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.

The following is Part I (see Part II) 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: I think it’s good to look out at the culture and realize it is going to be hostile on this. I think anybody that doesn’t is in for a rude awakening. So I think it is good to recognize that we’re going to be out of step with the culture, and the culture is also going to have a knee-jerk response to any articulation of Christian teaching on this. What many guys do then is make their next deduction: ‘therefore, I am not going to talk about this.’

What I would say about that is, first of all, this is an issue you cannot hide from. You must go one way or another on this issue practically in a local congregation. And if you don’t go the Bible’s way, you will go ‘not the Bible’s way.’ Furthermore, it is an issue which has implications for the totality of ministry. If one looks out at the church today and doesn’t see that one of the top crying issues in the evangelical church, in America and the western world in general, is the desperate need for virile, manly, godly servant-leader males in the local congregation, they are missing one of the big issues of our times. You cannot cultivate that in a culture of effeminacy in a church, and the minute you cave in on gender issues whether it be female officers, whether it be refusing to address male-female role relationships in the context of marriage, when you refuse to address those issues, you are refusing to address one of the key issues relating to church issues in our time. You are refusing to treat an issue that the culture is deliberately trying to impose its opinion on in the life of every congregation whether evangelical or non-evangelical.

It is the ultimate head in the sand approach not to address the issue. . . . If the Bible is unclear on this, then there is nothing that the Bible is clear about. If you can skip over the Bible’s clear teaching on this, then you have just undercut yourself in terms of the interpretation of Scripture. The Bible speaks more clearly to this than it does abortion. . . . It is vitally important for a man to face these issues.

Q: Men have abdicated their spiritual responsibility in the home in myriad ways. How does a pastor motivate men in the church to fulfill their biblically-mandated responsibility as the heads of their homes?

A: The first think is to remind men how many good women out there are just dying for this. If you came to visit me in Jackson, Miss. (which is not known for its cultural progressiveness), your guess would be, in terms of marital male-female issues, that I, as a pastor, would see more issues of male abuse or domination of women. That would have been my guess too and certainly would have been the presupposition of a New York egalitarian. Though I have seen that on rare occasion, nine-to-one the main complaint I get from women who show up in my office to talk about failing or struggling marriages, is that [they say] ‘Dr. Duncan, I so desperately want my husband to lead me spiritually, to lead our family, I want a strong spiritual leader. He’s not interested.’ I tell my men that. They are dying for somebody to shepherd them spiritually. That is an instinct that God has built into every godly woman, even if she doesn’t know what that looks like. I think there are women out there who want it even if they don’t know what it looks like. But we have not had, for several generations, that kind of male husband/father spiritual leader in the homes, so first of all, I say to the men, ‘don’t think that every woman is going to reject this. Most women already know that they want this.

The second thing I say is ‘men, I am not getting on your case for something that you have seen done and then decided you weren’t going to do it yourself. I know that you never saw your dad do this. . . . So I know that men have very little resources to draw on from their own experiences and upbringing. They haven’t seen their dad engage in spiritual upbringing in many ways. So we’ve got to build from scratch. . . . Men are going to have to build ex-nihilo, begin to reset a pattern that was lost long ago. The New England Puritans were already beginning to complain in the 18th century that we were losing family worship and that was two-and-a-half centuries ago. This isn’t my time to beat up on men. I want to be realistic about the challenges that they face. Some men will start to try to take this spiritual leadership and then get resentment from their wives, and they need to be prepared for that because the wife has never seen it. . . . Your kids are not going to just say ‘this is cool’ . . . but it is worth the pain because God’s plan for Christian discipleship is the local church-but God’s plan to build up the local church is a discipleship group known as the family. . . . That is worth any amount of toil we have to go through.

Q: Practically speaking, what will that look like in the home?

