The Back Room - What We Have Done to Our Sisters

For most of my Christian life I have stood in rooms where half the body was silent. I did not call it that. Nobody did. We called it good order. We called it biblical. We called it preserving Paul's command in 1 Timothy 2:12. And I held that command then and I hold it now. Paul said what he said. He grounded it in creation. I am not the man to overturn the apostle.

But the command Paul gave is narrow. The silence we built is wide. And the difference between the two is the size of the wound that the church has put on its sisters for the last several centuries.

I have to write this. I have spent twenty five years in sovereign grace circles. I have watched the same patterns play out in a thousand small ways. I have watched women carry the weight of the body while the men argued about doctrine. I have watched women hold the broken people in the room while the men handed them five points on a sermon outline. I have watched the apparatus quietly relegate the gift of tenderness to the children's wing, the kitchen, and the back row of the church building. And I have to say it out loud now, because I am tired of pretending the apparatus is biblical when the wound it produces is the opposite of biblical.

What We Have Actually Done

Look at what most sovereign grace churches actually do with women. Not what we say we do. What we do.

We tell them they cannot teach men, which is what Paul said. So far so good. But then we keep going. We tell them they cannot share a word of encouragement in the assembly. We tell them they cannot pray out loud when men are in the room.  Only the pastor has that authority and anyone he decides to delegate it to.  We tell them they cannot tell the body what God has done in their lives, because that might constitute teaching. We tell them not to ask questions during the sermon, even though the early church Bereans were commended for searching the Scriptures "whether those things were so" (Acts 17:11). We move the woman with the gift of mercy to the children's classroom because it is the only room where her voice is permitted. We give the woman with the gift of exhortation a casserole to bring to the potluck. We thank the woman with the gift of wisdom for keeping the kitchen running, and then we sit in the pew and wonder why the women in our churches seem tired.

I have watched it. I have participated in it. I have benefited from it. I have stood in the room where my own wife sat silent because the room would not expect her to speak, and I have only recently begun to understand the cost of that silence. Not just the cost to her, though the cost to her was real. The cost to the body, to all the men and the women. We have been operating with half the gifts the Spirit gave us, and we have called the operation biblical. 

It is not biblical. It is industrial. The one-man pulpit, which I have written about elsewhere, is the apparatus that produced this. The pulpit creates a structural binary. There is one place to speak from. Either the woman stands behind it (egalitarian) or she does not (complementarian). Both sides of the modern debate have accepted this binary as the question. And both sides are wrong about the structure that produced the binary. The pulpit was not in the New Testament. The binary it forces was not in the New Testament. Paul never imagined a single pulpit dominating the assembly. The body Paul described in 1 Corinthians 14 looked nothing like what we have built.

What Paul Actually Said

Paul's restriction is narrow. It is also clear. "But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence" (1 Timothy 2:12). Authoritative teaching of men in the assembly. Governance authority over men. Those are the two things Paul restricts. He grounds the restriction in creation, not culture. "For Adam was first formed, then Eve" (1 Timothy 2:13). The principle is binding because the order of creation is binding. I accept that. I will not pretend Paul did not say it.

But Paul said one thing. We built ten things on top of it.

Paul did not say a woman cannot pray in the assembly. In fact, Paul assumed she would. "But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head" (1 Corinthians 11:5). Paul is in the middle of giving instructions about HOW women pray and prophesy in the assembly. The praying and the prophesying are assumed. He is regulating the manner, not forbidding the act. If Paul thought women should be silent in every register, he would not have spent ink on how their heads should be covered while they spoke. The silence in 1 Timothy 2:12 is the silence of authoritative teaching, not the silence of total muteness.

Paul did not say a woman cannot share what God has done in her life. The whole New Testament is full of women whose voices the Spirit honored. Mary's magnificat was the first sermon of the New Covenant era, and it was preached by a woman to her cousin in a kitchen (Luke 1:46-55). The woman at the well went into the city and told the men "Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did" (John 4:29), and many of the Samaritans believed because of her testimony. Mary Magdalene was the first preacher of the resurrection. Christ told her "go to my brethren, and say unto them" (John 20:17), and she went and said. The first apostolic announcement of the resurrection came from a woman's mouth, with the Lord's commission, to the eleven men hiding in the upper room.

