Paul VanderKlay

Always good to hear from you George, even though this text base medium. :) 

I'm a wobbly pastor of a wobbly church. Sometimes we wobble and we do fall down. I've been wobbling here with my church for almost 15 years we still wobble regularly. 

What I liked about Ken's piece was that it recognized the seriousness and the difficulty of ministry. Ministry is seriously difficult and we too often saunter blightly into it trusting in railings and floorboards that are less than solid. Ken knows this of course. Other disciplines have established serious mechanisms for accountability and support, many of which have been developed recently. There is no reason we can't avail ourselves of these learnings. 

Another voice in the back of my head knows many "solutions" despite all that they offer can provide no guarentees. Do these laudible structures always prevent malpractice or even simple mediocrite? I doubt it. I've seen enough in the counseling profession to have a bit of skepticism both in terms of what they hope to prevent overtly as well as the supposed outcomes they professions wish to provide. Both the counselor and the patient are complex broken human beings and we are helpless against much of what commonly assails us. We certify and credential with paper and systems and are still helpless before the brokenness that crushes us. We are all wobbly. Not looking wobbly doesn't necessarily mean much. :)

I don't know that we can have a conversation that asserts knowledge that transcends culture, not because culture cannot be transcended, but because we cannot transcend it. All of our conversations are within cultures and their mergers and collisions. Likewise the Bible cannot communicate to us outside of culture. Maybe this piece I wrote for a comment on another blog might help explain my idea. I don't think that means we can't learn anything or that everything is relative. It means that culture (practices and ways of thinking that frame our perception of the world) are always with us. It also doesn't mean that things can't be true for all human cultures or normative for all human cultures. It does mean that expression of those norms might have different appearances and practices. 

My understanding of a basic complementarian position is that it asserts than men and women have normative different contributions to make to the body of Christ. More on my position. I am not as convinced that keeping women from holding office is a universal normative mandate for the church. I am not sufficiently convinced of that position to advocate it's application in our context, in fact my experience has been that having male and female office bearers working together in church leadership has been better than having only one sex at work. 

Our current specific cultural application of office bearing, however, is also a cultural construct (hopefully pursuing more universal norms.). I've been active in the church in cultures where women did not serve in formal leadership but served in other leadership capacities within the church that exerted power and influence even if not in the structure that we are paying attention to in this debate. Korean congregations often have women called and commissioned (ordained would not be an inappropriate word given the language, ceremony, respect, position, etc.) in their churches. In the DR many churches has "damas misioneras" who preached, taught, led, etc. A similar thing. 

If our current cultural location is bringing churches to not use the gift God has given women in the church to exercise them because of a lot of cultural norms about what names and chairs they must exercise leadership from, then we need to do some re-arranging. How elders, deacons and pastors work today continues to change in our culture and others. Despite the language you're hard pressed to say that our application of the offices is identical to the NT context. That's OK because the world is different. Again, I'm not advocating for relativism, just application. CRC deacons sometimes give out food but probably not in the same way that it was happening in the Jerusalem church. 

In coming to application (as in just about every circumstance) we look to the word of God and the Spirit of God to guide us. Things may look different again 100 years from now and we have no idea how. 

I'm comfortable letting the process work its way through. If we look at the history of the church (Alister McGrath's fine book on Heresy) we find that over time the church figures out what is heresy often by dead ends. It may be that allowing women in office becomes a dead end and Christ's living church moves beyond it. At this point I doubt that but I could be wrong. The church often takes hundreds of years to work things through. The issues we're dealing with today will become clear in time, but I don't know that we know the outcome yet. Best to keep reading God's word and working with it and doing the work of the church. pvk

Look at the issue of Infant Baptism. How long as this been going on? Neither side has given up, but many have learned to live with the disagreement. I would argue that infant baptism is a more important issue than women in office but clearly many more don't see it that way. I'm sure some have left the CRC over women in office only to get re-baptized. 

This is in my experience (as stated above) not really an issue that has separated the sexes. Many women don't believe in women in office and many men do. My heart mostly goes out to women (like Dawn and others) who wish to serve but don't get the chance. That's very hard. At the same time I've known men who very much wanted to serve and were never given the opportunity, not because of their sex but because of other things. Life is full of disappointments and injustices in the church and out of it. 

In my experience a small minority post on a forum like this. In my classis where women are allowed to be seated there are a good number of churches that don't have women elders or don't permit them. At every classis meeting one church from our classis attaches to their credential their protest over women in office. It is read or noted at each classis meeting. I know that bothers some, but it doesn't bother me. For the last 5 years I've always had a woman elder with me and I've seen nothing but graciousness and kindness towards them at classis, even from those who publically oppose it. My elders often are a bit hesitant about what will happen. Even though they are permitted to be there it is very much a majority male environment, out of 50+ delegates only 1-5 women often. I can appreciate their discomfort often. This is the difficult path that both sides are walking now, and on the path we learn to love our "enemies", which is what a foundational behavior of Christianity. 

The longer I ponder the miracle of the gospel, the more I see that love of enemy is not some optional merit badge in advanced, exceptional Christian practice, but rather the very basis itself. We made no greater enemy and no other enemy than God himself and it required the Son of God himself at no lesser expense than the cost of his life to get us back into the family. Why we imagine that we can finesse, negotiate or fudge our way through the inevitable conflicts of life in order to avoid loving our enemy is only attributable to the ever present blinding nature of sin. pvk

Thanks for your loving persistance with this Bev. I'll post a couple of responses:

Of course there is no "office" of prophet like there is of elder, deacon and minister of the word. Doing a study of the history of prophesy and prophets not just in the canon but also in ancient church history might be enlightening for you. I have not undertaking that study but an interesting place to begin might be the didache, an ancient document likely from the second century that gives some insight into some of what was going on in that time. The document is online. Here is a blog post by someone who noted some of the relevant sections about how they determined true from false prophets, and with some means for figuring it out that seem strange to us today. http://jamesbradfordpate.blogspot.com/2009/08/didache-on-prophets.html

The CRC, and most modern churches have done little work on prophesy, the gift or the office. It's a good thing to work on. pvk

"Prophesy" as popularly imagined presents many barriers, both cultural and religious in our context. 

1. Antagonism from moderns and some postmoderns

2. Skepticism from people who have experienced the charlatan factor.

3. Skepticism from people who have been burned by "God told me..." 

4. Cessationists in the church even if they hold to pre-modern ideas of revelation

that being said, North America is a skeptical island in a sea of people open to it from all over the world. 

Church offices get created after a sea change. 

At the same time you can't help but believe what you believe so don't be discouraged. :) pvk