A: It’s going to mean praying with and for his wife which will include confessing his sins toward his wife in prayer with his wife in the evening. It is going to mean dad taking a responsibility to foster Christianity in the home; dad taking the responsibility. He is going to be the one getting the family to church. It is not mom’s job to get the family to church. He is going to be a man. He is not going to be another child that his wife is going to raise. It has to do with cultivating a type of relationship with your wife wherein it becomes easy for her to respect you as Paul directs her to do in Ephesians 5. That is the whole point of the wives submitting to their husbands. He (Paul) comes back at the end of the chapter and tells you ‘wives respect your husbands and husbands love your wives.’ I tell married couples over and over that we often talk about a man’s need to love and the emotional need that a man has to be loved by his wife. It is much easier for a man to experience that when he knows he is respected by his wife.

Our egalitarian friends think that a healthy emotional equilibrium can be achieved when all those directives and distinctives are just thrown out the window. It can’t be. Honestly, one of the five big stresses on marriage today is undefined roles where you get two kind, sweet people who are breaking one another’s hearts continually because they are out of sync in terms of their role expectations . . . because they’ve not seen role expectations.

Read Part II of this interview here.

The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) has added four evangelical leaders to its council.

The council recently elected Daniel L. Akin, Joshua Harris, Susan Hunt, and K. Erik Thoennes to its board.

Akin serves as president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C. He is author of several books and biblical commentaries including God on Sex.

Joshua Harris serves as pastor of Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Md., and is author of numerous books such as the influential I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Boy Meets Girl, and Not Even a Hint: Guarding Your Heart Against Lust.

Hunt is a pastor’s wife, nationally-known women’s speaker, and author. She is also a consultant to the Presbyterian Church in America’s Women in the Church Ministry in Marietta, Ga. Her books include: By Design: God’s Distinctive Call for Women, The Legacy of Biblical Womanhood, and Leadership for Women in the Church.

Thoennes serves as associate professor of theology at Biola University and as pastor of Grace Evangelical Free Church in La Mirada, Calif.

Many of the books by Akin, Harris, and Hunt are available through CBMW’s webstore at www.cbmw.org/store/.

Randy Stinson, executive director for CBMW, says the additions only serve to strengthen the organization’s work within the evangelical world.

"I am excited about the Council members we have added because it gives CBMW the depth and longevity it needs," said Stinson. Each of our new additions brings different gifts to the work of CBMW, and all are current leaders in the evangelical community in various ways.

"Not only this, but it is expected that they will be influencing the evangelical community for the next several decades. I have a deep amount of respect for these individuals and look forward to serving together as we help the church deal biblically with the critical matter of gender issues. These new Council members are gifts to CBMW and to the churches we serve."

Mars Hill Bible Church opened its doors in February of 1999 with a stated desire to exist as a "church where scripture would be taught in a new way, a way that would reach a changing culture."

Gary Knapp and his wife, Becky, were among the first members of the Grandville, Mich., church, which now numbers more than 1,000 members and some 10,000 weekly attendees. Knapp taught an adult Bible class at Mars Hill and led a small group in the church for more than two years.

In those early days of church plant exhilaration, Knapp did not dream that within four years Mars Hill’s desire to engage the Gen-X culture would result in no small capitulation to the feminism incipient within that very culture. On June 9, 2003, Mars Hill amended its constitution and statement of faith, opening all offices-including that of elder-to women. Today, the church has two women serving on its eight-member elder board.

Mars Hill’s original constitution/confession of faith clearly set forth-in Section 6.400-the traditional view that Scripture limits the office of elder to males. Thus, Knapp said the winds of change blew in like a sudden storm on a clear day.

"During the annual church meeting in September of 2002, (Mars Hill pastor) Rob Bell mentioned in a very tangential way that the church board and he were looking into the issue of women in church leadership," Knapp said.

"It was not mentioned again until we received a letter in early April of 2003. The letter stated that the church board had decided to include women in all church offices. Furthermore, the letter stated that it wasn’t really asking for our permission to make the change but merely our approval."

Mars Hill is congregational in polity requiring a two-thirds vote to amend the church constitution.

A vote took place after a series of Tuesday evening gatherings of the congregation, called the "Areopagus Meetings," during which Bell presented leadership’s rationale for moving toward egalitarianism. Three such meetings were initially planned, but due to the overwhelming number of questions from those who attended the first three, a fourth was added, Knapp said.

