A Roadmap to the “Full Inclusion of Women”
As a further reflection to my piece, Why Do We Not Ordain Women?, I would like to look at this question strategically.
For if we don’t “ordain” women because God’s Word forbids us, then we can safely conclude that Satan is driving us toward the practice as a subversion of our biblical confession. And why would he not? We’ve seen church body after church body fall into this practice - followed up swiftly by embracing homosexuality and other sexual deviancies. Subversion and perversion go together, trying to create a new version of the church, and a new version of mankind. Along the lines of C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, I think there is great value in analyzing the situation strategically, like a general scanning a map of the battlefield.
For Satan’s end goal is not merely to “ordain” women, nor to get churches and states to accept same-sex “marriage.” These are milestones along the way to the ultimate goal of a complete repudiation of the Word of God, disavowing the Word Made Flesh, and rejecting God Himself. These milestones - female “ordination” and deviant sexual “marriage” - are significant, because once done, they are virtually impossible to undo, whether in church or society. It is like crossing the Rubicon. And as each successive gate is crashed, that is just one more step to a complete and total repudiation of God.
We know that our foe is wily and serpentine, rarely operating directly. Karl Marx naively proposed an explosive revolutionary path to Socialism, whereas the Fabian Society in England (one of the founders of the Labour Party) proposed a soft evolutionary roadmap to Socialism - even adopting the symbols of the wolf in sheep’s clothing and the Aesopian tortoise as their mascots.
We see the same shift to gradualism in churches that move from biblical fidelity to apostasy.
The Anglican communion started with women “deacons.” Only then, women “priests.” And only much later, women “bishops.” The key is to get on the onramp as easily as possible. At a certain point, people just get used to it, and they don’t even notice anymore. Then it is time to take the next step.
The enemy is persistent, and applies constant pressure.
Most so-called “Protestant” churches have long since gone to the dark side in matters of sexuality. But there are still a few holdouts. The LCMS is a tougher nut to crack than the ELCA. And it isn’t likely that Satan will try a frontal assault. The Fabian wolf in sheep’s clothing and the tortoise are more likely to win the day. There needs to be a soft, gradual move from the biblical to the unbiblical. There must be steps: a steady strategy for getting from point A to point B. And given the secular culture’s overwhelming feminism, and its corresponding success in normalizing deviant sexuality in a short period of time, the obvious pressure point - even in the Missouri Synod - is the issue of sex roles.
And while our confession is very strong on paper, there is a weakness to be exploited by the evil one: our culture of tolerance combined with our lax church discipline. This is a chink in the armor through which an arrow can sneak through if fired skillfully. For we in the LCMS are evangelical. We are focused on the Gospel. We love peace. We desire reconciliation. And those are godly desiderata. But it is easy to seek a shortcut to those happy places, ignoring the hard work that it takes to get there. Apart from personal sexual infidelity or bankruptcy (yes, bankruptcy) virtually no-one is removed from the roster. Usually, the person will offer up a clarification, an explanation, apologize, and promise not to do it again. The matter is happily concluded, and that’s the end of it - until the same issue bubbles up yet again to the surface somewhere else. The more bubbles, the more the issue is normalized. Those who complain about the bubbles are demonized, the whistleblowers become the problem, and Satan can rejoice in another step or two in the long march through ecclesiastical and synodical history.
Just as Saul Alinsky wrote his famous roadmap to subversion in the political realm entitled Rules for Radicals: a Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, those seeking radical change in the LCMS need a similar roadmap for change. And while the devil is sneaky and wily, much of his work is out there in the open for those willing to have a look.
In a paper called “Making the Shift: A Roadmap for Churches Moving to Full Inclusion of Women in Church Leadership” (part one and part two), a lady “pastor” named April Fiet teams up with a Fuller Seminary professor, Dr. Rob Dixon (author of “Raising Up Allies: A Pathway for Developing More Men into More Effective Allies to Women in Ministry” - which is a “seven-step process that communities of faith can use to help shape men into allies to women”) to provide a strategy for conservative Bible-believing churches to follow. And this “roadmap” is just that: turn-by-turn directions to get to the “full inclusion of women” in conservative churches. I commend this paper to our laity, our pastors, our professors, and most of all, to our presidents. You need to know what is going on.
The paper uses the journey of Bent Tree Bible Fellowship, located near Dallas as a guide and example. They “successfully” made the leap from male-only pastors and elders to playing mixed doubles in 2016. Today, they have three lady “elders” and two lady “pastors” on staff. They have managed to eat the cake of a confession that “the Scriptures are inspired by God, inerrant and authoritative, without error in the original writing, and the divine and final authority for all Christian faith and life,” and yet have the cake of women “pastors” and “elders.” This is the magic of the Fiet-Dixon Roadmap. “Trust the process,” as the kids say.
Again, I think it would be wise for pastors and laity to read this paper. You can download and print it as a PDF here. It’s a quick read. It is a technique to watch out for in the LCMS. It’s the perfect roadmap for Satan to employ among us.
Bent Tree announced “that the church was shifting its theological position to permit women to serve as elders” on April 17, 2016. They reiterated that they were “committed to conservative theology and a community where women gifted by the Spirit experience no limits or restrictions on their service” including to “share leadership as elders.” This followed a “deliberate and extensive process” that this paper lays out. And it is a “theological shift” from “some form of complementarian theological understanding to an egalitarian one.” This paper is a “roadmap that churches and organizations can use as they consider a shift from complementarianism to egalitarianism.”
