(أستاذة في كلية اللاهوت المعمدانية العربية تدرّب الطلاب في مهارات المشورة | Photo: ABTS professor training students in counseling skills) 

By Elie Haddad

John Piper released a new episode on his podcast on January 22, 2018 entitled “Is There a Place for Female Professors at Seminary?” His conclusion is consistent with his complementarian view of gender roles. If it is unbiblical for women to be pastors, then it would be unbiblical for them to be seminary professors training pastors. As might be expected, this has sparked debates on social media with plenty of voices both in support and in outrage.

This should not come as a surprise. Piper strives to be consistent and faithful to his understanding of Scripture, even when this makes him unpopular. I respect that. We, too, at the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary strive to be faithful to Scripture. Yet not only do we have women students and professors, we continuously exert every effort to recruit more of both. One of our constant struggles is that we cannot find enough Arab women, trained and equipped to teach at seminary level. This is why I feel compelled to weigh in on this critical issue.

I appreciate that there are sincere and thoughtful Christians on both sides of the egalitarian-complementarian debate. As important as this topic is, it is not my intention to enter into this debate through this post. Rather, my intention is to voice two other concerns that I have with Piper’s conclusion.

I do agree with Piper that we need practitioners to be teaching in vocational programs. Training leaders for the Church is not merely an academic exercise. Formation is key, as is the development of skills. However, if a pastor can only be trained by pastors, then why not get that training at church? Why the seminary? There are plenty of pastors at church to train emerging pastors.

The first concern that I have is how we view the role of the seminary. I do not view the seminary as an independent entity, external to the Church, producing leaders for the Church. I believe that the role of training leaders for the Church is the Church’s. The role of the seminary is to come alongside the church, supplying and complimenting what is lacking within it. The value of the seminary, in my opinion, is the presence of a strong core of faculty with diverse disciplines, skills, gifts, credentials, and areas of expertise. This is what is hard to find in most local churches. It takes a community of professors with this kind of diversity to expend in the formation of well-rounded leaders. Pastors trained only by pastors is likely to produce narrow-minded and insular leaders. I cannot conceive of an effective church leader, tasked with the mandate of shepherding and nurturing women and men in the church, not having been shaped by both women and men.

My second and main concern with Piper’s conclusion is ecclesiastical. When we say that the seminary exists to train pastors, what do we mean by that? Is it clerical training? Where does this division between clergy and laity come from? One of the important tenets of the Protestant reformation is the priesthood of all believers. This is an important distinctive of our ecclesiology. The priesthood of all believers is understood as each believer having direct access to God through Christ. It is also understood as having no spiritual aristocracy or hierarchy within the church – no dividing line between clergy and laity. This, of course, does not preclude the Church from having order and a leadership structure. It means, however, that every believer is clergy.

That was the understanding of Martin Luther. He made several bold statements about this: “Everyone who has been baptized may claim that he already has been consecrated a priest, bishop or pope.”[1] Also, “Let everyone, therefore, who knows himself to be a Christian be assured of this, and apply it to himself – that we are all priests, and there is no difference between us.”[2] I believe that an important promise of the reformation is still left unfulfilled.

The paradigm presented by Paul in Ephesians is very helpful in laying out this pattern:

And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ; until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ. (Ephesians 4:11–13, NASB95)

Christ bestows on church leaders these special leadership gifts, not for them to do the work of ministry themselves but to equip the saints (the believers, the “laity”) to do that work. The believers are the ministers of the Church. The whole body of Christ is on mission. This by no means undervalues the role of the leaders. On the contrary, the leaders have a strategic role. They are the equippers, the coaches. The members of the Church are the ones who are tasked with doing ministry in the world.[3]

This is what I understand the priesthood of all believers to mean. Every member of the church is a minister, a missionary, sent by the Holy Spirit, on behalf of the body of Christ, into the world.

I suppose that part of the challenge, as well, is an inadequate understanding of calling.[4] We tend to distinguish between those called to full-time ministry and the rest of the body of Christ. My understanding of Scripture is that every believer is called to full-time ministry, some in a church-based role as equippers and coaches, and the rest (the majority) are called for full-time ministry in the world. The primary place of ministry is not inside the church. We gather as a Church to worship and fellowship in community, and to be equipped. We go out into the world to be salt and light, to live out as Kingdom citizens, to take the presence of God with us to the workplace and marketplace. That is where the world can best encounter God. The whole body of Christ is on ministry, on mission, sent out into the world.

I believe that the role of the seminary is to come alongside the Church in equipping leaders, thinkers, and Kingdom citizens who are skilled in engaging their world. Some of our graduates will end up taking on leadership roles within the Church, and the rest will end up on mission in the world. The role of the seminary is to support the Church in training these ministers and missionaries. The whole body of Christ. Men and women. The seminary is a place for much more than pastoral training.

With this conviction, how can we conceive of having such leaders equipped and trained only by men?

To clarify and avoid misunderstanding, let me restate what I am saying and what I am not saying in this post. I am not arguing for or against women in Church leadership. This cannot be adequately treated in a simple post like this. I am not arguing, either, against ordination or the fact that some are called to specific roles within the Church, although I prefer the biblical term “laying of hands.” I understand laying of hands as setting people apart and affirming them in specific roles, not as a rite of initiation into an office as we move them from laity to clergy; but I will leave the details to another post. Finally, this post is not to face Piper head on. I suspect that he agrees with most of what I wrote here. Rather, this is meant to move the conversation from the top tier of the Church to the whole body of Christ. We get distracted by debates on who can be ordained and forget that the whole Church is on mission needing to be trained for this critical task.

I long to see the entire body of Christ – men and women – on mission in the world. I long to see the entire body of Christ – men and women – being shaped and equipped for this mission by mature and godly role models – men and women. After all, there is no room for exclusion in the mission of God.

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[1] Martin Luther, “An Appeal to the Ruling Class” (1520), quoted in Lewis W. Spitz. The Protestant Reformation (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 54.

[2] Martin Luther, “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” Works of Martin Luther (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1943), 282–83.

[3] Greg Ogden, among many others, does a good job expounding this model. Greg Ogden, Unfinished Business: Returning the Ministry to the People of God, Revised Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003).

[4] For a good discussion on calling: Os Guinness, The Call : Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life, (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2003).