Women Teaching Men: The Drift Continues?

By Elizabeth Prata

SYNOPSIS: Responding to Albert Mohler’s comments on women participating in a specific sermon-discussion podcast, this essay offers some context to the discussion, and warns that doctrinal compromise begins incrementally. I urge fellow female believers to maintain biblical complementarianism, heed scriptural warnings, and resist subtle departures from obedience.

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There’s a video clip of Albert Mohler (Youtube) answering a listener’s write-in question. It is on his podcast called “The Briefing” and the date was May 15. Here is the direct link to Dr. Mohler’s site for that date.

The questioner asked Dr. Mohler about a concern she had with her church having started a podcast to explain the previous Sunday’s sermon and answer questions related to it. Along with her pastors, a female church staff member appears on the podcast to discuss the sermon.

Context Counts

Mohler said in effect, no matter what the woman’s role is named, pastor or not, in that described situation she seems to be functioning as a pastor and she is teaching her congregation, which violates 1 Timothy 2:12. Below is the entire, unedited transcript from that portion of The Briefing:

My Church Started a Podcast to Answer Questions From Sunday’s Sermon, and a Woman is One of the Hosts Along with Pastors. Is That a Problem? — Dr. Mohler Responds to Letters From Listeners of The Briefing

Next, a question from a woman listener. She says she’s a member of an SBC church. The church started a podcast where the pastor and staff answer follow-up questions about the Sunday sermon. She says, “The purpose of the podcast is to expound on the sermon, exposit the Word of God to the whole church and offer practical application advice. The problem is,” she says, “one of the staff members on the podcast is a woman. She’s not a pastor by role or title, but I believe she’s acting as a pastor in this context because she’s giving advice to the whole church body.” And I’ll just simply say also, she’s teaching because that’s exactly what we’re told the podcast is doing. And so I simply want to say, I appreciate this woman writing this question.

I think there’s one error in the question where she says she’s not a pastor by role or by title. If she is functioning as a pastor, then she is assuming the role of a pastor and I think that’s what’s implied here. And yes, I do see that as a problem. I don’t think the church should ever lean into offering confusion on this issue, but should lean into clarity. And so I don’t know the church. I don’t need to know the name of the church. I can just tell you, I think this is something that needs to be thought through on a far more substantial biblical basis. And if this person is functioning with other pastors as a pastor, the title really doesn’t matter all that much. That’s because the biblical conception of pastor is both the title and the function, the title and the role. And so avoiding the title doesn’t mean you’ve avoided the problem.

End of The Briefing excerpt

Mohler is planting a flag here, taking a stand and urging fellow leaders to join him in that stand. It is a big course correction. Mohler stressed the need for biblical clarity on gender roles, noting that function matters more than title when a woman provides authoritative advice and application to her local church body.

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Beth Moore’s Opinion

As these things go on social media, the context of the woman staff member teaching her fellow members of her own church about the local church’s sermon on the podcast is left out. The resulting controversy simply diluted the context down to ‘whether a woman should talk about a sermon on a podcast’.

It was in this milieu that Beth Moore weighed in against Al Mohler’s recent comment. [see screen shot below]. Moore, of course, didn’t know or ignored the context – as well as the scripture. The emphasis of the red line is mine-

In deconstructing Moore’s reply, let’s first take a look at what’s missing: scripture. She who has taught men, preached in church, and led an functionally egalitarian ministry, ignores any of the verses in her reply and indeed in her entire ministry. Moore has not really addressed why she is not violating the pertinent verse in 1 Timothy 2:11, 2:12, as well as never addressing 1 Corinthians 14:34, 1 Corinthians 11:3 and other more general verses which command women to learn and behave in full submissiveness.

Beth Moore has infamously preached to churches, including her own, and has taught men since at least the 1990s, when she led a co-ed Sunday School class at her church and was also asked to ‘speak’ there on Sunday nights. So she must fervently defend her position, which is unbiblical, sby using herself as the example.

It does not matter if you are ‘paid staff’ or volunteer. Her Sunday School lessons included men and she did not mind that she was violating scripture at that point.

Moore stated that ‘I believe is beyond scripture’ but never supports her personal belief with Bible verses.

Whether a believer or not a believer in Jesus, we will all stand before Him on the Day. He is not going to ask Beth Moore, ‘As a woman, you preached to men. How to you defend that?’ And when Beth answers, “Well, I wasn’t paid staff.” He is not going to say “Well, OK then. You’re good to go.’

No, rather, He has already said in John 14:15, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.”

And in John 14:24a He has already said, “The one who does not love Me does not follow My words;“

What is the command? “But I do not allow a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.” (1 Timothy 2:12).

