Mark Clark [00:00:00]:
Hey, you're listening to the Mark Clark podcast. Hopefully you are having a good day. Today we are delving into one of the most debated topics in Christian history. Yes, the question of women. Can women actually be pastors and preachers in the church? We asked the Internet, what are the top questions that you would ever want a Christian to answer for you? And this was the second most voted on topic out of all the topics that people wanted to know about. Thousands and thousands of votes. And so we are tackling it in depth today on the podcast. So remember this, the way that other people can hear about what we talk about on this podcast every week is for you to review the podcast, subscribe to the podcast.
Mark Clark [00:00:42]:
So jump on, do a quick review, say, hey, this great. It's helpful. Share it with friends so that more people hear the message of everything we're exploring on this pod. And remember that this podcast is actually part of the Thrive Podcast network. It's a network of awesome podcasts. Marriage stuff, culture stuff. There's a lot of great stuff going on. So check those out over there.
Mark Clark [00:01:02]:
Now, here's the question. Can there's been this long history, there's some Bible verses that talk about women not speaking in church, women not being able to preach and teach and have authority. What is that all about? How are we supposed to interpret that issue? And there's been many sides and many heated debates and arguments. Well, today we settle the debate once and for all, y'all. No, we probably won't, but I speak into it and do some exegesis, do some philosophical stuff, do some cultural stuff, and really try to share personally where I have been with the journey of this question. So hopefully it's helpful to you and share it. If it is, God bless you. And hopefully this helps you.
Mark Clark [00:01:41]:
Let's jump into this. This is the fourth week and the second most voted on question about women in ministry. Let's get into it. Today we're hitting a question that has been debated many, many times. And there's all kinds of different views on it. So I'm gonna do my best to answer this question, kind of hone in on what we as a church have come to believe about this, which has been a bit of progress the last 10 years, which tends to be the way questions like this get answered. Because as Augustine said, in essentials you have unity, but in non essentials, you have liberty. And in all things there is to be charity.
Mark Clark [00:02:22]:
And so when you have essential questions like the divinity of Jesus, whether Jesus really rose from the dead, whether the Bible's true. You have unity across church. That's what church means. It means that we're all together on this theologically. But then there's non essential issues. Issues like when are the end times going to happen? Your position on women in leadership, all of these kind of things. And those are non essential issues. They're not things that define salvation.
Mark Clark [00:02:48]:
And in those there is to be liberty. The history of the church is, is people who have disagreed about things, all kinds of disagreements about things, but they remain the church. And then in all things, charity, meaning that we are to love one another, we are to respect one another. And so with that spirit, we come in to answer this question specifically about women in as pastors and teaching and preaching. And let me start by just saying for some of you, why this is even a question. Because if you're new to church and you're a skeptic or whatever, you might go, well, I don't understand this. Why is this even a thing? Why would the church even be talking about this? Let's move on to the next question. Well, here's why.
Mark Clark [00:03:33]:
There's two passages in the Bible that have created this question. First Timothy, chapter two says this. Let a woman learn quietly. Amen. All right, can I. And with all submissiveness. All right, that one too. Come on, ladies.
Mark Clark [00:03:53]:
All right. Paul says, I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority. Now this, this word is going to be important as we go forward. Authority. I told my wife not to come to this sermon, by the way, so she's, she thinks it's a different time. I got her busy. All right, Exercise authority over a man. Rather she is to remain quiet.
Mark Clark [00:04:18]:
Okay, so that's one of the passages throughout history that men have been afraid to put on their fridges for fear of a dry month. All right, so, okay, here's the other passage. There are two major ones. The first one is first Timothy 2. The second one is first Corinthians 14. Here's what Paul says in verse 34. The women should keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission. As the law also says, if there is anything they desire to learn, they ask.
Mark Clark [00:05:03]:
Let them ask their husbands at home for the shameful for a woman to speak in church. All right, so pretty clear. But we don't do this. You know, you ladies, you didn't come in and get a muzzle on your way in here, right? You're not, you're allowed to speak in church. This isn't how we function. So what do you do when the Bible in these two passages seems to be saying, you're not allowed to speak, let alone be a pastor or a teacher or a preacher in any. So what do we do with this question? Well, the first thing to understand is that as Christians, we fall under the Bible as an authority. So he has approached this question.
Mark Clark [00:05:50]:
It's not as simple as saying, well, the culture believes this, ergo you should believe something. And that's a good thing. And the reason it's a good thing is because throughout history, the church has been able to play a prophetic voice toward things that culturally were a mess. In Europe, they supported slavery so they could get cheap sugar, African slavery. And it was the church that said, you know what? The culture believes something. But the Bible tells us that human beings are made in the image of God and there's full equality, and so we shouldn't have slaves. It was William Wilberforce literally in the the house, making that debate based on the Scriptures and saying we shouldn't believe what the culture believes about a thing. My friend right now is running in the marathon in Berlin, and she just texted me.
