SAN ANTONIO, Texas - The issue of gender sits at the epicenter of the postmodern tremor that is shaking contemporary culture, R. Albert Mohler Jr. told attendees of the second annual Evangelical Theological Society Authors Dinner held Nov. 17 and sponsored by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW).

Mohler, a CBMW council member and president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said Postmodernism has bequeathed to our culture wholesale redefinitions of marriage and family as well as the very idea of gender itself.

"The issue of gender, in my estimation, is at the very center of the target of our secular age and postmodern world," Mohler said. "It is also at the very center of the target of where we see theological accommodation is taking us, not only in the body of divinity, but also in the complex of the comprehensive truthfulness of God’s Word. What we are looking at here is an assault upon God’s glory."

Mohler said that such confusion makes the ministry of groups such as CBMW all the more important. In the wake of the recent presidential election, Mohler pointed out that one pundit attributed George W. Bush’s reelection to the fact that he was able to articulate issues in terms of "binaries" such as good and evil, conservative and liberal, darkness and light.

Mohler said CBMW and its complementarian authors and teachers have crystallized the gender debate in the same way, Mohler said.

"That is exactly what CBMW forces because that is exactly what the biblical text requires," Mohler said. "That is, there are some wonderfully demonstrated binaries in Scripture and in creation by a Sovereign Creator’s decree and design…to His own glory. There are people who just don’t want to live in a binary world."

Numerous publishers, media leaders, scholars, and students who articulate and advance the biblical view of gender were among the 63 persons who attended the dinner. Mohler praised them for having the courage to "put much on the line" in uncompromisingly proclaiming biblical teaching on gender.

He also challenged attendees, telling them that new gender issues presented by transgender ideologies and gender-inclusive biblical translations require continued labors in research, writing and publishing.

"We need ongoing scholarship to address the issues that are being presented to the church right now," Mohler said.

"I want to suggest to you that one of the most acute pastoral and theological issues facing the church in the next generation is going to be the transgender crisis…This issue of gender is no longer just a matter of male headship in marriage and the church or who is ordained to the ministry. It has gone well beyond that … and we must be prepared to meet the challenges for the glory of God."

Alicia Wong, Women’s Studies Coordinator at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, said she was pleased to see a high number of female scholars, teachers and students attending the CBMW event. The dinner was held in conjunction with the 56^th Annual Meeting of ETS.

"The dinner was a great forum for us to get to know one another and to support CBMW," Wong said. "It was also encouraging to see the rise in [the number of] women who were attending and are supporting.

"I think that we need publish on these issues and we need to encourage one another [to do so] because our (the complementarian) voice will speak the loudest when it comes from women to women."

Monica Rose, Womens Studies Coordinator at Liberty University, said Mohler’s address spurred her on to further research and writing on gender issues from a complementarian woman’s point of view.

"What really spoke to me in Dr. Mohler’s address was the spirit of obligation," Rose said.

"As he was talking I was really compelled to spend a lot of time writing and doing research that needs to be done. It was compelling in that sense and also encouraging to meet other complementarians. I praise the Lord for CBMW and the work it is doing in serving as an advocate for the biblical point of view on gender issues."

The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood hopes to encourage pastors and church leaders to boldly proclaim the Scripture's teaching on gender issues through a half-day conference early next year in Minneapolis, Minn.

The conference theme is "Different by Design: A Crucial Call to Faithfulness on Gender Issues" and will feature two speakers: theologian and author Wayne Grudem and Sovereign Grace Ministries President C.J. Mahaney. Admission is free but limited to the first 225 persons who register.

CBMW’s half-day conference will be held just prior to the start of the 2005 Bethlehem Conference for Pastors on Jan. 31. The pastor’s conference will include speakers such as John Piper, Bruce Ware and Ken Jones. Both conferences will be held at the Minneapolis Hilton.

Randy Stinson, CBMW’s executive director, said the conference is designed to encourage pastors and church leaders to be faithful in teaching their congregations a distinctly biblical view of gender issues.

"CBMW is excited to be able to encourage and embolden pastors as they lead their congregations," Stinson said. "The gender issue is central to the health of the home and the church and pastors should be equipped to stand against the cultural tide.

"With all of the novel and sometimes bizarre egalitarian arguments coming from some sectors in the evangelical community we feel it is necessary to offer concentrated teaching in a conference format."

Grudem will address exegetical and theological issues on gender and Mahaney will deliver a pastoral charge. For more information on the conference or to register, please see http://www.cbmw.org/conferences/register.php.

Just when you thought the Episcopal Church USA (ECUSA) could not become more theologically deviant, a recent Christianity Today weblog revealed that the ECUSA's Office of Women’s Ministries has been promoting the worship of pagan gods.

In CT’s Oct. 26 blog, Ted Olson sheds light on the feministic and pagan worship offerings available on the ECUSA’s website.

Most audacious and troubling among them is a liturgy labeled "A Women’s Eucharist: A Celebration of the Divine Feminine." As Olson points out, the liturgy calls for the worship of a pagan deity specifically condemned in Scripture.

