of our culture. And it's a school of thought that needs to change. Churches need to push back against it graciously, but firmly push back against these views. They're not biblical, and therefore they're not godly. Um, and the christians who are absorbing them doesn't make them the enemy. But the views are wrong, and they should be pushed against in the nicest way we can. I'm not here saying that, uh, egalitarians are wrong about everything. I want to make this very clear. Egalitarians are fundamentally wrong in their. This is my summary. I built my case for 39 hours. Let me give you the summary. Egalitarians are fundamentally wrong about there not being role differences between men and women. That's a fundamental error, and that's a fundamental part of the movement and the view. But they are peripherally correct in a lot of cases about abuse and misuse of women, about devaluing and just mistreatment and not acknowledging the high value nature and authority that women do have. So they're right about many of those things, but that's not the fundamental movement at all. That's the fuel they use to bring people into the movement. But that's not what the movement is actually teaching. It's teaching no role differences. So patriarchalists and complementarians are often wrong in other ways. There's a correctness there, that there's role differences, but they're peripherally wrong much of the time. This is my conclusion. I know it probably sounds arrogant when I'm saying this, because it's like, who are you to if you only watch this video, it probably feels that way to you. I'm suggesting that this is based upon a lot of work I've done, that you can go look at yourself, 39 hours of it, of teaching, plus countless hours of study and prep, and you're welcome to go look at that and evaluate that and see if you agree with these conclusions or not. You obviously have to make up your own mind. But there are times when patriarchalists and complementarians, and I've seen it in my own circles, devalue women or overly limit their behaviors. And hopefully this video will help that. Hopefully this will help stop that. Um, that's something peripheral to the complementary and patriarchal view that is incorrect views, because they do disagree on things that is incorrect. And we'll go into that stuff in detail today. In fact, mostly I'll be talking about those issues and not egalitarians. I'll be talking about the intermurral differences between complementarians, soft ones and stronger ones, and patriarchalists and hard patriarchalists and strongest of them and all that. So, um, next thing I'll say is this. This is a secondary issue, right? I'm just priming the pump, getting us ready for all the practical application. This is a secondary issue. If you disagree with everything I'm about to tell you about men and women and their roles, it's really not going to affect your views on most of my other teachings, especially not the gospel, the nature of scripture, the interpretation of the vast majority of the Bible, it's not going to affect those things. This is a secondary issue. I think that we should embrace egalitarians as family in Christ. Family, brothers and sisters, beloved in Christ, who we disagree with, but who are beloved. Right. They're wrong, and their error is causing some problems for them and others, but we love them. So try to be gracious. Remember this. These are whole egalitarian denominations. I'm not saying every Christian in any one of these groups is like half a Christian or not a Christian or anything like that. No, it's just an error. But here's why it's worth dealing with.

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The application of this error is huge. It's an error about the nature of a person's marriage. It's an error about the governance of churches around the world. It fundamentally hits things in a hard way in marriage and church ministry, and it's going to impact greater society in larger ways as well. So I don't want to die on this hill, but I want to talk about it because it's very important. So if you're a female, um, and you're listening to this and you're doing something that I'm going to suggest the Bible says you're not allowed to do, I will have encouragement for you at the end. I'm treating you as a sister in Christ. I hope your ministry has been blessed. I hope that there's a great amount of fruit that's come from it. And I'll have some encouragement for you on maybe how to proceed if you find out that you need to change something. Um, and again, I am coming to you not as the authoritative Mike winger, but as just a brother in Christ who did a lot of research and made it all available for you. If you follow with me and you track with me on that research, then I think my encouragement will be very helpful for you too.

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How do we need to approach this issue? All right, this was where I started my whole project. Here's the summary. The entire project started with this issue. How do we approach the topic of women in ministry, women in marriage, women in greater society, and our role differences between them and men? The number one rule is scripture is king. The Bible is the king here. The Bible rules and tells us what to do and how to handle these issues. The Bible, nothing else. So we have to avoid bypassing the Bible. So video number one was we bypassed the Bible. This is the thing I saw most commonly, especially among egalitarians, but also in other camps, too, they bypass the Bible entirely. I'll just offer you a few reasons. Uh, I go through an hour worth of content here, but when I talk about this. There was seven ways I gave of people bypassing the Bible, but one of them is this, using life experience to bypass the Bible. So perhaps it's storytelling. Well, I got saved under a woman preacher. Therefore, the Bible must support women being pastors.

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That's your storytelling. You can't do that. Like, you're not allowed to do that. You can't just say, my story overrules the clear teaching of scripture. You got to start with scripture, then you go based on scripture. How do I interpret the thing that I went through in my story? That's what you really need to do here. Uh, others would say, um, well, women always lead denominations into error. Women are a lot of false teachers are women. Therefore, the Bible must support my view. Wait, hold on. Slow down. You're not quoting any scripture here. This is bypassing the Bible using your storytelling. It's a fundamentally bad method for coming to theological conclusions. Another one was making a boogeyman. Uh, some would say egalitarians are worldly compromisers. Well, you know what? Whether that's true or false, it doesn't prove you're right about your views. It doesn't prove that your views are biblical. So we need to back off of that kind of language for a minute while we open the text of scripture to study it. Um, egalitarians would say that patriarchalists and complementarians are oppressors. And I do actually see this. Like, there's whole chapters in books written about this, about how if fundamentally, you are oppressing others and this is oppressive and it's immoral.

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Okay, but you realize the problem here is you're no longer using scripture to be your guide. You're using your very modern understanding of the word oppression.

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That's what you're using. So in other words, you're letting culture guide your theology. That would be a fundamental error. Others, let's see, patriarchalists would say that complementarians are just weak egalitarians in disguise. That's what I call making a boogeyman, right? I'm going to make a boogeyman out of your side. You're not using scripture, you're just calling names. That's not fundamentally how we come to these conclusions. First use scripture, and then call me weak.

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You can't do it the other way around. Um, so the price of entry is that I have to follow scripture and follow it joyfully. I have to go into the word of God and let it teach me. That's the price of entry. I'm not going to use philosophy to say, because of my philosophical syllogism, complementarians are wrong. No, I'm going to go to scripture and let it guide me and direct me with God's clear instructions for us. That's the price of entry. I'll follow scripture wherever it leads, whatever it costs, uh, including into egalitarianism. I would have happily followed it into egalitarianism. And there's plenty who've. It's weird watching the responses. I've seen a number of people, uh, make videos about me saying that I was biased and that in no way would I have been egalitarian. I was never going to accept that view because it would cost me too much or something like that. And I would say there would be costs either way. If I was afraid of paying a cost, I never would have done this series in the first place.

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That's it. There are costs no matter how I came out. But the greatest cost would be violating the clear teachings of scripture in public teaching and then standing accountable before God. That would be the great cost. That's the cost I'm afraid of. So we need to honor God by believing that. Three things.

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Three things heading into this study. You got to honor God by believing that. One, what God says about men and women is true, right? That means scripture is going to lead me, not my other concerns. Number two, what God says about men and women is good.

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That's very different than saying it's true, isn't it? It's good.

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That should be your starting point. God, who designed me and then tells me how to be what he says about that must be good. It must be right, it must be healthy. And that leads us to number three. You should head into this and out of this saying that what God says about men and women is needful. And I think it's never been more needful than it is right now. I think we live in a culture that is largely in rebellion against the truths of God relating to male and female, and that it's needful that we reinforce, that we hold our ground, and that we state out loud these socially unacceptable truths that are the Bible's teachings on men and women.

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So here's what I'm most confident on, because I want to move from what I'm most confident on to what I'm perhaps not as confident. I feel, uh, a degree of confidence about it, but not as confident. I would say the things everyone should agree on. And then there's the stuff that I realize there's still going to be some debate on. So there are three pillars that I would say I'm most confident on concluding this study. These two plus years, these are the three things. Three things, not two, mind you. The third one's extremely important. The three pillars that form my understanding, and I think the biblical teaching on men and women and their differences. So these are the three pillars that form the foundation for, I think, a biblical view of men and women. The first one is male headship and female submission in marriage. Pillar number one, there should not be debate on these facts. I don't believe. I think that the Bible is clear enough that there shouldn't even be serious debate on the topic, how it plays out, how it gets applied in every situation. Absolutely open for discussion, debate, disagreement on those issues, even different ways of playing it out. But the bare facts themselves shouldn't be debated if you're going to be a biblical Christian. Adam has a creation based higher role of authority than Eve. The primary application of this is in marriage. I did a teaching on this. We went through genesis two, asked, is creation just a result of the fall? Or, excuse me, is complementarian, uh, relationships just a result of the fall, or is there something bigger going on there that's pre fall? And the answer is, it's actually pre fall. Adam in his creation was given a higher role of authority than eve. And you can see this in a number of ways. I'll list several of them now. So just by way of recap here, I've already gone through this in great detail in video number two in the series, and you can check that out in the playlist down below. But adam is made first. Here's the first thing adam's made first. And there's New Testament support for this, that this isn't just a fact that Adam is made first, but that this has implications for m Adam's authority over eve. One timothy 212. And I go over it in detail in the video. I'm just going to summarize it here. Um, paul says, I don't permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over man. Rather, she is to remain quiet. Four, adam was formed first, then eve. Right? It's a creational difference that relates to the authority differences between men and women. That's a pretty big deal. Then we also see, number two, adam is not only made first, adam, uh, eve is made for adam, whereas adam is not made for eve.

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There's a purpose in the creation of these two. You can get this in one, uh, corinthians eleven, verses eight and nine, for man was not made from woman, but woman from man. And this is about the authority difference between male female, especially in marriage, in particular in this passage, and how that applies to public prophesying. We'll get into all the details here later. Uh, the third reason is right here. Also in one corinthians, eve is made for adam. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.

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There is a sense of foreignness or purpose, supportiveness, uh, that's being created there, and that is just the biblical teaching. This is super offensive to people today, and I'm very sorry for the offense. You feel that's there. Um, perhaps it's beautiful. Perhaps what's offending you is something that's actually beautiful. And when you get mad about it, you're actually kind of get madding. You're getting mad, uh, at something that makes marriages wonderful and healthy. Now, maybe you feel that it always leads to oppression and abuse, but I'm going to tell you, there's three pillars here. I'm just talking about one. If you only take one pillar or two, it will absolutely lead to abuse.

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If you take three, it won't. It never will. Not if you take all three pillars. And this is why I would say this view is fundamentally complementarian, um, as opposed to. At least I would identify it as that. That would be the name I would choose for it. Okay, so that's the third thing Adam's made. First, Eve is made from Adam. Eve is made for Adam. Number four, a pre fall creation reality that shows the difference between male and female. Here, Adam names eve after naming the animals. And I do think that that has significance. Look at video number two for the case. For that, I'm just giving you the conclusions. Uh, number five, Adam, not Eve, is given commands from God that he must relay to Eve. That's like five pre fall creational realities that just flow from the authority difference between Adam and Eve. The New Testament clearly uses several of those as its reasons for ongoing differences between male female, even today, after the fall and after the death and resurrection of Christ. Kind of a big deal. What I just said is a big mouthful, but I'll just move forward. The cumulative force of all this in Genesis two is, uh, when you couple that with how the New Testament interprets it and applies it, it's incredibly powerful.

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It's a defeater, I think, for most egalitarian claims relating to creation.

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So Adam's authority and ultimately male headship and female submission in marriage, I use the word submission. There, uh, many people today, submission is a bad word. I don't submit to anybody. If you feel you don't submit to anybody. You're using a really particular version of the word submit that the bible is not talking about. Uh, you submit to people all the time. You yield, you defer to, you give in to people all the time. You allow others to make decisions, you support all the time. Um, and so we're just saying that in marriage, that has a specific place.

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So in Genesis three, we get the fall. In Genesis three, marriage roles are affirmed again, but with increased difficulty post fall. I'm going to leave the pillar on the screen. I just thought about that. I think I'd like you to see it. Um.

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There it is. Okay. Just so you know, I'm continually reinforcing the same first pillar. Super duper important. In Genesis three, marriage roles are affirmed again, but with the increased difficulty that they'll experience after the fall, sin enters the world. Now marriage is going to be harder. It's not, as many, um, egalitarians claim, the introduction of marriage roles as a difference. He'll rule over you. No, that's not an introduction. It is an increased difficulty in preexisting roles that Genesis two has revealed to us, as the New Testament clearly interprets it to be. Genesis 316 shows this about the fall. This is the fall. This is the event where obviously things get worse. But it's not an introduction of a new idea. It's rather something getting harder that was already present. Um, your desires shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you. I looked in a lot of detail. I looked at the people who thought that it was saying that Adam, eve is just having sexual desires to her husband and he'll control them or something. Um, we looked at all that, uh, we looked at all the other interpretations that I found on offer for those things that I thought were even worth looking at. None of them worked.

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Here's my understanding. This is not a new relationship. Adam already had a role of authority. What it is, is it's increased difficulty post fall. It's just like the, uh, curse of the thorns. Adam was already going to be doing farming. He was already going to be eating of the plants. Now, because of the thorns in verses 1718. You can keep reading in Genesis there. Uh, because of the thorns, he's going to have increased difficulty in the preexisting task of farming. He was a keeper of the garden. Now it's going to be harder to take care of, uh, plants and get food from them. Eve, she's going to have increased difficulty. The contrariness that's going to be there between them in an already existing male headship in marriage relationship. That's, I think, just the biblical case. I could feel how much this irritates and hurts and angers people. I think that that irritation, hurt and anger is based on not having all three pillars in place. And we're going to talk about all three, all three today. This is just the first one.

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Uh, Genesis three also confirms this, that Adam's authority is present in a few different ways. As you read Genesis two, it's there. In Genesis three, it's there. Uh, Adam bears primary responsibility for their sin. That's clear. He's approached first by God to be accountable for the sin, the curse that is directed because of Adam. That curse impacts the whole earth and impacts everything, whereas Eve's curse, or the curse related to Eve, only impacts women and their things. And so that's interesting. More importantly, though, the New Testament supports this idea that Adam had a greater representational role and accountability than Eve did when they both ate of the tree with egalitarian views. This doesn't make sense. I don't. And yeah, go watch the video if you want to debate on that. I already taught through all the alternate views. So, um, here's the summary. Feels weird giving the summary. I'll be honest with you guys. Here's my fear. Someone's going to watch my summary, discount my views, because they haven't heard my case for the views, and then they're not going to go back and watch video two, where I build the case, or video seven or video twelve or whatever. So I'll say this, anytime you want to push back on me, please go back and watch the original videos. This is a summary. This is an overview. This is just meant to make it all accessible. Okay, that's it. Just, here's the conclusions. So Adam bears primary responsibility for their sin. You can see this clearly in the New Testament, because one corinthians 1522, romans five, verses 14 through 19, it clearly shows us that we didn't die in Eve or Adam and Eve, we died in Adam.

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He was the guy that was responsible for all of mankind. He had a greater responsibility. This extends from it, since it seems a greater authority that was there, a representational role. So through one man, Scripture says, sin entered the world. In Adam, all die. Scripture says, not adam and eve. Now, I will say in Genesis three, I reject the helper argument. Genesis two, rather, where God says, I'll make a helper suitable for him. I don't think that the word helper, ezra, or however you want to pronounce it in Hebrew. I don't think that that word implies female subordination. I don't think that word implies. It doesn't mean, I don't think that it's taught in the passage as a whole, or that when you take it in all context, it's there. I don't think the word lexically like that the definition of the word implies serving under, uh. I don't think that that's in the meaning of the word. Many do. I build my case for that elsewhere. The New Testament also clearly teaches that male headship applies to all marriages, not just Adam and Eve. So you could just say, well, Mike, that was just Adam and Eve. Adam was a special case, first human. But rather the New Testament teaches that, that Adam and Eve headship thing that we see from creation, it applies beyond simply Adam and Eve. So here we go. Ephesians 523.

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For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body and is himself its savior. Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Wait till you get all three pillars, y'all. This is just one of them. But at any rate, this certainly includes an element of authority, headship. I did a whole thing on that. All the alternate definitions of headship. It means sourcehood. It flows from the source of just a source thing. It doesn't have anything with. No, um, definitely authority is being meant here and is intended and would have been understood by all the early readers of the work.

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So many egalitarian attempts were there to get around Ephesians five. Oh, it's mutual submission. That is not a good argument on any level. Um, I've dealt with that in great detail. I hope you'll go look at it. All right. You can tell I'm, like, paranoid that people will just dismissively not consider the counterarguments to egalitarianism. That's what the whole series is for. I hope you'll take a look at it and, um, I'll move forward. So, yeah, the headship thing that Adam had in the garden, that extends to marriages in general. That's a rule about men and women. As God created, he made them to be that way, and it wasn't a result of the fall. That's like a really big deal. The first pillar, um, I'll put back on your screen here. The first pillar is a big deal. Male headship and female submission. In marriage, there's three pillars. How far does that submission go? When can wives rebel. All those good questions. We'll get to that today. Um, now, christian wives are clearly taught to submit to their husband's leadership. I looked at ephesians, but there's also. It's in colossians. It's in one. Peter three one. I'll offer some nuance and talk about some limits on this stuff today, but for more info, I would encourage you to check out these other videos. Right. I've got this video. Was women's submission just a curse to be overturned or. I got this other video, male headship. Is it really biblical? And then finally I've got this video. Wifely submission or mutual submission? I deal with all of those arguments, um, in the series. Those are just parts two, part eight, and part nine. And a lot of people skip those parts. If you're talking about marriage, you're going to need to check out those parts. At any rate, here's the video that is not in my series that I would also recommend for follow up men in particular. How to be a husband, the lost art of biblical manliness. I like that title. Personally, um, that video, I've been told, has helped people's marriages in really significant ways, and I hope you'll check it out if you want to understand more about this issue in detail, because today's video is not primarily about marriage. I'm not going to get into tons of detail. I'll talk a bit, a bit about it. But pillar one, pillar one, male headship and female submission in marriage. That is very much a real thing.

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Some egalitarian scholars, they will hold to the marriage part, but they'll all reject pillar number two. Okay, so some, probably the minority, they'll hold to pillar number one to some extent. At least all of them reject pillar number two. Pillar number two is this. Elders positions and functions are for men only.

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Elders positions and functions are for men only. Pillar number two is more than saying this is important. It's a lot more than saying a woman can't be in the position of an elder like an ordained pastor. It's more than that. It's not less than that, but it is more than that. Elder is a title. If I merely say that a woman can't have the title elder, then it leaves open to the idea that she can do everything the elder is doing, just not with the title. Do you see how that's possible? But I'm going to say pillar two that no one should argue about in my view.

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I feel like I'm really putting myself out there when I say this, but I think that it's only because scripture is so clear on this particular topic. I think no one should be arguing about this. Um, that the thing that shouldn't be argued about is that not only the title, but the unique functions, unique functions of an elder teaching with authority. In that elder context, that is also ruled out. That means that the application is a little bit bigger than saying a woman can't have the title pastor or the title elder. One Timothy 212 is the passage, part of the passage that I spent an eleven and a half hour video teaching through, dealing with every egalitarian argument against this interpretation. But it turns out that this is correct, that modern translations pretty much get it right. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man. Rather, she's to remain quiet. That that speaks of, and it gives you Adam and Eve as the reason. Okay, explodes from pillar number one.

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This is the function of an elder. Teacher. Have authority is not the title elder, it's what the authority does. Right. Now, first Timothy, three other places show she can't be an elder. But first Timothy 212 shows she can't have that function. That particular function. Please see video number twelve for a ton of info on this. It'll take you days probably, to watch that video or the podcast. I, uh, recommend it on video because then you can get all the stuff on screen. There's, I think, 500 slides that I made for that video. It's all free, available for you. I hope it helps. I think this is abundantly clear. Every egalitarian attempt to get around pillar number two that I looked at failed and failed utterly. Where is it? Pillar number two?

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Let me talk about briefly mention a couple of those. They say that there was a major cult called the cult of Artemis in Ephesus. That's true. And that this was like a female only cult. That's not true. Where the women were in power, that's not true. Where they kept the men in their place, that's not true. Where they taught that women were in dominion over men, that's not true. Or maybe the hyperfeminist ephesus theory where maybe I won't hook it on Artemis, but Ephesus in general, Paul writes Timothy in Ephesus. Ephesus was like this very hyperfeminist environment where women were domineering over men and it was a big problem. That's not true. Um, or they'll say that the word authority in one Timothy two doesn't mean authority. It means a bunch of other stuff, but not authority. That's not true, it does imply it has an authority connotation in the word, um, or that it was just Paul's personal opinion. Paul says, I don't permit. It was just this person. No, that wasn't the case. Uh, or Paul doesn't have jurisdiction over us.

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There's a dangerous argument. Um, that's not true. Or they would say it's about marriage, but it's not about ministry. And I don't believe that's true either. And I gave a bunch of reasons why others would say it's really about a bunch of female false teachers. Paul's not limiting all women. He really just doesn't want. There's like a group of women who are false teachers in ephesus at the time, just like maybe a small group. But he's like, hey, don't let women teach for a while because they're false teachers. Or maybe it's about new believers. There are women that are new believers. And don't let new believers be teaching with authority. That's not cool. Neither of those things works.

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It just means what it looks like it means. It's Paul's normal standard practice for churches in general.

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Not only the title elder, but the function of an elder in teaching with authority. That specific task, that's something I don't want women doing. Why isn't that oppressive? Isn't that mean? I think you've brought in some wrong philosophical views, and they're making it so. You can't listen to what scripture is saying on this topic if you feel that. Furthermore, one timothy two shows that this is based on creation. Based on creation. This is not based on the fall. This is not based on something else. Right? Look at the next. Verse 13, for Adam was formed first, then Eve. Okay, Adam first, then Eve. That's what pillar one was about. And Adam wasn't deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. I totally deny that all women are thereby more easily deceived. And I have a whole if you believe that, please go check out my case in video 1312, video twelve, where there's a timestamp to it. Are women more easily deceived than men? Check it out. I'm going to change your mind because I think that there's a lot of good arguments against that view. At any rate, um, this connects to Adam and Eve. This absolutely connects to Adam and Eve. It's a creational reality. That's pretty big deal. It's based on creation. Quiet here doesn't mean women can't make noises in church. It just contrasts teaching with authority. Like, you won't be in the teaching position. You'll be in the learning position, is the idea, during that time. Now, you can go on, uh, one Timothy three. It doesn't just say not teaching with authority. Teaching and authority and that sort of elder context. And I built a case for why. That's an elders context in video twelve. But also one Timothy three goes on to show that there's qualifications for elders. And guess what? Only men meet those qualifications. Only men. Right. For instance, one Timothy three. Two. I'll put it on your screen here. It says that husbands of one wives. Husbands of one wife is one of the requirements for overseers. Now, this rules out a polygamist, but it also would rule out a female. Now, some would say, well, then, uh, only Paul could. I'll just mention this in passing. Only, uh, Paul couldn't have been an elder because he wasn't married. He didn't have a wife anymore. Maybe she died. Who knows?

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No husband, uh, of one wife is a saying, a euphemism or whatever for a man who is faithful in marriage. Okay? Now, you could be single and you're faithful in marriage because you abstain from fornication. You could be married and you're faithful in marriage because you abstain from cheating on your spouse. You're basically a good husband, but it can only ever apply to a male. I've never seen a single example of husband of an heir, husband of one wife that. That refers to a female. This is something that I hear asserted all the time on social media as well as in egalitarian writings. I've never seen a single example of that term being used in Greek in any text to refer to a woman or a mixed gender group ever. It could easily have been written several other ways. Like, uh, an Overseer must be faithful to their vows, must be reliable as a spouse. Right? Like, there's other ways to say it. He could have said faithful in marriage, literally, just. But when you say the husband of one wife, it means a man who is faithful in marriage. It doesn't just mean faithful in marriage generically. I, um, don't know why this is hard for some to grasp. We'll just move on. You'll get it. Or you won't ignore the chapter. Break between one Timothy two and one Timothy three for a second and realize that this passage says right here, I don't permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man. And then the very next thing he says is, here's who can be an elder? And guess what? It's got to be a guy that is definitely present in one Timothy, chapter three, verse two. But there's more evidence we can give for it. Actually, I give a lot more evidence in my video. I will mention a few things, though today to help build that stuff a bit stronger because I know that a lot of people didn't understand this from my video on one Timothy three where I talked about the female counterparts to deacons. Here's how this works. I'm going to little sidebar here, okay? Because I want to clean up any messes and then move on. I can't wait to be done with this project and get on to teaching the book of hebrews. Um, yes, that's going to be awesome. Okay, here's how this works and I'm going to put it on your screen. Where is it? Right here. Okay. I know you can't read this text very well, but this is one Timothy three. And it has the qualifications in the first chapter, that's elders. And the qualifications in the second chapter there, that's deacons. The blue on your screen, that's the stuff that is only about men.