"I think the congregation had exhibited considerably more reaction to this proposed change than the board expected," Knapp said. "Given the response of people during the Tuesday evening sessions, it was clear that many people were disturbed by the proposed change."

Knapp said the Areopagus meetings revealed that the new vision was not necessarily that of the board of elders but of pastor Bell.

"I learned later that the board really didn’t hammer out their position after corporate study and discussion but essentially rubber-stamped what Rob had presented to them," Knapp said. "In fact, one board member essentially said, ‘We’re here to support Rob and do what he wants to do.’"

Knapp, who holds both a master of divinity and master of theology, formed a committee along with several other complementarians to oppose the change. The committee also sought to articulate a biblical view of gender roles, a view held by the majority of Christians throughout church history, a view limiting the office of elder to males.

The committee got permission from Bell to organize a meeting to present the traditional view, Knapp said. Members wanted to enlist as guest speaker Wayne Grudem, member of The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) and author of numerous books on gender roles.

However, Knapp said other church leaders later balked on the logistics of such a meeting; the group could neither advertise it nor invite an outside speaker. A church leader phoned Grudem to inform him of Mars Hill leadership’s stance.

"I was asked by people who opposed the by-law change if I would be willing to come and speak," Grudem said. "I said yes in principle, but details had to be worked out.

"I got a call from a member of the pastoral team who made it clear to me that I was not welcome to come, and I told him I had no intention of coming without the permission of the church leadership. So that died."

The committee went ahead with its meeting with another speaker. Advertised largely by word-of-mouth, the meeting did not garner a large attendance. Four days later, the congregation voted and the egalitarian bill became church letter.

"Would it have made a difference if we had been able to have Dr.Grudem speak?" Knapp said. "I think it would have, provided we could have advertised it effectively. But as Rob Bell said after the results of the vote were in, ‘I will never ever stop teaching what I am teaching.’ So it would merely have been a matter of time before the church finally capitulated to his point of view, or until he decided to leave."

Grudem says the approach of Mars Hill leadership in bringing in egalitarianism is fairly typical.

"Suppression of any alternative point of view is probably the most common way for an egalitarian viewpoint to be advanced in a church," Grudem said. "Mars Hill [followed] that pattern exactly."

What happened following the vote seems to typify the obfuscation with which church leadership pursued the change: a final vote total and percentage was not made public. Only later were several members able to wrangle a percentage out of church leaders, Knapp said. The constitution change appears to have passed by the slimmest of margins, he said.

"Several people had to call (Mars Hill executive pastor) Doug Childress personally to finally obtain the 68.5 percent figure-after being strongly questioned as to why they wanted to know," Knapp said. "The actual number of votes cast has never been given."

Steve Sebastian was another Mars Hill member who opposed the change. He phoned church offices on the day following the vote and received the increasingly familiar run-around. Sebastian believes his vocal opposition to the church’s move to egalitarianism led to his ostracism by church leadership.

"I and approximately six others that I know of called and requested to audit the ballots because we were told during the meeting that we could audit the ballots after the meeting. However, when people went to do that, the doors were locked and there was nothing to see.

"I asked Doug (Childress) on a phone call, exactly when we cold see and recount the ballots. He said that he was going on vacation and that I would need to submit my request in writing to the church and to call his secretary. I did that and I also tried to get hold of a staff member [who is a] friend through the office.

"Now I am told that all staff members received an e-mail that stated that I had been trying to reach various people on staff and that no one is to receive any calls from me for any reason."

Sebastian says during the Areopagus sessions, he began to detect that leadership in general and Bell in particular was nonplussed if not antagonistic toward the opposition.

"One young man came up (to a microphone during one of the meetings) and said that he disagreed with what he had just been taught and Rob (Bell) sarcastically and high-handedly put him in his place," Sebastian said. "That did not go over well.

