Are Women Redeemed?

Four women sit, faces buried deeply in their hands, visibly anguished. Regardless of the gifts they’ve been given and despite God’s call for their lives, the 1994 Synod of the Christian Reformed Church determined that they may not be ordained as elders, ministers, or evangelists.

The caption under the photo of the four women doesn’t say if they are among those who now face the wrenching decision of whether to defect to another denomination in order to fulfill their call as ministers. But one needn’t be in seminary to grieve the painful blow this decision has dealt the church.

Synods past have said that scripture’s teaching on women in office was "ambiguous." Women were permitted to "expound" scripture, but could neither administer the sacraments nor be ordained. Many delegates in past years voted for this half-gesture out of fear of a denominational split, and they deferred to future gatherings the decision on a complete opening of church offices.

This year, the all-male delegates approved a report alleging that scripture "clearly" shows that women are not to teach or be ordained. One delegate bluntly told women that "like it or not, authority in scripture is given to males." In so stating, the church has declared that women are not equal to men—the ramifications of which will affect every person, regardless of their vocational call.

The Christian Reformed Church is proud of its redemptive-historical interpretation of scripture, the belief that individual texts must be interpreted in the context of scripture’s central core: the thrust toward redemption. We baptize infants as a sign of God’s claim to their lives—not as a sign that we have received God.

In this framework, the assertion of women’s lesser status strikes a bizarre chord—puzzling in light of the church’s view that it is God who initiates call and covenant. This summer’s decision implies that God’s jurisdiction over anointing falls short when a woman is the subject—in such a case, it is implied, grace is not sufficient and the men of the church must step in and decide.

IT IS STRIKING that the Christian Reformed decision shares the season with the pope’s declaration that women would never be priests, the domination of the Presbyterian Church USA’s general assembly by reaction to the Re-Imagining God conference, and a Christianity Today cover article titled "How the Feminist Establishment Hurts Women," which claims that "barriers of all kinds are crumbling in spheres of work and public life." Barriers for women within and outside of the church are formidable and disheartening, and they deny women—and therefore men—the full freedom of life in Christ. Yet these barriers are condoned—and worse, denied.

Most women called to ministry have no desire to defiantly destroy the cohesion of the church—they simply want their gifts affirmed and welcomed. They want to deliver the Word and the sacraments of grace, and they want the church to recognize what God has already confirmed. They want full membership in the body for all people, and they want the church to acknowledge that past beliefs about the subordination of women are incongruous with the entirety of God’s redemptive story. They want the body of Christ to be the model of reconciliation for the world.

Yet this struggle forces women into the ironic and uncomfortable position of demanding the right to be a servant leader. For many, the church is our deeply loved family and historical community that we do not want to leave. Like all families, there are relatives and habits that annoy and offend, but to leave would disavow our call to live in covenant with God’s children. It would mean abandoning our mothers, sisters, and daughters in the struggle for full membership in the body, and would rob our fathers, brothers, and sons of the rich sustenance women’s leadership can provide.

As in the struggles against slavery, abuse, war, and apartheid, which all were once sanctioned by the church, many of us will continue to "defect in place." Women will continue to provide the unacknowledged eldering, ministering, and evangelizing they have throughout the church’s history. We will live with the confidence that someday denominations like the Christian Reformed Church will issue a humble plea for repentance, just as the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa needed to repent for years of condoning apartheid.

The love, power, and grace of God is the ultimate authority against which all earthly authority is checked. A denominational decision cannot deny that power, nor can it take away our joy in sharing in the redemption story.