Paul did not say a woman cannot exercise teaching gifts informally toward men. Priscilla and Aquila "took him unto them, and expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly" (Acts 18:26). The "him" was Apollos. Apollos was a man. The teaching happened. Priscilla was named first in the verse, which indicates her primary role in the conversation. Luke wrote the Acts 18:26 in the same spirit that Paul wrote 1 Timothy 2:12. He did not see a contradiction. There is none. Authoritative public teaching of men in the assembly is one thing. A woman explaining the Scriptures to a brother in a private home with her husband present is another. Paul knew the difference. We have lost it.

Paul did not say a woman could not prophesy. Philip had four daughters who prophesied (Acts 21:9). Joel said "your sons and your daughters shall prophesy" (Joel 2:28). Peter quoted it at Pentecost as the very thing that was now happening (Acts 2:17). The Spirit was poured out on all flesh, sons and daughters together. The prophetic gift was given without regard to sex. We have built an apparatus that pretends Joel did not say "daughters."

Paul did not say a woman cannot serve as a deacon. "I commend unto you Phebe our sister, which is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea" (Romans 16:1). The word translated "servant" is diakonos. The same word Paul applies to himself. Phebe was a deacon at Cenchrea. Paul commended her by name. He told the Romans to receive her in the Lord, and to assist her in whatever business she needed. He honored her work. He named her. He commissioned the Romans to honor her. The deacon's role was not for men only.

I should also say plainly where I stand on women deacons. I have no problem with them. The sovereign grace world I came up in usually does, and I am at peace with their disapproval. The reasons given against women deacons are not bad-faith reasons, but they are inferences built on top of the text rather than the text itself. The text says "I commend unto you Phebe our sister, which is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea" (Romans 16:1). The word translated "servant" is diakonos. The same word Paul applies to himself elsewhere, the same word he uses to describe Christ as a minister of the circumcision (Romans 15:8), the same word that gives us the office. Paul did not invent a softer category for Phebe. He named her with the apostolic word. He commissioned the Romans to receive her. He honored her labor. The text settles the substance. The arguments against come from inferred restrictions in 1 Timothy 3:11-12, and those inferences run the other way at least as easily, since "the women" in verse 11 reads more naturally as women deacons than as deacons' wives once you watch the structural placement of the verse. I will not pretend the inference is as strong as the text. Paul named Phebe. I take what Paul gave. If the sovereign grace world disapproves, the disapproval is with Paul, not with me. I am keeping my eyes on the man who wrote Romans 16.

Paul did not say a woman cannot teach the Scriptures to children, to other women, or even men in informal settings. Lois and Eunice taught Timothy "the holy scriptures" (2 Timothy 3:15). Paul commends them for doing it. The teaching of children is honorable. The teaching of women is honorable. The teaching of the body in informal settings within the limits Paul named is honorable. What is dishonorable is taking the gift of teaching that the Spirit has given a woman and confining it to the back room with the children when the same gift could have edified the whole body in any number of non-authoritative ways.

And speaking from experience, I have learned so much from my own wife, and other friends.  My own dear friend Tammi Holbrook taught me more than any man ever did regarding the nature of Christ's suffering on the cross.  She did all this informally, and I'm grateful for her instruction!

Paul did not say a woman cannot lead in hospitality. Lydia opened her house to Paul and the brethren (Acts 16:14-15). The first European church met in her home. She is named in the text. She constrained Paul to come, and the body of Christ in Philippi started under her roof.

Paul did not say a woman cannot fund the ministry. Luke names a list of women who "ministered unto him of their substance" (Luke 8:3). Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna, and many others supported Christ's ministry materially. The Lord let them. He honored their service.