Mark Clark [00:06:40]:
Her and her husband went to a church in Berlin, and it was pastored by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And of course, Bonhoeffer preached in the middle of the rise of Nazi Germany. And he spoke against the cultural norms and said, just because the culture believes Jews are bad and that Nazism is right doesn't mean the church should believe that, because we fall into the Scriptures and the Scriptures don't believe that. And so we look to the Bible and we say, what does it say about a particular issue? We don't necessarily look to the culture that we live in. That is our main framework, or what's called a hermeneutic, a frame, a lens through which we decide epistemologically what we believe about a certain thing, reality, God, whatever. And so the Bible is the authority. So when it comes to this question, it's a question of what does the Bible say? And deeper still, what does it mean? Because sometimes it may not mean what it seems that it is saying. And a good example of that is this very question.
Mark Clark [00:07:41]:
Even over the last year and a half, I've come to see what I thought the Bible was saying about this particular issue, that it might not actually be saying that. And so we as a church don't want to ever out Bible the Bible. We don't want to believe something that the Bible's not leading us to believe. And so we've changed or evolved on this question over the last 10 years to align more with what we think is a biblical view, which is good, because the church, when it pushed against the Catholic Church back in the 15, 1600s, the premise was that the church now, in its protest, the Protestant arm, which is what we are, you protest. They protest against the Martin Luther and Calvin and Zwingli. And then there was this arm of Christianity that came out, and one of the mottos is reformed and always reforming. You're constantly reforming and trying to figure out what is the most biblical. How do we be as faithful to the Bible? And then aside from that, how do we methodologically do ministry? How do we miss the logically be the church in a particular culture, in a particular place? The church often looks different in sub Saharan Africa than it does in China, than it does in the United States, than it does in Canada.
Mark Clark [00:08:51]:
Why is that? Is that a Bible issue, or is it a missiological issue, or is it a methodological issue? There's all kinds of categories. Is it an ecclesiological, the way you structure and govern your church, Is it that issue? And then how does that play out in a particular culture given certain parameters or certain scenarios? Of course, as we talked about when we were Corinthians series, you have women being told not to cut their hair short. But of course, you go to any African country and all the women have their hair shaved because of health reasons, the way their health hair grows and so on. And so are they not being biblical? What does that mean? And so there's all kinds of examples of this where we have to be. We have to be diligent to try to figure out how do we actually remain faithful to the Bible, not the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law. And that's what we've come to see, that there is a history that we came from that had one view, which in the view was male pastors and male elders. Only male, because elders are men. In the New Testament, according to 1 Timothy, Chapter 3, Titus, Chapter 1, it's pretty clear, but we had thought, and because we worked through this, that pastor and elder were synonymous, that they were the same thing, that pastor meant elder and elder meant pastor.
Mark Clark [00:09:59]:
What we began to do is about a year and a half ago, I was reading through Ephesians 4, and I began to realize that maybe that position was somewhat unbiblical. And so I want to take you through a couple of ideas, some supportive texts and problem texts for women as pastors, and show why we landed. But the short answer to this question about women as pastors is yes, on all accounts. And you don't have to agree with me, that's okay to be wrong once in a while for yourself. So Ephesians chapter 4, verse 12. Let me work through some of the. Some of the texts that I was working through and realizing that I needed to adapt some things. And so Ephesians chapter 4, verse 11.
Mark Clark [00:10:37]:
Here is Paul explaining the gifts that God has given the church in every culture across the board and saying, here's how missiologically the church is to do its work of evangelism. How are you going to plant a church in Corinth, Thessalonica and Philippi and Vancouver and Toronto and Montreal and Ottawa and Winnipeg and Calgary and Coquitlam and Abbotsford and Chilliwack or Yarrow or whatever. How are you going to do that? How are you going to do that? Well, I've given you a structure. God says in Ephesians chapter four, I've given you a certain people in certain roles in order to accomplish your missiological task in the world. And so he lists them. He gave apostles. And apostles are people who lead networks, they pioneer, they're entrepreneurs, they think about leading big things. They plant churches, they go on, they become global missionaries and so on.
Mark Clark [00:11:34]:
I gave apostles, called out ones like the apostle Paul and so on. And then I gave you prophets, people who speak prophetically into a particular culture. And then I gave you the evangelists. They're people who recruit people to Jesus. They're people who actually see people come to faith in Christ. And then he says, I gave you the shepherds and teachers. And this word shepherd is the word poimein. And here's the reality about poimain.
Mark Clark [00:12:05]:
That's an E, by the way. This is why my wife home schools and I don't. All right, so this is the word poimine, the word shepherd. Now, here's what's really important to understand. First off, that the word poimine is different than the words in the New Testament for the word elder. The word elder has two words, presbyter, us, where we get the word Presbyterian, and Episcopal, where you get the word Episcopal. And both those words are elders. And they seem to be, from what I can tell, supposed to be the male leadership of the church based on the concept of male headship in the home.
Mark Clark [00:12:42]:
That according to Ephesians chapter five, which is just after the thing we're reading, it says, for the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church. So the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body and himself its savior. So it's this idea of leadership in the home that in the end, Even if it's 51% to 49%, there's some kind of call out on the husband to actually lead his family, protect his family, provide for his family. Because at the end of the day, you need a leader for something as important, important as the home. And so here's Paul. He's saying it's not supposed to be an authoritative leadership. It's not supposed to be totalitarian. It's none of that.
