Divine Design by John MacArthur Jr

Author:John MacArthur, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: John MacArthur, Divine Design, men, women, household, gender roles, Christian
Publisher: David C. Cook
Published: 2011-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

Notes

1 Pawson, Leadership Is Male, 63.

2 George Grant, The Dispossessed (Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1986), 73.

3 Ibid., 73–79.

4 Gallagher, Enemies of Eros, 14.

Part Three

GOD’S DESIGN FOR THE CHURCH

6

THE CHURCH’S LEADING MEN

If you were to pick a neighborhood church to visit at random on a Sunday morning, you might find a much different scene than you would have a generation or two ago. Just ten years ago, depending on which denomination you visited, you would have had as much as a 12 percent chance of finding a woman leading the congregation in the worship service, whether reading a Scripture passage or preaching the sermon. And that percentage has only increased.

Our society gives hearty approval to this trend. Check out this lead from a chapter titled “To Hell with Sexism: Women in Religion” in Megatrends for Women:

Women of the late 20th century are revolutionizing the most sexist institution in history—organized religion. Overturning millennia of tradition, they are challenging authorities, reinterpreting the Bible, creating their own services, crowding into seminaries, winning the right to ordination, purging sexist language in liturgy, reintegrating female values and assuming positions of leadership.1

The authors then proceeded to document each of those activities. A few samples are worth noting:

• “According to a ‘USA Today Snapshot’ published March 29, 1993, women account for 12 percent of Episcopal priests, Presbyterian ministers and Reform Jewish rabbis, as well as 11 percent of Methodist ministers. Women are 9 percent of Baptist pastors and 2 percent of Conservative Jewish rabbis.”2

• “The ranks of fully ordained American women doubled between 1977 and 1986, to 21,000 … there are more than 30,000 women ministers today. The figure of 21,000 is well on its way to doubling again, to 42,000, sometime in the late 1990’s.”3

• “In 1987 women represented less than 10 percent of the profession. But in the coming years that percentage will reach a critical mass of 25 to 30 percent. The reason: a huge increase in women seminarians.”4

• “One third of the 56,000 students in seminaries accredited by the Association of Theological Schools are women, compared with one eighth 10 years ago and almost none twenty years ago.”5

Add to those statistics these disturbing trends: The emerging feminist theology teaches that God is not male, God does not exist in a trinitarian form, Jesus was a feminist, and the true history of women was edited out of the Bible. Female values are also on the cutting edge: Aburdene and Naisbitt, the editors of Megatrends for Women, asserted that once women’s perspectives “attain greater power, [that] will signal revolutionary changes in church policies.”6 And for years now we have seen a surge in attempts to purge male terminology out of Bible translations.

All this is not limited to liberal churches and denominations, however. Aburdene and Naisbitt quoted in a positive light Christians for Biblical Equality (the organization we referred to in chapter 1), stating that “women as well as men exercise the prophetic, priestly, and royal functions” of the church.7 Evangelical churches are just as susceptible to

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