"On the second night of the Areopagus, they had pulled the [microphones] and were not going to allow any questions. The head elder said that the leadership felt that the questions were counterproductive and gave an apology for Rob’s behavior. Rob also offered a tearful apology and said that he never imagined that this teaching would be met with such opposition and that it ‘freaked him out.’"

What drove Bell’s seemingly abrupt ardor for egalitarianism? Sebastian said it apparently stems from Bell’s drinking deeply from the well of a radical new hermeneutic proposed by William Webb in his 2001 book Slaves, Women & Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis.

In the book, Webb proposed a new method of biblical interpretation he calls a "redemptive movement hermeneutic." Among other things, Webb argues that passages on women in ministry should be read trans-culturally in such a fashion that overturns traditional beliefs about gender roles in ministry. The upshot of the new hermeneutic for Bell is that giftedness, not gender, determines one’s fitness to hold a church office.

Sebastian approached Bell following one Sunday evening service and suggested that he ditch his fascination with the so-called redemptive movement hermeneutic and get back to preaching the Scriptures. Bell’s response surprised Sebastian.

"He burst out laughing and asked me in a sarcastic tone if I knew how we came to have the canon of Scripture. [He] belittled the process by which the canon of Scripture was decided upon by suggesting it was absurd that 300 men in some meeting could accurately tell us what books should be included," Sebastian said.

"I stated to him that I did not believe that the general Mars Hill attendees were aware of the major paradigm shift [as to] how all Scripture is interpreted to the point of having to restock the church library. He responded by affirming my statement and thanked me for ‘getting it.’"

Zak Lahring was also a member of the committee opposing the change. Lahring and wife Shawn were outraged at the manner in which the issue was handled.

"During the entire thing, they tried to quash the opposition," Shawn Lahring said. "Publicly they told people that they would be able to voice their opinions and get their questions answered regarding the issue during the Areopagus meetings. But when people did that, the response was always, ‘thank you’ and no answers were given. The traditional view was not discussed."

On the evening of the vote, leadership ratcheted up the pressure to help ensure a positive outcome, she said.

"The pressure regarding the vote was incredible," Shawn Lahring said. "On the night of the vote, people were told, ‘we just want to tell you what your ‘yes’ vote means. Your ‘yes’ vote may mean that you totally agree with this new direction of Mars Hill. Your ‘yes’ vote can also mean you aren’t really sure about this new direction of Mars Hill but trust Rob Bell and the leadership. Your ‘yes’ vote can also mean that you don’t agree with the new direction…but you trust Rob Bell and the leadership.

"Your ‘no’ vote means that you don’t agree with this direction for Mars Hill and don’t trust Rob Bell or the leadership.’ Now, honestly, what do you think those who didn’t even know about the opposition would do? If I were a new believer/member and didn’t personally know my Bible, I would have voted ‘yes’ myself."

Leadership from Mars Hill did not respond to interview requests by Gender-News.com. Lahring said this is hardly surprising, given the sleight-of-hand with which church leaders pursued the female elder issue.

"I’m not at all surprised," she said. "They would have to be able to truly defend their position and or course, they can’t and they know they’ll just embarrass themselves...the only good thing to come out of this is that a lot of people woke up and went back to Calvary or to other places where they teach the Bible is sufficient."

Knapp has not returned to Mars Hill since the vote. The Lahring and Sebastian families also left, as did others, Knapp said. Mars Hill’s change does not reflect a biblical engagement of the culture but represents a capitulation to the subjective whims of postmodernity, Knapp said.

"Despite how [some] might define and understand postmodernism and the church, I think the classic definitions apply to Mars Hill and churches like it," Knapp said.

"Truth for them seems to be more subjective and experiential than a product of a worldview developed by means of an interaction with God’s Word, an interaction that often requires rigorous exegetical study and a measured reflection upon the results of that study."

For a review of William Webb's book, see the article by Wayne Grudem, "Should We Move Beyond the New Testament to a Better Ethic? An Analysis of William J. Webb, Slaves, Women and Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis" in vol 47.2 (June, 2004) of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society here.  See also the review by Thomas R. Schriener in vol. 7.1 (Spring 2002) of The Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood here.