Paul did not say a woman cannot disciple another woman. "The aged women likewise... that they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children" (Titus 2:3-4). Older women teaching younger women is not a workaround. It is a Pauline mandate.

The list of what Paul did not say is longer than the list of what he did. The apparatus has built a wall of "did not say" that the New Testament never knew. We have to dismantle the wall. Not the verse Paul wrote. The wall we built around it.

The Tenderness the Body Is Starving For

Women carry, as a pattern, a tenderness that most men do not. Not all women, and not exclusively women. But the gift is unevenly distributed across the sexes, and the woman in the room is more often than not the one who sees the hurting person before the men do. She feels the weight of grief in the room before the men notice it. She holds the broken thing gently while the men are still figuring out it is broken.

This is not a lesser gift. It is a greater one.

Christ was tender. He wept at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:35). He cooked breakfast for the men who had betrayed Him (John 21:9-12). He held children when His own disciples tried to send them away (Mark 10:13-16). He washed feet (John 13:4-5). The strongest man who ever lived was the most tender, and the church that bears His name has spent the better part of two thousand years marginalizing the gift He embodied because the gift more often shows up in women than in men.

A church without women's tenderness is a church starving for the gift of Christ. We feed ourselves doctrine and exposition and exegesis and we wonder why the body is full of doctrinally-correct men who do not know how to hold each other through grief. The men did not get the tenderness training. The women did. And the apparatus has been telling the women to keep their tenderness in the children's classroom for so long that some of them have forgotten the body needed it.

I have seen what a woman with the gift of mercy does in a room when she is not gagged. The woman who sits down next to the visitor whose husband just died and does not say a word for thirty minutes, just holds her hand. The woman who notices the new girl at the back and walks over to her between the morning hymn and the sermon. The woman who hosts the family with the wayward son in her kitchen and feeds them and lets them cry without rushing them toward an answer. The woman who carries the body when the body is too tired to carry itself. These gifts are the lifeblood of the household of faith. The apparatus has been telling these women that their gifts only count if they fit into the slots the structure has carved out for them. The slots do not fit. The gift does not fit because the gift is bigger than the slots. The body is the loser.

The Body in 1 Corinthians 14

In the same letter where Paul gives instructions about women's praying and prophesying with a covering, he also describes what the assembly is supposed to look like.

"How is it then, brethren? when ye come together, every one of you hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a revelation, hath an interpretation. Let all things be done unto edifying" (1 Corinthians 14:26).

EVERY one of you. Not every man of you. Every one. Paul opens the doors of the assembly to the gifts of every member. The participatory model is the New Testament model. The one-man pulpit is the human invention. And in the participatory model, there is wide room for the body to hear from women in ways that do not violate the narrow restriction Paul placed on authoritative teaching of men.

A woman can share a psalm. She can offer a word of encouragement. She can read scripture aloud. She can pray. She can ask a question that helps the brother teaching to clarify his point. She can tell the body what God did in her week. She can sing. She can lament. She can rejoice in print. She can carry the prayer life of the body in ways the men in the room cannot. She can do all of this without ever once teaching a man with authority. The structural problem is the apparatus that has only one slot, the pulpit, and uses the slot's structure to define the entire range of acceptable speech for women. Once the slot becomes a body, the range of acceptable speech for women opens to the size of her gifts.

The men who fear this opening tend to fear it because they have spent decades in a structure where the only voice in the room belonged to them. Letting other voices speak threatens the structure. It does not threaten Paul. Paul wrote the verse that opens the body to every member. The men who guard the pulpit are not guarding Paul. They are guarding the apparatus that has given them the only microphone. That is a different kind of guarding.

What the Apparatus Has Cost

The apparatus has cost the church its sisters' gifts for so long that some of those gifts have atrophied. Women who carried the gift of teaching have spent decades pouring it into Sunday school flannelgraphs because the apparatus would not let them pour it anywhere else. Women who carried the gift of mercy have been told their gift only matters when channeled through casseroles and nursery rotations. Women who carried the gift of exhortation have been silenced through the entire course of their adult lives because the men in their churches could not bear the thought of being encouraged by a sister.

