Paul VanderKlay

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

Thanks for the comment and especially catching the typo. I changed it. pvk

Thanks John. Those are helpful comments.

In my own classis territorially we have the Bay Area: SF, San Jose, Oakland, etc., Sacramento area, Fresno are, Stockton, Modesto, Bakersfield and others. Having multiple cities within a classis can also be a benefit because we can compare notes and try different models. 

Part of the challenge we face is finding the right size. GR has how many classes? The impact of the CRC on GR is unique. Part of what I plan to get into is also intra-classical work. Have the GR classes ever thought about creating a thing for dialogue about the shape of missional impact over the city? I don't know but I think it would be cool. 

We have the Holy Spirit and no end to ministry opportunities. Unfortunately what we also have is fear and complacency. pvk

Thanks Al, this is real encouragement to me. 

I've agreed to babysit this corner of the network for a few months but I've not wondering how important this investment of time would be. Your comment gives me the sense that we might be able to do some meaningful work here. 

There is a broad sense that we've lost our way in terms of leadership. Part of that is always with us by virtue of our brokenness and the fallen state of our context, but part of it I think is genuine as we saw in the recent resignations and conflicts. I thought it was healthy to have Synod recognize that our culture of leadership isn't what it should be. Confession is often a good place to begin. 

I believe that through the cultural shifts on many levels we have lost the ability to articulate the practical value of the gospel. A lot of the missiological work over the last 30 years has been an attempt to re-engage, whether that be through the seeker movement, the emergent movement, liberation theology, charismatic movement, some conservative movements to try to recapture past successes and clarities, etc. This impacts all three levels of the church but the level MOST impacted I think is the classical level. The local level has the motivation of broad-life-spectrum face to face relationships, the bi-national/synodical level has the attraction of power, size, attention, importance, etc. The classical level is again, in the middle. 

I'm also convinced that our individual motivations, whatever they may be, must also be met by face to face, life to life relationships with others, including church leaders in order to knit together healthy, productive, generous community where difficult and legitimate differences can be processed and productive next steps can be embraced even by differings sides of debate. Again, classis can do this and help us learn to do it at the local level and at the bi-national level. 

Keep chiming in. I have a real sense that we can do some good work with this new tool we've been given. pvk