The devil is, as they say, in the details.
Fiet and Dixon identify the following steps:
IDENTIFY a Catalyst
GATHER the leaders
DECLARE a Decision
ENGAGE the Congregation
IMPLEMENT the Change.
Find a Catalyst
The catalyst at Bent Tree was a pastor who “had been nudging the church in an egalitarian direction for his entire tenure, some 25 years.” He created “adaptive, long-lasting change over the course of many years.” The paper cites another scholar who says, “the way people see and do things is to challenge how they define themselves.” The “change process disrupts the way a congregation sees and understands itself,” and the “process is often painful or uncomfortable.”
The shift “in theology from complementarian to egalitarian” requires someone to “drive the change process,” perhaps a “leader with a strong egalitarian conviction.” And this catalyst for this “shift toward the full inclusion of women” must be nurtured and cared for, so that a listener, “rather than making judgments” instead “asks questions for clarification.” And “another way to heed and support the voice of the catalyst is by making space for their voices to be heard” so that the “spark created by the catalyst can begin to grow.”
Gather the Leaders
The strategy used at Bent Tree was for the elders to spend a year “studying the relevant texts” and then writing “what they thought the Bible’s message was regarding women in leadership.” And they determined that “no office of the church was off limits to women” and “the group was unanimous.”
During this “discernment and reflection,” they not only read books, but “brought in outside experts to share their interpretations.” They reflected on whether or not “the larger congregation should be made aware that this leadership group [was] intentionally studying this topic.” They decided that keeping it secret would “result in more freedom for the team to have an open and unhurried experience.” They did admit that “pursuing this process in secret” could “result in some awkward dynamics” including a “loss of trust.” The key to determining whether to be secret or open is “establishing a safe space for the church’s leadership community to hear from God.”
Declare a Decision
According to Fiet and Dixon, “The movement of the Holy Spirit was clear when the team arrived at a unanimous decision to include women as elders in the church.” The leadership team then announced to the congregation, “Our sense is that the Lord is leading us in an egalitarian direction.” How to handle this requires some delicacy:
Declaring a decision includes counting the cost (which could include people leaving the church), discerning the bandwidth needed to engage with the congregation’s questions and concerns, and providing the resources needed to make the change systemic. A decision may be expressed through some sort of statement from the leadership, a researched theological paper, a sermon series about the decision, or some combination of these things.
Engage the Congregation
After the final decision was made and declared at Bent Tree, then there was “an invitation for individual congregants to reach out to elders and pastors in repose to the position paper.” And “one leader used the word ‘campaign’ to capture how his community thought about this step. Intentional processes are proactive, carefully constructed, and they are clearly and repeatedly communicated.”
Other strategies include things like “email blasts” and “seminars with outside experts” and “sermon series that follow from the declared decision.” The process is a “rollout” that must “effectively shepherd the congregation through the change process.” The people must be “brought along.”
They do acknowledge “backlash” in the form of “pushback from individuals or groups,” even “angry pockets” that “can persist.” This is handled by care concerning “how we have conversation.”
Implement the Change
“For a shift to be successful,” say Fiet and Dixon, “the change needs to become integral to the way a congregation ‘does church.’”
This requires “intentionality with words and titles.” For example, a congregation may have “given female staff members the title ‘director’ when the more appropriate title is ‘pastor.’ By making this shift verbally when addressing these staff members and in places like the church website, the church’s value of the inclusion of women at all levels of church leadership is made clear.” This indicates the “vision for where the church is going.” They also suggest adopting the New Revised Standard Version in the pew.
This “road map for making this shift can span over the course of months, or even years.” It is indeed the turtle, and not the hare. Change in the LCMS is far more likely along the lines of “slow and steady wins the race.”
The article concludes:
Indeed, Bent Tree and the other leaders surveyed for this project demonstrate that it is possible to make an egalitarian theological shift. Congregations who aspire to make the shift to the full inclusion of women in church leadership can follow the roadmap outlined in this series: identifying catalysts, gathering leaders, declaring a decision, engaging the congregation, and implementing the change. May the Gospel advance in greater measure as our faith communities discern fresh ways to partner together as women and men in ministry.
We in the LCMS need to be aware of this strategy. We need to be able to recognize it, and we need to become resistant to the idea that since it’s a turtle, we have lots of time to deal with it. The temptation is for everyone to think someone else will address it, and to just kick the can down the road. The District President might assume the next DP can deal with it. Pastors can easily make excuses: “not my district, not my circuit, not my circus, not my monkeys.” The laity can always say, “Well, my congregation doesn’t do that.” We can all stick our heads in the sand, and especially because we don’t want to get 8-balled, and we pastors don’t want a whispering campaign among the DPs to keep us off call lists. We don’t want to get hassled. Besides, we can all rest on our laurels and crow about how we “owned the libs” during Seminex half a century ago.
Dear brothers and sisters, we are called to be faithful to the Word at all costs.
Lord, Jesus Christ, with us abide,
For round us falls the eventide.
O let Your Word, that saving light,
Shine forth undimmed into the night.
In these last days of great distress
Grant us dear Lord true steadfastness
That we keep pure till life is spent
Your holy Word and Sacrament.
May glorious truths that we have heard,
The bright sword of Your mighty Word,
Spurn Satan that Your Church be strong,
Bold, unified in act and song.
~ LSB 585:1, 2, 4