Mark Clark [00:13:22]:
It's a calling out. And what I love about this and what our heartbeat is, a church, is to call out young men, to call out older men, to call out men. I'm beginning to realize I'm not a young man anymore, all right? I'm almost 40, which means I'm basically dead, all right? And what I've begun to realize is men my age need to be called out for their crap, because men my age are sitting around smoking weed, eating gummies, going to the strip joint, bunch of losers. And the Bible goes, you're supposed to lead your family. We have a whole generation of young men who sit at home and knock off looking at porn and watch Wedding Crashers and really hope to marry a good woman one day who has a great job so he can sit around with his buddies and play Halo. Losers. And the Bible goes, it's really easy to just sleep around, do drugs, have no responsibility in your life and be a loser. But you're supposed to be the head of your wife.
Mark Clark [00:14:28]:
So figure your life out. Get a job, get a Bible, love Jesus, put your pants on, work hard, be a leader. Don't just mail it in in life, be progressing and protecting and providing. That's a beautiful call of the church to a culture that doesn't care and will leave you alone and will just let you be what you are. And the church comes about and says, I got a bigger vision for your life, guys. And so this is literally that now the construct of the church becomes a gathering of families where you have this male headship idea retained at an elder level, but the question is at the pastoral level in Ephesians 4, here's what you don't have. You don't have in this word shepherd or Pastor Poimane. You don't have any indicator of gender at all anywhere in the context.
Mark Clark [00:15:23]:
This is men and women. And this is what struck me as I'm reading through my Bible. Paul is giving the gifts that Jesus has given to the church in the world to accomplish its mission. And he says that he gave all these roles, and he doesn't say, okay, now hold on now. This one pastor is. Is only male. And that started to bug me. And I was like, why? Because he's saying, have you met women who are good at any of this stuff? I'm asking.
Mark Clark [00:15:55]:
You're like, I'm scared to answer this. All right, no, yes, of course. My gosh. My wife's a better pastor than me, right? She's the brain. She's the heart. This week we had our. I was away at a staff retreat, and our friend was taking care of our other friend, who has four kids, which is just one too many. You realize that when you get the 4th, everyone stops calling.
Mark Clark [00:16:25]:
All right, you start. No one hangs out with you. And you have four kids. Three kids. It's doable. Four kids. It's like, all right, we'll see you in 20 years. So.
Mark Clark [00:16:33]:
Tends to be what happens. Sorry. Abbotsford family that I met the other day with seven boys. How's that for cliche? All right. Nothing to do in Abbotsford but play Settlers of Catan and have a bunch of kids. So. So four kids. And this girl that we know is babysitting them, and she gets hives.
Mark Clark [00:16:56]:
She breaks out in hives all over her body. And what does my wife do? Drops everything. And now takes care of seven kids for days on a. Seven kids up early, 3 o'clock. Taking care of the girl with the hives, bringing her medicine. Because my wife is a Christian, all right? She's a shepherd. She loves people and she leads and communicates, and she's a poi main man. She's a caretaker.
Mark Clark [00:17:24]:
She's a leader. She's a lover. All right? I called my wife. I'm like, let that girl go. She's got her own problems. Stay away from the hives. Don't go near the hives. I don't want you to get hives.
Mark Clark [00:17:35]:
I don't want me to get hives. Stay in the house. Let that girl figure it out. And those other four kids, they probably got hives now, so stay away from them, too. And I show up, and this little kid is, like, crying that his mom's away and he's hugging my wife. I'm like, oh, my gosh. You gotta put a garbage bag on. You'll be walking with a hazmat suit, right? Because they're kids, they got disease.
Mark Clark [00:17:58]:
Point being, I'm not a great shepherd. I mean, I love you, but you bug me, to be honest. All right? You bother me with all your nonsense all the time. Or I just. I'm just like, ah. Because I'm more this, right? I'm an apostolic, like, strategy. I'm flock focused versus sheep focused, all right? That tends to be. I'm kind of thinking up here.
Mark Clark [00:18:25]:
And so you. You're a person and I love you and you're great, but I struggle to remember your name. And I do my best. I try to figure it out, but oftentimes times, like, hello, good to meet you, I'm. And then as you're saying your name, I'm like, delete, right? Because I only have so much space in my brain. I can't. I can't remember. Brian.
Mark Clark [00:18:45]:
I do my best and I play little word games. I'm like, brian. Brian looks like the guy off Breaking Bad. He's got a bald head. His name's Brian. But then I see another bald guy and it's over. All right? So the point is. The point is I'm bad at this, all right? I'm not great at this, but my wife is amazing.