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The pink or red on your screen, that's the stuff that's about women.

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This is something that a lot of people push back on. I would just encourage you to follow this logic. I'll briefly mention it, then I'll move on because I don't want to get into a whole like half an hour discussion of this section. Here's step one in my little argument. Husbands of one wife is meant to mean men only, but egalitarians will say it means men or women. To my knowledge, it was never ever used that way. Here's step two in the argument.

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Note that the term husband of one wife is used not only of elders but also of deacons in verse twelve. So now I'm going to direct you the second chapter on your screen right there. So this is one Timothy, chapter three, verse twelve. Verse twelve says, let deacons each be the husband of one wife.

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That is used of deacons.

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Okay, just note that it's there. I would also affirm there it's referring to just men. Then step three, note that women are clearly spoken of as distinct from the men who are called deacons. In verse eleven.

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Just go up one verse. This is the pink or the red verse on your screen. Pull out your bible if you can't read it because it's too small, depending on what you're watching this video on, or if you're on YouTube. You could zoom in, right? Could you zoom in?

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Did you know that? Did I teach you something cool?

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Note this. Women are clearly spoken of as distinct from men. Paul talks about them in verse twelve and verse eleven, the men are husbands of one wife. Verse twelve, the women are distinct and only mentioned once in a verse in verse eleven. Okay, now, here's step four, putting all that together. See that? Just as Paul was only talking about men in verse twelve, deacons must be husbands of one wives. Husbands of one wife. He was only talking about men in verse two, elders must be the husband of one wife. If we know the pink part is about women, it confirms that the blue stuff is not, because that's where women pop up, right? Boom. Their women or their wives must likewise be these things. Then getting back to the males, who I'm going to call deacons in this passage, Paul calls them deacons. He then shows he's talking about males all the rest of the time. If verse eleven is about women, the entire rest of the chapter is about men.

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If the blue had been inclusive of both genders. I'll put this another way. If the blue stuff, qualifications for elders and deacons, uh, generally had been about men and women, verse eleven wouldn't exist.

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Think about it. Why would he go, oh, yes, and the women, if what you had said wasn't about men, why would you say, and then the women, it doesn't make any sense. So there's more info on this on video number four. Uh, but I'll just mention titus one six also affirms the elder must be the husband of one wife. That uses that phrase again. And there are several indications in scripture that every elder was male. See video number four. On a question of whether there were women, elders or not. I get into all the nitty gritty detail and all that stuff. In addition to that, to support pillar numerodos, as, uh, white people trying to speak Spanish say, pillar number two, elders positions and functions are for men only. We also have the fact that there were only male apostles. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, acts. See video five on that. Whether there were actually female apostles or not, I have a whole long discussion on that. We also see this present in biblical rules about New Testament prophecy. Here's how this works. Let me put them up on your screen.

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There it is. In that video, I talk about this. Women, uh, could prophesy, but they had to do so with head coverings to support male headship. That is that man's role in the marriage.

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That's interesting.

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What about this other video, women didn't participate in the judgment of prophecy. One corinthians 14, there were these limits on the role of women participating in ministry. They were participating, otherwise you wouldn't need limits. You just say, they don't do it. But there were these limits. To preserve this rule of elders, functions and titles are preserved for men.

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This does not pop out of the blue as a New Testament idea. There's consistency in scripture here. It comes from Adam and Eve. Um, also, there was like an all male Old Testament priesthood. I talk about that in one of the videos as well. Why were there only old Testament priests? Um, the high spiritual roles in the Old Testament and New Testament are reserved for women. The one exception is probably prophecy. I have a video where I talk about whether prophecy and how that relates to all that stuff. But the point here is, um, there's a lot of scriptures that further support and nuance this, but the main idea that. Where is it? I lost it. There we go. Elders positions and functions are for men only. That is really thoroughly and consistently taught in scripture. And it's not just based on one verse.

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This is pillar number two. I don't think this should be debated. And let's be clear. This wasn't debated throughout church history. This was not debated. This is a very, very new debate. And anytime a theology is brand new, it's a red flag if nothing else, right? It's something where you go, m. Why did we not think that before? That's, ah, something you have to at least ask and answer. Okay? You need to at least dig into that and figure it out. And if you don't have a good explanation, then you suspect. So that's pillar number two. Elders positions and functions are for men only. A lot of people stop there. Pillars one and two are the only pillars they've got. And they become abusive and they become oppressive, and they extend the rules about the differences between men and women way beyond what I think they're supposed to. And they become a little bit like the Pharisees who made a bunch of rules about the Sabbath that weren't supposed to be there, and they made life hard for other people. So what's pillar number three? Pillar number three is women's status as image bearers. And sons of God is inviolable. As a rule, you are not allowed to violate their status as image bearers of God. And as you heard me right, sons of God. Why would I say sons of God and not children of God? Well, first off, children have no rights, very little rights. Anyways. Sons, uh, of God is a very specific title that they are given in the New Testament. Women are also given, and we're going to get into that right here as we talk about pillar number three. So let's dig in. These are some things that I think egalitarians would all agree with. Let me put it this way. Pillar one, some egalitarians agree with, most don't. Pillar two, complementarians and patriarchalists all agree with pillar two. No, egalitarians agree with pillar two, pillar three, egalitarians would agree with it, and many patriarchalists would neglect it. Not that they would disagree. The worldly ones would deny it, but they would at least neglect it in many cases. So this is where I'm going to push back on at least some patriarchalists, many of you patriarchalists who use the title you may find we agree, except in the name you call your view. Right? But I'm going to say you'll agree with me that there's pushback on a lot of patriarchalists on this. So especially, um, say, islamic views. Islamic views do not have this intact in their perspectives. Or like the real red pill guys.

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Uh, I'm going to date this video a little bit by saying this, but the Andrew Tate perspective, at least as it is today, I don't know what his views will be in a week. Uh, but that guy, what little I've heard from him, I'll do a little video on something he said, uh, pretty soon here. What I heard from him is clearly unbiblical and clearly rejects pillar number three. Women's status as image bearers and sons of God is inviolable. These things are what keeps abuse from happening. This third pillar is what raises the status of women, keeps, uh, it from being low, and also stops abuses from taking place. And it becomes the guide on how we extend the application of eldership and marriage into not only the rest of marriage and the rest of church ministry, but also the rest of life in general. Let me give you some examples.

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Genesis 126 and 27.

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It says this before even giving you the details of Adam and Eve's creation, before chapter two shows you a difference in authority that's there, and chapter three affirms it as well. Before that, you get let us make man in our image. And that, by the way, is generic for male and female in this chapter. And let them have dominion, and over the fish of the sea. Wait. Dominion, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and every creeping thing that wait, they have men and women both have dominion. So God created man in his own image. And, yes, that's a generic for male and female in this passage. In the image of God, he created him. How do you know it's generic? Male and female, he created them. Clearly it's generic for both. You can't deny this. Women m are also in the image of God. Um, I got a lot more on that in my series. Uh, I'll try to stop saying that. Just know that that's true about every sentence that I say in today's video.

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I like the way that the CBMW puts it. That's the council for biblical manhood. Womanhood. I would agree with them on the following phrase. They say both Adam and Eve were created in God's image, equal before God as persons and distinct in their manhood and womanhood. This is the single most exalting thing that human nature has built into it. The single most exalting thing brings you far above animals and creation and trees and all that other stuff. You're made in the image of God. When God's like, hey, yeah, okay, look, you raise an animal and you kill it and eat it. Yeah, you could do that, but you kill a person, you die. Death penalty for you. Why? Because God created man in his own image, mankind in his own image, male and female.

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This is an exalting status thing. And it's a. Tread carefully how you treat humans, because when you violate them, you're violating someone made in the image of God. When you hurt them, when you harm them, when you come against them, when you mistreat them, when you abuse them, women, too. You're abusing someone made in God's very image. That's a huge, huge thing. We're God's highest created things, I believe. And this is shared between the sexes. This is one reason why I like the language of equal in nature, different in role. I think all this language starts to feel difficult when you push on it really hard. But I like it. It's helpful. Equal in nature. We're made in God's image, different in role. Male and female in marriage is different.

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Seems like a good way of putting it. Uh, we're not interchangeable. Man and woman can't be switched and changed. You can't have the man become the mother and the woman become the father. It's never going to work. It's not designed that way. You can't just say, yeah, uh, in our marriage, she's the head and I'm the one who supports and I yield to her leadership. That would be unbiblical. That would be against God's design. You've just made your own marriage however you feel like doing it, but you don't realize that you're the result of someone else's creation, and he has a plan for you. So we're not interchangeable, but we're equal in dignity and value.

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Both in the same passage I just read, both male and female are given dominion over the earth. We see this in Genesis 126. And in 28, he blesses them. He says, multiply, be fruitful, fill the earth in what? Subdue it and have dominion.

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So women have dominion, too? Yeah, that's pillar three. Women aren't powerless or without authority. They have a different authority than their husbands, but they are not without authority. They're to dominate the earth. That's a big deal. This is pillar three. Pillar three is what I think changes your understanding of how this stuff plays out in life. Um, so women have the same authority over the earth that men do. An example of how this could play out in life is in Saudi Arabia. Up until 2018, I believe women were not allowed to drive.

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I would say that telling women they can't drive while you have cars available for other people is limiting their dominion over the earth. Right. Like, woman's, not like, controlling her husband in some ungodly way by driving a car. That's weird. This is a dehumanizing treatment towards women. That kind of lack of freedom, lack of the same authority. That is a shared human authority that adults should all have. So that would be wrong. Um, there's more in pillar three to help you see how there's a balance that needs to be brought in that I think corrects patriarchal views in many cases, and even is going to be some correction for complementarians, even the softest complementarians. We'll talk about those in a second. But husbands are to self sacrificially act in love. This is important. This is a pillar. Okay. This is not just a random example. What I'm going to share with you now belongs as an essential part of any sort of complementarian or biblical view of men and women in their relationships. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. You're to love your wife like Jesus. But, uh, what's the example of that? Self sacrifice in my marriage. If one of us has to sacrifice, I should prefer me.

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There would be no abuse in marriage if people followed a biblical perspective, if they brought all three pillars in, not just one and two. All three. There would not be abuse in that marriage. He gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. Do you see the love and care and concern and that the things he's doing? This is important, husbands. The things he's doing are not to preserve his own power, but her purity and her health and her well being. That's what Jesus did for us. He gave up so much in order to preserve our health, m give us well being. And so a husband should self sacrificially love his wife, not just make sure she's under his thumb at all times. That would be an abusive relationship, not a biblical one. I can't stress this enough because, listen, no patriarchalist or complementarian view can pretend that they're a christian view unless they do. Ephesians five, verses 25. Well, just keep reading all the way through 33. You can't do this.

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You can't do this unless you love your wife like you love yourself. I've never seen an abusive relationship where a husband loves his wife as he loves himself. That doesn't exist.

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Um, if your view of men and women doesn't include a husband having a continual call, and I'm a husband, okay, this is not always easy to.

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But having a continual call to sacrifice himself for his wife on her behalf, then it isn't a biblical view. You can't call it biblical perspectives on men and women at all. Imagine, uh, a Jesus who never died for us. That would not be a christian Jesus, that would not be a real Jesus. So it wouldn't be a real christian view of male and female. If it doesn't involve a husband dying for his wife, metaphorically here, unless it's necessary, in which case, husbands, you die for her, you take the bullet. Easy, case solved. That's the right thing. There's going to, bullet's going to hit somebody. It should hit you, not her, period.

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It wouldn't be Christianity if we had a Jesus who never dies for us. And it's not a christian marriage in the truest sense if the husband isn't going to sacrifice for his wife. Now why is this super important to drill in? Not only to complementarians and patriarchalists, but because I've never seen an egalitarian who critiques a complimentarian view of marriage. I've never seen them actually critique the real thing. I've only seen them say, oh, it's abusive, it leads to abuse, it causes abuse and domestic violence. And I've never seen them critique an actual biblical, complementarian view of marriage. I've never seen it happen. And then they think they're critiquing complementarianism. What they'll say is something like, well, that just doesn't happen in real life. That just never happens. No, but that's not true. It does. There are godly marriages out there where they really do this stuff, and just to say it never happens is to wave away. What is an example of the very thing that you're trying to refute? All right, we'll move forward. Um, speaking, uh, of pillar three, let me put it back up. Pillar three, which I should have put in my notes more clearly. Wait. Oh, I'm getting way ahead. Where are we now?

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Pillar three, numero tres, said me.

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Um, before I go any further, I'm going to dig a little deeper on pillar three. I want to give you guys specific details. I want you to show how fleshed out this is in scripture, because these are things a lot of complimentarians and patriarchalists miss. And they're things that really stood out to me in my long study over the past couple of years. Number one, by the way, say, number one, because there's three areas where the Bible speaks of a woman having authority. And I want to mention all three of these, because there are those who think women just simply don't have authority. Andrew Tate, um, or guys like that, or the red pill crowd. Not every guy who says he's red pill. I don't know everybody's views. But there are those who think this, that, uh, are part of those crowds, and that's kind of what they're known for, at least from what I've heard.

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At any rate, three, um, areas where the Bible speaks of a woman having authority. Number one, a woman has authority over her children. Over her children. I think that's a big deal. I think that's actually a really big deal. So, Ephesians, chapter six, one and two, children, obey your parents.

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That would be father and mother. Right. Honor your father and mother. It's the first commandment with promise.

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Children, obey your parents. What does that mean? Well, you don't obey people who don't have authority over you. Obedience is because of an authority. A woman has authority. She has authority to make decisions over her own children's lives. Now, in the context of her relationship with her husband, that would mean they both have authority, but his role as head, it's like a 51% share or something like that. As far as, like, voting shares or something. Um, yet he's to do that. He's to extend that with self sacrificial, loving and caring concern for others.

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But she has an actual authority over the kids that's present. Surprise, surprise. And husbands who want to act like they're going to make every decision and treat their wife as though she's, uh, an authorityless servant in the marriage. That is not a biblical view. That is a sub christian view of marriage. So there's one is a husband's headship does not mean the wife makes no decisions regarding the kids.

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This seems like a no brainer to me, but I'm going to mention it because I think some people are going to be like, wow, I didn't really think about that. Number two, second area where the Bible speaks of a woman's authority. One Timothy 514. So I would have younger widows marry, bear children, and manage their households.

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That word manage, it comes from the same word as, like, desperate or basically the person in charge. Now, in English nowadays, despite is a negative term, like a. Despite a bad person. It didn't mean that in the Greek, right. But this is a person who's very much in charge. They're in authority in the house. Either the man or the woman can make decisions about the home, and a woman can and should make decisions like that all the time. Even called the one who's managing. And you think of managing as cleaning the house? Cleaning the house is not managing the house.

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This should be. Should go without saying.

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If I hired a housekeeper to come in and clean my house, she's not managing. Running my house. Right. That's different. So a woman has authority in the home. Now, the man, I think, based on what we've read in scripture, pillar one, does have the final call. He doesn't have the only call. That's the difference. So I've seen a lot of, um, usually egalitarians, uh, kind of come against, I might say ridicule, because it does happen that way many times, but come against the idea of a husband being the tiebreaker and having that sort of role in the marriage. So that you have two people who are both authorities, but the husband is a tiebreaker if they disagree, and after discussion, even argument, if it's a godly argument, you know what I mean? Not like a heated, fleshly one, but real disagreement where they share their different thoughts that the husband can be the tiebreaker. And there's those who ridicule that. Like, that doesn't really work. That doesn't happen in real life and stuff. And I think it does happen in real life, and that's just weird to deny that. But it also, more importantly, it seems biblical. It does seem to be biblical, that there are two intelligent, high level authorities in a marriage, husband and wife, that they can work together, but with a deference to the husband, when there are these differences of opinions that are significant. Now, there are times, as the leader of the home, whereas a husband, you say, hey, I'm not making every decision. I just hold that decision making role in that slightly more high fashion than my wife. But she's making decisions all the time. That's why she's an authority over the kids, and she's an authority. Not a nanny, an authority. She's an authority over the home. She's managing the home because she's not just following my instructions every step of the way like I'm the micromanager, but rather she is actually an authority. I think that's a healthy thing. I think that pillar number three is trying to elevate these different roles of women, these capacities and intellect and, uh, the high value of being made in God's image and all that good stuff. Um, so then there's the third area where the Bible speaks of a woman having authority. And the third one is perhaps a bit sensitive to some people. I don't think it's too adult, but it does have to with bedroom stuff. All right, so let's just be straight with you. So in one Corinthians chapter seven, it talks about a woman having authority over her husband's body.

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Interesting. And it's talking about her husband, not men in general, but her husband and its authority in that physical sense of the conjugal rights. That's how at least one translation puts it. Let me read it to you. One Corinthians seven three. The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise, the wife to her husband should be given, never taken. That. There's a word for that right. For the wife does not have authority over her own body. What? The husband does. What? So this is chauvinism. This is evil, right? No, but read on. Likewise, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. This is an area where you see that marriage is a partnership of two people with authority.

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I might sound egalitarian, except that one of them has, when it comes to decisions about the marriage itself or about life in general, that one of them has slightly more, um, that's male headship. Not an authorityless wife, but a wife who yields to her husband. But they're both very high authorities. So it goes on and explains this in more detail. Don't deprive one another, except perhaps by agreement. Meaning what? Like here's a specific area where, um, a husband is told, you're not just making this decision for your wife. Don't say, we're going to fast physically from each other while I seek the lord in prayer and stuff like that, or for some other reason, we're not going to be with each other. This is my decision because I'm the head of the marriage. You're the head. But guess what? On this issue, you're supposed to get agreement with your wife. Doesn't this help us see that headship in marriage is not supposed to function as unilateral, uh, decision making.

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It's a balance, but yet with a yielding, at least in certain circumstances, where there's that kind of disagreement. So they share and share both control and obligation. She has rights. He has rights. One corinthians seven. They're both, uh, obligated to the other person and they can only abstain except by agreement for a limited time. It's not, the husband alone has authority. So this has some, you call this egalitarian aspects to it, but there's a clear command in scripture for wives to submit to their husbands. So there's obviously not egalitarianism in play here. So it's qualified submission. Qualified submission of the wife to the husband. It's not just submission. Submission, submission unqualified, just submit. Woman, that's not the teaching of scripture. There's an error that I see with many patriarchalists and some complementarians. Uh, they think that the man must be showing authority in just about every interaction with his wife. It's not good to get this into your heart, husband. If you're living in marriage and you feel that you have to constantly get the upper hand of authority in every interaction, it will be very bad for your marriage. It will cause a lot of unnecessary stress, strain, insecurity, anger, and it could drive your wife away.

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Um, you will become the angry, lonely man. I've seen it happen. You have too, probably. Maybe you've experienced it. Realize that you don't want to fall into that mistake of acting like your wife has no authority just because you have authority. You're the head. Guess what? She's got a lot of power. She should so many act like the wife has no authority and makes no decisions that would be incorrect, that would deny pillar number three about her equal status in the image of God and her status as a son of God. We're going to talk about that now in a second. What does it mean that women are sons of God? I thought that was a very exciting thing, biblically speaking. But before I go there, I'll just mention briefly they both have authority, but the husband has a higher degree of authority, at least in general. But that doesn't mean that he's exhibiting his authority with minutiae control over all things, such as even the conjugal relations of a man and woman. Man and woman. He's told to get agreement on that, not to force his will and his way. There's probably a lot of areas like that husband where you're like, hey, just because I'm the head doesn't mean I'm going to force my will and way, um, I'm going to get agreement here, or we're just not going to move forward.

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That seems godly to me. There are many patriarchalists who think what I just described is weakness. Well, then how do you explain one corinthians, chapter seven, verse five, except perhaps by agreement?

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You need to wrestle with clear text of scripture and not follow your gut into an insecure degree of micromanagement.

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All right, women's status as sons of God.

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Uh, Galatians three, verses 26 through 28, talks about this.

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Check it out. For in Christ Jesus, you are all sons. That's a masculine term of God, through faith. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. That would be men and women, right? There is neither jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free. There is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise. The Bible here just clearly was like, hey, there's no male female. You're all sons. You all have the status of sons of God. Now, I have a whole video where I talk about this Galatians passage. It's called, like, the egalitarian silver bullet. The sun language is deliberate and powerful because it doesn't mean women are now male. Okay, that's a very modern idea. That's not anywhere present in the scripture. What it is saying is a son has a status in the inheritance that a daughter does not have. She's getting her inheritance, a lot of it, through her marriage, and then she's going to be sharing in what that other man gets under his headship. But in Christ, there's no male and female. What does that mean?

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Flash forward for a second to the return of Christ, to pass the judgment to the eternal kingdom. What are we as christians doing? We are ruling and reigning with massive, universal authority. Men and women.

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In Christ, she is an heir, not a daughter heir with a lesser authority or a lesser inheritance, but an heir, a, uh, full heir, like a son. A son of God in Christ. Doesn't mean they're. Women are male. Now, that's not at all what it's getting at. That's a super modern trans issue. That is very wrong. But this is, in fact, powerful.

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The son language is deliberate and powerful. Sons had a greater inheritance, a full inheritance, a greater authority. There's no male m or female in Christ. There's no marriage in heaven. Scripture says. Jesus says there's no marriage or giving of marriage in heaven. So wives have a role, at least here on earth now, but their nature as children of God in the fullest sense, sons that should be respected at all times, they're not lesser christians. They're not lower christians. Men don't have inherent spiritual authority over women.

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I think that's incorrect. Okay, I'm getting into some nitty gritty here that some would disagree with. I'll talk more about the whole. Men are the priests of their home later on. Um, but we need to respect the sonship status. Not that they're male now, but the sonship status of women in Christ. That's a huge, huge deal. That's a big deal. That's part of pillar number three. So here's an example of how this plays out. First, Peter. Three, seven.

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How does God feel when you mistreat women in Christ? Likewise, husbands, live with your wives with an understanding way, showing honor to the women as the weaker vessel, their vessel, which Paul talks about, vessels like your vessels, your tent, your flesh, your physical body that you will be putting off upon death, and you'll be getting a new glorified body. Um, they have a weaker vessel. I was looking at my wife's hands the other day. We were talking. I was, like, telling her, honey, your hands, to me, they look like a child's hands. Okay. Is my hands, uh, like, seven inches across? Like, from here to here? Right. As a guy, it's good to know your hand size. You can measure things without coming to measure. And for her hand is like a child's hand to mine. It's just so tiny. I just. Mike Winger, how do you pick stuff up with those little hands? She's got the weaker vessel, okay? But also it's weaker in another way. Not just physically weaker, but also women have a lower authority role in both ministry when it comes at least to eldership and that role, but also marriage.

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You should not think of this as a way to degrade women. Put them down. Think of them as less. You should have understanding because they have that weaker vessel. Why? Since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, and this comes with a warning. So they're fully inheritors. They're going to rule and reign in eternity. Okay, this is a temporary situation. You better treat them with respect so that your prayers may not be hindered. Husbands, if you don't treat your wives as full children of God, as full heirs of Christ, inherit that eternal kingdom, your hairs might be hindered, you stress out and they fall out because you have a bad marriage, but your prayers may also be hindered.

