Irving Bible Church Puts First Woman in the Pulpit

For the first time in its 40-year-history, last Sunday Irving Bible Church (IBC) in Irving, Texas, had a woman to fill its pulpit on the Lord's Day. Jackie Roese, the church's teaching pastor to women preached at all three services, addressing more than 3,500 attendees.

The action has sparked no small controversy among evangelicals in North Texas and beyond. Tom Nelson, pastor of Denton Bible Church told the Dallas Morning News that the congregation is on "dangerous ground" for violating the clear teaching of Scripture: "If the Bible is not true and authoritative on the roles of men and women, then maybe the Bible will not be finally true on premarital sex, the homosexual issue, adultery or any other moral issue. I believe this issue is the carrier of a virus by which liberalism will enter the evangelical church.

As one of the larger evangelical congregations in the Dallas metro area, IBC has served as the home for professors, administrators and students of Dallas Theological Seminary for many years. Mark Bailey, who serves as president of DTS, has removed himself from a team of regular guest preachers at the church due to its move toward egalitarianism. Bailey cited "personal convictions and professional reasons" for his decision to amicably distance himself from the church.

Inside the church, the controversy seems to be more limited as few members have left over the issue. The church's elders produced a 24-page position paper on the issue which argues, in essence, that Bible verses restricting women's role in the church "were culturally and historically specific, not universal principles for all times and places..." and that the Bible presents "an ethic in progress leading to full freedom for women to exercise their giftedness in the local church."  Elders also concluded that the office of pastor or elder "seems to be biblically relegated to men." Church leaders have said Roese preached "under the authority of an elder board that will continue to be all male," according to the Dallas Morning-News report.

Denny Burk, editor of the Journal for Biblical Manhood & Womanhood, said the view expressed in the elders' position paper represents a marked shift toward egalitarianism.

"The elders have clearly moved the church to an egalitarian-friendly position, despite their limiting the role of elder to men," Burk writes in an upcoming editorial in the JBMW. "That the office of elder only ‘seems' to be limited to men suggests that the elders are less than certain about their conclusion on this point. What is perhaps most significant here is the fact that the elders have adopted a trajectory hermeneutic in their understanding of the relevant biblical texts."

Burk further argues that the so-called "trajectory hermeneutic" popularized by William Webb in his 2001 IVP book Slaves, Women & Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis, undermines the Reformation principle of sola Scriptura ("Scripture alone"), and thus, undermines biblical authority. This aberrant view is behind IBC's capitulation on the issue of female preachers, Burk asserts.

What bears noting are two observations: first, just because something in the Bible is clearly conditioned by the culture in which the author wrote, does not thereby nullify that truth or make it reversible for another culture.  And second, whether one believes that women should exert elder authority in the local church by preaching a sermon is ultimately a much larger question than merely that of church order.  It is a question of whether we deny or affirm the plain teachings of God's holy Word. The authority of Scripture is at stake in this matter.  May we give these questions the gravity they deserve.