Prednisone to buy

View Article (PDF)

A recent Barna study, entitled “Number of
Female Senior Pastors in Protestant Churches
Doubles in Past Decade” and encompassing a sur-
vey of over 600 Protestant pastors, presents findings
by the Barna Group that show that the percent-
age of female pastors in Protestant churches has
doubled in the past decade.¹ Now, says the group,
10 percent of all Protestant pastors are female, up
from 5 percent between 1990 and 1999.

Though the group has not released data related
to the study, it asserts that 58 percent of the women
pastors minister in “mainline” churches. This crop of
pastors is not young and is aging—the average age
is 55, an increase from 50 some ten years ago. The
women in question are well-trained, with 77 per-
cent possessing a seminary degree (versus 66 per-
cent of male Protestant pastors). Women ministers
earn less than their male counterparts—roughly
$45,000 per annum for women versus roughly
$48,000 for men. One factor likely related to this
statistic is that women pastors lead an average of
80 people in their churches, while men lead over
100 people in theirs. In general, however, church
attendance in Protestant churches covered by the
survey is dropping. The average Protestant church
now has 101 people attending, as opposed to 109 a
decade ago.

As noted above, the Barna Group has not
released information related to the study. It none-
theless deserves analysis and commentary. What
does this survey tell us about Protestant churches?
Are there connections to be made in the data? Can
we discern lessons for our churches today? In this
brief essay, we will address these questions. As we
will see, these are not esoteric matters, but rather
issues of first importance that lead us to consider
the very nature of the Lord’s church.

For our purposes, we zero in on the major
swath of churches identified by the study that have
called women as their pastor. The majority of these
churches are found in the mainline. Many of us
have dear friends and colleagues in the mainline.
We know of biblically faithful churches within
these denominations, assemblies and individuals
courageously contending for the gospel, and we
applaud and pray for those that are taking steps to
confront compromise.²

With that qualification stated, the mainline,
speaking generally, is awash in compromise. A large
number of churches have appointed women as pas-
tors. These churches are struggling greatly to survive,
with an average attendance of roughly 80 per week.
The movement away from Scripture and toward the
culture has not brought the spiritual harvest that
some thought it would. Instead, it has contributed
to the long, slow death of the mainline.³

Many other churches outside of the mainline
are appointing women as pastors as well—42 per-
cent according to this survey. This figure demands
our attention. Protestants of all kinds are liberalizing
on the gender issue. In a way that might surprise
many Christians, Protestants are showing a strong
affinity for women pastors. This move, however, is
not contributing to the health of churches in this
branch of Christianity. Attendance is steadily drop-
ping. Critics of complementarians might decry the
connection we’ve drawn between compromised gen-
der roles and lower attendance. But it seems plain as
day, staring us in the face, demanding our response.

The study leaves it to the reader to draw such
conclusions. However much we might interrogate
this particular study and to whatever degree we
might seek to moderate our hypotheses, two things
are abundantly clear: first, Protestant churches are
liberalizing at a steady clip on the gender question;
second, they are generally struggling, with closing
in the offing. This is to say nothing of the parallel
trend of homosexual inclusion and advocacy. In the
same way that many churches embraced the cause
of female ordination as a righteous one, a large
number of congregations march in step with the
culture in embracing homosexual pastors and con-
gregants. The Barna study does not comment on
this particular trend, but discerning observers can-
not help but note a second major shift away from
Scripture that will cause massive harm to denomi-
nations and assemblies that embrace it.⁴

Though some may feel the temptation to
downplay the importance of this survey, such disre-
gard would be unwise. As we have noted, the prob-
lems sketched above belong not only to mainline
churches, but Protestant churches more broadly,
including, presumably, doctrinally conservative
ones. This problem is not far off. Trouble has come
to our house.