The cost has also been pastoral. The men who guarded the pulpit also lost something. They lost the corrective effect of having a body of believers around them whose gifts complemented their own. They lost the women who would have told them when their tone was wrong, when their pet doctrine was overrunning the table, when they had wounded somebody and had not noticed. They lost the wives whose insights would have softened their preaching. They lost the mothers whose tenderness would have kept the discipline from hardening into harshness. The pulpit was supposed to be a place of grace. Without the body around it, it became a place of unilateral pronouncement. The apparatus did not just hurt the women. It hurt the men too. It hurt them by removing the resistance their wives and sisters and mothers would have provided to the worst tendencies of male temperament.

A man preaching alone for forty years with no female voice in his ear becomes, eventually, a man whose preaching has been formed in the absence of half the body. We have those men. They are in our pulpits. Their preaching shows it. The hardness in our circles is partly the result of having silenced the gift that would have softened it.

What I Am Asking For

I am not asking for women to be given the pulpit. I am asking for the pulpit to be replaced with the body. The structure of the modern Reformed assembly is broken before the question of who stands at the front is even raised. "Every one of you hath a psalm" (1 Corinthians 14:26) is the New Testament pattern. The pulpit is the pattern we inherited from Rome by way of Wittenberg. We can still recover the apostolic shape if we are willing to let the apparatus go.

In the body, women's gifts are not in tension with Paul's command. They flourish under it. The narrow restriction holds. The wide freedom opens. The woman with the gift of teaching teaches the children, the other women, her own husband in private, and informally in the assembly within the limits Paul drew. The woman with the gift of mercy holds the broken in real time, in the same room as the brothers. The woman with the gift of exhortation lifts the body. The woman with the gift of hospitality feeds the saints. The woman with the gift of wisdom is consulted, listened to, honored. None of this requires her to teach men with authority. All of it has been denied to her in many of our circles for so long that we have to relearn what the apostolic body actually looked like.

I have spent the last several years writing about the apparatus that produces gospelist gatekeeping. The same apparatus produces this. The men who weaponize anonymous complaints against a brother who reads scripture from a tablet are the same men who tell the women in their churches that their gifts only count in the children's wing. Different rooms, same apparatus. The cure is the same. Tear down the apparatus. Recover the body. Let the gifts of every member edify the household of faith.

To My Sisters

If you have read this far, sister, I want to say something to you directly.

The church owes you better than what we have given you. I owe you better than what I have given you. The apparatus has lied about the size of your gifts and the boundaries of Paul's command, and it has used the apostle as cover for the silencing the apostle never asked for. You are not less because you are not standing behind a pulpit. You are not less because the apparatus would not let you speak. You are not less because half a century of male preachers used 1 Timothy 2:12 to enforce a wall the verse never built.

Your tenderness is the gift Christ embodied. The body needs it. The men in your life need it. The household of faith needs it. The fact that the apparatus has trained the church to tolerate your gifts only in the back room is the apparatus's failure, not yours.

If you have stopped attending churches because the rooms felt small, you were not wrong about the rooms. They were small. The participatory model is bigger. The body Paul described is bigger. The household Christ is gathering is bigger. We will have to rebuild the rooms. The Author who poured out His Spirit on sons and daughters together has not changed His mind. The apparatus changed it for Him. The apparatus does not get the last word.

I am sorry. The men of my generation owe you that, plainly, before we owe you any thoughtful corrective. We sat in the rooms where you were silenced. Some of us silenced you. All of us let it happen. The repentance is collective and overdue.

The sweet whispers of Christ are loud enough to reach the back room. He hears the gifts you carry that the apparatus would not let you bring forward. He has not missed any of it. "For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister" (Hebrews 6:10). He has not forgotten. He has been listening to the gifts the apparatus gagged. He has been counting the kitchen meals, the held hands, the prayers the body never heard out loud, and the quiet teachings you gave to women and children whose lives the men in your church will never know you shaped.

Grace and Peace,
Brandan