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This is a threat, okay? It's not in a mean, threatening way, but it is, in a sense, a threat. Husbands, yeah, you've got that headship role, but you better respect your wives. You disrespect them, you violate pillar three, your very prayers before God will be hindered. That is heavy stuff. Okay, so not only is abuse ruled out, simply being inconsiderate of your wife is also ruled out. You're not being understanding of her. You're not being considerate of her. Her vessel is weaker physically and perhaps in her authority role in relation to marriage, but this is no occasion for her to be treated poorly. Why? Because women are equal as heirs in Christ. So let me look at these pillars one more time before we move on to applying all this stuff in real life.

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Pillar one, male headship and female submission in marriage should not be debated. It's very clearly taught in scripture. Number two, elders positions, functions. Excuse me, elders. I don't know why I wrote that way. Elders positions and functions, it should be, say, and there are for men only. Like the title and the function, both are for men only. And number three, women's status as image bearers and sons of God is inviolable. If you have either pillar one, two, or three not in place, you have a sub biblical view of these things, and you're going to cause problems. Problems in the nature of marriage and leadership in church or problems in the way you treat women and the respect you have for women. And that includes women. There's plenty of women who don't respect other women because they don't have pillar three in place. So you might want to word these pillars differently, um, especially since I forgot to put. And in pillar number two. But I think that fundamentally, though, uh, there should be no serious debate about these things.

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There might be nitpicky debate, but I think fundamentally those pillars should be pretty intact with no serious debate. What we can debate on is application, because even though the Bible gives us these three pillars and they're very solid, they're not everything the Bible says about the topic. There's actually a whole lot more scripture says, and now we're going to race through a whole bunch of things, but we're going to do it in the form of asking questions. Um, here's the big question. Here's the big, big question that we're going to launch into now. How far out do we draw the application? We've got marriage and eldership as principles. Then we got that third pillar that's going to flavor how we apply it to all things. Now we've got those pillars. How far out do we apply this beyond marriage and eldership?

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Uh, women voting, women being bosses, or maybe there's less extreme, there's a patriarchal, some patriarchal positions would say, no women voting, no women bosses. Uh, some less extreme ones would say, well, no women college professors, no seminary teachers, specifically christian theology type stuff, no, um, politicians, because they're standing in a representation, role of governance over groups of men, and that's having authority. Women in general, some would say, must be submitting to men in general, not just in church, to these select elders who are men, but to men, period. Not just in headship to your own husband, but woman. You have like a submissive attitude towards men in general. And now it changes all of life, right? Because every interaction is flavored now. And is that biblical? That's a big statement. Then that's like the hard patriarchalist position. The strongest patriarchalist person would be like that. No voting, no bosses, no college professors, no seminary teachers, no politicians, women submitting to men in general. Then you have like swing over here, the softest complementarian, who would basically say, we don't draw that application out at all. It's just the elder title and marriage. It's a very sequestered kind of view, very isolated. Just get marriage in place, get elders in place, our men only, and then it doesn't go anywhere else. It doesn't affect any of society. Your question of can women do? It's always yes, as long as you've got marriage and eldership in place, no application in society. And, uh, we've already seen that this can be a bit limited, because it wasn't just the elder title that was forbidden. It was the function. Teaching and having authority in the church. Like an elder. Yes, but it was that function. So it seems like it's not just the title that's a little bit too bare. That's the softest complementarian. They're a little bit too soft. I've read a complimentarian who suggested a woman can teach every Sunday just like an elder does, as long as she doesn't get the title ordained elder. And obviously that's not biblical. That violates first Timothy 212. So I would say both extremes make mistakes. In general, the strong patriarchalists, the strongest ones. Their mistake is there's a bunch of examples of scripture violating their rules that they're overlooking. They have so many rules extending so far, you could apply that to the Bible and go, wait a minute. The Bible pretty much violates your rules, like a bunch. So they're missing examples from scripture that break their rules. The softest complementarians also make a mistake, and their mistake is, I think, seeing the trees but not the forest. They see marriage and eldership, but they don't realize there are things that are true about men and women in general. And by ignoring those, you almost act as the rest of society doesn't also get impacted by these truths about men and women. The, uh, question is, how much and how much are these actually rules? We're going to get into that stuff now. I think you're going to find this interesting. So how far out, uh, do we extend the boundary? It's kind of like what the Pharisees were dealing with, with the Sabbath. It's a legitimate question that they were asking. No work on the Sabbath. What counts as work? Obviously, I can't go to my normal job occupation on the Sabbath and do the normal day's worth of labor. But let's say I want to clean up around the house. Does that work? How much cleanup around the house can I do? Let's say I want to cook something. It's kind of work to start a fire. To starting a fire count as work. And what they did was they extended. What they thought of was these rules about the Sabbath were like fence built. This is the analogy. They gave a fence built around the mountain to keep the people safe. The people in the Old Testament, they were told not to approach the mountain or touch it lest they die. And so they took that as a metaphor for the laws being to preserve the people's lives. And so the Sabbath law is like, don't work on the Sabbath, huh? Let's build a fence around that mountain to keep people from working on the Sabbath, touching it, dying, that kind of thing. How far back should we build the fence? What counts as the mountain is this little hill part of the mountain. So they got it. Further and further out, the debate between the stronger patriarchalists, the softest complementarians, and everybody in between is largely about how far you extend the fence.

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Yeah, marriage. Yeah. Eldership. What about all the other stuff in between? Yeah, let's talk about that stuff today. Does scripture indicate that we have isolated rules for marriage and eldership, softest complementarian, or a principle about male and female that's meant to be extended beyond those rules? And if so, how far beyond? And I don't have the simplest answer in the world for you, but I'm going to break it down and then summarize it at the end. Very simply, we're going to walk through a whole bunch of stuff in scripture on how we put all this stuff together. There is a clue here in the way the Bible justifies the rule about men being elders. Here's a clue for us. So in scripture, there is a hint that the rules aren't totally isolated in principle, as the softest complementarians would have. And it's in the following logic. Um, creation, we understand from pillar number one, shows that a husband is the head of his wife. We also understand from pillar number two that the elder's role and function are limited in the church to men.

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But what we see, if we look at the reasoning for this, is it's because of creation, meaning that pillar number one flows into pillar number two. These aren't just isolated realities. One creates the other. So it would at least seem artificial to create a boundary that's completely tight around marriage and eldership, at least in potential. There's a potential for it to extend beyond, because certainly marriage has extended into the role of elders in the church. Could it perhaps extend into other things as well, at least in principle? It would seem possible. So we see this in one Timothy 212 through 14. I already went through this earlier in this video today, but we saw that Adam and Eve was the reason for why there are elder requirements of basically a guy being an elder. We also see in one corinthians 14. I'll show you this here, uh, on your screen, 33 through 35. As in all the churches of the saints, the women should keep silent in the churches. I've talked about this in my video. It's just in reference here to the judgment of prophecy. I believe um, for they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the law also says. If there's anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For shame. For a woman to speak in church. Speaking here, I believe, about the judgment of prophecy, a very particular kind of speaking that is established by the context. This passage, one corinthians eleven. That's after discussing headship and head coverings and prophecy. And it's all flowing from the concept of marriage. Marriage has this policy and therefore will extend it to functions in the church.

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If creation flows into marriage and marriage flows into the church, the leadership roles of the church, then in principle, it's not just two isolated rules. It's more like almost less like a pillar and more like a pyramid. Almost. But one and two go on top of each other.

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It's one idea impacting marriage and ministry. It's not just two isolated rules. So there are fundamental truths about the creation of man and woman that impact both marriage and ministry. It would seem artificial to have the softest complementarian view where you totally isolate those rules to marriage and ministry. I'm not saying it's not possible, but it would seem, like, arbitrary, like, why did you draw a line there? You need more. That's all I'm saying to start with is you seem to need more. You want to look at other scriptures and other statements in the Bible and examples of things to try to fill in the gaps and ask, how else does this rule about man and woman apply into greater society and other relationships? So does, uh, that mean the hard patriarchalists, uh, are right? The hardest or strongest patriarchalists are right? Women, um, perhaps shouldn't vote. Women, uh, shouldn't, say, be in a government position or judge Judy shouldn't have ever been a judge, right. That kind of thing. And I think that biblical examples are actually going to contradict that. The hardest patriarchal view, we will actually have tangible pushback against that kind of an extension of the fence into its largest diameter. Am I pushing my fence analogy too much? Excuse me. Possibly. So the Bible has rules, marriage, pillar one and two. Right. It has those rules, but it also has examples. And, um, there are negative examples in the Bible that are not to be repeated. Like much of Samson's life. Samson's life is a lot of negative examples, don't do what he did kind of thing. But there are also positive examples which can help us understand how to properly apply the rules. And let me give you an example of how Jesus used examples to help us qualify how rules from scripture are applied, how policies go into play, because that's what we're talking about here, how the male female policies of scripture play out in the rest of life. So here's an example about the Sabbath.

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Jesus and the Sabbath. Um, there was a lot of conflict in Jesus'ministry regarding the Sabbath in particular, and an example of this, uh, in them dealing with the Pharisees. How far do we extend the fence of no working on the Sabbath? Well, they would extend it to everything you could conceive of as work. Like, you can't light a fire on the Sabbath. Maybe you'd be freezing cold, shivering, which is a lot of work in a sense, but you couldn't light that fire on the Sabbath. Even today, they have special elevators in Israel where you don't hit the buttons. It just goes to every floor on the Sabbath. Because pushing the button is triggering an electronic response. It's kind of like lighting a fire. And so, uh, obviously, pushing an elevator button does not work. This is an artificial extension of the Sabbath laws beyond what's reasonable and ultimately becoming a burden for people in different situations. Here's an example how Jesus shows pushback against overly applying the rules of scripture. And I do think this is pretty important for today's discussion, and one of the reasons why I wouldn't call myself the patriarchalist position.

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So Jesus says, if on the Sabbath, a man receives circumcision so that laws of Moses may not be broken. Are you angry with me because on the Sabbath, I made a man's whole body? Well, see, Jesus healed a guy on the Sabbath. The Pharisees are like, you can't work on the Sabbath. Obviously, healing someone is a great work.

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So, Jesus, you shouldn't have done that healing on the Sabbath. We task you with the accusation of violating the commands of God.

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Jesus uses an example from scripture to show that they have artificially extended the rules of the Sabbath beyond their original intention. What's the example? On the Sabbath, a man received circumcision on the 8th day. A jewish baby was circumcised. That would happen even if it was on the Sabbath. It was on the 8th day period, according to the text of scripture. So here we had an Old Testament rule. Obviously, performing a circumcision is a work.

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It involves labor of some kind, and it was still required to be done, and yet it was done. Why? To show that this little baby is part of the covenant, that he's part of the abrahamic covenant. It was a wonderful thing, right? It's something that our culture we think is weird. It was a wonderful thing. It was a way of affirming God's promise to Abraham and their commitment to God. So it was like a wholeness thing. You're part of the covenant is what it's saying. So it's a good thing. Well, Jesus makes a whole man's body well and whole on the Sabbath. Certainly this example shows us that they were wrongly drawing out the application of do not work on the Sabbath. I think there are examples in the scripture that show that many harder patriarchalists are wrongly drawing out the application of male headship. We're going to be talking about a bunch of those today. There's more on this, actually. Uh, there's another example with David eating the show bread. In Matthew twelve, Jesus, uh, talks about how David and his people went and ate the show bread that was, uh, only for the priests to eat because David and his people were going to die, they were going to starve, they were suffering, they were on the run, they were famished and they needed it to survive. And so either the necessity of saving human life could violate the ceremonial law or the specific task because David was on such an important mission, being the one who was anointed to be king in the future. At any rate, there are justifications for breaking normally held rules.

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That's interesting. And Jesus uses that example in Matthew twelve. Also in Matthew twelve, the next couple of verses, verses five and six, he uses the example of the priests working on the Sabbath to show them, hey, the priests are still laboring on the Sabbath, but they're not breaking any laws to show them that they had wrongly extended Sabbath laws too far. I think many patriarchalists can wrongly extend, uh, male headship too far, thinking they're only preserving what's good, but actually unintentionally smashing something that's good. So here's an example related to marriage. And I'm not going to talk actually a lot about marriage in the rest of the video, but for a little section here, I'm going to talk about it a bit more. So we know that, uh, a woman is called to be submitting to her husband. And we also know that you've got the question of, well, what do you mean by submission? Is it micromanaged in? Is it what? And I think pillar three already has pushed back against the over application of that. But here's an example in scripture that shows reasonable limits on female submission in marriage. And it has to do with a woman named Abigail in one Samuel 25. And I would encourage you to pause the video and go read first Samuel 25. If you're not familiar with the passage, many of. Many of my audience already is. So I'm not going to go over all the details, but in one Samuel 25, David shows up at this guy's house. Nabal. David and his guys have been protecting Nabal and, um, his crops and others from violence. And now his people are in need. And David's like, hey, give us some food and stuff. We need some help. And Nabal's like, I don't care about you. Go away. And David gets mad. And he's like, you know what? I'm going to kill Nabal. This is a short version. Then we've got the hero. The only hero in this chapter. Abigail. Abigail is Nabal's wife.

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She's Nabal's wife, and she goes under her husband, subverts her husband's authority, goes against his wishes, and does a number of things, yet it's seen as positive in scripture. It's a positive example of a wife, in a sense, rebelling against her husband's authority. And I think it's there for a reason. Let me tell you what happens. So, uh, again, if you don't know it, go pause and read first. Samuel 25. Let me just give you the bullet points. We know she subverts her husband's wishes. We know that she's called discerning, and her husband is called not discerning. That's chapter one. Samuel 25, verse three. She's discerning, yet her husband is not discerning. For those who are like, well, women are always more easily deceived. Well, Nabal is the one who is not discerning here. Abigail was discerning. We also know that life is in danger. This is a very dangerous moment. Read verses five through 13. We also know that she goes behind his back, and she's right to do so. Verses 18 through 20. She openly tells others that her husband is worthless and prone to folly. Verse 25.

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Right m. She doesn't protect his reputation at all costs because there are some costs that are too high. She is seen as being right in this situation. See verses 317 and 32 through 35. Abigail is right to go against her husband's authority, to go behind his back, to give commands to his and her servants to do things opposite of what he wants them to do. Right. She totally subverts his authority.

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The principle here is that for her own safety or the safety of her household, a wife can righteously violate the principle of submission. I think that that is a reasonable and biblical example of when to violate the rule about yielding and submitting. Another example that's not about marriage is David fleeing Saul. Saul's the king, and David totally goes against him and flees and runs from him. And this, um, would be considered like a type of treason, gathering men and a military group and running off to run your own thing. But he was right to do so. And we don't take this as a negative rebellion, even though there's a general rule about submitting to authority and submitting to the king. Now, he doesn't take it too far and start attacking the king and trying to kill the king. But so David's an example of a godly rebellion, and it's very measured and it's minimal. He only rebels as much as he has to for safety and things like that. And I think that a wife can learn from that too. Um, these examples help us flesh out how we are to apply the rules. It's like when know we know the New Testament tells us to obey those in authority. But when Peter's confronted with a command from proper authorities to stop preaching the gospel, he says, uh, we have to obey God rather than man. Acts 529. That's because disobeying rightful authorities is good when that's what obedience to God requires.

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So this is how I think examples in scripture help us flesh out applying the rules. Life is complicated. Uh, we encounter all sorts of crazy situations, and we do need to have nuanced understandings of how to apply policies and rules in scripture. So coming up, we're going to be looking at a bunch of examples in scripture that help us to figure out how far do we apply the gender role distinctions in life and the impact of these rules in general. I'll just summarize, is going to be that they consistently push against the strongest patriarchalist views, but they fail to establish the softest complementarian views, making me personally, at least, you might consider me a soft complementarian. But actually, now that I'm at the end of this whole study, I'm not sure if I want to use that term. Maybe I should just say complementarian, right? Not patriarchal, not softest complementarian, but complementarian. Maybe leaning slightly in a softer direction. Um, I think it's fair to say that anyway. It'll all make sense as I keep going. But for the rest of the video, I'm going to focus not on marriage, uh, but on ministry and greater society. Looking at biblical examples on how the rules play out in those spheres. This is the area that I thought was the there was the least written on it, at least in my experience. I could read tons of debates on how to interpret scripture, but when it came to how to play these things out in life, it's just sparse. There's just not as much there. And so hopefully this is going to be a good resource for people. Now, let's talk about examples. Um, in the old testament, it's hard to miss that there are only male priests. It's kind of hard to miss that, uh, there are only male apostles. See video five for more on that. For those who would disagree with that point, uh, there are only male elders, and a husband is, of course, the head of his wife. And so many patriarchalists would say this means only men should be in societal roles of authority. Like, look, the rule seems to be like, just put kind of evenness, sort of flatten it all out, and you've got men priests, and you might even add male kings in there. Um, although there's no instruction in scripture that only men can be kings, yet these other categories seem like it's more of a policy in place than it is. You could say the kings thing is just sort of human culture spilling over into the historical record of the scripture, which does happen in many cases. It's just hard to. It's hard for me to really prove one way or the other on the king issue. Right. So let me just set that aside for a second. I'm not denying it, just not addressing it yet. We'll come back later. Patriarchalists will sometimes say, yeah, this is basically the male priests, apostles, elders, and husbands being the head of their wives. This is saying that men need to be in societal roles of authority across the board. If you have a judge, that should be a man, if you have, um, the president of a college that should be a man, ceos should be men.

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But what about examples in scripture?

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Most of the leaders in scripture are male, but not all of them. And there are some in scripture who are in positions of leadership that I think are hard to square with this patriarchal perspective of, uh, not a preference, a rule that men need to be in charge in all of these societal roles.

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Deborah is a chief example. And for those patriarchalists listening, you might be rolling your eyes right now. My impression is that most patriarchalists I've read have not taken Deborah as carefully as they should. They're not reading the text of scripture as carefully as they should. Let me give you some examples. Deborah had genuine political power over men at God's instigation.

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Look, uh, at my video, I think it was number three, where I talk about Deborah and what the function of a judge was. She was like a supreme court. But the short version is this. She had genuine political power, I mean, significant power over men, and it was at God's instigation.

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How far do we draw out the application, if that's the truth, if I'm accurately understanding this, that God raised up Deborah and put her in that position and approved of it, it would seem you can't put it out too far, because in the church and marriage spheres, you have a rule.

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But in the society sphere, at least with Deborah, it couldn't be too strict, because Deborah's position itself would be sinful. But it wasn't. It wasn't. Let me give you more on Deborah. Deborah was appointed by God. Read judges two, verses 16 and 18. Please. Read that. She was appointed by God.

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Uh, some think she was just in that role because Barrack wouldn't do it, that barrack was supposed to be the one who was the judge, but he wouldn't step up, and so Deborah was in that role. That is not what scripture teaches. That is not remotely what the passage is actually teaching. We've gone over this in detail, but let me say this. Barak was never asked to be the judge. He was asked to lead the army to go against Cicero. He was never asked to be the judge. Even this is important. Even after he stepped up and he went into that role, he wasn't later put into the judge position. Right. Even after Barak stepped up, Deborah remained judge for decades, even after Cicero had been killed.

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Barak was never supposed to be the judge. He was supposed to be a military leader. Barak, third reason, was shamed, not by Deborah being judge. He was shamed by Jl killing Cicero. Jail was lifted up. That wasn't shame for her. That was a glory for jail. But it was shame for him because he was someone God called, and yet the big sort of crowning achievement, everybody be talking about somebody else instead of him to show kind of disapproval of his doubt and his fear that he had. Nothing is said about him being shamed because Deborah was judge. It's only because Jl jail wouldn't need to be in the story if Deborah's existence as judge was already a shame on barrack. Do you see that we're misinterpreting it if we, um, make it about Deborah? There's nothing I see to indicate Deborah was only in the position because no man would do it, or as judgment on men, as I've seen some patriarchalists say, even if you think that's the case, then you would have to say that the examples of scripture mean women can lead when men aren't stepping up, even if there are tons of men available, as there were in Israel. Tons of men. And she lived for decades at God's instigation.

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That seems pretty significant. And it would seem that you can't have this blanket patriarchal rule that would rule out, say, deborah being or Judge Judy, even if you think she's a little bit obnoxious, you couldn't just say that by virtue of her being a woman, she shouldn't be in that position, because that just doesn't seem to be true in scripture. Uh, number four, she has nothing bad said about her or her position.

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Nowhere in scripture is Deborah's position criticized or what she's done. Her life was not criticized at all. This is actually pretty remarkable because it's super rare for the book of judges where it's like everybody seems like they blow it. Not Deborah. Deborah's like, uh, great. Deborah's awesome. In the book of Judges, Deborah was a success. She was a very rare person who. There's nothing critical said about Deborah at all in the book of judges.

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Uh, some people say that women ruling. Here's another pushback. I got to mention these things because you have to pick which things to include in this last video, even though I've covered so much already. But I'll say some people, they say that women ruling in government is a sign of God's judgment. And they cite Isaiah 312, your women shall be your rulers. Some say women ruling in government is a sign of God's judgment. But nothing about Deborah's behavior seems questionable or negative or God's judgment at all. In fact, read the book of judges again. What's the nature of the judges? They're deliverers. They're not God's judgment on the people. They're God delivering the people.

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They fall into sin. They get oppressed, and then he raises up a deliverer. That's what a judge is. They're not judgment on people. That breaks the themes and the teachings that we've got in the book of judges to say that she wasn't a punishment. She was part of God's grace and deliverance for Israel. Now, on Isaiah 312, I'm going to have a link down below. I'll put on Isaiah 312, and we'll take you to the exact timestamp where I address this claim in more detail. You guys can check that out. For those who want to push back some more. So what conclusions can we make from Deborah, from that example in scripture? Just like Jesus using the example of the priests, uh, circumcising on the Sabbath.

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Well, women can be in high roles of government and authority over men, even making major life changing judgments over men. That's what Deborah did. Why? Uh, perhaps government authority just isn't as big of a deal as a marriage.

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I'd agree with that. The governor of my state is not nearly as important as my relationship with my wife.

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He's, um, important. He's got value. He's important in my life, sadly, unfortunately. But it's nothing like my marriage, and it's nothing like the church leadership and the authority that they've got there. It's just nothing like that. Government authority just ain't that big of a deal compared to marriage and the local church. I think that's the lesson that we learned from that. Does that mean that women in government is ideal? Let me push back on the more egalitarian side. Uh, does that mean that women in government is an ideal? No, that's a feminist ideal. It's not biblical. It's not taught in scripture that we need, like, a society wide aspiration to break glass ceilings and put women in power everywhere.

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That is not the point of Deborah. Deborah doesn't teach that. You're bringing that with you, and then you're taking Deborah and using her for something that she would probably be offended by, to be honest. I'm just saying there's no blanket restriction. What we have here is a rule breaker. It doesn't make a new rule that idealizes the opposite of what you were thinking. It just makes it so you can't extend the fence and say all government leadership positions are off limit because the example in scripture seems to say that that's not. You have no clear teaching that says that's the case, and you have an example that's very positive, that seems to indicate it's not the case. That seems really important to me. Here's another example. This is, again, why I wouldn't call myself patriarchalist. Uh, women bosses. Women bosses. Uh, why are they significant? Um, they're not just entrepreneurs. They're bosses. That's a big deal. Proverbs 31 commends a woman who is an entrepreneur. She commands servants and she runs a business.

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She's clearly meant to be, like, an idealized woman, like man. She's, like, achieved it. Right. She's just a really amazing woman, and she commands servants. She's a boss that has male employees, is what's implied, and that this is a positive thing. So a man who's submitting to his woman as a boss, that's perfectly fine and good, and he should, just like ephesians, uh, six one says the following.

