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

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.