The so-called Eucharist is taken directly from a rite of Tuatha de Brighid, "a Clan of modern Druids … who believe in the interconnectedness of all faiths." The rite is celebrated at a communion table that includes a candle, a vase of flowers, a large bowl filled with salted water, a chalice of sweet red wine, a cup of milk mixed with honey, and a plate of raisin cakes.

The rite begins when the plate of raisin cakes is lifted high and the following mantra is repeated:

"Mother God, our ancient sisters called you Queen of Heaven and baked these cakes in your honor in defiance of their brothers and husbands who would not see your feminine face. We offer you these cakes, made with our own hands; filled with the grain of life-scattered and gathered into one loaf, then broken and shared among many. We offer these cakes and enjoy them too. They are rich with the sweetness of fruit, fertile with the ripeness of grain, sweetened with the power of love. May we also be signs of your love and abundance."

The plate is then passed and each woman eats a cake. Olson points out that the raisin cakes are taken from Hosea 3:1 which ties Israel’s love for cakes of raisins to spiritual adultery in their worship of strange deities. Many scholars believe the raisin cakes to be offerings to Asherah, the feminine counterpart to Baal, Olson says.

The ECUSA and its women’s ministry also scandalize the biblical understandings of marriage and divorce, offering on the website a "Liturgy for Divorce."

The opening two paragraphs of the liturgy are as revealing as they are stunning. The final two lines of the second paragraph echo the plotline of a Hank Williams pain song and in no way resemble the plain teaching on the sacred covenant of marriage set forth by holy Scripture. The ECUSA takes upon itself the authority to dissolve marriages in which "love dies." The first two paragraphs read:

"Dearly beloved: We have come together in the presence of God to witness and bless the separation of this man and this woman who have been bonded in the covenant of marriage. The courts have acknowledged their divorce and we, this day, gather to support them as they give their blessing to one another as each seeks a new life.

"In creation, God made the cycle of life to be birth, life, and death; and God has given us the hope of new life through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Savior. The Church recognizes that relationships follow this pattern. While the couple have [has] promised in good faith to love until parted by death, in some marriages the love between a wife and a husband comes to an end sooner. Love dies, and when that happens we recognize that the bonds of marriage, based on love, also may be ended."

ECUSA’s Office of Women’s Ministries responded to CT’s weblog and has removed the pagan liturgy from the website.

The response says that the listed liturgies are not officially sanctioned by the ECUSA but "are intended to spark dialogue, study, conversation and ponderings around women and our liturgical tradition. There is quite a difference in presenting resources for people’s interest and enlightenment and promoting resources as official claims of the Episcopal Church. Only General Convention has this authority."

Still, given the website’s other content on marriage and divorce, it begs the question as to why the ECUSA Office of Women’s Ministries would include such an obviously unbiblical document in the first place.

Interested readers may find Olson’s full weblog on the ECUSA liturgies here

The following is Part II (see Part I) of a Q&A with J. Ligon Duncan, chairman of the board of The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. Gender-News.com recently interviewed Duncan-who has served as pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Jackson, Miss., for the past nine years-on issues of gender roles as they relate to the pastoral ministry.

Last summer Duncan was elected Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), placing a committed complementarian at the head of one of the fastest-growing denominations in the United States.

A: We did an entire series on manhood and womanhood last summer. Our motto at First Pres[byterian] during the summer months is ‘we don’t gear down, we gear up.’ Even though we have an affluent, transient congregation that has second and third houses and jets around the world and stuff, we can have some pretty impressive consistent summer attendances, not only on Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings but also on Wednesday nights. We spent the whole summer on manhood and womanhood. Furthermore, it is something that is taught every time that officer elections come around in the church. We explain why it is that we don’t have female elders and we don’t have female deacons. It gives us an opportunity [to reiterate that] this is not an act of chauvinism, it’s not a blind act of traditionalism, this is something that is a biblical conviction.

We do it at the point of new members class as inquirers come to the church. We want to explain why it is when you look around when the Lord’s Supper is being served and you don’t see any women serving that supper, it is because all of our elders are male. And we touch on it whenever it comes up in the text. When I’m preaching through Genesis, it’s going to come up in the text. When I am preaching through 1 Timothy, it’s going to come up in the text. When I preach through Titus, it’s going to come up in the text…We’re not going to dodge it. I write about it. No doubt there are some people who have gotten their noses out of joint on that, but we’re going to do what the Bible says. That’s our approach.

Q: Wayne Grudem has said that feminism is the entry point into the church for wholesale liberalism. Is he right?

A: That is so far beyond being an intriguing theory that it is to the point of being an incontrovertible fact. You can chart every denomination that has placed women in leadership in the last 120 years and you can chart their numerical decline in the western world and their theological decline. When our evangelical egalitarian friends whine that we are using an illegitimate slippery slope argument, this is not some sort of wild-haired spin theory that we are coming up with. It is a fact.