Obey Jesus, and use scripture to stand on, not tradition, behavior, or personal beliefs.

A Bad Path

As I watched the discussion around Mohler, Moore’s response and the issue of women teaching/preaching, I reflected on the sad trajectory of Aimee Byrd and her former appearance on the podcast Mortification of Spin alongside two other pastors, Carl Trueman and Todd Pruitt. I don’t recall if Aimee discussed specific sermons when she was a co-host on the podcast, but she did discuss Reformed theology. The trio used to chat about cultural topics from a Reformed perspective, not necessarily related to their specific churches. I remember when Aimee went egalitarian, she was then let go from the podcast after she wrote a book titled ‘Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood’, which critiqued complementarianism. Aimee refused to answer questions about it.

Following her departure, her former co-hosts publicly criticized Aimee’s theological drift toward egalitarianism. In particular, Pruitt retracted his endorsement of Byrd’s book, and there was other fallout. Aimee left her Presbyterian church, began preaching to churches here and there, and finally landed at a church with a female ‘pastor.‘

This is always the trajectory, unless one is willing to make constant course corrections, repent of one’s drift on whatever topic or sin a believer is involved in, and return to a right standing with Jesus. Every demographic of every believer in every stage of life is warned in the Bible. As for women, we tend to want to usurp or dominate. Don’t even put a toe on the bad path.

The Start of the Path

Watching this issue brew up again in advance of the June SBC annual meeting caused me personally to reflect again on the nature of sin. Moore is kind of right here about how extremism is never satisfied, but not in the way she thinks. It’s actually sin that’s never satisfied, [see 2nd paragraph in the above screenshot].

Sin doesn’t express itself as a whole bag of evil at first. It nudges. It takes tiny steps, very tiny.

We KNOW from the Bible how deeply sin grabs us, how prevalent ambition, pride and other sins can be. Why tempt sin? Why not FLEE from any deviation from Jesus’ standards, so as to avoid treading a fallen path?

For me, if it even hints at a possibility of wandering from the center line of His mandated order for my gender or for my church, I avoid it.

In the book The Pilgrim’s Progress, the Shepherds warned the two pilgrims, Christian and Hopeful, about the next leg of their journey. They said strongly to avoid the Flatterer. They also carried a sure note on which way to go. But they forgot to look at the note and they did not heed the warning. It happened like this. A Flatterer who was actually a deceiver led them away to the bad path:

“But ‘by and by’ [incrementally], before they were aware, he led them both within the compass of a net, in which they were both so entangled that they knew not what to do; …there they lay crying some time, for they could not get themselves out.”

The man they chose to follow along the way was a false apostle, disguised as a man of light. He was Flatterer, with fine words and soft spoken. The pilgrims saw that the road which he led them on had appeared straight but once entered, was subtly taking small turns…away. Soon they were entangled in a net and could not free themselves.

This engraving for that scene in The Pilgrim’s Progress was created by George Woolliscroft Rhead,

Incrementalism is a killer

The road away from complementarianism is subtle. It takes incremental turns away. While many women would balk at even the suggestion of standing at a pulpit and preaching to their church on a Sunday, the road ends there, it does not begin there. Each and every decision you make as a woman Christian matters.

Moore began hers back in late 1980s when her aerobics class dwindled and her devotional time at the end of her aerobics class grew. Soon the class morphed into straight Sunday School, as she was asked to substitute for the woman teacher going on maternity leave. Men attended. She dealt with it by asking them to sit in the back.

Conclusion

This controversy arose last week because, as The Baptist Press reports, “Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler announced his intention today (May 18) to propose an amendment to Article III of the SBC Constitution that, he said, “would make clear” how cooperating Southern Baptist churches will view the role of women in the office of pastor/elder/overseer.”

Both announced SBC presidential candidates endorsed Mohler’s proposal. “Southern Baptists have been clear: ‘the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture,'” wrote South Carolina pastor Josh Powell in a re-post of Mohler’s announcement on X. “I have supported & continued to support any effort to make our Constitution equally clear.”

They have ‘debated’ this issue of women preaching in SBC churches before. But sin is crouching at the door, wanting to have you, as we read in Genesis 4:7. It never really departs and it never leaves you, or a ministry, or a church, or a para-church or an organization alone. It comes back and even stronger than before. (Luke 11:24-26).

It is up to each of us to maintain a straight path, to constantly refer to the ‘note’ (AKA pastoral admonitions), to remember and heed the warnings from the word of God. We need to make course corrections at the moment, fully and completely, every time.

I pray the SBC does the right thing. More importantly, I pray *I* do the right thing. I love Jesus, and I always want to follow His commands.