Mark Clark [00:19:08]:
And the point of Paul, he's saying, look, I've given all of these gifts to the church. And he doesn't stop and give a footnote and say, now, some of these are only men. That's my point. And that stood out to me biblically as a thing that I had to wrestle through and figure out. So then another text was Acts, chapter two. So in Acts, chapter two, here's Peter. He gets up in his sermon, the Holy Spirit has just fallen for the first time in the church. And Peter gets up to preach, and he quotes Joel, chapter two, which was a prophet from hundreds and hundreds of years before Pentecost, the day the Holy Spirit dropped.
Mark Clark [00:19:45]:
And Peter says this, in the last days it shall be. God declares that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh, flesh. And your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. This is Peter's. This is the sermon that started the church. This was the beginning of the church in the world. Even on my own, my male servants and my female servants, in those days, I will pour out my spirit and they shall prophesy. Right from the beginning of the church, you have this idea that God is going to pour out his spirit evangelistically, missiologically, from a leadership level, from a prophecy level, on both men and women together, and not Just reserve it for men.
Mark Clark [00:20:32]:
And so we start to understand the Bible starts laying out this idea that even if there's different roles in the home, for instance, those roles are just roles. They're not a matter of equality, quality, or essence or value in any way. In the same way that Jesus isn't the Father, he's different than the Father. He has different role in the Father, but in his essence is equal with the Father. He's not less than, because he needs to submit to an idea or come and incarnate himself and die for sin and so on. And the Father doesn't. It's different. And so the pastoral role is the on the ground, tactical leadership of the church, leading teaching, doing ministry.
Mark Clark [00:21:10]:
And that I began to see. There's no gender distinction. Ephesians 4. That's a role women are already doing in the world on staff in an amazing way. And it's biblical. So another text, First Corinthians, chapter 11, verse 5. But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head. Remember, we already did this in the master class, since it's the same as if her head were shaven.
Mark Clark [00:21:38]:
So he's doing a cultural reference here. So it's not something that comes into our modern culture. And that's part of the hermeneutical thing is you got to sift through when's he talking culturally about a scenario. But here he lays out something very important. He says every woman who prays or prophesies. And so what he's saying is literally in the gathering of the church, in First Corinthians, chapter 11. See, in First Corinthians 4:14, which is the one I read at the beginning, he says women can't speak in church. That's chapter 14, verse 34, 35.
Mark Clark [00:22:10]:
And this is what I meant by trying to make a distinction between what it says and what it means. It can't mean that women can't speak in church, because he's already said three chapters earlier that they can pray and prophesy in church. In the gathering, they just got to make sure they have a head cover on to show the world that they're married and all. So. So cultural reference. But he's saying they can already pray. They can already prophesy publicly in the gathered church. Galatians, chapter three.
Mark Clark [00:22:36]:
There is neither Jew nor Greek. This is the climax of Paul's argument about salvation. There is neither slave nor free. There is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Now, a feminist Hermeneutic on this uses this verse as the most important verse that says, therefore there's no distinction in role. There's no distinction in anything. Everybody's the same in essence and everything. But I don't think that's real.
Mark Clark [00:23:02]:
I don't think the male and female point is the major point Paul is trying to make in Galatians chapter three. I think it's important. I don't think it's the ma. He's dealing with Jew and Greek that's his main issue. And he's trying to give different social constructs. But his point here is that the cross eliminates the sociological hierarchies that destroy women. And now you have male and female as one. In the context of the Church, in the context of this subversive community of people alternative to the world, you have this beautiful dissolving from the social, cultural authority structures.
Mark Clark [00:23:39]:
Romans chapter 16 was another one. In Romans 16, Paul's laying out all the people. He's saying, here's all the people who've helped me in my life. Says, I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a servant of the church at San, that you may welcome her in the Lord in a way worthy of the saints. So, you know, everybody talks about the idea that Romans is the greatest letter in the history of the Church. Romans is the doctrine. Romans is the greatest single document ever written in the history of the Church, is why I wrote my thesis on it. I was like, well, no point in going for the.
Mark Clark [00:24:13]:
Let's just go for the highest thing and give myself the most work. And then I chased footnotes for four years in a library, which I love, by the way, because I'm not a poi main. So I like footnotes because they don't cheat on their wives, they don't go to the strip joint, they don't gossip, and they don't write me dumb emails. So I like footnotes more than people praise God. Okay, so point being, you have Romans and it's written to the Church. And he writes these 16 brilliant chapters which people say, if Paul didn't, you know, found so much theology of the Church in the first century, he'd be famous anyway. We would know who he was because he was so good at writing and philosophy. Philosophy and theology.
Mark Clark [00:24:54]:
And he gives the letter of Romans to Phoebe, and she takes it as an emissary to Rome and reads it to them and hands it to them. He gives it to a woman, which in that culture would have been crazy. And the point is, is you go through Paul's whole ministry, and it's often funded by women. And women are surrounding him, helping him to preach and teach and lead. Talk about that, that you may welcome her in the Lord away way worthy of the saints and help her in whatever she may need from you. For she has been a patron of many and of myself as well. You know what that means. She's got the money and she's funding me, and she's funding the mission of the church, and she's a leader.