Perhaps one of the major threats for conserva-
tive churches is not simply a full-scale frontal assault
from feminism as has happened in the last several
decades, but a contemporary backdoor attack that
weakens our churches without our knowing it. In
other words, danger lies not simply in stoutly ideo-
logical feminism—a major threat—but in passive,
fully orthodox, do-nothing conservatism. While
many churches act upon the clear scriptural teach-
ing that men are exclusively called to the pastorate
and to eldership (1 Tim 2:9–15; 1 Timothy 3:1–7),
one wonders if far fewer churches celebrate it.

What do we mean by this? We may appoint
men to be our pastors, but do we cultivate the next
generation of male leaders? While never privi-
leging manhood over womanhood, do older men
model and pass on a vibrant, gospel-driven vision
of manhood? To put this even more plainly, are the
men of the church quick to lead, quick to evange-
lize, quick to clean up, quick to protect and cherish
their wives, or do they sit back, heels up, content
to let the women of the congregation work them-
selves to the bone?

One wonders if this is not the case in many
professedly biblical churches. No generation, we
might say, has the ability to rest on its laurels. No
church can assume that boys will simply inhabit
gospel-wrought manhood. Example is essential,
but so is teaching, plain teaching, especially in our
modern age, so hostile to biblical manhood as it is.
Our schools and TV shows do not ennoble men;
they infantilize them, sneer at them for their mas-
culinity, mock them for taking initiative, tranquil-
ize them with one lesson after another showing the
inherent adolescence of every man and the natural
maturity of every woman. Where we do not shep-
herd boys through the many obstacles they face to
become men of Christ, we leave them to flounder,
flame out, and even lose their souls.⁵

Churches are suffering. They are closing. They
are, most importantly, compromising on scriptural
matters. Where men are not disappearing from
leadership, they are simply fading away. They are
replaced by a well-educated crop of women, many
of them gifted, who in many cases preside over
dwindling congregations unable, despite their cul-
tural acquiescence, to retain youth.⁶ The amazing
thing about this situation, this great glacier sliding
into the ocean, is that it transpires with so little dis-
cussion. Where one might think that the members
of Protestant and mainline churches would wring
their hands and cry out for change, there seems to
be little outrage, little conversation, and little hope.

There is hope, however. There is more hope
that we can get our arms around, to be precise. Like
the rediscovery of the law in Nehemiah’s day, many
Protestants need a radical discovery of the absolute
authority and boundless wisdom of the Word of
God. We need a fresh vision of the grandeur and
glory of God. We don’t need the same old boiled-
down pieties and formalities, the tried-and-true
programs and initiatives. We need a breathtaking,
spine-crackling glimpse of the Almighty. Like news
of a comet bursting across the sky in a predawn
morning, we need to rediscover the sovereign maj-
esty and absolute authority of the Lord we worship.
We need to chase this God like we would pursue
that comet, roaring down the freeway in desperate
search of the One of whom we have heard.⁷

We need a Kierkegaardian existential crisis,
a rediscovery of our fundamental sinfulness and
dependence on the holy Lord of Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob.⁸ We need the man Jesus of Nazareth
ever before us, His holy, Spirit-inspired example
creating fresh faith in us through the gospel. We
need the divine Son of God overshadowing us as
He hangs on a cross, overwhelming us in His per-
sonal payment of the cost love must pay to conquer
wrath. We need an encounter with the biblical local
church, the tangible outpost of God that He has
tailored to us to render us holy, joyful, and faithful
before Him. We need to exhume the doctrine of the
image of God and to remember that, in a way we
struggle to fully comprehend, we bear God’s hand-
print, and thus with all people—with every man or
woman—we possess dignity and a touch of glory.
These things we must have, or like David in Psalm
69:1–3, we will die. For so many of our churches,
the waters have come to our neck. Embracing the
culture and shunning the Word, we have stumbled
into a rushing flood, and it sweeps over us. There is
no refuge save for God alone.

