Last week, I listened intently as a famous Bible teacher waffled around the subject of women preaching. He painfully twisted himself into a pretzel, trying to be politically correct and pleasing to the wide and varied interpretations of Paul’s infamous instructions to the church at Corinth.
In his self-inflicted contortions, the Bible teacher sidestepped God’s assurance to His people that His truth must and is bound to endure through every generation, including the current. Many generations have come and gone since Apostle Paul instructed women attending church services in Corinth to keep their mouths shut.
Corinth, at the time, was a wealthy, cosmopolitan city in ancient Greece. It was a major commercial centre and a hub of wanton immorality where liberal views on family and humanity were the order of the day.
Over the centuries, there have been all sorts of variations to family types, cultures, and the makeup of church congregations across the globe. None of these changes in life’s circumstances impact the Word of God as written.
So, Paul’s instruction to the church at Corinth that women should remain silent and be taught the Scriptures by their husbands at home must remain applicable and current as if he had said it today. The truth is that those instructions must remain applicable to the circumstances in which they were given, and despite the brutal contortions of the Bible teacher, they cannot be transported out of context.
If men and women in traditional societies had remained faithful to the divinely created order for the family, there would be no need for Apostle Paul’s instructions. Men would be the head of families, present in sanctuaries, and standing in their God-given role in societies.
But, this is not so in many cases, especially among the descendants of enslaved people. Today, Paul would have to face the fact that more than 80% of congregants are women, and some 90% of these women have no husbands.
More interestingly, the majority of women are likely to be more educated than the few men who attend service at any given time. These women are better able to grasp the deeper contexts of the Scriptures than many of their male counterparts in the congregations.
Under the current dispensation, Paul would likely be asking the men in the churches today to be silent and enquire of the deeper meanings of Scriptures from their wives at home.
Furthermore, that same Paul, who in the instant of the church at Corinth was instructing the women to remain silent, was in other parts of the region commending other women of his generation who were leading house fellowships, some who were deacons and several who operated businesses in bustling commercial spaces.
If the Pauline rule at Corinth were applicable to other churches, it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to lead any fellowship while remaining silent. Hence, the real meaning of Paul’s instructions to the church at Corinth cannot be universally applied.
But many men of the cloth, in this current dispensation, will use this instruction to stand in the way of the gospel of Jesus Christ advancing across the globe and blame Apostle Paul for it.
When Christian women, especially in congregations where men are few and far between, are told to be seen but not heard, the proliferation of the gospel is slowed to a crawl.
While men are established by God Himself to be the head of families and ahead of women in rank order, both men and women are temples of the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead. No more, no less.
Without a doubt, men have been assigned the righteous role as head of the family, and male leadership, especially in the church, is the perfect will of God. However, there is nothing in the Scriptures that suggests that the male temple holds a stronger version of the Holy Spirit than the female temple.
So when Christian women are told to remain silent and to hold their corners, especially in this season of wanton secularity in our churches, it is an indirect move to shut down the presence of the Holy Spirit on the earth and bring the spread of the gospel to a snail’s pace, if not halt it altogether.
Women, formed from the body of the first Adam, gave birth to the second Adam, in line with God’s order for humanity, which is to be fruitful and multiply, reproducing after our own kind.
This fact was not lost on the Son of God, who ensured that women were very much a central part of His ministry.
Having been used by God to carry the Living Word in her world, mortal men have no authority to prevent any woman who is qualified from carrying a message to a congregation for a few minutes.
Men who have relinquished their God-given role as leaders in the home, church, communities, and nation will be justly punished, but defecting men cannot and will not deter or derail the ultimate purposes of God. The Word promises that if men and women fail to praise God, the very stones in the earth will rise up and fill the gap.
Men missing in action do not surprise the All-knowing God. He designed and appointed the ‘help meet’ when he saw that Adam needed a viable companion. This ‘help meet’ has stood firmly in the gap, singly holding tattered families together, occupying the vacuum men left when they choose to pursue sin. That ‘help-meet’ will be the help-meet to preach.
Church leaders who understand divine purpose look beyond the useless, divisive, and destructive debate as to whether women should preach or not and focus on the heart matter. At the heart of it all is determining God’s intention towards the beautiful temple, which is well-taught in the Word, positioned and available in an environment where learned men are few. Advancing the gospel across the globe, under the auspices of the Great I AM, should be the beginning and end of that debate.
Men who fail to recognise that the Great Commission was not gender-specific are standing in the way of the ultimate return of the Messiah.
The question is, why? The answer is the same. It is the mission of the enemy to stop the spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ and delay His return, while populating hell as much as is humanly allowed and religiously facilitated.