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Six one. That's not what I wanted. Bond servants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling. I mean, this would obviously apply into an employer employee relationship as well. Now, there were females who had authority over their bond servants in that culture at that time. And what he's saying here is that, hey, even if you're. This is how you'd have to apply it. Even if you're a male who has a female superior, you submit, you obey them.

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Now, how is this possible?

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If men are just supposed to have authority in all spheres, in all areas, how is this possible that men are then encouraged to submit to female leaders like bosses?

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How is Deborah possible? Because marriage and eldership are so much more important than jobs and bosses and masters and even government.

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These things are rules. Whereas when you extend the fence out, it can no longer be a rule. You might call it a preference, and we'll come to that a little bit later, but it wouldn't be a rule.

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It's also quite normal. This is an important point, I think, for bosses, and there's going to be debate on this. I know not everyone will agree with me. Hopefully, the three pillars we all agree on, and here's where we can all have a debate.

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Um, but it's quite normal for bosses to have both authority and to teach their employees. Bosses usually know more about their business than their employees do, and so they teach them no. Here's how you trim the vine in order to get better crops, or here's how you store the grapes in order to ferment wine properly or something.

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Because in the proverbs example, she buys a vineyard. So she probably is overseeing the work and teaching men in the course of her entrepreneurial stuff.

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Is her husband, uh, still having an authority role in relation to the jobs and stuff like that that they're doing? Yeah, they'd be sharing everything in that context. Um, and I'm not making that a rule, but I'm acknowledging that that's the case in proverbs 31. But this confirms something. If a boss can teach and have authority over a man, and that's affirmed in scripture, when servants obey your masters, then it confirms that one, Timothy two. It's additional confirmation because I've already talked about other stuff in the last video where we went over this one, Timothy 212. I do not allow a woman to teach or have authority is specifically in that church context, because in that same teaching, Paul talks about obeying earthly leaders and masters, and some of those would have been women, the masters, anyway.

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So, yeah, it's an issue when it's teaching in an elderlike fashion. Authority in an elderlike fashion, that's the issue. And that's going to give us a cue and a clue on how to extend that into other areas of life. Queens. Let's talk about queens.

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Since it appears there's zero issue, in my opinion, making a rule that women can't simply be in authority over men in other areas. Let's talk about queens. Uh, queens would have had command over men in various situations. Now, it would have been less than the kings, for sure. Definitely less than kings. Right? We know Jezebel. When she put out orders, she would use the name of her husband, Ahab, and she would sign stuff with his name, because there was obviously greater authority with the king than the queen. But that doesn't mean that the queen never commanded anybody or never had any authority over men. And this would push back against the strongest patriarchalist view, like the, you know, Saudi Arabia kind of perspective on things where you're, like, making this rule like, a woman's not really ever in charge of anything. Um, and that would be wrong. Uh, obviously, the queen is a very high position who has definitely a significant amount of authority, just not over her husband or more than her husband, that kind of thing. Paul, then, in Romans 13, one commends us all to submit to whoever is in authority, and queens would have been included in that. I think that, again, it doesn't seem to be an issue in scripture, uh, to have women with authority over men, at least in certain contexts. When it comes to marriage and ministry, that is where we have a rule. And in other areas, there doesn't seem to be that same kind of rule, solid, not bendable kind of policy in place.

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Is that the strongest point in the world that I just made about queens? No, you could caveat. Uh, it. I don't think you can ignore it. You got to do something with this. With queens. I do think it's legit, but I wouldn't rest my case on it. I'm just bringing all the examples out. So, should men rebel against and disregard women who are in positions of authority? In online discourse, if you see a woman who has a position of authority, do you have to comment, like, you need to go home and take care of your kids? Uh, you should be typing that into the comments on videos where you see a woman having any kind of authority. Do you walk in and you're like, hey, can I talk to the manager? And the manager comes up and it's the woman and you're like, oh, I'm bothered.

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No, you're being weird. That's not biblical.

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Uh, not only do we have biblically approved examples of women in positions of authority outside marriage, in the church, I mean, marriage, they have a position of authority. They just don't have the man's position of authority. We also have romans 13 one telling us to submit to those in authority. So that's important. Let's talk about women voting in patriarchalism. This is a debated topic. I don't think we have examples of anything like democratic voting in scripture one way or the other, right? There aren't really that sort of voting. We have a representative democracy in the US, and that's the context I'm familiar with. So I'll talk about that. So the idea of, like, I vote for a representative and then they represent me, and then, uh, it's not straight democracy, but it's democratic. We don't have something like that in scripture, to my knowledge. But I will apply a couple of things we've already talked about. If Deborah can rule as the judge, which, by the way, the judge, remember, is the highest authority in Israel, ongoing position of authority in Israel at the time. Not a king, mind you. They weren't supposed to have kings, but the judge was very powerful authority. We have her, then we have queens who use some degree of authority, a significant degree of authority, I would say, even though it's not the kingship. And three, we have women who can be bosses over men and jobs if those three things are in place. Principally, I see no biblical case for restricting women on voting. I, um, just want to put that out there. It seems like a silly question to ask to some people, but I think it's actually cool to try to apply the text of scripture to these types of questions.

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Um, so it may seem like a stretch to those who are opposed to women voting. If you're listening to me now and you're opposed, you're my brother, sister in Christ, I hear you. But I would ask you to wrestle with these truths if a woman can't vote, because that's a tiny, tiny bit of power, well, how on earth can Deborah be judged? Or a queen or an employer command or order their male employees? It doesn't really make sense to me. It seems as though you have no biblical argument, clear biblical argument against that except that you're extending the fence as far and wide as you possibly can. And I think that's the mistake the Pharisees made. I'm not calling you a pharisee. You're not a pharisee. I'm saying they made a mistake in one area that's similar to the mistake you're making in this area. So I'm not labeling you a heretic and pharisee and your works based salvation or something like that. M I'm just saying we can learn lessons. Don't draw out the application with your imagination. And then ignore these clear passages in scripture that show that women were queens and Deborah and then women bosses. And it seems fine with all those things. Here's a big point. Um, it's clear to me that the Bible is not trying to limit all women from having all authority over all men in all circumstances. It's not even trying to. In fact, it seems to refute that idea. So, yeah, women can have authority over men in many circumstances, but not in certain ones. Marriage, ministry.

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That's a big point.

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Marriage and eldership. I say ministry. I should be more careful. Um, eldership. Marriage and eldership. All right. What about working at home? There are those who say a woman should be working at home. Her job is to stay in the house, take, uh, care of the things at home. This is not even a conversation that would have taken place, for the most part, pre industrial revolution. Because the industrial revolution moved the workplace out of the home for a lot of people. And so it was nine to five, go to work, do your thing, come home. There were other people who did that, but a lot of people, they worked from home and the family business, which a lot of people were just entrepreneurs. It was a lot of family businesses. And everybody's working.

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Dad works and mom works, and four year old kid works and stuff. And everybody's working to different degrees, their capacities. But there are those today who think women should be working at home. Man goes away to his job, and woman stays home. And that's a rule because of Titus two five. So we'll briefly mention this, which I have talked about in detail. I'm just, again, overviewing it today.

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The command here is that women, uh, should train other women to be self controlled. So they're teaching them pure, uh, working at home, kind submissive to their own husbands. Okay. One of these is working at home.

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Working at home in a society where you don't have this industrial revolution context. This, like, go to the stock market and work for 8 hours, and then come home. Um, what does working at home mean? Working at home, I think, just means taking care of home responsibilities. It doesn't mean must stay home and not have a job outside the house. I don't think that's what it means. Rather, it means not neglecting your house responsibilities. So here's a balance, right? The feminist is going to be like, well, we can do what you want. You go out and get yours. And then the stronger, maybe patriarchalist is going to say, some of them, a few of them would say, this means a woman can't, uh, have a job outside the house at all. I think that there's a balance here in between, which is just to say this. Uh, yeah, you can have a job, but if your job pursuits are compromising your ability to get the job at home done, then it needs to be addressed.

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Uh, husbands, however, the same can be said about you.

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If you're working 70 hours a week and you're never home and you don't take care of your kids, and you barely know what's going on in their lives, that's not okay. Now, maybe there's some crazy life circumstance that doesn't make it possible for you to do other than that, but this is a situation that has to be remedied at the soonest opportunity. And I think for women who are gone all day and basically your kids never see you. And when they do see you, you're too tired to do anything that is not healthy for your household. Now, maybe you have no choice. Maybe your husband died and you were working two jobs just trying to make ends meet and keep food on the table. And maybe you don't see a way out of that for now. Okay. And may God be with you and help you through that circumstance. Right. Obviously, circumstances can force situations on you that are not ideal, but this is not something that you're to be taught is okay. Um, working at home means taking care of home responsibilities. But also, one corinthians seven doesn't say that women have to be like, say, homemakers who can't do full time ministry. For instance, one corinthians seven, verses 34 and 35 show that they can do full time ministry instead of marriage and homemaking.

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Woman doesn't have to get married, even. She could just be doing ministry all the time, and that's perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with that. I talked about this, uh, previously in other videos. But I'll just say this. It implies something, doesn't it? That homemaking takes a priority for the married person and is less of an issue for the single person. But homemaking is not the only thing you ever get to do. It's just a major issue that needs to be checkboxed. I'm doing that stuff I'm taking care of. Doesn't mean you have to bake your own sourdough bread. Right? It means you're making sure that your family and kids are taken care of. Women aren't only homemakers, is my point.

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So look at the proverbs. Well, sorry, before I say this, um, I'm struggling with all finding all the right words to provide the balance that's needed here. There are plenty of parents who are neglecting their kids because we live in this sort of fast paced society, and we have so many easy babysitters, and, I mean, like, tv and stuff. Right? And we outsource all of the discipleship of our kids to other sources, school or church.

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That's a mistake. But it's also a mistake to artificially limit entirely what people can do by saying, like, a woman has to just be a homemaker, can't have a job, that kind of thing.

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These seem like too strict rules. Rather, the biblical principle seems to just be, look, you have needs at home. Are you taking care of those needs, truly? And if you can say yes, then the other stuff you do is fine. That would be, I think, a more safe principle to live with. So, proverbs 31. Uh, she is an ideal woman, I mentioned before, and let's look at a couple of specific verses that talk about this with her.

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Is she a homemaker? Well, she's obviously a homemaker. She's providing food and m clothing for her kids and stuff. But she considers a field and buys it with the fruit of her hand. She plants a vineyard. Obviously, she's not just working at home. Right. She buys a land, and she sells good buys and sells good. She perceives that her merchandise is profitable, and her lamp does not go out at night. So she's a hard worker. She's getting a lot done. She's not just, uh, hanging out. She makes linen garments and sells them. She delivers sashes to the merchant. Okay, so she's got a lot going on. Doesn't mean she does it all single handedly. She's probably in charge of a bunch of employees or servants, however you want to couch that out. I think it would apply with employees as well. She's an entrepreneur. Uh, Lydia in the scripture is a well respected woman who works for a living. She's a seller of purple acts 1614, priscilla and Aquila both made tents for a living, not just him, but both of them, him and her. And they both did ministry as well. Several women followed Jesus from city to city and helped sponsor the ministry of Jesus financially. Let's look at their names. Luke, chapter eight, verses one through three.

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Soon afterward, he went on through the cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. And the twelve were with him. And also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities. Now, these are all women Mary called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Choosa, uh, Herod's household manager. I highlight her and then Susanna and many others, and they provide for Jesus. They're sponsoring his ministry financially.

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Joanna's married the wife of Choosa, Herod's household manager.

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Joanna's married, and she's traveling with Jesus M on ministry, like helping supply funds and stuff like that, and learning and being educated and discipled by this rabbi. This is something that I think a lot of patriarchalists would say. She couldn't do this, you can't do that.

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But at least in this circumstance, it seemed fine. So I wouldn't make such a hard rule about that. We don't need to assume she was neglecting kids or something like that. I don't know what the story was beyond that, but this is significant. Deborah. We can also read about Deborah. Deborah was a judge of Israel. She went and sat under the. And, you know, they bring cases to her, and she would decide them. So this was a significant amount of time. Maybe she was already past raising her kids and they were with. They had kids of their own or something at the time. We don't know. But she was judged not just a homemaker. Uh, the principle is this. Married women should make sure they don't neglect home responsibilities, I would say, but neither should men neglect home responsibilities. And in our culture today, a lot of that's happening. A lot of the neglect is happening. That's not good. If you must pick between your home and your career, it's an easy choice. You pick your home. Modern feminism has suggested that you don't have to pick. No matter how poorly neglected your kids are, you don't ever have to make a choice. You can do what you want. Go get yours. And that's unhealthy, and that harms families. In a non ideal situation, you may work a lot more than you want to. Understandable.

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Life is tough like that. But if you have to pick, you always pick home when you have to make those choices and you can. Career, uh, and other pursuits are not ruled out, but some societal stereotypes. It'd be good for society to have healthy stereotypes about a mom being around and taking care of things. And a dad who comes home and assists and takes care of things. And basically parental attention, uh, towards raising up and training their kids to be adults. In my own judgment, we've too easily set aside homemaking as offensive. And that's actually pretty crazy to think that a woman says, like, I'm a homemaker, and she's embarrassed.

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Embarrassed.

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That's our culture going crazy right there. Uh, in my judgment, we've way too easily set aside homemaking as insulting, as lesser as like, a life wasted without achievements.

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It's weird hearing myself say it out loud. It's like we really think that in our culture, but, uh, we do.

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But it doesn't mean that we need to have this hard and fast rule, like, go back home. Go back home to everybody. It's unrealistic to think that a woman who has grown children, grown children still has the same at home responsibilities that she used to. Or that when they're 18, she's got the same responsibilities when they're twelve as when they're eight, as when they're two life changes. Or a woman who doesn't have kids. Obviously she has different responsibilities at home. And we need to be flexible and not have these hard and fast rules that we dump on everybody. I think my opinion there, you can think about your opinion. That's what this is really about, is you figuring out what you think. So am I saying that there's no application to society in general outside? Don't be an elder and submit to your husband. Are these the only applications of those first two pillars? Uh, no. I'm saying that we don't have to take an all or nothing approach. I think the flavor I'm getting is that there aren't strict rules, hard and fast rules about society in general. There's hard and fast rules about marriage and eldership. And when you extend beyond that, the examples from scripture show that these aren't these hard and fast rules that just have to spill over where you project what you think is a principle from scripture into a bunch of areas where there's no clear teaching in scripture.

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No, I think the examples show us that's not the case in society in general. It seems there's less application to the male headship stuff than there is in marriage and church. Maybe societal roles outside of marriage just aren't that important. That's my thesis is that these other things, bosses and presidents and professors, it's just not as important as eldership and marriage. And that's why the rules are not that way. But scripture proves something that fundamentally contradicts recent modern gender values.

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The very modern idea that it's offensive to treat men and women as though they are best suited to different roles is totally wrong.

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This seems to be a fundamental flaw that our culture has swallowed. An example of how you could see this, and we sort of wake up a little is in sports. I saw a video recently of a transgender person. He's a male, uh, imitating a female, and he goes out on the basketball court, and he's playing basketball with women. And men absolutely dominate physical sports over women. 100%. Absolutely dominate. And, um, people think that that doesn't happen because they're detached from reality. Uh, but we've seen many, many examples of this in tennis. People thought Serena Williams, because she's remarkable. She could beat me any day of the week, but I'm not even a tennis player, so if you play tennis, you could beat me any day of the week, too, whoever you are. Um, but Serena Williams was this amazing, best female tennis player in the world, and there was this big controversy because someone said in an interview that she couldn't beat the top hundred male players in tennis, and people were very, very offended by that. Calling for the man, I forget his name. It was a sports guy that was well known, calling for him to publicly apologize for these statements. Now, Serena Williams, I don't think, was bothered at all. In an interview, she was like, yeah, we don't want to compete with the men. They would just destroy us. They're stronger than us, they're faster than us. They hit harder than us. Like, no, we don't want to. They finally put her up against, uh, one of the top male competitors, and he destroyed her, which nothing. This is nothing bad about her. It's just, like, reality hitting us in the face. Sports does this. It says, look, male and female are fundamentally different. Sports reveals this, right? We have equal value and all that other stuff, but we're fundamentally different in these ways. And so this basketball player pretending to be female in our crazy culture was put on a girl's team, and he injures, like, three players in the course of the game, so they have to shut down the game. And he's clearly.

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He should be probably physically restrained by an angry parent at that point. I'm trying to be careful with my words here, um, because he's a man brutalizing women, uh, in mma, mixed martial arts, there was a man playing as a woman, right? He's larping as a female. It says, I'm really a girl. And he goes and he fights the females, and he beats this woman and fractures her skull. Because you have these classes and these different groups to protect the women. So we see it in sports.

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It becomes more obvious to us somewhat in sports, but we don't realize that in society in general, the fundamental flaw of our culture is acting like men and women are interchangeable and the same. And we're definitely not. We're definitely not, and we're not supposed to be. So that's to say that our culture is wildly wrong about this view. But the strongest patriarchal view also seems wrong, because the hard and fast rules they have that they extend to all of society seem contradicted by specific examples in scripture that are positive. Examples like Deborah, or proverbs 31, the woman.

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Or statements about who to, uh, follow and obey your parents, or, um, more likely your employers, that sort of thing.

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So, in scripture, I think what we're getting is that there are stereotypes that are positive, that we want to propagate, we want to restore, we want to bring back some stereotypes. Like, for instance, men and women have different roles. That's a good thing. It's not oppression. It's good. We, uh, don't want to overly limit women, okay?

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Which is an offense to their nature and their salvific status and their integrity and other things. You don't want to overly bring limitations there and extend these things too far.

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But we also don't want to effectively reject women's unique roles by ignoring them, or even worse, treating them as offensive. Saying that the term housewife is insulting is just showing the confusion of our culture. And it's insulting to say that it's insulting. That's what should be considered insulting. I think here a woman without a career is seen as weak or an underachiever.

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I've heard people say, my mom sacrificed everything to raise me and my family, uh, my siblings, so that I could go out here and achieve this great career. And I thought, like, how sad that you look at your mom as though she did something lesser than you, and you're going to go, I'm going to make money and work with a bunch of people whose names I'll forget after I quit, um, submitting to a boss, and that this is somehow less than raising your children and being married and having this picture of Christ in the church.

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Career is not more than marriage and family. This is insane that we think this, but we do think this way. So it's a positive stereotype to think of a housewife as a beautiful, wonderful, ideal role.

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Positive stereotypes are helpful recognitions of men and women's roles. When they say things like, men are warriors. The seems to be a positive stereotype, in my opinion. Make your own judgment here. You can disagree with me on this and still see a lot of things you approve of in the rest of what I'm sharing. I hope you can filter things like that, but, um, I think it's a positive thing. Men as warriors, men, uh, as leaders. That's a positive stereotype. Doesn't mean the only leaders in society can be men, but it's a nice stereotype. It's positive. Men as protectors and those who take the bullet, um, and those who would never hit a woman. Um, that's a positive thing that we see. Women as mothers, women as nurturers, women as supporters, women as. I think this is positive. The weaker vessel.

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Seeing a woman as the weaker vessel would stop the MMA male from fracturing the skull of the woman and what she's going through. These are positive stereotypes that I think we should probably endorse as christians, but these should not become overly strict rules. This is, I think, the value of looking at these examples, and we'll look at more examples, too. We haven't even talked about all the church ministry questions. I'm going to get into worship leaders and things like that. So overly strict rules would be, in my opinion. I know I'm going to get a lot of flak for this, but, uh, I think that this is true, so I'm going to share it. The idea that a woman cannot ever be president would seem to be an overly strict rule, but that doesn't. Everyone's going to hate me after this. That doesn't mean it's some ideal, like celebrate the breaking of the glass ceiling. Like, as soon as we have a woman president. Like, that's a big thing for woman equality. No, it's not an ideal. There's nothing, like morally superior about a woman becoming president.

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I would think that you could say, um, hey, I think we have reason to prefer a male as president, given what we know about the roles and the functions and all that. But I would certainly vote for a woman if I thought that it was the best move to make at the time.

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But I'll very much push against the idea that we have to advocate for woman presidents, uh, for women in every position, equally as many ceos, female ceos as we have male ceos. That that's some kind of ideal. Why is that an ideal? We don't need that as an ideal. Let men and women have their different roles and different tendencies in society. That's a healthy thing. It's not a bad thing. There are, however, negative stereotypes. Women are intellectually weak. One might say that's a negative stereotype that I think is incorrect. Very incorrect. Like, even Abigail was an example of a woman who is more discerning than her husband. First, Samuel 25. Three, go check it out. Or women are generally more easily deceived than men. See video 13, where I talk about my whole case, why I really want to change people's minds on that. Men and women.

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I think that's an incorrect view. Or that women are like permanent children. That's like a super hard patriarchal view. I don't even know any christian I've heard say something like that. But there are some patriarchal people who say things like that. Or that women can't feel. Uh, excuse me. Men can't feel frailty or be sensitive. Dude, we're all weak. Like, when I'm weak, then I'm strong. Paul says, uh, you need to feel your frailty, men. You just need to keep moving forward and do the things you got to do anyways. You just can't quit because of it. But, yeah, uh, the idea that men can't feel frailty or be sensitive, you don't want to be weak and giving in under circumstances, um, under hardships, quitting easily, that kind of thing. But, yeah, you can experience all the other stuff. Or that men should be pursuing sexual conquest. This is, like, very negative stereotype. Uh, the man who walks in and all the girls are swooning for him. He can have any girl he wants. This is not a healthy thing at all. That's ungodly as some kind of ideal male men being about self advancement. This is interesting. So, in the industrial revolution, it seems men, um, started becoming more and more about self advancement. And so pursuing their careers and getting to the top and the sort of capitalism giving you the opportunity to rise up more, which has both positives and negatives, of course, but the idea that men were going to pursue their own advancement and their own career for their own glory seems like an unhealthy thing.

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Pursuing the benefit of society in general, pursuing the blessings and protection of your own family, that seems like a very healthy thing. But then when feminism popped up, they said, uh, let's take that thing that we identify as with men. Selfish, narcissistic self advancement and career pursuits. And now let's have women doing that so we can have equality. So it's taking something unhealthy and then just transferring it to the next gender.

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All right, what do I do if society is kicking against the fundamental differences of men and women, such as in our society, because we do not live in a neutral society? We. At least me, I live in California. I live in a very much an egalitarian society that kicks hard against biblical truth about male and female, that thinks it's offensive and hurtful, and they're very, um, unhappy with it. Right. It's very bad. I'd, um, say feminism is pretty, ah, messed up in that regard. Modern feminism is very, very fundamentally flawed. Uh, we've never been in a culture that works harder to deny and undo maleness and femaleness than the culture that we are in right now. LGBT and Q are all united by one common philosophy, that they're going to undo the maleness and femaleness that God has instilled within us. It's not true that we need more female ceos, presidents, movie producers, et cetera. And Deborah doesn't give you a case for that just because Deborah was in that position. I would say it means it's not a rule against it, but doesn't mean that it's the ideal to pursue for every woman, as though we just got to have all the women in all these positions at equal numbers. Why is that important? I don't want unjust discrimination against women, but nor do I want to idealize. Basically trying to push as much maleness as you can onto women, and that just seems unhealthy. Extreme rules about business and politics seem unbiblical. I don't want to go and extend the fence too far, right, make these hard and fast rules, but we do need a masculine and feminine revival and renewal in our culture. We just need it to not be the hardcore red pill, Andrew Tate stuff. So we don't need more female ceos and presidents and movie producers and all that, but we don't also need a hard and fast rule against them. I think that we can allow these things to be a little bit more organic, as long as we keep ideals in place in marriage and in ministry and eldership in particular, and then we can let these other things play out with a little bit more flexibility, as we see actually seeming to happen in scripture. So, for whatever my advice might be worth, uh, this is what I would suggest to a woman in today's culture who's thinking about her options of career and family and making decisions about her future. I would suggest just be careful that you're not making your decisions about your future as a result of devaluing marriage or motherhood. That devaluing is one of the primary issues that goes on with modern feminism. And so you don't want that to drive you and drive your decision making. You want to see the value and the goodness and the beauty in those things, the worth in those things. That's really important that we hold on to that. Okay. To wind up this sort of section of the video where I've been dealing with how we apply the rules towards genders in the Bible to things that those rules aren't specifically talking about, that go beyond marriage and ministry into greater society. I don't think that the scripture supports either the softest complementarian or the strongest patriarchalist. I think it sort of sandwiches us somewhere in the middle between them, where we affirm the fundamental realities behind the gender differences and those being good and healthy and wonderful and those even radiating into all of life. But we push against hard and fast rules that limit too much going on between, um, say, a woman doing this or a woman doing that or having this or that position. So, in principle, I would say this, and this is my view. I hope you're developing your own view, and whether you agree with me or not, that you're wrestling with these scriptures and these examples from the Bible and not quickly dismissing them, but really working on them and really thinking them through, because I sort of feel pushed into this perspective by what I think scripture is saying. So in principle, it's not immoral to prefer men for some tasks and women for others. This has to be true. This is against our culture for sure. But I think that in principle, it is not, I'm using my words carefully. Immoral to prefer men for some tasks and women for other tasks. I said prefer there, not require and exclude and all that, but prefer. So, in biblical marriage and in ministry and especially eldership roles, we see that this absolutely is true. There's definitely role differences that are good and not immoral in those things according to scripture. So taking that as our cue, we'd have to say, yeah, you can't make some blanket rule that it's simply oppressive to have any sort of preferences related to gender. So that's one side of the coin. That's something that our culture needs to hear. I believe, and christians need to hear this so that they can be biblical about these things.

