Gender roles and pastoral ministry: Q & A with J. Ligon Duncan, Part I

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.