Mark Clark [00:25:42]:
And then he goes on in the Rest of Romans 16, this is the last chapter in Romans, greet Prissa and Aquila, my fellow workers in Christ Jesus, who risked their necks for my life, to whom not only I give thanks, but all the churches of the Gentiles give thanks as well. And he goes on to, in chapter verse 7 of chapter 16 to name Unia, which many argue. He then calls her an apostle. And so here you have patrons, you have apostles, you have leaders preaching and teaching and founding churches that are women. Now, what do you do? Of course, you have Lydia and Philippi. Now come back to these problem texts. What do you do with these? You have all this trajectory of saying, okay, this is the way it is. Women lead.
Mark Clark [00:26:30]:
Women are preaching and teaching in the churches. The idea. Talk about Timothy. Paul later writes to Timothy that your mother and your grandmother actually are the ones who gave you the faith and trained you up. Timothy. So what do you do with these two problem passages? I have 13 things to do with them. You ready? All right. Some of you are like, my gosh, can we talk about aliens? All right, we're getting there.
Mark Clark [00:26:55]:
All right, all right, here we go. I'm going to fire through those, these 13 things, and then I'll pray for us. First, here's these. Both these problem texts let a woman learn quietly with all submissive. I do not permit her to teach exercise authority over man. Rather, she's to remain quiet. And then later, one he says she can't talk in church. Okay, what do you do with these 13 things? First, for those of you taking notes, he doesn't say this or anything like it in any of his other letters.
Mark Clark [00:27:22]:
So the AAPostle Paul wrote 13 letters. He never says anything like this in any of the 11. You have 1 Timothy 3, you have 1 Corinthians, chapter 14. So what's the point? Well, he's probably, then we can deduce addressing it's very important, a specific situation in Ephesus where he writes to Timothy, and in Corinth, in those two cities, he's addressing a particular situation, a cultural scenario. Because in the other letters, we don't have anything like this. In fact, In Colossians chapter 3, verse 15, Paul contends that the whole form and practice of the gathered church. Listen to Colossians 3:15. Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns and songs from the Spirit singing to God with gratitude in your heart.
Mark Clark [00:28:16]:
That happens. There's no gender there. It's your to teach and admonish one another. Have you ever learned anything spiritual from a woman in that context? Yes, we admonish one another. There's equality in the room, all of that. Secondly, the church situation in both of these places. In fact, most of the churches that Paul planted was that they were separated by gender. And so the way you would set up is you would have males on one side and you'd have females on the other.
Mark Clark [00:28:48]:
And then you'd come into the church and a guy would be speaking or preaching, whatever. And the women who were not educated at all wouldn't know what's going on. And so they would start to yell at their husbands. Now, some of you are like, man, I wish church was kind of still like this. I get to hang with my girls. I don't have to hang with this guy all the time. You know? Hey, what did he say? What did that mean? Just shut up, fool. All right, so some of you would kind of maybe rather that.
Mark Clark [00:29:15]:
But that's the way it was. And so the women would be on one side, and they wouldn't know stuff. So they'd be. They'd be firing over. They'd be, greg. What does that mean, Greg? I'm not sure there was many Gregs. I'm just Greg. And then Greg would be like, well, Phoebe, what he means is.
Mark Clark [00:29:34]:
And then Sarah will be like, what? Hey, David. David, What? And there'd be chaos, which is why in 1 Corinthians 11 to 14. Go back and read it for yourself. His constant theme is, there's chaos, and everybody needs to be calm. There needs to be order in the context of the gathering. There needs to be order in the context of worship, because there's chaos. And one of the reasons there's chaos is because the women are asking their husbands questions. Right there, right then yelling, what does that mean? What does this mean? Yada, yada, yada.
Mark Clark [00:30:04]:
It's like watching a movie with my wife. All right? We try to watch Inception. And she's like, well, what layer are we on now? I'm like, just enjoy the movie. I have no idea. All right, so it's like that, it's. He's saying, everyone stop screaming during church. If you got a question for your husband, ask him later. Right? So in, in that scenario in Ephesus and in court, because here's, here's what you gotta understand about First Timothy.
Mark Clark [00:30:32]:
You gotta understand this hermeneutically. First Timothy is literally written to who? Who do you think First Timothy is written to? Say it out loud, Timothy. Some of you are like, Joey. All right, so First Timothy is written to Timothy. He's a pastor in the city of Ephesus trying to lead a church. Notice it's not written though. Of course, we got a hold of it and started passing it around the church and reading it because it's beautifully. Doctrinally, he's writing specifically to Timothy about some scenarios that Timothy has written to him about his church in Ephesus.
Mark Clark [00:31:15]:
And he's addressing Timothy. He's not, it's not like Romans where he's laying out a massive theology of the doctrine of the church or Ephesians, which is basically a doctrine of the church that can be passed around to all the churches. He's writing to his friend, to his protege and saying, I hear you're dealing with some stuff in Ephesus. Here's the deal, you got to do this. So he's not necessarily setting up, here's the argument this to be true about every church in every timeline, in every scenario for all of time. Africa, Asia, India, everywhere. He's not saying that. He's saying, Timothy, you've got this scenario where the women are screaming and yelling.