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Therefore, in society at large, I would conclude that outside that church environment, it's okay to prefer, say, male firefighters. Is this, uh, a surprise to anyone? I would prefer a male firefighter, male warriors, for instance, that sort of thing. It would be okay to prefer men for at least certain things. That would be hard to argue against biblically, uh, speaking, but offensive to our culture, for sure, because our culture has devalued the beauty of a woman's specific role and calling and giftings, uh, unfortunately. But it would also be okay to prefer female childcare workers, and I would generally trust women more for taking care of kids and not overstepping inappropriate ways with children. That's generally something that I think is accurate and true. And what does it do? It sort of rises from their natural role in the home, extending that out into society in a way that creates, I think, a preference, but not a solid rule that one must obey at all times.

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Moreover, uh, we do not have a moral imperative. We do not have a moral imperative to make sure we have equal numbers of female ceos as we do male ceos. That is not a moral imperative. There's no need for this. This is not something we need to worry ourselves about. We don't need to try to force that scenario. And so I think, uh, those types of things are unnecessary. Doesn't mean you don't want to stop other sort of discriminatory practices that are problematic and are unbiblical in various ways. But you don't have to try to create a scenario where you artificially shove equal numbers of women into positions that traditionally men have been more prone to take and perhaps fit their giftings and their maleness a little bit more. But I would also not exclude. Right.

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We do have a moral imperative based upon all this, to reject the gender inclusivity stuff that we see in our culture nowadays. Um, it is okay to have a boy Scouts club that's only for boys. It is okay to have a, uh, girls club that's only for girls. And it is quite fine because we're not interchangeable men and women. And so that seems like a common sense thing that most cultures would have understood throughout time. And we're just sort of currently glitching on this topic. In other words, I'll put it this way, as I understand these things and you're putting them together in your own mind as well, and feel free to disagree with me, I hope, on the pillars, the three pillars, we fully agree. I hope, um, at least, or substantially agree, at least on these other things. I would understand. There's going to be more debate. And, um, I hope I don't lose your attention to all of the interpretive work that has gone ahead of this time, as I'm now talking about some very practical application stuff. At any rate, I would vote for a woman for president if I thought that she was the best person on the ticket, the best option. I would not celebrate it, however, like it was some sort of victory for women in general, like, uh, it was some sort of great big event for equality. I would not, and I don't think that we need to obsess ourselves with those types of things. Now, you may disagree with me here in this example I'm giving, and that's totally fair. I'm just trying to be transparent about how I'm putting all this stuff together again, asking you to work on it yourself as well. So I hope you can see that I'm trying to apply scripture consistently.

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And, uh, I think that that's the best answer I've got at the moment. So let me move over to the next section of the video, which is going to be what detailed guidelines do we have for women in ministry?

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What detailed guidelines do we have for women in ministry? That is the questions about things beyond just sort of like, can you be an elder? What else? What about a woman doing worship leader? A woman being in some other ministry position in the church that puts her in some degree of authority over a man, or teaching on occasion, or Bible colleges or seminaries, and you're teaching theology, writing theological books and sending them out. That kind of stuff. All that stuff we're going to talk about in this section of the video.

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But first I have to talk about church roles in more detail, in the sense of saying, uh, what is an elder?

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Because when I say only men can be elders, um, I have to define that term. And when you go from church to church, you realize they define these things way different. Some don't even use the word elder ever, or some use pastor and elder synonymously. Or some have pastors, then they also have elders. Some churches have elders who are sort of like the lead or have more seniority and more authority. Those kind of, they're pastors with more authority. Then you have other pastors who have less authority. They're not called elders. In some churches you've got a pastor, and this was, uh, the old church I was at. You have pastors over here who are doing the ministry. Then you have elders who are basically kind of like a legal body who are there to check certain boxes on documents you have to send to the government. To say, hey, the elders sign this. And they were kept as separate, uh, groups. And so while I was doing the function of an elder in the church, I was not considered an elder in the church. I was considered a pastor, not an elder, even though I was doing the elder thing. So it just gets really confusing. Uh, some churches use the word pastor to refer to what the Bible calls elders. That's great. I wish everybody did that. Others use it as a catch all. And sometimes you can't easily tell what it means. Let me give you an example. Here's a local church. I looked up on their website not far from where I live, and they have these pastors. These aren't even all their pastors, but these are some of the pastors. They've got eight different titles and positions for pastors that I found when looking at this website. And they have a, uh, pastor of assimilation, another one who's a pastor of worship and digital media, a pastor of leadership development and small groups, a pastor of worship and service production. A pastor of women. Is that a role a woman can take? A pastor of women? What do you mean when you say a pastor of women? You obviously don't mean what the Bible simply calls an elder. Who would have, uh. I, uh, don't think any elder in the New Testament would have had only a role towards women.

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So what do they mean by these things? Now, you might ask, and I don't know. I don't even know what these different jobs are. So if I say, hey, can a woman be a pastor? And I go, no, am I saying a woman can't do kids ministry or women's ministry? No, I would never say that. We got to define our terms here. If I was to ask what people are filling these roles at this local church? Well, I put in pink and blue or red and blue here, whatever color that is. I don't know. I'm a guy. One of our weaknesses, um, the pink ones are the ones that have women in those roles in that local church. I don't want to call it their name because I don't want a bunch of people, like, giving them a targeted attention for reasons that have nothing to do with what they're doing, but, uh, have everything to do with me just using them as an example. At any rate, if women are doing these jobs, pastor of worship and digital media, is that okay?

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Is that being a biblical elder?

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I don't know. I don't know what these jobs are. These jobs seem like they're bifurcated and sort of split down and sliced down into different categories that I don't know what to call that, but I know they're calling it pastor. I'm going to recommend. That's not a good name for this. Not the best name for this. Doesn't mean that their ministries are all invalid or something. But half of these are women. Uh, maybe the pastor of women is actually, she's got a great ministry for her gifts, and she's doing it in a way that would not violate any biblical statements. But it might be a confusing title. I, uh, would say number three looks a little confusing. Pastor of leadership development in small groups. Like, you have a woman who's pastor of leadership development. That would seem to imply that she's in this spiritual authority position over men in a way that at least raises questions based on what I've read and studied in scripture. So I would have to say this.

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I'm going to deal with these issues in a way that I define pastor, and you have to ask whether that definition fits someone who has the name pastor near you. Okay. So you have to use some wisdom on. You can't just say women can't be pastors, right? Because there are women who are pastors or chaplains or whatever else, but they're not actually doing anything that fits the stuff that the bible has told them not to do here. So you've got to use some wisdom on that. So what is a pastor? What's my definition of a pastor? Ephesians, uh, 411 mentions pastors and teachers. You guys know the passage of apostles, prophets, pastors, and teachers.

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That is the only time we see the noun pastor as a title like that used in scripture. It is a shepherding term. I think here in ephesians 411, it likely refers to elders, um, who were pastoring and teaching. That's my opinion about that. I won't get into the whole debate on that, whether it's one thing or two things, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I do think the pastor term, minimally, I could say the pastor term in ephesians 411 is referring to elders, specifically elders. And I'll build a bigger case for it right now that, uh, when the bible talks about elders, pastors basically should be using that same concept. So it's a shepherding term. Some think pastor just refers to caretakers, people who are taking care of the flock, in which case, you could use the term pastor to apply to women, men, just about anybody. They don't even have to have any kind of ordination. They don't have any special authority. It's just wow, look at you. You're visiting, uh, people in the church who can't leave their houses and you're bringing them food. You're pastoring because you're caring for the flock. So it's a very broad catch all term for some people. I don't think it is in scripture, though. I think, um, a more careful way of putting it is it is a caretaking leadership term by nature. Let me give you some examples. In these verses right here, you can look them up on your own, but we see, and it's on your screen there and it's in my notes. For anybody who wants to get my notes, they're down in the video description here. Click that and get them. Or if you're on my website, you just have to open the video page, not just watch the video on some other page. Open the actual video page, and then you'll see a link to the notes there as well.

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So these scriptures show that the concept of shepherding, right, not the noun pastor, because it's only used that one time in the New Testament, but the concept of shepherding is used frequently. And it is every time that I'm aware of. Every time used in the context of not only caretaking, like doing, say, giving food to people and stuff like that, but leadership and authority. So caretaking leadership, a leader who takes care of people, but someone in authority who takes care of others. So it has, uh, an authority connotation connected to it, like the way elder does. The metaphorical concept of shepherding is used of Jesus in these verses. On your screen right here, it's used of Jesus. One Peter 225, Hebrews 1320, John 1011. It's used specifically of elders. And we see that right here. Um, one Peter five acts 20.

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It's also used of Peter as an apostle. He's told to take care of the sheep. So Jesus elders specifically in multiple verses. And then Peter, um, as an apostle, it's used of people who have minimally the elder role or higher.

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So I think that this is a case that the word pastor, the concept of pastor in the Bible, that concept of pastoring is an authority position, not just a caretaking role. So it shouldn't be used as a catch all for people who just do ministry and they help people in different ways, like you're pastoring them. In my opinion here, I'm not going start fights over it, but at least you'll understand how I'm going to use the word in this video. And if you use it differently, then you're going to need to apply it differently, you're going to need to acknowledge that and not take what I say about pastors and apply it to people who have less than an eldership type role. So that's the title I use. Pastor as an official title is the same. It's synonymous with the word elder. I think in scripture. In scripture you have overseer, you have elder, you have shepherding, and they're all used of the same office. That person who is that elder role, who is basically what you would, most of most the world outside the church would think of when they say pastor, they'd think of someone who's doing the elder thing. They wouldn't think of a lesser position who's not really a lead pastor, but they're just going to think the same thing. So what is wrong? Let me give some specific pushbacks to why I will not use the word pastor as a catch all phrase for people doing, saying, say pastor of women. I think that that would be a misnomer because if you have a ministry just to women, you're not in an elder role. Because that's the nature of the elder role is. It's more than that. So why, uh, would I not use it as a catch all? So biblically, shepherding, number one, seems to always carry authority. And every time I see it used, it always carries authority. That concept of shepherding. When it comes to official, regular, ongoing positions in the New Testament, there are only two, elder and deacon.

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Elder and deacon. And if you're going to take one of those two, if you want to be biblical, you're going to have these only two ongoing, sort of official positions in your church like that. Really biblical. Maybe you say it's minimalist, but as far as someone who is going to take a position that they say hearkens back to scripture, that's going to be one of those. So the elder is someone with authority. The deacon is somebody with either no authority or with far less authority. They certainly don't have an elder like role of authority. You can look at first Timothy, Titus, acts, et cetera, and you'll see that there are these two things. So functionally. Functionally, in churches, pastor often overlaps or replaces the role of elder. Here's another reason why I think we should use pastor for the word elder. Like we should just use that for our word elder or just go back to elder and don't use pastor at all. Um, so functionally pastor in local churches, it just ends up stepping into the elder role naturally, whether people intended it to or not. That's just what happens. So then it tends to muddy any distinctions between who can be an elder versus who is a pastor, but not officially an elder. And so I think that it causes confusion. And even in churches who use both titles, um, they tend to blur functions so that pastors end up doing stuff that's clearly an elder function, even if lip service says they're not really elders, because the people in the congregation end up responding to them all the same. Because when you call the guy on stage a pastor, you call this other person pastor and that person elder, it just becomes unclear. Um, so to be clear, perhaps someone is a female pastor in name who serves as a children's music director and doesn't really do any of the elder stuff. That is fine. I'm saying the title seems to be unhelpful in its overall impact on the clarity of role distinctions in the Bible and in the church. And in a lot of churches, it becomes a real slippery slope.

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Uh, what started as we're just calling her a pastor because she's doing caretaking over, like, the next generation ends up being, why can't we have a woman? If a woman can be a pastor, why can't she just do all the pastor things? And it just ends up being a slippery slope, a genuine slippery slope that slides into other things. And you will see these changes over time. I think a lot of churches right now who are like, well, we can have a woman and she's a pastor, and she can kind of like, she sort of teaches, but not in that senior pastor way, but like, in a lesser fashion, and then give them a generation, give them ten years or 20 years, and they're just going to be egalitarian. Many of them. Not all of them, but many of them. So lack of clarity leads to lack of clear lines, which seems like that's pretty obvious. All right, so what options would I suggest are good, uh, for churches when it comes to titles? My opinion here, it's just my two cent. You need to think about it yourself. I'm not giving commands to the churches here. Um, I would suggest get back to using elder and deacon. That's option one. The nice thing here is by using elder instead of pastor, by using that commonly and really getting that into the dna of your church, it makes it so that when people open the Bible, they immediately translate what they're reading into their local fellowship. Because when they open the Bible, they don't ever see pastors this, pastors that, they see elders this, and then they go, oh, this translates into what I see, in my church. So because that would fit scripture, it would make the Bible more readable and easy to understand. Uh, in that one area, I think that would be a nice thing. Plus, there are just two specific offices the scripture gives us, elder and deacon. It'd be nice if we just stuck to that, because that much more closeness to what scripture is giving us would be that much more likelihood that we're going to be honoring God in various ways in our churches.

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Optionally, I would say use the word pastor as a synonym for elder, but I would say please don't use it as a catch all. Deacon is a catch all term. Deacon is. I'd like to talk about that for a little bit here in a minute. But deacon is a catch all term that I think fits those types of various ministry roles where you go, hey, we want you to be sort of an official representative, but you're not like a pastor elder. Call him a deacon. Um, and I'm okay with saying deaconess as well, or just calling women deacons either. Whichever one, I don't really care personally. Whichever one, you all can argue about that. So I don't expect everyone to follow my advice here. My opinion, yeah, using pastor as a catch all for various people that aren't in elder roles as well seems, uh, to cause confusion and be inconsistent with the concept of shepherding that I see in scripture. So, um, I think it's going to cause some confusion about the Bible. But for the sake of this video, even if you don't want to follow me on that, just know to me, elder and pastor mean the same exact thing. That's what you got to know to make everything I say next make sense. What marks an elder from a non elder is simply that thing one Timothy 212 talks about. It's teaching and having authority. It's both of those elements in that official position in the church, congregationally. Um, that's why the elder first Timothy three two has to be able to teach. That's why one Timothy 517 says the elders rule. Use that word, rule. They have authority. So they teach and have authority. Those are the two things that they have that deacons don't have, at least as an official function. All right, let's talk about deacons briefly. What is a deacon? Um, so I have a bit of a nuanced view here.

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Deacon is a catch all, but because it is a catch all, it doesn't entail a specific degree of authority nor teaching.

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That means that a deacon doesn't mean if you're a deacon, you have zero authority. Or if you deacon, you have this much authority. Rather, deacon is meant to be like, there's a whole variety of people that can be called deacons. You're not an elder, but you're doing something official. Uh, maybe we'll call you a deacon. That's kind of how I see it. Deacon. The word means servant, but I think it means, in a sense, official, like an official person who's in that role in that job. So some deacons may have more authority than others, but none of them would have as much authority as an elder. It doesn't include the concept of teaching with an authority. If someone's doing that on a regular basis as a deacon, they should probably be moved into an elder role at some point.

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So it's more of an authorized position of service in the church. Deacon then is a range of roles. For example, like running audio and video.

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You might might. I'm not saying you have to make a deacon out of everybody who does everything in your church, but you could say that someone's a deacon who runs audio video. If they help with the finance and business side of the church and dealing with tax paperwork and stuff like that, you could optionally make that person a deacon. Something that would be maybe even more inclined towards deacon roles would be something like running the food ministry. Uh, I had a pastor or church who, um, not my pastor. I was one of the pastors. I wasn't the lead pastor. Right. So previously, now I'm not employed at any church. Um, I go to church, but I'm not on staff anywhere. And, um, my main ministry is online stuff. So this person was over the food ministry and they didn't really do a whole lot beyond that. Now let's imagine a person did nothing beyond that. They're over the food ministry. They're overseeing the distribution of the food. They're coordinating with, say, ralph's to go pick up stuff, because when people give food, you got to pick it up right away, otherwise they're going to stop calling you. So you go pick up the food and storing it here and coordinating trucks and borrowing semis from these people and all this kind of crazy stuff. That person is sort of doing what could be called a deacon role unless they're also doing some other things that make that sort of more of an elder type position, I think.

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Um, so overseeing church picnics, coordinating the helps ministry, and organizing that sort of thing that's going on. I don't see that as an elder role in particular. Now, an elder may also do that because we wear many hats, but that by itself, an elder does not make, in my opinion, so not elders by nature. That would be like, uh, the deacon role. Now, you can say, hey, the person running audio video is very different than the person who's, like, overseeing our helps ministry. So deacons can have a lot of variety in how much sort of authority they might have, but they're not elders. That's what I'm suggesting. So here's some clarity that I'll offer, because I've had some pushback on the deacon thing. Again, I think Deacon is a broad term, and I have said in my previous, in my series, and you can go through it for yourself if you want to look at the details, but that women can be deacons. Okay. There's some specific reasons I've given for this, and I've had several people say, mike, you just didn't convince me on that. And that's fine. That's up to you, what you believe about these things. But I would just remind us here at the end, the conclusion, some of the reasons for that number. Uh, one, Phoebe seems to be called a deacon in that sense in romans 16 one. And, uh, probably the number one reason to think that is, uh, he says, I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a servant of the church at Kentria. Now, this is the word deacon. It's the exact same word for deacon that we have for the men who are deacons, where, you know, a deacon must be this or that.

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But the reason why this looks like Phoebe, uh, is an official deacon, and she's not just someone who serves at Kentria, at the church there, but rather she's an official one because it says a servant of the church at Kentria. It's the way it's introduced, like it's a title related to that fellowship. She seems to have, like, a deaconess type role in that fellowship, and it's recognized, which, because deacon is a catch all, doesn't seem to be a problem for me as far as, like, worrying about how much, uh, is that making her a pastor? Is that putting her in that position of authority? I don't think we have reason to think that. So deacon doesn't entail that sort of specific degree of authority. So Phoebe is one of the reasons. There's another one, which is one Timothy 311. One, uh, Timothy 311 shows, and please hear me carefully.

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I do not think one Timothy three eight through 13 is about females being deacons. Rather, it's all except for verse eleven about men. Verse eleven, however, seems to indicate that women had some sort of counterpart role related to serving doing deacon type ministries.

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So it shows that there are female counterparts to deacons who do a deaconess type ministry. The reasons for this is, and I'm going to briefly run through these just to remind people because I feel like maybe I didn't explain it well enough in the original video or maybe it was missed. For whatever reason, there are no qualifications for elders wives. In the earlier passage, in one Timothy, three elders roles are given nothing about their wives that's important. That's because there is no female counterpart doing elder type roles. There's only men can be in that role, but there are qualifications for deacons female counterparts. Right? That word wives, I think that would probably be not the right translation in my opinion. Um, it probably refers to just women. It's the same word. Gune, I go over this in the previous videos where I talk about these things. So there's no qualifications for elders wives, but there are qualifications for deacons female counterparts, whether we think they're their wives or not. Why would that be? Because they're doing deacon type stuff. That's why they have to be dignified, not slanderous, sober minded, faithful in all things, right. Uh, it's not like you can't serve God if your spouse isn't godly. It's that these women are actually doing deacon type things. Why is that? Because deacons, this catch all tons of ministry opportunities are know. In the early church, we had women who were baptizing other women before things shifted and infant baptism started becoming more and more of a thing because that wasn't originally the thing in the New Testament. Um, before that, we had women who were baptizing other women because they thought that that was more appropriate. You had women who were discipling other women. So you've got a lot of female deacon like needs, female ministry needs. And there's a catch all that you can use. Deacon Phoebe seems to be a deacon. There seems to be in one Timothy 311, something like a female counterpart doing deacon type stuff. So I'm okay with the title going there as well. The early church continually also acknowledged women deacons. This was something we see. Uh, they never, however, acknowledged female elders. But female deacons is something that was there. This even shows they had specific ministries, like two women usually.

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In other words, just saying that. Here's the nuance.

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Saying that a woman can be a deacon isn't saying that a woman should do everything that a Male deacon can do.

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I'm not going to draw the lines on what women deacons can do versus men deacons can do. I'm just going to recognize it's okay to say we have needs. Let's have a woman doing that. We have needs. I think maybe a man should have this role and it would be preferred, but I wouldn't personally make super hard and fast rules about it. But to simply act like there's no preferences at all would seem to be, uh, inconsistent with what I see in the rest of scripture, in my opinion.

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So there's the new one. There are tasks a male deacon is probably good for others. A female deacon is probably good for. Um, and I'm sure there's some overlap they're both great for. Again, this is a catch all. The title can and will mean different things for different people, but the title elder is less diverse. It's not a catch all. It's like an authoritative teaching position, among other things, ruling, making decisions about things like that for the congregation. So female deacons could have different role than male deacons is what I'm saying. Uh, since deacon is a catch all, it makes sense that saying someone can be a deacon is not the same as saying someone can do anything that any other deacon can do. That's the nature of it being a catch all.

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So we also know that women were in ministry. Paul talks about this in scripture. He has his co workers. He mentions a bunch of women that are doing m ministry who are like doing a lot of ministry. They're his co workers. In ministry. It's pretty significant. We have women who are missionaries, things like that. Deaconess seems appropriate with all those considerations.

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I present that information to you for you to, uh, consider here.

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But if you reject women deacons, I would have one suggestion for you. Let's say that, I don't want to say that women are deacons. I have one suggestion for you. I think this is important. I think you will probably agree with this. A church that doesn't have female deacons should reserve using the title deacon for only leadership positions you believe women can't have.

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That is, you ask one question, is this thing that I'm about to call this guy deacon because he's doing this? Is that a thing I would say a woman can do? Then I won't call him a deacon. I think that's fair. I think that that keeps us from excluding women out of ministry roles that they're perfectly suited for. If you use the title to describe all kinds of men serving in all kinds of ministry, you can unnecessarily limit women's service because in the culture of your church, it'll be like, that's a thing a deacon does, and now they're going to have a woman do it, and there's going to be resistance. And probably more realistically, women just simply will not volunteer for, push um into, or recommend themselves for those types of jobs, because in their minds, it will look like that's only for men, because only men can be deacons, and a deacon is doing that. So I think that that would be good. Don't use the title unless it's for something that only a man can do, in your opinion. So this leads to simple principles that we're going to use. All this stuff. Okay, I have elders and deacons. I've hashed that out. Let's m move forward. This leads us to simple principles we're going to use to answer all the questions about women's involvement in all different church ministries.

