A few nights ago I was sitting in the car, waiting for David and Caroline to come out of Meijer. I turned on the radio and found the broadcast of a church service. I knew right away what kind of a church it was. The soloist was doing a heartfelt job, but was obviously not a professional. It was not a church with a band and drums, but a certain kind of piano accompaniment. As I listened to the pastor pray, I was about 90% certain that I was listening to a Baptist church service.

And it made me feel incredibly homesick.

So what does that have to do with the book How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals?

Everything, really.

The chapter I’m highlighting today is “How I Changed My Mind About Women in Church Leadership” by Cornelius (Neal) Plantinga, Jr. Plantinga is the President of Calvin Theological Seminary, the flagship school of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC). The church where we are currently members is a part of the CRC.

Plantinga offers so much food for thought in his chapter it is hard to know where to begin. So I will begin at the end and leave the rest for you to read if you choose to buy the book.

Plantinga discusses at length the issue of slavery in the Bible and how Christians’ views have changed over the years. But, even more importantly, he discusses the only way to handle all of the passages on slavery:

The upshot is that it is remarkably hard to dismiss what Paul says to slaves. You need a big, subtle hermeneautic to do it. You need one just like that used by the gender egalitarians. You need to be able to tell time, theologically. You need to see the big movement of the history of redemption that rises above the small print for local times and places.

It is very hard to explain away what Paul says about slavery. It requires thoughtful application and consideration in light of all of Scripture. This is a key point that many often overlook. We dismiss slavery out of hand as Americans, but very few Western Christians have ever been asked to give a theological explanation of the verses that condone slavery and encourage slaves to even stay and submit to their masters. Almost every Christian today would say slavery is wrong, but how would they carefully handle the passages related to it? It takes a subtle hermeneutic, just like the issue of women.

Plantinga then quotes F. F. Bruce on Paul’s teachings that relate to the idea of female subordination. Bruce writes:

If general, where there are divided opinions about the interpretation of a Pauline passage, that interpretation which runs along the line of liberty is much more likely to be true to Paul’s intention that one which smacks of bondage or legalism.

Perhaps most meaningful to me are the next two paragraphs:

Given the almost universal sexism of first-century settings, the preaching and ruling of women might then have been scandalous and detrimental to the preaching of the gospel. Today the situation is precisely reversed. It is the exclusion of women–often done with lofty and humorless reassurances that they are equal even if subordinate–that is scandalous and enervating. One result in conservative churches is that they are hemorrhaging devout and gifted women to denominations that are not their home.

Alongside the pain and humiliation it visits on women, besides the diminishments it brings to churches that drain or dam half their talent pool, the policy of excluding women has become deeply embarrassing. Males discuss somberly whether we ought to “allow” women into church offices. The discussion sounds so much like that of parents trying to decide whether their adolescents are ready to assume adult responsibilities. It sounds so much like majorities dithering over whether they ought to invite minorities into their club. It sounds as if the church belongs to males.

Plantinga concludes with an acknowledgment that these kinds of issues make people uncomfortable. It makes him uncomfortable to think with concern that it could lead to the proverbial slippery slope where anything goes.

He then writes:

But any of us who relativizes the slave subordination commands in the New Testament has already been walking that path. We are embarked. We reject slavery not because individual texts condemn it, but because the sweep of Scripture does. Most of us evangelicals are so convinced that slavery is wicked that Ephesians 6:5 & co. will not move us. The text must have had local and temporary application.

Last evening I was thumbing through a devotional book by my bed: Amazing Grace: 366 Inspiring Hymn Stories for Daily Devotions. As I went through it, I was struck by how many of those hymns I haven’t sung in years and years. I know the words to them as well as I know my own name. Many of them I could sing all three or four verses at the drop of a hat. They are a part of my faith heritage. But the church we attend now has a different hymn heritage and so I sing different hymns now.  Sometimes we sing familiar ones, but often the words have been updated (a personal pet peeve of mine) and so even then I cannot lose myself in the joy of singing those songs.

It all makes me very homesick for my faith heritage. There are days my longing to be back in a Baptist church is so strong it feels suffocating. The CRC is not my home and it never really will be. As much as I appreciate our current church, it is not home in the deepest sense of the word. And yet I had to leave my denominational heritage behind because I no longer fit in nor would I be welcome with the views that David and I hold about women in the church.  Just as Plantinga wrote above, I’ve been forced to move to a different denomination because of the questions I’ve asked, the giftings I have and feel compelled to use, and the steadily growing personal conviction that my brothers and sisters in Christ are wrong in their unwillingness to recognize women as equal partners in the gospel.

When Plantinga writes about the pain and humiliation women feel, he is not exaggerating or overstating his case. It is painful and humiliating for gifted women to be marginalized and dismissed. It is painful and humiliating for women to be told they need to sit down and shut up. It is painful and humiliating to know that friends and family members assume you have compromised your Biblical convictions because of your understanding of women in the Bible.

Many of the essaysists in this book mention the loss that accompanies such a view. No one who wants to “fit in” in the evangelical and/or conservative Christian environment today would ever make the choice to embrace this view. But when you realize the freedom and joy granted to women by God, the pain and humiliation pales in comparison. Far greater will the joy be to hear “Well done, good and faithful servant” when we see Christ and rejoice in all that we were allowed to do on His behalf and through the empowering work of the Holy Spirit.