Mark Clark [00:31:52]:
They're also bringing false teaching because culturally speaking, you gotta understand something. And a friend of mine grew up in a church like that, by the way, ethnic church. They still exist where you separate the men from the women. That's just culturally what some cultures actually do. And that was the scenario. Here was the other cultural scenario. In Corinth they had Artemis. In Ephesus they had Artemis worship, fertility goddess.
Mark Clark [00:32:15]:
They would come to her. And what happened in both Corinth and Ephesus is the. The female deities got worshiped and there was almost like a what scholars call an over realized eschatology. Eschatology means what will happen in the end. And they believed that the end had arrived, ergo they didn't need to be married anymore, they didn't even have sex with their husbands anymore, that they were goddesses, that all gender had been dissolved and now they could do whatever they wanted. And they started spreading false teaching because they worshiped a female goddess in both these churches. And the reality is Paul is saying the women need to calm down. The women need to understand it's not the end of the world.
Mark Clark [00:32:53]:
They're not. They're not goddesses who get to, you know, use their authority in a negative way toward their husbands and toward people in general and kind of walk with them. There needs to be humility. Even among women in the church, there needs to. To be humility. You don't get to walk around now because there's now no male, female, like you own the joint and you get to do whatever you want, which is why he hones in here submissive. And they can't exercise authority. This word is the word outain.
Mark Clark [00:33:24]:
And literally it means. It has. Most scholars recognize a negative connotation. It's like. It's like a bad authority. It's actually the only time in the entire New Testament that this word is used, the word authority, meaning. Because every other time, it's Christ having authority over the church, and that's a good thing, but every time it's used of people, it has a kind of a negative connotation. And so what he's saying is maybe this is a description of what's going on in Ephesus to Timothy and Corinth, but not necessarily everywhere else.
Mark Clark [00:33:58]:
Now, for those of you who might, you know, wonder about that, there is precedent for this in Paul. For instance, in First Corinthians, chapter 7, I don't know when last time you read that is. There's a passage that. For married people or single people. For single people. It's a passage that kind of sucks because in First Corinthians 7, you're doing your divos, okay? You got your Bible out, all right? You're sitting there in the morning, it's 8:00 in the morning, you're doing your devotions, you're reading and you got your coffee and you've already taken your instant Instagram shot, all right? So everybody knows and can see you, all right? It's like, hey, here's the. Eight times a year I do my devos. It's beautiful out.
Mark Clark [00:34:33]:
So that's happened. And you're reading First Corinthians 7. And Paul says, I wish you would all be like me. Meaning I wish you would all stay single. I don't want any of you to be married. Now, how many of you go? It's in the Bible, Erico. I shall follow that. None of you.
Mark Clark [00:34:51]:
Why? Paul tells us why? Cause you're all too horny, that's why. That's what he says in First Corinthians, chapter 7. Go read it yourself. He says, man, I wish you guys were more like me, but you lust and burn with passion. So you all get married, but you're weak, because if you didn't get married, you'd have all the time in the world to do mission, to use your money and your time and your energy to reach people for Jesus. But then you get married. He says in First Corinthians 7, 8 says, and you start to care about domestic things, the mortgage, the kids gotta go to school, and they gotta go to horse camp. All right? Sorry, I'm just working on my own stuff.
Mark Clark [00:35:27]:
All right? So they gotta do all this crazy stuff. And he says, man, I wish you'd just stay single. So in that moment, he teaches that everybody should be single. That's the gold standard. Here's the problem. In First Timothy, he writes to the women and says, you better get married. All of you are abandoning your post of marriage. You think all this stuff has happened.
Mark Clark [00:35:53]:
Here's my exhortation to you. Get married. Make sure you get married. Everybody get married. So which is it? Get married or don't get married? The Bible says both. So what do you do? You got to use your brain. You got to enter into the study and go, what was the context of what was going on? What is he trying to say? So there's precedent of this. Fourthly, he says they should learn.
Mark Clark [00:36:22]:
Let a woman learn. I wanted it purple. Oh, there we go. Okay. Learn, learn. That right there is progressive. Because what he's this. In that culture, women didn't learn.
Mark Clark [00:36:42]:
They had babies. It was Handmaid's Tale. All right, they had babies. All right, there's one lady in the crowd. All right, you're tracking with me. We got it. All right, so they had babies. They stayed at home.
Mark Clark [00:36:55]:
That was it. And of course, now they're not. They don't know stuff, so they're yelling at their husbands. And Paul says, you know what a great thing is? I got all. I got Lydia leading churches in Philippi and funding them. I got Phoebe walking around, planting churches and teaching and taking Rome their letter. I got this woman and that woman. I got Prisca.
Mark Clark [00:37:14]:
I got all these things going on. I need the women to learn. That's. Let a woman learn. That's actually super in that culture. Super progressive. I want them to learn, but they got to do it quietly because they're disturbing everybody. But I want them to learn.