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One, women are to be greatly involved in ministry. As a rule, women can even choose ministry over marriage. One corinthians seven, women can be greatly involved in ministry, like full time, completely devoted to ministry. This rules out the idea of leaving ministry to men, which is what pragmatically can happen in churches. I think that that's a mistake. We're limiting gifts. We're limiting the function of those gifts in a way that is not clearly in scripture and in a way that seems to go against what we see in scripture. Uh, number two, principle two, there is a limit on anything that starts to become the doing that elder thing.

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Um, doing the elder thing is the limit, both the title and the function of an elder, the unique function. Not everything an elder does, but the stuff that only an elder does, that unique stuff that is for males, for men, by God's design, by God's command, and in a way that is good, even if you don't feel like it's good, because you've been influenced, perhaps, by culture, and you may have some blind spots when it comes to how you evaluate gender issues. Um, doesn't make you a bad guy. Makes you probably pretty normal nowadays. But we got to get back to scripture. So let's talk about some specific examples. We'll apply this question of women in ministry to specific examples. Uh, here's some easy cases. I'll take easy cases. Then I'll take a bunch of hard cases. Easy cases, at least in my opinion. Easy. Can women be ushers?

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What do you think?

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It does involve directing men.

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Um, sit over there. Don't sit over there. Come over here. Wait just a moment. They're praying right now.

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It involves directing men, it involves answering questions, which you could say involves teaching, because new people come to the church and they go to the usher and they're like, hey, I was wondering, uh, how, uh, do I get involved in small groups? And the woman's like, well, let me educate you on how to get involved in small groups. So there's a level of authority. An usher actually has some level of authority that's real. They also have a representation role. They're representing the church in some ways. They also have a teaching position. In a position, really, but they have moments of teaching. So they're teaching an authority that go on. Um, but I would say this is an easy case because this is nothing like the kind of teaching that an elder does. An elder does this authoritative teaching congregationally, proclaiming the truths of the gospel, proclaiming and representing Christianity, uh, to the body. And this is dramatically different than what we see with ushers. And we've seen already. There's women bosses, there are women king. There's Deborah the judge. There's these different people in these roles where they have authority and they're teaching. So an usher is an easy case. Okay. A woman is not in some sort of position of eldership because she's an usher. I don't think there's any concern in any way for this easy case. What about serving in tech and media ministry? Do I have to get into that? That's easy. Yeah, of course. There's nothing wrong with that.

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There's, uh, absolutely zero wrong with that.

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If anybody who says a woman can't run the sound because then she's like, controlling. She has a controlling influence on the congregation or something like that. What ministry can a woman do at that point? I don't know. It just seems weird. Uh, what about a children's ministry teacher?

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Children's ministry. Teaching children's ministry. So you're in a teaching role. There's some authority. Well, it's not over men. First Timothy says, uh, over men.

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It's implied then that teaching women children is something that is appropriate and good. That's actually what's implied by that? I think so, yeah. Great. Easy. Women's ministry teacher. Wonderful. What about doing food ministry?

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Yeah, there's not a problem here. This is nothing like the role of elder. It's just nothing like it. Um, what about unofficial teaching moments? Uh, so, I mean, you're not like on stage somewhere. You're just educating men. What about teaching men? You're educating them on theology. But it's in this sort of unofficial sense. And here we have the example of Priscilla teaching apollos. We talked a lot about this, um, earlier in the series. Most of you are already familiar with it, so I'll just say in acts 18, we read about them at verse 26. It clearly says that Priscilla also had a teaching experience where she taught apollos better theology. She corrected his wrong theology or incomplete theology, I might say. And he received it humbly. He received it and he learned and he grew and he became a better leader for people in Christianity.

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He's being trained in a sense, and not an official. It's unofficial, but he's being trained in theology. So there are men watching this right now who think, I don't really want a woman correcting me. Maybe I let my wife tell me something, but I don't want a woman correcting just. It's just your pride, dude. Get over yourself. This is so weird. You need to receive humble correction. Abigail brought correction even to David, and he thanked her for it. Right. Some just random woman. You've got other examples in scripture of women bringing correction to men, women bringing know at a moment when there's tension and things like that. It's just weird, man.

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We laud humility as a virtue, and then someone goes, who are you to correct me? I'm a man. This makes no sense. So this is an easy one. Unofficial teaching. Moments like, a woman can correct a m man's theology. She hears him say something that's wrong or post something that's wrong online, and she types. Actually, that's not what the Trinity is. Or actually, that's not what Jesus said right there. If you read the rest of the context, it says this. Or did you understand that this doctrine or this thing, nothing wrong with that. Now, anytime anyone corrects anyone, we should try to do it with humility and with kindness and stuff like that. But otherwise, it doesn't matter. The gender issue is not an issue there. What, uh, about evangelizing men? I think this is an easy case. Women doing evangelism toward men. We see in scripture the woman at the well. And I'll answer the question you got in your head right now in a second. The woman at the well, uh, John four, verses 28 through 30, she talks to Jesus. Then she goes into her town and she tells everybody, hey, everybody, come see. This guy told me everything I ever did. And then they come out to see Jesus. Um, that is evangelism, right? Uh, did she plan a church and start pastoring it? No, but she definitely was evangelizing men. And this was a wonderful, wonderful thing. Um, the telling people of the resurrection of Jesus, which happens very early on after the resurrection, first thing that happens is women see it and then they go and tell people, is that not evangelism? I mean, here's people who are believing Jesus is dead, and they're being told, no, he rose from the dead.

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It's evangelism to the disciples of all people. But it definitely would overlap into saying women can do evangelism, where they're simply telling men about the truth of the gospel. That is entirely appropriate. Now, there can be, obviously, questions about, like, well, how much time are you going to spend with this man? Are you going to be alone with him and things like that, and about appropriateness and all. Of course those questions are there, but in the bare reality of it, yeah, women can do evangelism, but what about stage evangelism? Okay, I should have put this baby in hard questions. I'll answer in a minute, but what about stage evangelism? I'll jump ahead and get there now. Uh, Billy Graham, Greg, Lori, those types of things where you set up an event, maybe you have a concert type event, maybe you have something else, and there's a stage and you're gathering a group of people, and there's a whole ministry built around putting up this guy or this person on stage to proclaim and preach with a lot of authority and the support of this whole ministry. To say there are mouthpiece proclaiming, I think in this case, where a whole ministry focuses on gathering large crowds into venues and having a person out there as an authoritative teacher supported by the church, representing them. Uh, I think that that seems like it overlaps into an elder position. That seems to be the case to me, whether it's officially an elder or not, it seems like it does get into that role because of all those factors. So Greg Laurie functions similar to an elder not only in his church where he's a pastor, but at his outreaches, he functions like a pastor there. He's teaching with authority from a place of leadership, with a whole group of christians supporting and backing his message. That is different than just doing evangelism. So in that role, I would think one Timothy 212 would apply. I think that that seems reasonable to say it would apply there. Let's ask a question, uh, about women theologians, though. Back to easy questions. Women theologians. This is not only easy to answer in that it's permissible, but I think it's actually a good thing, a wonderful thing. A woman who says, I want to be a theologian, it's not something that you should feel weird about or embarrassed about.

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Um, I don't think there's any reason for that one. Timothy 211, the same passage that forbids. Right. I don't permit a woman to teach her exorcist. Authority says, let a woman learn.

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Now, there's a way of doing the learning, but learning quietly with all submissives is simply affirming all. I've gone all through all this in the video before, so this is not like, uh, women can't make noise, and they have to be like the dog with their tail tucked between their legs at all times. That's not what's meant by quiet and submissive. But the idea of let a woman learn, that is in a command form in that text, limiting a woman's theological education. Learning is specifically critiqued in scripture, in multiple places, actually. So it's not only here, but when Jesus was doing his ministry, he had women disciples who traveled with him and continually learned and were educated by him. This was very uncommon at the time. Rabbis didn't do know. Now, this doesn't mean that they bunked with the men. Obviously, they were a very gender, uh, segregated culture. In some ways that are very positive, actually, and in some ways that are probably not, but in many ways that probably are good. We can remember them today. I remember. When was it Mike Pence said he had a rule about not riding alone in a car with a woman other, uh, than his wife or family or something like that, and people just lost their minds. Like, this was the most oppressive, horrible thing ever. It was just weird because I heard it and thought, it seems like, okay, rule to me.

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Um, this is not oppression. If you interpret that as oppression, there's something you're misunderstanding about acknowledging differences between men and women and all those issues of temptation and affairs and things like that. Anyhow, let a woman learn one. Timothy 211. Or women disciples of Jesus. We, uh, could even read the specific example of probably one of my favorites, which is Luke 1038. I've gone over this, but I'll briefly mention it.

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Mary and Martha, right?

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Their whole experience back and forth and about how one of them was doing the housework, and not just housework, but doing the hosting of a group of people. And the other one was just sitting at the feet of Jesus, getting discipled and learning. And when you see the rabbinic context of this, it feels even more powerful. So I'll explain that briefly. Now, as they went on their way, Jesus entered a village. This is Luke 1038. And a woman named Martha welcomed him into her house, and she had a sister called Mary who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to his teaching. That phrase sat at the Lord's feet. Nt Wright says it means she was officially being trained to be a rabbi. I think that's a broad overreach, but it does mean that she was officially sitting at a rabbi's feet to be discipled by him. She wasn't just located there at his feet, like physically sitting right at his feet. You have to picture them in a room three inches from each. No, no. She was in an official, I'm a learner of this rabbi position. She was a disciple. That's the rabbinic context. It's interesting. And listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving.

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She was what? Distracted with much serving. Because guess what's more important than being the best host in the world?

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I don't know. Learning theology.

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And she went up to him and said, lord, do you not care that my sister has left me alone, left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me. So this is so interesting because you've got, uh, what I call that the interface of, uh, a woman learning theology and being discipled versus a woman who's hosting and taking care of the sort of tasks that you would normally associate traditionally with womanhood.

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And what did Jesus say? But the Lord answered her, Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, which will not be taken away from her. I'm not going to tell her to stop learning and stop sitting at my feet. I'm not going to limit the theological education of women. I think that that is a principle we can draw from the things we're learning in scripture here. Do not limit the theological education of women.

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There's a topic, a theological study or something else. Woman theologians, no brainer. This is a beautiful thing. What about a woman being in seminary classes? Again, I'll skip over to what could be a little bit of a harder question. Uh, the reason why people debate whether women should be in seminary classes is because some seminaries are specifically designed to train pastors. Like, that's their whole agenda. We just want to train pastors. And I think that this can be an open question.

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If I have a group, like, say, when I went to the school of ministry, uh, at Calvary, Costa Mesa, that is a group, a small group of men. We had like 20 guys in our class, and they go in and they're literally just being trained for pastoral ministry. We have classes and discussions about what it's like to lead a church and things like that.

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To say only men can be part of that group is not to limit their theological education. Now, in a sense, you're like, hey, you can't be part of our theology class that we're doing here, the apologetics class we have in this group. But the cohort is meant to teach and train up, uh, pastors only. I think that's fair. But if you have a broader seminary where you're like, hey, only 12% of our students even move into full time ministry or become pastors, then you got to really ask yourself if the limit like that makes any sense. You seem to be allowing lots of people that aren't pursuing pastoral ministry, and you know they won't, and you don't care that they won't, and you let them in your program. So I don't know why you would prevent women in that case. My two cent on that. Others can work through that and think about it on their own. Um, you could even just say certain classes, maybe the seminary broadly embraces men and women coming, but there are certain classes like, dude, this is literally just pastor training. There's no reason to bring women in there, except that we are sort of complicitly encouraging, stepping into roles that we think are not biblical. And so I can understand limits there, and they seem quite reasonable. But you don't want to limit the theological education of women in any way that you can avoid. So what about, uh, a woman theologian who, again, this is a bit of a more tough question, but I'm going to ask it right now because I'm on topic with women theologians. A woman theologian who writes a book about theology that men read.

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Okay, now, there's an intersection of a woman teaching theology to men.

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Perhaps this is an easy question. It seems to me easy, okay. It doesn't seem easy to a lot of other people, and I'm not laughing at that. I'm actually trying to think, how do I make sure I answer your dilemmas in my response here? But I think that you can use Priscilla as at least part of an example of this question. It was an unofficial teaching moment, but it was also simply a non elder teaching moment.

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Priscilla, uh, in acts 1826, her name is listed first. She definitely teaches apollos here. Acts 1826, uh, Priscilla and Aquila heard him, heard apollos. He was teaching things. He was incomplete. So they took him aside and explained they, the way of God, more accurately, probably the word Priscilla is before Aquila here, because she's more, well, known to the writer, more well known to the audience, or possibly because she was perhaps more prominent in the discussion, that she actually did more of the talking than Aquila. But at any rate, you can't discount her as just sort of standing to the side and going, uh uh-huh. Uh-huh uh-huh. What else are you going to doing? She was actively teaching, explain to him the way of God more accurately. And this is lifted up as a positive example. I think, in scripture she shows that women can correct a man's theology outside the function of elder. That's what I think the principle we learn from Priscilla is. Remember how I said, examples help us to not extend application too far and make the mistake the pharisees did, where they forbid so many things on the Sabbath that what was meant to be a blessing became a burden on God's people? I think the gender differences are meant to be a blessing. We extend them too far, they become a burden. We remove them entirely, and it becomes a plague in another way. It damages families, it damages marriage and hurts the culture. And we see this happening right now. Do I even have to make a case? Authors are not like elders. That's my main point.

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I would suggest the only thing an author, female author, who's writing theology needs to consider is don't write your book in a way that mimics the elder role in a person's life.

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Now, there's lots of nuanced ways you can do that, but basically, you could write a book where you're simply taking authority over, uh, the reader, and you're claiming authority over their lives, and there's a way in which you can teach that doesn't do that. You're not in a church. You're not proclaiming things as a book. You're not proclaiming with the backing of a church in an official position, representing. You're not doing something at the church gathering on Sunday mornings. You're just touching the topics of theology, which you're encouraged to study in scripture. So I think that it's fine. A writer doing theology and a man reads it and he learns and grows from it, is a positive thing. I've learned and grown from female commentators, um, one of the most, uh, challenging studies I did in the gospel of Mark, one of the most. It wasn't the most by long shot, really, but it was in this top ten of the hard studies I did in the gospel of Mark. And it was this study about the name it and claim it stuff, um, that we see from, um, what's his name Kenneth Copeland and those guys. And does that.

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How fairly are they interpreting the words of Jesus about asking what you want in his name?

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It was a woman theologian who wrote about these issues in the gospel of Mark that I thought had the best handling of the subject. And I shared it and even held up her book and said, here, she wrote this book and shared it with others that they could check it out on their own if they wanted. I don't think this is like her becoming your elder. Uh, let me put it this way. When you read a book, are they becoming like an elder to you?

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Probably not, right? If that happens to you, maybe you shouldn't read too many books because maybe you're a little too easily just being honest, you're a little too easily influenced by others and not processing stuff fully on your own. So you got to maybe have less sources that are really, really trustworthy just for your own sake. Like, that's just wisdom. But why would we limit the authors? We should limit the readers. In that case, say, hey, maybe you have a problem reading this book. Fine. Um, others don't. I don't want to make a rule. Writing as christians, helping other christians, not a problem. Just don't write in a way that mimics the elder role. What, uh, about a woman running a podcast or YouTube channel?

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I have friends, uh, and women I know who I love, their ministries, their online ministries. And, uh, you might say I'm biased, but, hey, I'm not asking you to make a decision based on that. I love their ministries. I'm asking you to make a decision based upon what I'm about to tell you. So a woman running a podcast or YouTube channel, and they teach theology, and they talk about theology, and they address issues that are related to Christianity specifically.

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I think that if it's directed towards women, how could anyone argue against that?

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That's a no brainer.

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Um, you will ask if it could be directed to men in a second, but let's say it's directed towards women. Obviously, nobody could argue against that. You have a ministry that's focused on ministering to women and teaching them theology and that kind of thing. Um, I don't see that as being inherently any kind of problem. I will say this.

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Just don't turn it into a little kingdom that is in competition with the local church. This is not an issue with that ministry existing. It's an issue that happens frequently in parachurch ministries or in secondary ministries within a church where there's, like, a gathering here and this person gets a big ego and they start sort of getting more and more commanding of people, and their head gets big, and they start building a little kingdom within the church or a kingdom within their podcast, or a kingdom where they're like, uh, I'm the one. You got to listen to everything I say and do everything I say. They effectively become like an elder in that ministry, even though that ministry is not like it's a YouTube channel in this case, it's just a YouTube channel where you're teaching specifically towards women. Just don't turn it into, like, a role that's meant to challenge or usurp another position in the church that is there and specifically for men.

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Let's say that you have a YouTube channel, um, and you teach in podcasts or whatever, and you're doing theology, and it's to men and women, and you know that men are listening and women are listening, and you're cool with that, and you've marketed it in a way that was meant to reach to both sexes.

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My advice here, and many would have this more challenging. My advice here would simply be, don't slip into the elder role. This has to do with the nuance and the way in which you communicate. You'll have all sorts of little decisions you make here and there that are you saying, hey, uh, this is just me backing off an elder type role, making sure I do this in a way that honors the Lord. Just keep that position of pastor, that mantle of pastor kind of off of you. But the alternative to this, I think, is not good, because imagine saying this. You can't be neutral here. If you're going to answer the question, you're going to answer it somehow. Imagine saying that a woman, um, can't write books, especially books that men might read. Can't, um, do christian podcasts or YouTube channels or religious Instagram pages or all of the other sort of media things that are so easy to do nowadays. And you're going to say they can't do those things that can only be done by men, or even worse, only be done by elders, which, of course, takes elders away from a lot of the tasks that they're doing in the church, because now you have them doing all the other stuff.

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These are public forums, YouTube, podcasts, books. All these things are public forums. And it seems artificial to restrict christian discussions in public forums because of a restriction on the role and function of an elder in a church. We see women teaching and having authority in various ways in scripture. That is not a problem. We just see it here in the church as being an issue I'm not, um, worried here about women running these podcasts. As a general rule. There's going to be some that do it wrongly. There's going to be some that, uh, are oppressive and are usurping and things like that, whatever. But I'm not worried about that. I'm more worried about weak women, because I think if you tell women, check that off, check that off, check that off, you can't do this, you can't do that, you can't do this, you can't do that. And then you're basically saying, we want to strip you of being part of public discourse, of being able to have this sort of wide impact in people's lives. We're worried about women having influence, not just pastor influence, elder influence in the local church, but influence in general. I don't think that that should be our main concern. Influence shouldn't be the problem. Um, that is my opinion. I do think it's true. I think that it harmonizes various scriptures, both the clear teachings and the examples that we see.

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Does that mean that a woman should make her podcast, her identity, her theological work, her identity? No, uh, she really shouldn't. That would seem unhealthy. And to turn that into a career and self achievement as my main goal and stuff, that seems to be problematic. Right, like that family, ah, marriage, if assuming you're married, would seem to be a much higher priority than those things. So I don't want to create a group of theologically weak women, though I've seen this before, women's ministries who feel like, okay, we'll have only men teachers when we really have teaching, and then when a woman teaches in our women's ministry, it will always be not theological topics. I've seen up and close women's ministries where that was the rule. Women can do testimonies, but they can't teach the Bible, really. Maybe reference a verse, but you can't do, like, bible teaching and theology, that kind of stuff. And it just kind of made the women in the church kind of weak, theologically speaking. And, uh, sort of, they had to constantly just do these devotional things that were just so thin. And most of the women who were most serious about Christ just felt like the women's ministry was bleh. And they were right. And I think it was a result of overly restricting the functions of women in the church.

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My point here is there's a cost. If you have too many restrictions, there's a consequence. It's not just being safe. No matter where you draw that line, it's going to have consequences. So I want to be cautious, and I'd rather draw it closer to the mountain than further back, personally. Um, so let's talk about women prophesying. Okay. In scripture, this is actually some pretty important stuff. Um, in scripture we have female prophets. In the Old Testament, we, uh, have Miriam, Holda, Deborah. Uh, in my notes, you can look at specific verses there or go actually watch the full video where I talk about them in detail. We also have women prophesying congregationally. Uh, in one corinthians eleven, we read about this. There's women who prophesy in the congregation. To the congregation. That means they're speaking in ways that does imply some degree of teaching, although it's not the official teaching position of the elder, but it has some degree of teaching showing that that rule about no teaching is not this sort of super hard and completely broad rule. It applies to, like, an elder type role. In the New Testament, we have women prophesying in acts 21 and Luke chapter two. In public.

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In principle, this means that women could actually speak in a congregation to a mixed gathering.

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This seems like a no brainer. That doesn't mean they can do any speaking in any fashion.

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But there are congregational gatherings, and I know some are like. But Mike, John MacArthur, I read his stuff on. I talked about his stuff in the videos I did on these issues. So I hope you go back. Um, but my point is this. There is speech to the congregation that is like an elder teaching and authority. Then there is that which is not like an elder, prophecy, which doesn't happen to most churches. Now I get that, but prophecy would be a category where you go, hey, that would be non elder like teaching or non elder like speaking.

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It's not really the same as teaching, but it involves an element of teaching. I wouldn't just call it teaching, though. Obviously you're inspired by the spirit to share something specific. Um, but for an example of this, we could look at, uh, one corinthians 14, verses 29 through 35, and I guess I'll read them and then briefly remind you of my conclusions on this controversial section of scripture. Um, let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh in, weigh what is said. Okay? This is speaking about the judgment of prophecy. If a revelation is made to another sitting there, let the first be silent, for you can all prophesy one by one. See, women could prophesy so that all may learn and all be encouraged that they're learning because there is an element of teaching and prophecy, but it's not the first Timothy 212. Teaching and authority. Teaching or authority kind of joined sort of, uh, mutually informing terms that speak of like an elder's authority and teaching.

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Um, and the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets, for God is not a God of confusion, but of peace. Then it goes on, as in all the churches of the saints. The women should keep silent in the churches. I believe this is during the judging of prophecy. Not silence in general, but in the judging of prophecy, for they're not permitted to speak. Well, he just said that they could prophesy. In one corinthians eleven, it talks about women, specifically rules on how women can prophesy, that they have to do so with head coverings. See video number eleven. If you want to get into more on this, I, um, have a whole big thing on it. For they're not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the law also says. If there's anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands. A home for it. Shameful for women to speak in church. Again, this, taken out of context, is a problem because, uh, it contradicts other scriptures. You look at it here, let the others weigh what is said, that weighing, that judging of what is said. That's what I think is being discussed there.

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Here's why I brought that up. Women speaking in some ways, but they're being limits on some of the speaking. Okay, you can prophesy, but when it comes to judging the prophecy and measuring it and weighing it, we want just men to do that, because that's like an elder type function, isn't it? The discernment of the prophecy, the statement to the congregation of how they should receive what was just said, the evaluation of it against scripture. Women are capable of doing it intellectually, but there's a position that God is trying to preserve between the differences in male and female. So let's let the men do that because it's going to be an elder type thing.

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Women could speak functionally, could do a speaking thing to a mixed group of christians, male and female, just so long as it does not violate an elderlike function or role.

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I think that that's our principle that we use, and I'm drawing the fence further in than a lot of patriarchalists would want, but I've already drawn it further out than the softest complimentarians would want. So women doing announcements then, would be fine. A woman standing up in church and saying, okay, well, we'll get a church picnic, uh, next Sunday, and you need to bring this and do this, or she's teaching. She's doing it with some kind of authority, right. Because she's telling people how it is. But obviously this is so different than an elder function. It's not something we need to worry about. Um, unless you only allow elders to do announcements. Is that how you feel about announcements? It's like, dude, announcements. Only the pastors can do that. Then fine, I guess only let pastors do it, but I think it's probably fine. What about women leading in prayer congregationally?