Just go look at the denominational statistics, look at the denominational histories of the last 120 years and you cannot find an exception to this trend. In the Church of Scotland in 1960 when they began hammering for women elders-the argument was ‘we don’t have enough elders in our churches, this will revitalize our churches to get women elders’-the Church of Scotland is on chart to cease to exist in 2034. Somewhere between 1964 and ‘68 was when they brought in women elders and women ministers were not far following that. I can show you that trend everywhere this issue has been compromised. So as far as I am concerned, Wayne is irrefutably correct on that particular point.

Q: What about evangelical groups like CBMW, groups seeking to promote complementarianism in the home and in the church, how effective are we being?

A: I think CBMW has been very effective and if there were no CBMW out there, I know that even denominations like my own-the Presbyterian Church in America-which are constitutionally, as well as instinctively, complementarian, CBMW has played a role to buttress our commitments to Scripture because it is hard to hold these commitments. People with genuine evangelistic desires will sometimes sort of keep them in the closet. They will say ‘this is going to cost us converts, it’s going to impact our witness, I can’t have this as an up-front issue because I’ve got to show how we embrace women’s leadership.’ You feel for people who are wrestling with those kinds of issues. But having the CBMWs around to keep this issue on the plate, when there are many around who are good and godly guys who would really like this to be off the plate, there are ways that CBMW and other organizations have helped in that regard.

This is a cultural war that we are losing and there is no sign that we are not going to lose the cultural part of the war more badly than we are losing it now. When you’ve gotten to the point where you can’t get clear on homosexuality and homosexual marriage, male-female role relationships are rather pedestrian in comparison. The culture war is going to be lost and has been lost in the mainline churches. The question will be, ‘will evangelicalism hold?’ That, in large measure, is going to depend in large measure on evangelical Baptists, Presbyterians, and low-church Anglicans. The Anglicans will be mostly in the developing world because many Anglicans in the English-speaking world have ceded on this issue. But there are 50 million of them-50 times more of them than there are of American Anglicans. Thank God, these folks are strong on this issue.

I think organizations like CBMW play a vital role of educating pastors on the issue. One of my favorite things about the Journal on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is the review of literature. That is hugely helpful for me as a pastor. I try to keep up with this literature myself but that review of literature is exceedingly helpful to me. There are a variety of ways that organizations like CBMW are able to keep this issue on the front burner, rather than it being put where a lot of folks would like for it to be put: in the closet somewhere.

Read Part I of the interview here.

William Carey, the father of modern missions, undertook his first work in Calcutta. Dorothy Carey refused to go.

Dorothy finally gave in to the desires of her husband and, though pregnant with the couple’s fourth child, accompanied him to the field. The events that followed-in human terms-qualify as an unmitigated disaster.

Dorothy Carey was seasick for much of the five-month voyage from England to Calcutta. She later became afflicted with dysentery and then the couple lost their five-month-old son, Peter. In the end, Dorothy Carey’s mental health deteriorated to such a degree that her husband called her "wholly deranged."

What was William Carey’s response? "The cause of Christ" took precedence over his family, he replied.

Was Carey’s response biblical? Which comes first in the life of the minister-family or ministry? What are the biblical responsibilities of a husband and father? How should a wife respond to the many trying circumstances of ministry?

A new book, Good Christians, Good Husbands? Leaving a Legacy in Marriage & Ministry, written by Doreen Moore, examines these and other critical issues that ministers face in balancing their callings and their families.

Moore seeks to answer these and many other questions by examining the marriages and ministries of three of the greatest preachers in Christian history: Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield and John Wesley.

Moore, a summa cum laude graduate of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, deals with Carey only in the introduction but delves into the lives of the three eighteenth-century leaders, all of whom were passionate about glorifying God by serving Him in their generation.

Not all of their balancing acts of ministry and family were pretty among the three men that Moore’s book examines.

For example, in 1771, John Wesley’s wife, Molly, left him after 30 years of marriage. It was not the first time Molly had left her husband but Wesley did not ask her back on this final occasion. Biographers variously called their stormy relationship a "thirty years war" and "a martyrdom that lasted thirty years."

Wesley’s theology of family belied the outcome of his moribund marriage. Moore quotes Wesley: "The person in your house that claims your first and nearest attention is, undoubtedly, your wife."

By contrast, Whitefield was able to keep a harmonious marriage to Elizabeth Whitefield despite an irrepressible commitment to public ministry. Moore unpacks four areas that shaped Whitefield’s convictions regarding marriage and family, areas that helped him succeed where Wesley failed.

Edwards was a success both as a husband and a father, Moore writes.

"The legacy he has left to the Christian community is far reaching, yet the legacy he has left to his family is equally extraordinary," Moore writes of Edwards. "Jonathan Edwards and his wife Sarah were married thirty years and had eleven children: three sons and eight daughters. The trajectory of his descendants is truly remarkable…"

The book is available for purchase in CBMW's Online Store.