Mark Clark [00:37:30]:
It's beautiful because Jesus was the one who wanted to set a trajectory of people who were marginalized to progress. It's the church that did that all through history. It's the church that took the people who were behind socially and set them up for success. Jesus is the one who hung out with the marginalized, hung out with the sick and the poor and the deaf and the blind and the paralyzed. All these people were left behind. Jesus, the one who sets them free, sets them on a new trajectory. The church has always done that since the first century. Fifth, if a person wants to interpret this as an absolute, here's what they have to understand.
Mark Clark [00:38:12]:
In First Timothy, there is no real context of the gathering of the church, just talking about a woman learning quietly and being submissive in general. He's not saying when the church is gathered. The problem with that is, therefore, then you have to say this just applies to life in general. It means there should be no woman police officers, no woman presidents of companies or institutions, universities, countries, whatever, because in general, women should submit to men. But of course, we don't actually think that. Or if you do, you're very quiet about it. Number six, the thing about this text, let a woman. I talked about this First Corinthians, so I'm not going to deal with it too much.
Mark Clark [00:38:53]:
Let a woman learn quietly, so on. This could also be the word wife doesn't necessarily have to be woman and the man over a man. This is the word husband. See, in Greek, they're the same word husband and man, wife and woman. They're the same. So he may be simply talking about the home context and saying a wife should not have authority over the context of her husband. It's very interesting in that context, if you interpret it that way, that he says a man singular. He doesn't say over men in general.
Mark Clark [00:39:25]:
He says over a man. And in the Greek, it's singular over a specific singular man. And of course, when he uses Adam and Eve later in the text, he talks about Eve was deceived, and so on. They are also the paradigmatic married couple. They're not just a paradigmatic male and female. It's important. Number seven, he could be using an analogy later when he talks about Adam and Eve to make a point about the situation in Ephesus or Corinth that isn't to be pressed to apply to all people. There are times when Paul will use because oftentimes the debate is, well, he.
Mark Clark [00:40:01]:
He doesn't root it in a cultural scenario. He roots it in the Bible. And he says that a man should lead a woman in the church because Adam was made first and so on, which is what he goes on to argue. But what's important about that isn't so much. Sometimes Paul will use a biblical passage and he'll. He'll use it to support something, but it's to support that specific point he's trying to make. He's like, hey, you should be faithful to God. You know, like Moses was faithful to God.
Mark Clark [00:40:29]:
But it doesn't mean that every single point about that thing needs to be applied to every scenario in all time, in every context. He's just using a Bible passage to use an example, to make his point to those specific people, not necessarily saying it's applies to everyone all the time. Number eight, as we talked about, the word authority is used once and usually negative. The other thing about it is, I think sometimes what we do is we read, I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over man. This right here. And we infer the opposite, which isn't what he says. We infer that a man should exercise authority over a woman, but he doesn't say that. He just says, in your context, when women are exercising totalitarian authority in a negative way over the men in the church, chill, don't do that.
Mark Clark [00:41:17]:
He doesn't then say, and by the way, all the men should do so, which is important. Number 10. All available evidence is that women played active roles in preaching and teaching and prophecy in the early Pauline communities. You have Phoebe, you have Prisca, you have Unia, you have Udea and Syntyche. Number 11. The context of a couple of these passages is rather confusing. First Corinthians 14 seems to be contradicting what he said in 11, but he's not. If he's addressing that particular scenario.
Mark Clark [00:41:47]:
The women are spreading false ideas and false teaching and kicking against authority, which is why he comes up with both of these ideas. Number 12, to the question of preaching specifically, which is part of the question that the Internet asked. So Internet modern preaching. So of course women preach and teach in the church. They pray, they prophesy. That's his point in chapter 11, verse 5. That's his point when he's planting all these communities. That's the point of Acts, Chapter two.
Mark Clark [00:42:17]:
The women will prophesy, the female servants will prophesy the. The point. And so he lays that down. But the question of modern preaching, people raise that question as if it's the epitome. What we got to understand is in the New Testament, there Wasn't really any thing like a modern sermon. That's why Paul's like, hey, make sure if you're an elder you can teach. Because the idea of some qualified person who goes away and studies for eight years of their life and gets a Bible degree and then gets up on Sunday and sits under lights and exegetes some planned out sermon and insert funny story here. And let me make eight points that all start with the letter S and then tie it up with a bow and a poem at the end.
Mark Clark [00:42:54]:
You know, all of that, that's like a modern expression of preaching. That wasn't a thing in the New Testament. So saying that a person can or can't do this as a man or a woman is kind of irrelevant to the point, because that wasn't a thing. It's not how they functioned. This what we do, this is a modern construct of what we do that some people have critiqued and said the church needs to be more looking at each other and so on. Number 13. And lastly, the overall vision of Paul in the New Testament is men and women sharing leadership ministry. And these are only two passages in the New Testament that seem to push against it which are exegetically, theologically complex and linguistically difficult.
Mark Clark [00:43:32]:
So in the end, as my mentor Larry Osborne says, you have a couple of obscure passages that have good explanations about being cultural moments. So before the Lord, we do our best with anything like this and we say this is the best we could do and the best we could interpret. Now let me end this way and then I'll pray for us. The church does two things that Jesus did with this question. First, it agrees with the feminist spirit in the sense that women are equal partners in life and ministry. But it disagrees with it in its political aspirations and its bottom line assumption that men are bad. We disagree with that. We don't think men are fundamentally bad.