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This is easy, but I think it's a nuanced answer, which is as long as that leading in prayer is not done in a way that reflects elder like or pastor like roles. Not pastor caretaking, but pastor as a person with that authority, like an elder.

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Um, there's ways to pray that reflect that kind of authority, and there's ways to pray that don't. Most of the time, people pray and they don't step into that at all. And there's nothing wrong with that. So is your church one that says only the pastor can lead in prayer when we're in public? Now, if it is, if that's your church culture, then women shouldn't be leading in prayer in public. But I think that that's probably not a healthy thing because you sort of are making it so that nobody in your church, except for a very small group, um, actually have any experience praying in public, and that's not really great for their spiritual development. I think that limits the spiritual development of the people to have a rule like that. Anybody praying in public seems positive to me, so, uh, I would support that 100%.

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What about a children's ministry leader and teacher? I, um, already said teaching children's ministry. I'll just say this. Uh, any ministry that isn't to adult men is an absolute no brainer. Of course a woman can be doing that, and if it's not adult males, then why would there be a limit on that? I don't see why there's some sort of hard limit on that one. Timothy 212 says, I don't allow a woman to teach or have authority over a man. The implication is, I allow a woman to teach and have authority over non men. That's the reverse implication of that verse.

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All right, let's talk about tough cases. I mentioned a couple of little things, but we're going to dig into the harder ones. Uh, these are things that you will find. An even larger portion of the audience here will disagree with me. That's fine. I may be wrong, but I'm going to do the work to try to put on display my thinking on this, um, and open up specific verses and specific concepts so that we have some puzzle pieces to work with to try to put together. So how old is too old?

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This is an important question, because, say, let's say you're thinking, can a woman, say, do high school ministry? And in what capacities can, uh, she do high school ministry? Well, let's see. I've got a 13 year old in there, but I've also got an 18 year old in there. At what point does a boy become a man? Right? Because then it's going to inform the kind of decisions I make in some of these ways.

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So some would say I'll offer, like, three options, right? Puberty, uh, a specific age, like, legal definition of age, like 18 or 21 or something, or independence as a general rule. So let's talk about the puberty one.

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Puberty, uh, has some pros, right? Puberty, uh, is a physiological change where a boy is moving into manhood. He's literally capable of making a baby. Like, you're just pretty manly right there. So you could suggest that that's a big change that steps into, uh, manhood. But puberty isn't just a moment, right? We talk about people hitting puberty, but puberty is a whole drawn out, long process. They're still getting there for years. Years. And so just because the voice changed or something else may have happened physically doesn't mean you have now clicked over into manhood. And let me put it this way. I think puberty is a bad measure, uh, of what we have a cut off for who a man is. Um, because you can't drive, you can't drink, you can't work most jobs, you can't live on your own. You don't live on your own. You're still fully dependent on your parents, and you're not even treated legally as an adult. So it would seem to me to be wrong to do that. Um, now, there can be some measured differences here. Like, obviously, you treat a 14 year old different than a six year old. I'm just saying they're not a man. They're not a full blown man. They're like a young man, a youth, not quite a man. They're moving into manhood.

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Um, but I think puberty is too early of a cut off. Um, just as I don't want to treat a girl who hits puberty as a full grown woman, she's still underage, put it that way, right? I think that that'll hit people's hearts. They go yeah, she's not a full grown woman yet. Don't you dare treat her that way. Okay, so we see that there's got to be older than that. Um, how about, say, a legal definition, like 18? Here in the US, 18 is a legal definition. We do commonly think, hey, you're 18 now, you're a man. Um, I would say that that is a legal definition. But a lot of 18 year olds, and I'm, um, going to push on. The independence issue here is they lack independence. Uh, completely.

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A lot of them are still in high school, so they still have the same routines and rules in their lives that they did when they were 17. As they ticked over to 18, not much actually changed. And so even in some households, it's like, hey, you're 18, but you're still treated like you're 16, and you still act like you're 16 in many cases, which is unfortunate when people grow up too slow for sure nowadays. Um, so if a boy is still under his mother's control, he's still in high school, he's still living at home, he's still not self sustaining at all. That's different than a boy who is.

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So the third option here would be maybe it's not an age, maybe it's independence. Well, independence I kind of like better, because independence doesn't assign a specific age to. It means that one guy at 17 is a lot more like a man than another guy at 19. Um, maybe it allows for different cultures to land differently, some farming cultures and communities. A 16 year old is more mature, more adult like, than like a 19 year old living in the city. And this independence, like some degree of adulting, maybe. I'll put it that way. Not independence, because maybe they still live at home. Perhaps a better term would be adulting.

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Is this young man, young, old boy or whatever, is he stepping into adulting then? It would seem like now you really have to call him a man. I don't really see much of a choice on that. That seems like a clear cut off for manhood is when someone steps into adulting. Now, uh, what if someone's dependent when he's 35? This is where the independence thing doesn't really work that well. There are some 35 year old men who aren't adulting yet.

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They're defective and they need to stop making excuses, um, and step up.

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Um, that's important. But obviously that's a man.

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So I don't know exactly how to draw the line here. Um, in my head, this is somewhere between, like, 1819, it's right in that zone, maybe you should cut off where they should be adulting. Look, this is, this is a tough case. This is a tough challenge. I think puberty is too young. 18 might work, but it's going to create these muddy zones where you're and, and you're drawing rules where we have, like, social groups, that there's 18 year olds along with 14 year olds in the same social setting, and it makes it hard to figure out how to treat those ministries. Um, and I'm just saying there's a challenge there. It's a genuine tough question.

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I, um, just don't know. Um.

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There you go.

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I lean towards the adulting principle. I was like, are they moving towards adulting? Are they starting to be more adulting things than, let's call that manhood. Um, but I'm not 100% sure. So being leaders, uh, and teachers of males and females in youth ministry, now let's answer this question, this, uh, tough question. What about a woman being a leader and teacher of males and females in youth ministry? Um, how old are the youth? Okay, so junior high wouldn't seem to be a problem.

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But what if they're in high school and you've got high school seniors in there who are like, they walk in and then there's like, a female teacher, and he's like, hey, how are you doing?

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He could get married right now. Um, I get it. That seems to be tough. Um, maybe we say, hey, we have these hard and fast rules for outside of high school. We realize in high school, there are some men that are there. There are some mostly boys, and there's some few men. Because we're erring on the side of the younger people, we're going to allow a little bit of fudging here. And so I'm just going to let people work this out on their own. But I'll also ask this question. Youth ministry, um, in youth ministries, they do play out in different ways. Are you functioning as a pastor in your youth ministry, whether it's twelve to 14, uh, or 14 to 18 or something like that, in churches I've served in, when I served in youth ministry, I functioned as a pastor. In that ministry, I did not function as just someone who was a guest teacher who was helping out. I was a pastor there.

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However, the people serving in children's ministry, they really didn't function. They just didn't seem to carry that culturally carry that mantle of pastor.

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It just wasn't there. The children's ministry was just kind of a different thing now, in other churches, it's not like that. The person over the children's ministry is very much like a pastor. So what I'm trying to acknowledge here is the way these ministries function may dictate how you answer this question. Maybe there's, uh, older adultish people there, but you're not really functioning with that sort of a pastoral type of mantle or function. And so you go, yeah, this is different. Like, you're more of a facilitator. You're just doing things differently. But if you're running with that title, then I'd say you should probably err on the side of, we need a man for that role. What about, uh, teaching Christian, uh, doctrine outside of Sunday, the Sunday congregational pulpit, in an official capacity? It's just outside Sunday morning.

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Maybe, let's start with this. Maybe it's outside church gatherings in general, so that it's uh, at like a conference or a Bible college. So conferences, Bible college, is that separate from the role of elder you're teaching, or teaching men and women, but is it separate from the role of elder? Is there such a thing as a christian teacher who doesn't have the title or function of an elder yet? Is teaching theology? Like, if we just look at our lives, we look around at the world, do we have these things? Do they exist in reality? Uh, I think that demonstrably, yes, they definitely exist. The Bible college teacher who's walking you through early church history or the book of acts or something like that, they're not your elder. And if they're trying to function as an elder, if they're trying to sort of take over the role that your local church pastor has, that's, um, a mistake they're making. But certainly many of them are functioning in a way that you would just. They're not. They're my teacher, but they're not my elder. My pastor, Michael Heiser, is an example of this. Here's a scholar who did lots of publicly available teachings about theology and all that sort of stuff. Um, not only was he not an elder, he delighted in that he was not an elder. I mean, he's like, I'm not a pastor. I'm not cut out for that kind of thing. What I'm doing is very different than that.

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He knew what he was doing is different. And if you watched his teachings or listened or read his books, you knew what he was doing was very different than that.

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If he had been instead, forgive me for this, Michelle Heiser and Michelle had done all the same things. It wouldn't seem to me that she in this case, this is a weird analogy. Would be violating something, uh, because Michael Heiser, in his role, was not violating some m sort of pastoral elder type role. I know this is a challenging question for many. I say it's a hard question, but I think that the answer here is true.

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Seminary professors, for example, are not like elders.

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And you might say, but Mike, aren't they teaching a man christian theology? And I would say, yes, they're teaching men christian theology, but not in the sense that Paul's talking about in one Timothy two. Right. Go see video 13. Keep in mind, seminaries didn't exist. YouTube channels didn't exist.

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He's talking about elders roles.

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He's not answering the question of all these other settings because those settings simply weren't a reality in their culture. But if those settings had popped up in their culture, we're trying to ask, how would we take his principle here and apply it to there? And I think the answer is, it's not an elderlike role. Um, there's room for disagreement here. That is my opinion about it. And I do lean on the side, full disclosure, right. Here's my bias on display. I lean on the side of more liberty here because I fear, uh, the restriction of the gifts and the weakening of women in the body of Christ. Um, and I think that the biblical rule about the elders and about marriage, if we have that solidly in place, that that's going to do its job to radiate out into other things in many ways.

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So, um, we don't need to be super strict, and I don't think the Old Testament or New Testament is super strict about it beyond those things. So I would be fine with a conference, a Bible college, a, uh, teacher stepping up, but I would ask the woman to consider the following, and I know there's many women listening who you speak at conferences, you do these things. So what do you think of this? My recommendation would be what to think. What steps are you taking to ensure this doesn't become an elder like role? Because you're on the stage, you could do anything you want with that microphone.

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Do you do any steps? Are there things maybe. Oh, I'm not going to share that, or I'm not going to step over here onto this, or I'm not going to say it in this way. I think that that's wisdom to do that. Um, I would do the same thing. When I was asked to speak at things before I was actually a pastor, I would say things in a different way than if I was actually a pastor. In that church.

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So you should take some steps, and you should be thinking about that. It should flavor what you do on certain issues. For instance, you could refer a question or a student or a topic. You could say, you know what? On this issue, I'm going to refer you back to your local church. Pastor speakers, uh, do this all the time. When they know they're not a pastor and they're speaking in these conferences and stuff, they go, hey, here's a question for your local pastor, or after the service, we're going to have some pastors come up and here are going to be available for you. Can you please come up and ask them about this? That's a way to defer, uh, don't posture around on stage like some super spiritual authority for all of Christianity. Um, that happens a lot, especially, to be honest, in pentecostal circles.

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Um, just being real with you guys. Uh, just be a Christian who's there to minister to or help or educate other believers. So Sunday teaching, right? The regular Sunday thing that goes on for churches, that's the elder's place in the New Testament. They're like, at the regular gathering of the church. They are there to proclaim with authority the doctrines of Christ. Does that mean they have, like, roman catholic authority? No. That's weird. But there is an authority that's there in the presence of the leaders that should be distinct and that should be protected and that should be taking place. But what about, like, say, Wednesday evening?

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There's a real hard question. Can you go to an off service? Some churches have, like, a Wednesday evening service where they meet on Wednesdays and they unpack this stuff, and they basically have something that looks just like the Sunday service, but it happens on Wednesdays. Um, this is tough, because in some ways I go, yeah, obviously. No, because it's the same as the Sunday service. It's just happening on a different day.

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There are people who won't go Sunday and they'll go, I'll just go Wednesday. Right. And that is their church thing. And the teaching and the proclamations are effectively of the same nature and flavor. And so I'm like, yeah, if you're doing that, if this is like, the same flavor, elder type flavor, forgive my clumsy words here, that you have on Sundays, then, yeah, Wednesday night should be reserved for just that elder position.

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Okay, I'm interrupting the video briefly. This is editor Mike. I'm currently editing. I saw this portion, watched it back, and I thought that I might have created a bit of confusion. I'm not here meaning to weigh in on the question of Sunday mornings. I'll do that in just a moment. I guess what I'm really saying about Wednesdays or midweek services is the following. If you treat those services functionally and in the way the services are formed, they mimic the sort of liturgy of Sunday morning. If they replace Sunday morning and they mimic the liturgy of Sunday morning, the service format, then my recommendation would be to treat those services the same way you treat Sunday morning. So that the way you answer the next question on Sunday morning is how you answer the question on these midweek or off Sunday services.

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Uh, that's about what I wanted to say. I hope I didn't jump ahead to the Sunday question too early in my explanation here. Okay. Editor Mike, out. But I'd say this.

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Can a male do it without being an elder?

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Would you allow a male to teach on that Wednesday night? Like, let's say that you have. Oh, we're going to have Mike, ah, come to the church and teach on apologetics. Uh, I don't really think it fits on Sunday. We'll put him on a Wednesday.

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Um, or maybe it's not me. Maybe it's, like, some other guy. His name's Julio, and he's going to come up and he's going to be sharing, uh, apologetics. He's not a pastor. You don't want people to think he's a pastor, and you find yourself pushing him to Wednesday night or Sunday night or Friday morning.

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Probably in your church, you have this person, and you put them on these other days because they're not in that pastor role. That's probably an indicator that you could probably have a woman teach in some respect on those other days as well. Probably. Possibly. I know this is a tough question. Every church has to wrestle with this, and I hope you guys give each other grace.

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So the question I'd have is this. Can a male do this teaching without being considered an elder or even being considered for the position of an elder in the future? Like, they could. Just not, like, as a training thing, but they could do this thing, and you're like, they're not an elder. They'll never be an elder, but I'll let them teach in this context, then probably a woman could do that too. I would think that is probably a good indicator.

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I, uh, think there's room for disagreement here, and I hope that we have tolerance for each other, because it's kind of like romans 14. One man thinks, uh, he can eat anything, and he praises God for it. Another man thinks, I don't want to touch this stuff, and I'm going to under the Lord, I won't touch it. On some of these hard cases, we're going to have disagreement and we should let the church just have some differences. And that's okay.

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We need to have some grace on each other here. We're trying to honor the lord.

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What about teaching on a given Sunday, though? So I'm trying to back things up. Uh, I first started talking about teaching, say a bible college or a conference. Then, hey, what about teaching at an off service like Wednesday night or Friday or something. Now what about teaching on a Sunday morning? Um, now here's where a lot more people are just going to be like, no, that's a hard no. And that's totally understandable. Um, because there are many who would say, you can't separate the Sunday morning preaching from the role of a pastor, an elder. You just can't separate the two. And then I'd say, well, in that case, you should not have women teaching on Sunday at all because you don't see a difference. Now, there actually are denominations like this for Baptists, I'm told, not a Baptist. But I understand that the office is the function, and the function is the office, meaning if you do the teaching on Sunday, that's what pastoring is.

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If you're pastoring, you're teaching on Sunday. So ordination in a sense is sort of just like a pointless piece of paper. You're in the role, you're doing the thing on Sunday, therefore you're pastoring. Okay, then that's easy. It's an easy pass. Like, no, not on Sunday mornings. Now, some would be like, oh, this is just way too oppressive. And I'm like, well, why is that so oppressive? There's nothing wrong with having that as a rule. And then saying, look, the entire life of the church doesn't happen on Sunday mornings. It's a particular thing that happens on Sunday mornings. Nothing wrong with preserving and just focusing on that and having limitations there because you're seeking to honor God and do what he says in his word. This is a reasonable way of preserving role distinctions and making the role of pastor powerful. This is actually something you see in Baptist churches, is the pastors have a role of hopefully proper, hopefully not arrogant, hopefully not self assured and all that, but a sense of the power of the message and of the preaching. I'm not just coming, like right now. I'm sharing my thoughts, my opinions on this text. I am not teaching the way that normally Sunday morning preaching probably ought to take place where it's like, this is the truth of God. I think that this kind of rule that only a pastor does Sunday mornings, it kind of sets aside Sunday morning as like the proclamation of the truths of God in a special way that it probably should be okay. Now, others would say, they'd answer different. They say, well, if, okay, there's a generally, no, we don't have women preaching on Sundays, because that's generally where elders, pastors do it through their thing. But there are some exceptions.

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And I know women who go, I'll do a Sunday morning. If I show up, there are speakers, they get asked to come, and she'll say, I'll do it if I am being interviewed. So the pastor's on stage. So he's the one who's still pastoring the congregation, and he's asking me questions, and I'm being interviewed. And this creates a visual separation from the role of pastor. I'm not standing in the pulpit alone up there, and I think that that is, in my opinion, a legitimate way of handling that issue. Do you see how there's a real effort being made to make distinctions? I think that's important. Um, others would say, uh, I'll do it and I'll even be alone on the pulpit and share, but only if I'm doing it as a guest. Like if they want me to come all the time, I'm not going to do it regularly. I'm not going to be teaching once a month. I'm like, special guest moment. I'm going to come share my thing that I know that I'm good at, and I'll do it in a way where I'm clearly not your pastor. Maybe even during this, during the message, I'll reference your pastor this, and you might ask your pastor about that, because I'm going to create this distinction as a way of just sort of affirming those differences. Others would say, uh, maybe it's not about how often I do it, but it's about what I talk about. So they'll say, I'll do it, but only if I'm speaking carefully, such as I'm only sharing a testimony or I'm not touching certain theological issues. Um, and perhaps then they would think this doesn't really count as teaching in the sense Paul's talking about in one Timothy, because I'm not teaching like that theology stuff. I'm instead teaching, um, uh, something lesser. Maybe it's just a Paul. Maybe I'm doing a thing on apologetics or a thing on, um, family, uh, and raising kids or dealing with tough questions. There's all sorts of different things. Some would say maybe if I'm not teaching them in an authoritative fashion, like maybe Joni Erickson Tata. I suddenly forget. I think it's Joni or Johnny. Johnny. I can't remember. You guys know, sorry, got it wrong. But uh, she's a marvelous speaker, amazing testimony, super powerful speaker in the sense of impacting people's lives.

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But she's not getting up and teaching as though she is your local church pastor. Like, you know, she's getting up and sharing her stories and her experiences of suffering that she's gone through, being paraplegic, going through all that kind of just uh, mind boggling difficulties. And she brings something really special that your pastor will never be able to do in the way she does. And so maybe, okay, maybe you have her come and everybody in the church knows she's not a pastor. She's just coming as a special guest, do a special thing and it doesn't blur into that role. Or maybe they don't know, look, this is where I say, um, I'm going to let churches, obviously not like I have control, but I'm not going to try to tell you this is how you have to do this. I sort of think romans 14 is coming in going, let each be convinced in his own mind you're trying to honor the Lord and serve him and then say, lord, I'm going to give this to you. Do the best I can with it. Try to create as many opportunities for women in ministry as I can, while preserving the role distinctions that you have created. These are the two sides that I want to bring together and just smash together as hard as I can. Preserve the role distinctions God has given. Create as many ministry opportunities for women as we possibly can. Smash those together as much as you can. Um, so many churches have people speak on Sunday, for example, here's sort of a case for this, who are clearly not doing so with the kind of teaching and authority a pastor has. So an example could be like sanctity of life Sundays. Uh, you're like, we're going to have a sanctity of life Sunday, a pro life Sunday. And we're going to invite the speaker from this pro life ministry and they're going to come out and share and everyone knows they're not a pastor, they're not doing it as a pastor. So maybe if that's the case, your church is like, yeah, we're okay with that. And another church would be different. They'd go, I want to have a sanctity life Sunday. But I don't really feel good about having someone who's not a pastor on Sunday morning. Well, then you definitely shouldn't have a woman teaching in that church, in that culture, on a Sunday morning. So I think it just depends. Uh, this is a challenge. Probably the safest thing to do is to say no women on Sundays.

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Um, but it could also be potentially somewhat limiting. But we do live in a world where, guess what? There's other six other days in the week, there's other opportunities to share, and there's things that you can do in writing books and going to conferences and doing other things. We need to make sure we preserve the role of elder is the point. So I would totally leave room for disagreement here. Here's a major rule I got to have on this, and I hope you have it, too. This is important, is we need to have some grace and flexibility for people who are applying this differently and not have one set of policies that every church is forced to follow. It's, uh, interesting that the New Testament doesn't give us those kinds of clear policies that are like, every church has to look exactly like this, maybe because we're meant to have some flexibility and that that's okay.

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What about women worship leaders here? My answer would be, as I understand the scripture here, I would susay, it probably depends, um, when I did worship, uh, because I actually play that guitar, I don't play it very often nowadays. Used to play it quite a lot and would, um, do worship. And I first started doing worship leading, not because I was the best, but because there was very few people available. And so there was me. I was always available. Um, when I first did worship leading, though, I really just led in song. Um, not just sing songs, song songs, right. But worship. But I'm just playing the songs and leading people, and they're worshipping, and I'm just facilitating with music.

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As I grew in serving and stepped into more ministry roles, I eventually came to a place where I was doing more. I was really leading worship as a pastor. And this is different. The way I would exhort people, the way I would instruct the congregation as I was leading worship, and the way I, as a guy who's equipped with a teaching gift, I would teach in the course of leading worship in a part of a song, stop and explain something that I thought was, like, a powerful theological truth, and then continue worshipping. Um, I was doing this as a pastor, so this is why I say it depends.

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Are you leading worship in a way that is pastoral in function, in teaching authority, that kind of thing. Um, or are you doing it in some other fashion? That's how I would answer the question of women in leading worship. Um, when we say, like, a woman can't be on stage, that seems obviously too far. I'm not going to beat up a church that does this, but it seems an obvious mistake. I don't think this is a hard case. Can a woman be on stage, like, say she's playing piano?

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I don't know why anybody would restrict that. That's so weird. Um, what about vocals? Can a woman be singing vocals? I don't know why anybody would restrict this, where male and female voices complement so well. Why would you not be having them both on stage?

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What about she's the one on the mic singing the songs and telling people like, all right, um, let's do that chorus again, or stanza three or something like that. Um, again, I don't see a problem with this because any song leader can do that. It doesn't seem pastoral to me. It's when it's merging into a pastoral role that I feel like. Then you say, okay. So in other words, the answer, I guess, would be yes, as long as you're not becoming that sort of pastoral thing on stage while you're doing your thing. I think that would be the answer. Um, woman, being a leader of small groups.

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What about a woman who leads small groups in the church? Um, and it depends on the nature of the small group leader. So it's obviously a leader. The word is there in the name. But, uh, some small group leaders are really just facilitators. Um, they just sort of are like, okay, and the next question. Hey, how about you take this? All right, next one. How about you take this? They really are just facilitating. They're like guiding discussions and guiding program, but they're not really doing a whole lot more than that. But a lot of small group leaders do end up functioning like elders, just as a lot don't. So this is why I would say, I'm just going to say, just don't be sloppy. Like, protect the biblical rules. And if you have small group leaders, make sure that you're intentional about how they function and what the limits of those roles are. And if that's the case, you have a woman there, or maybe you have a woman there who's assisting and there's a man there, and you have some sort of interplay of how you think it should work. Churches obviously are going to work this out on their own. Most of them already have. I'm just trying to answer these questions to the best of my ability. Um, leading small groups depends on the nature of that particular position. That would be my answer. What about a woman leading ministries to children and women with men who are under them? So my ministry is to children. But I also, like, you're a woman, you're leading the children's ministry, but you have male teachers. So your third grade class, a guy does that, but you're overseeing it, so you're in authority over that guy. Maybe you're even explaining things to him, teaching him things, telling him. You're saying, I'm going to get rid of you and bring someone else in.

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Um, I think she's not functioning in the description I just gave. She is not functioning as an elder over those men.

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So I would not forbid it. But it will require wisdom, because in many cases, the person who's running that children's ministry, because of the reputation they gain being over that ministry, they start being treated as a pastor from others. It just happens organically. And so that's a concern. And how do you answer that? Uh, I'm not entirely sure. Okay, so I'm saying this piece seems okay. This piece seems like, handle that with wisdom. I don't exactly know. In some churches, I think they probably handle it totally fine, and they have a woman doing that, it's totally no big deal. In other ones, it probably becomes a problem. Was the problem that she was in that position or was a problem that they didn't securely keep in place their concepts of, uh, who was a pastor and who was not? And so maybe it was a secondary issue. I don't know if you do allow this, just have something where there's an awareness of who is a pastor in your church and people aren't confused about that. Now, there's a word for those who want to err on the side of safety that I'll have. I'll remind you of this. Um, the side of safety, preserving the gender roles where you create more restrictions to just preserve those roles. It's an understandable impulse, it really is. And maybe it's the right impulse, but I'll suggest this.

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Um, it's also the side. Safety is also the side that could limit ministry for women and the development of women spiritually. I've seen this.

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A woman who's taught you will never have a reason to express theological skill towards other people, is not going to study theology that much. It's going to be much less likely that culture is going to create weaker women spiritually, it seems to be the case. And that seems to be, uh, what we don't want based on scripture. Let a woman learn. Let her sit at my feet. This is a good and healthy thing. Love God with all your mind. There's an error on that side that you think you're just getting safety, but you're also getting some other consequences. Be aware of those. But we have to have grace for people who don't agree or want to answer all these questions the same as you or the same as me. Um, it doesn't mean that they're automatically liberal. It doesn't mean that they're automatically oppressors. It means that maybe they're working through a different sort of cultural environment than you are in, in their church. And then this is kind of how the nuts and bolts come together in a way that works better there. Or maybe they're even making some mistakes. Every church is, and we need to have some kindness and grace towards each other on these issues.

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It's okay to realize that these are not all equally clear things. These are all tough things I just talked about. So there's some things I didn't want to forget to mention. I'll move on to this next section of my notes, things I didn't want to forget to talk about. Um, one of them was this in the study. Um, this is a pushback against most, uh, people that are in my camp. I think. I don't think husbands are the priests of their wives. I think that is an unbiblical terminology to use. Doesn't mean they aren't leaders. A man should not be called the priest of his household, the priest of his wife, because the New Testament teaches that we are all a priesthood of believers. It's actually a really important New Testament doctrine. It's actually part of the Reformation, was recovering this idea of the priesthood of all believers.

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And historically, we create these other priesthoods that rob the priesthood of all believers from us. And making a man the priest of his house is a problem, just like the Roman Catholic church slowly having these accretions where they've invented a new priesthood that's not biblical, that's also a problem in orthodox churches. There's a problem. There's a development of priesthood, the priesthood that's not biblical, it's historical, but it's not biblical, and it wasn't original. There were no priests in the New Testament except for every Christian who is a priest. And so this is the sort of thing that can diminish a woman's spiritual role. Uh, she is a leader and she is spiritual and she is a priest in that sense. In that New Testament sense, not the Old Testament sense. Nope. No woman was. But in the New Testament sense, we're all priests. But, um, she does defer to her husband, but she has that priesthood. What this means is there's no mediator between the woman and God. That's the priestly function that we want to make sure, uh, doesn't happen in the New Testament church anywhere. I have no mediator between me and God.

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That doesn't mean I'm on my own. Like, I have no fellowship and belonging in the body of Christ or that, uh, my elders or pastors have no authority over me. I'm not saying any of that. I'm saying I have no mediator between me and God except Jesus Christ. That's why we're all priests. When you say the husband's a priest of his home, you're implying if you read scripture and look at what priests do, you're implying that he somehow mediates her relationship with God. And that is definitely not the case. And it's especially a problem for a woman who has an unsaved husband. It would seem to be very weird. So I think that this is poor terminology and would recommend that christians stop using it. My opinion there, but I do think it's pretty solidly biblical. I think it's a big oversight when we say that men are the priests of their homes. Um, find a different word for that, please. Video number six, timestamp number three. That's where you're going to find my whole thing, my spiel on priests. And I'll get into all the details there. A woman is a co leader. She's under the authority of her husband's leadership, but she's also a co leader. She's not a non leader. She's not the non priest of her own. Um, so are we supposed to generally be restricting women from being influential? I mentioned this briefly earlier, but I'll just mention this.

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Uh, the mere fact of a woman having influence is not a concern. Okay, so Deborah was influential. Incredibly influential. Miriam, the sister of Moses, was influential. Mary Magdalene was influential. Phoebe was influential. Priscilla was influential. Junia was influential. Um, in all the ways these women were influential, the Bible seems to approve of, um.

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We. Let me just say influence is not the same as eldership. So there's a certain kind of influence that's a concern. Eldership, um, not influence itself. Influential women is a good thing.

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Um, state governors have massive influence. For instance, governor of a state, massive influence. Is he an elder? Not by a long stretch. Not remotely.

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There's a difference. There are gifts of teaching and leadership that are given to believers in general, I believe. And I talked about this in previous videos. I'm just going to mention it now shortly. Romans twelve gives a bunch of gifts. They seem as though they are accessible. They are potentially in any christian, including women. Teaching and leadership are some of those gifts. My point here is that there are women who have gifts of teaching and leadership, and they should be put into positions where they are teaching and they are leading, just not an elder role. That's the bottom line there. Um, only men can be elders, right.

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But we should have women who are teaching and leading in various capacities, but not blurring the lines on the eldership thing.

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Um, do women need to concern themselves with taking an attitude of yielding or submission to all men? This is something that I've seen in various groups where they're like, hey, yeah, I think that maybe in every interaction where a woman's interacting with a man, she should exhibit some sort of honoring his manhood by kind of presenting herself in a way that, uh, affirms his leadership. And I don't think that this is true. Let me walk you through some reasons. Does scripture say that women must submit to all men?

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No, just their husbands?

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Right.

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Were there men submitting to Deborah when she was the judge? Was Deborah as the judge, making rulings on men and their lives and then doing it in a submissive fashion? I don't think so. That seems artificial. Seems like this is. We're drawing the lines out too far, in my opinion.

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Um, it also, scripture says, yeah, men only men can be elders. And further, it clearly supports women in various positions of authority over men. Bosses, employers, that kind of thing. And queens, uh, and they would have some degree of authority over men. I don't know how to get around that. So the scripture seems to support those things. So my answer would be no. Um, it seems really sketchy to me and leads to abusive attitudes. It doesn't necessarily that it is inherently abuse. I don't know, maybe it is, but it leads to abusive attitudes towards women. To think that they have to walk in an attitude of submission towards every guy they meet.

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And so the old example that I know John Piper gives who I love John Piper so much of his stuff I agree with.

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But I know he gives an analogy where he says, hey, um, if a man pulls over and asks for directions, and a woman gives him directions, she's giving him instructions, teaching him something about where to go? Go here, go there. She should do it in a way that exhibits support of his leadership and shows her generally yielding attitude.

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I think that's weird. And I don't think we need to worry ourselves about those sorts of things. I think that, hey, that preserves male female. But you're drawing stuff out pretty far here unnecessarily. Um, someone asked my wife directions. I don't think she has to be, like, worried about that kind of stuff at all. Yeah. All right. So next thing I didn't want to forget to mention are these restrictions that I'm talking about, about eldership, marriage, and then how it sort of plays out in some preferences in wider society, but not hard rules. Are those restrictions based on capacity to lead, intelligence, gifting, or other skills?

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So perhaps you're thinking, women simply can't think as good as men, lead as good as men. Women, just as a rule, are not as capable as men. And that's why we need a man for that position and a man for that position, because no woman could be as smart as him or be as not deceived as him or something like that. And I think this is demonstrably false. Um, perhaps you're a woman who's really good at leading or teaching. Okay, maybe you have a gift in that, or, you know, one. But biblically, this doesn't qualify you for that role of eldership, for instance. Nor is it the reason you're disqualified is because you're not good enough at that sort of thing.

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How would we unpack this? Um.

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Please resist the strangeness. The strangeness that comes from trying to say men are just better at all that leadership stuff than women. It's not actually true in that sense.

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I've heard people say, men won't follow women.

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Women can't lead men because men will not follow women. And I'm like, that's cute, but, uh, saying that as some sort of blanket rule about all of reality, I was like, it's just always going to be this unbreakable reality. Men will never follow women. All I have to do is find one woman that is able to command the attention and following of men. And then it's like, oh, I guess we can let women lead now because in every way, and it could be pastors and churches, because we found a woman that men will follow.

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I think that there's no point in having to say all this stuff. It's just we're getting beyond scripture, beyond, I think, common sense in some ways, you might say men tend to respond better to male leadership. And I'd imagine that's probably true. And women seem to tend to respond better to male leadership, too. And that may be because we have a preference that's in place. But a hard and fast rule, it seems like we go way too far.

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Uh, you could think about couples, you know, there's got to be a couple, you know, where a woman is smarter than the man, less deceived than the man, and deceivable than the man, who is a better leader than the man, a better teacher than the man, generally more capable than that guy in just about every way. But you wouldn't therefore say that she should be the head of that marriage. Because there's only one thing a woman can't do that a man can do.

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Okay, there's a few things. There's one relevant to what I'm talking about now, and that is she can't be a man.

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It's being a man that's the difference. It's not your skill, it's not your intelligence, it's not your creativity, it's not your ability to lead. It's your ability to be a man. And how God has made male and female different. And he wants us to image that to the world because it's a good difference, it's a healthy difference, right? We're different, and we're meant to work together in those ways that reflect that difference. So this is a good thing. So if you would affirm that the married couple I talked about, where the woman's more capable in every way, that the man is still the head in that marriage, if you would affirm that, then you have to affirm that. We're not saying women are all weaker, less capable in every way.

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We're saying that there is a manhood and a womanhood that is meant to be preserved and on display for the sake of honoring God and all the good that comes from it. The one thing a woman can't do is be a man, right? No matter how capable she is in decision making or inspiring others, she can't be a man. Uh, God wants us to preserve creational distinctions in our behaviors. Men can have certain roles and women have others according to God's good design. That should stop us from treating women as if they all are less capable than men.

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They're just less capable of being a man. That's the difference. I hope that this helps. I know there's people out there that this is going to go back and re listen to that one part. Please inconsiderate it. Um, because it's not good, but it also means this. Okay, so for the more chauvinist attitude, thinking women are all just. Men are just better in every way. Okay?

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That's not what scripture is actually teaching. And then you've got the other side where a woman is thinking. I have a sense of calling. I have so many skills. And so even though scripture really does seem to say that I shouldn't do this, like, I think that I should follow my passions and my sense of calling and my sense of skills and my giftings. No, because the scripture is not forbidding you based upon the lack of your perception of those things. It's based upon male and femaleness. Another thing I didn't want to forget to mention is that these truths, the things that I'm discussing here, would be a great buffer against lgbt wokeness.

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Male and female are different by design, and their roles truly matter. And it's immoral to dismiss those roles, or even worse, act like they're interchangeable. They're not. This would be a defeater for the ideology behind the l, the g, the b, and the t, because all of them treat male and female as though they are interchangeable, as though they are not essentially important, as though they are not a godly thing to promote and support and create distinctions with the same society that's embraced feminism, which has moved towards vilifying the differences between male and female. In a sense, that same society is now embracing gender folly and gender confusion and gender denial and gender fantasy land, uh, biblical complementarianism. It protects against both this and the abuses of devaluing women and treating them wrong. And that's why I think that it is the biblical view. I would say I'm a complementarian, and I hope that I'm making more people complementarian because I think that that is a biblical perspective. So, what's my answer to the question of how far we extend the boundaries? Let me try to summarize. In marriage, it doesn't mean men are the only authority, just the higher authority. So we don't extend the boundaries so far that women, like, lose authority in their marriage. Um, they have authority over their husband's bodies, for instance. There's a lot of authority there in ministry. It extends to anything that is functioning as an elder does in teaching an authority. They're moving into that elder role. That's where the limits are. We should encourage women being involved in everything that isn't, that women should be involved in tons of ministry. And that's sometimes missed in complementarian and patriarchal churches. We're not encouraging women to serve as much as we should in the rest of life. Outside the marriage role, where a husband's ahead, they both have authority, but his is a higher authority. Then we have the. And he has to self sacrifice all three pillars. Right. Then we have the ministry rules where it's, hey, as long as it's not an elderlike thing. Yeah, uh, it's cool. In the rest of life, it seems less strict. The rules are less strict. There's less specific rules that we have in scripture. At least there are positive stereotypes, I think, that should still be intact, and we don't want to fight against those, the positive ones.

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But there's less strictness. So how can I justify being so strict in marriage and ministry, but less strict in other things? Recap. The examples in scripture seem to push against that strict over application of those two principles, drawing them out too far into society, like the Pharisees did with the Sabbath. The clear teachings in scripture only limit those two things. There is no clear teaching in scripture that limits, uh, that other stuff. And there's examples like Deborah, who I don't think is a coincidence, and I don't think I'm overusing her example. I think that this is there, like the example of David eating the showbread that was there. And Jesus uses that, the example of the priest working on the Sabbath, and Jesus uses that, the example of Deborah having massive authority over men. And I think that we can use that in a similar way. I think the idea is that if marriage and ministry are intact, here's the idea. If marriage and ministry are intact and we're preserving gender roles there, the rest of it will work itself out in at least our church culture, so long as we aren't seeking to overturn the other two. A woman in politics isn't an issue, but only women in politics, or pushing all women as much as you can into politics, that is obviously a societal problem. The societal obsession with breaking the glass ceiling seems unhealthy. The way we can see this is look at how egalitarians respond to these two pillars. Male headship in marriage and eldership in churches. They're anathema to that movement, because it fundamentally breaks the narrative that they've got and puts us back on the right track, I believe. So here's conclusions. Let's talk conclusions. Whether you agree with me on all of these things, uh, which I don't know if anybody does, or maybe you don't agree with me, that's not that important to me. Um, but I hope that I can encourage one thing, the methodology of applying the examples of scripture to fill out where the clear statements of scripture don't go right. Clear statements, marriage ministry examples, helping us fill that out. I hope that you take specific teachings and examples in scripture and work them into your applications instead of following your intuitions too much, because that's what the hardest patriarchalists tend to do. The softest complementarians, I think, tend to do. Their intuitions are driving them and maybe not as much the examples of scripture. My opinion there, I'm not trying to insult anybody, um, hope you'll consider it, but please at least wrestle with these scriptures and ask yourself, is that really a good answer? Did I really handle that well? Did I really give it a, ah, fair application?

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If you think I left something out that proves me wrong, just make sure this wasn't the only video you watched. I got 39 other hours. That's where I made my cases here. I just summarized things and brought up stuff that I'd already concluded and proved in other places. A bunch of reasons you may have that have jumped into your head as you've watched this video of like, why I'm wrong here, wrong. But I probably dealt with 98% of that in the previous videos. So please go and watch the videos. They're in the video description down below the whole playlist. Now here's a warning. I hate to give this warning. This is not as bridge building as I'd like it to be, but I have to give the warning. Egalitarians are doing great harm to the church. Christian, uh, Galitarians who I love, who are my brothers and sisters in Christ, many of them. They're doing great harm to the church with their teachings.

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The best of intentions. They've got the best of intentions. They want to really help people. They really are seeking to do good, but their zeal is here. Without knowledge, they're wrong on this issue. They're harming our reputation with propaganda because egalitarians almost without fail will vilify as immoral and oppressive the biblical teaching on men and women. They're harming our m. They do this in public. They'll tell everybody like, oh yeah, christians. Basically what the world will hear is, um, the egalitarians saying, don't worry, I'm not like all those other christians for the past 2000 years who are oppressive and abusive and this and this and this. And they're confirming the narrative that Christianity is in fact a problem. Um, though they're not intending to, but because their teachings are wrong, that's what they end up doing. They're also harming our ministries and upsetting God's ordained order for leadership in churches by saying we ought to not only open the door to women in ministry, but pursue and push, not, uh, to women in pastoral ministry, but pursue and push for more and more and more of them and celebrate them and protect them. And all this sort of thing is actually causing harm because God has specifically said, don't do that. But there's also harm to marriages. And this, to me, hurts me even deeper because I think marriage is the core of the issue and everything else grows out of that. Um, people actually believe that biblical marriages are harmful and ugly and oppressive.

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Egalitarians are telling them that it is christian egalitarians. This should shock you. This should bother you. This should make you sick to your stomach that this is happening. If you're an egalitarian who has promoted such things, you're not going to listen to me. Uh, if you come to this part of the video and you haven't changed your mind yet, you probably won't now. But the right thing to do would be to repent of those issues and to publicly go out and be like, how do I undo some of the damage I've caused?

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Egalitarianism is fundamentally an unbiblical movement.

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They're often right about examples of abuse, but then they translate that into everything is abuse. The whole idea of what God has designed, a male or female, is abusive, and that is a problem. There are solutions to the problem of real abuse, which does happen and is a major problem and always has been and always will be of, uh, men abusing women, that issue, 100%. That's a major problem. But biblical complementarianism will solve that problem. They just deny that. And they call that abuse as well.

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So we need that third pillar of the three pillars. The third pillar will stop the abuse, I believe. So it's not good enough. Here's another point I don't want to forget. It's not good enough to just believe this stuff, the stuff that I'm sharing with you, at least the three pillars, if you can agree with me on that much, it's not good enough to just believe them. The grudging complimentarian, the apologetic complementarian, the guy who's like, I guess I'm complimentarian, man, this is lame. Yeah, I guess I believe. I don't want to, but I'm complimentarian. You need to get to where you want to, okay, this is the problem. If you only believe it, but you grudgingly believe it, then that means you are disapproving of what you know God has said is good.

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I'm not trying to make you feel bad here. I just want you to know there's more work to do. You're not done yet. You've changed your theological position, but you haven't changed your heart position. You need to get to where you believe it's healthy and good and beautiful. Um, keep looking at it. Keep seeing it. Keep seeing it from God's design.

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If you look at the relationship of Jesus and the church, that's your model. That's healthy and good and beautiful. Now translate that to how you see husband and wife. Now translate that to how you see eldership in the church and look at those things until you see the beauty of them. This is God's beautiful and good design. Don't be the apologetic complementarian where you make your own views look ugly because your heart has not yet come around to a godly perspective. Until you appreciate and champion these things, you aren't yet fully biblical. All right, next thing I don't want to forget to mention is christians have to get back to the bible on this issue.

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Um, the pragmatic value of reaching our culture and having greater reputations amongst them by throwing marriage and ministry roles under the bus, it's just not going to work. We got to get back to it, and we need to look at the world as not. This issue is not something like, okay, here's a side issue that I guess we're just going to have to accept that it just goes against the world. I need to look at the world and go, you all need this. This is something you guys need. You're missing this. This is what Christianity is to offer you, is this beautiful complementarity. On one hand, it will stop those abuses over there. On the other hand, it will stop, uh, the eraser marker that's being rubbed all over male and female right now in our culture, and it will bring them altogether.

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Now, I want to ask, uh, a question that I said I would answer here at the end of the video. What would I say to a woman pastor who has watched my series and she's changed her mind? And right now you're a pastor in a church. You've been doing it for five years, ten years, 20 years, however long, and you've changed your mind. Um, what I want to say is this, uh, you're my sister in Christ.

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You're my sister in Christ. As for the past, as for what you've done in the past, you were my sister in Christ. Even when you were doing that, okay. You weren't a non Christian. Um, I don't think that this discovery, that that role that you're in is not the role you should be in. I don't think that discovery invalidates any of the ministry you've done in the past. Don't think that. Don't think you have to go back and think that all the people that you minister to and, uh, you taught that you helped, that you pastored, that that didn't count in their lives or help them in their lives. It did, and it was good that it did. Okay. That was something good that came out of it, and I'm very glad for that. Rejoice over the good. Maybe you did it unaware. Most likely you did. Most likely you did it unaware. You thought, oh, well, I read Philip Payne's book, and so I was convinced, uh, nt right. I heard him speak on this topic, and I was like, oh, good, what a relief. I've just misunderstood those passages. I can do this pastor thing. But now you realize that stuff was based on bad logic and not true things. And so now you got to make a change. Right now, what you have to do is honor God. Be an example.

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Now you got to respond to what you know and honor the Lord in that. There's a time in Israel where Josiah the king gets the book of the law and then reads it and then suddenly realizes that the Israelites were doing a bunch of things they weren't supposed to. You know, he has a revival. It's a beautiful thing. It's a wonderful thing. It was a big revival.

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Trust in God. Be my encouragement to you. I am not promising that everything's going to work out okay. There's going to be turmoil. There's going to be challenges. There's going to be like, what am I going to do for a living? What am I going to do with this vacancy that's now at the church that I've been at? But trust in the Lord and be okay with the struggles that may come.

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I don't know what else to say is obey God, and obeying God is worth it, even if it comes with difficulties. You know that. You know that. I hope and pray you find huge blessing in this, but you may also find difficulty. And, uh, the last thing I'd say is be brave. Please be brave, because your friends, the people you've ministered to in the past, chances are they will not understand. Many of them will not support you. Many of them may be pretty upset. With you. Be very brave and stand strong and speak truth and do what's right. And God be with you. Um, my heart goes out to you. I take your situation very seriously. But, um, what else can we do? What else can we do than honor God, come what may?

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So this has been my attempts to puzzle the pieces together again. This video is about application is not my full teaching. I'll say it one last time. Please go back and watch the playlist of videos if you haven't. There's so much packed into every video you, um. And I think that you will find you will get a lot more out of that than you would out of even this video. And after watching this, you'll go back and watch that and you'll be putting the puzzle pieces together, maybe better than I will because now you'll have the full series. I hope and pray this has been a true service to God and to his church.

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I, um, wish there wasn't such division and disagreement on this topic.

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Um, I've made a lot of people angry for this series. I've lost the respect of a lot of people with this series. Um, but I do believe that it's accurate and that the substantial foundation of all the things I'm saying is just very much true.

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Next up is the book of Hebrews. I'm going to have a little break because I have some little secret projects I got to work on. I'll tell you guys about later, but, um, next up is the book of Hebrews, verse by verse. I cannot wait to do that. I'm so glad to be done with the women in ministry series. It has taken me way too long. Health issues made it take much longer than would if otherwise. And may God be glorified in it. But I like to just close this thing out in prayer. Thank you guys for joining me. If you've been here for the whole journey, maybe put in the comments. I just want to know, like, I watched it all. Just maybe put that in there. M all right. Father, we thank you so much for your creation.

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You've made us like, the nature of our existence is that you've designed us. You have intentionally put into everything, into our very nature's, um, design and purpose and complementarity, and it's there help, um, us to see the beauty of it. Help your church to be reminded of what it has in many ways known for 2000 years and recently forgotten. The differences between men and women are good and wonderful and beautiful and to be preserved by your own command. They're creational and they're not just a curse of the fall to be reversed. These are things that you want. We pray, Lord, based on the clarity of your word, that we who are aware of it would be able to be good examples of those who walk in godliness and holiness in broken, difficult circumstances, but in a way that honors your word. And we pray that there would be a reversal of the trend that's going on right now, at least in the western churches, uh, to just sort of follow culture wherever it goes. We pray that, um, this issue that started in Genesis one and two and three, that we would preserve it now in these days that we're in at the moment, that we would preserve it as a church. Our churches would wake up, that more and more churches would get bold, would lose their fear of culture or their worries about other things and their misconceptions about gender, and get back to what scripture says. We pray that this series would be a blessing and help others do that, but also that there would just be more people rising up, holding firm, but not putting the fence out too far. Give us wisdom. Help us to just honor you, to honor each other in Jesus name, amen.