Mark Clark [00:44:16]:
I remember giving a book that I'd read called Every Man's Battle, if you've ever read that book. It's a book about men struggling with lust. Opens with a guy driving his Mercedes. And he sees this girl jogging by, you know, in her little skimpy jogging outfit. And the guy's like, marnie, cranks his neck around and crashes his new Mercedes. And he's got to explain it to his wife. And so I gave this book to a guy who would come to me. He's like, I'm struggling with this.
Mark Clark [00:44:41]:
So I give it to him and he said it was actually our buddy who gave it to him, but he told Me that he did. He puts it on his, you know, his bedtime. His bed stand beside his bed and his wife, he was out. His wife read it and she sifted through it and read it. And by the time he got home, she was standing there like this. You're. You sicken me. Do you believe this stuff? He's like, no, no, I was just helping a buddy out.
Mark Clark [00:45:03]:
I don't know what you're talking about. She's like, who gave you this? And he's like, oh, Dave did. And she's like, we ain't hanging out with Dave anymore. I'll tell you that Dave's a creep because there's this sense that men are bad, that men are terrible, flawed. And so we need to rebel and we need to make everybody equal and we need to do all this stuff. We don't believe that. We, we think that's an idol in the culture. Jesus would push against that and say, we want to make good men because good men are going to be good for women and children and society in general.
Mark Clark [00:45:35]:
We believe as a church, you win the man, you win the war. Missiologically. So here's the thing. We believe all this stuff about women. Of course it's beautiful and it's biblical, but here's why we would ever even shift to an idea like this. It's not out of fear, because some cultural pressure. See, I talk to churches all the time and I can tell in the leaders eyes that the reason they make these kind of evolutions is because they're afraid. They're afraid of what the culture is going to say to them.
Mark Clark [00:46:06]:
They're afraid of getting a nasty email. They're afraid because the women in their church are complaining about stuff. And so they, they crumple under fear. We will never do that. That's not why we do stuff. That's not why we make decisions. I asked every great leader I know who functions like this, I said, I'm exploring two years, I'm exploring this. I want to know what it's about.
Mark Clark [00:46:32]:
Help me. Send me anything you have in regard to your study and your exegesis and your theological convictions about this that I can read so I can understand it. You know what all of them did, men and women together, they laughed and said, sorry, I got nothing. We just do it. And I wasn't laughing. I said, so why do you do it? And they're like, oh, fear. The women are complaining. I don't know what to do.
Mark Clark [00:46:59]:
The culture has changed. Let's do this. You don't have any Bible verse? Nah. Click. So I had to go away with my Greek New Testament and sip my candle light like Martin Luther and figure it out. What about this? What's the Greek say? What about that? I was all of it. So we could have conviction and understand hermeneutically, theologically, exegetically, biblically why we do certain things. The beautiful part about it is you look all around the world, we love it.
Mark Clark [00:47:32]:
Because strategically, you know, in Iran right now it's one of the fastest. I don't know if many of you read this article. One of the fastest moves of the church in history is happening right now in Iran of all places, because the Ayatollahs made Islam state law. And after 50 years, it's proved wanting and the mosques are emptying and people are coming to know Jesus. Mostly run, by the way, by women church planters. And it's the same thing in China because it has to be the women. Because the one thing women do is step up when the men do nothing. Right.
Mark Clark [00:48:15]:
You better be clapping at that husband. That's right. That's right. She steps up, but I'm do nothing. And that's why we want to retain the understanding of the family as well. To call you to actually not do nothing, to do something. This isn't out of fear or pressure. Our church has grown significantly every single year since we started 10 years ago.
Mark Clark [00:48:44]:
This is about understanding how to be biblical because we fear God way more than we fear having a small church. And I'm not gonna take less of an amazing eternity so that you like me for the next 40 years. I don't care. I'm an apostle. I don't care. If I was a pastor, I'd totally care. Like, ah, I'd sit in the room and like twist my hair. I'm like, ah, that person sent me an email.
Mark Clark [00:49:11]:
You can send me an email. I probably won't even get it. We saw that it made sense biblically. We love women, we think you're powerful, we see your value and we're excited about the future. Father in heaven, let us always be humbly learning from you how to be better, how to be full of grace and truth at every moment. Thank you. That in the cross, the issue for both men and women isn't what we believe about any of this stuff as women. It's about humbling themselves, the fact that they're sinful and flawed.
Mark Clark [00:49:56]:
Sometimes they only think that maybe about the men around them because it's buried or expresses itself a little deeper. Let the women hear that they are sinful and in need of the grace of Jesus in their life. Let the men hear that they are sinful and in the need of the grace of Jesus. Because the power of the cross and the power of the resurrection, you save us and set us on a mission. So now we're trying to organize it right with the time that we've been given so that as many people come to know you as possible, that we would glorify you and serve people well. Give us your grace in this. In Jesus great name we pray. Amen.