We would give God glory, and see our
churches come alive, by celebrating biblical man-
hood and the call of men to serve our churches as
pastors, leaders, and elders. We do not seek some
sanctified Cult of the Man; we would avoid the
temptation to over-react to our secularized culture
and to equate the cultivation of godly men through
the power of the gospel with that gospel itself. We
would, however, recommit ourselves to what will
seem a strange errand to many around us. The Lord
has called men to lead His people since Adam was
dust of the earth. From the first, man led woman;
in ancient Israel, men almost exclusively led God’s
chosen in a wide range of offices and roles; in the
era of Christ, all of His apostles were men; and
the plain teaching, it seems to me, of those same
apostles is that men are called to be the leaders of
God’s church. There seems to be some physical and
emotional grounds for this reality, but the clearest
reason given in Scripture for this situation is that it
pleased God to order the home, church, and to an
extent society in this way.⁹

What, then, do we need to do to fulfill this
end? We need, in whatever movement we find
ourselves, to celebrate and cultivate male leaders.
We need to teach the men of our congregations
that contrary to what popular figures like Adam
Sandler, Tiger Woods, Alex Rodriguez, Mark San-
ford, and many others teach them, men are not tall
boys.¹⁰ They are not idiots. They are not supposed
to perpetuate what we might call boy culture when
adults (and, in point of fact, when boys). They are
fundamentally called to turn away from their sin
and to embrace Christ in joyful adoration and
humble contrition. The gospel is the only means
by which they can please God and glorify Him. It
frees them from hell, primarily, and from a life of
enslavement to the sins and passions of their flesh,
some of them common to all people, some of them
common to men.

Though equipped with varying tempera-
ments, tastes, physiques, gifts, and minds, men who
believe the gospel are called to marshal all their
faculties to work for the blessing of others to the
glory of God. They are called to serve as leaders
in the church, home, and, with different qualifica-
tions, society. Men have the awesome privilege of
emulating their Savior and laying their lives down
for their families and churches.

In order to address the foregoing, it seems
that pastors must take special care to raise up male
leaders, whether these men will be pastors or not. It
may be true for many of our conservative churches
that we have so prioritized certain callings of the
pastor that we have not emphasized pastoral train-
ing nearly enough. A momentous task like the
passing of leadership from one generation to the
next does not happen by accident. If we think it
does (and many of us seem to), we are kidding our-
selves. Do we really think that a lukewarm portrait
of Christianity, which the human heart is already
trained by sin to reject according to Rom 3:10-18,
can compete with a conception of manhood offer-
ing our unsaved boys the opportunity to tune out
and live for themselves? Faced with opportunities
to run a killer Fantasy Football league, to ogle at
girls through raunch culture films like The Hang-
over, and to goof off with fellow guys on ChatRou-
lette, do we really think most guys who do not have
excellent parents and vibrant churches will some-
how opt in to the way of the cross? Can we really
expect our poor youth pastors to compete, like the
last man in the Alamo, with the multi-billion dollar
industries of modern life urging young men to live
selfishly and stupidly?

Godly development of young men happens,
it seems, when fathers take spiritual responsibil-
ity for their sons and when godly pastors identify,
train, and aid young men, cultivating their faith,
celebrating their gifts, releasing them as Paul did
Timothy to turn the world upside down for Christ.
Our shepherds must also train the men of the con-
gregation to do this on their own with boys from
their own homes, from the church, and from the
broader community.¹¹

The trends revealed in the Barna study did not
come from nowhere. Many churches have accepted
the tenets of ideological feminism outright. Oth-
ers have resisted the age-old pressure to ideologi-
cally accommodate the culture but are doing so in
practice. As a result, there are countless young men
in our churches today who are not receving train-
ing. Whether in the mainline, mega-churches, or
the confessional movement, they need advocates.
Trained by the culture, they stand to wilt, to grow
feminine, to exude passivity, to shirk responsibility.
Trained by the gospel-driven church, given a stun-
ning vision of God and an exciting plan for their
lives as men, they bear incredible hope and promise
for the future flourishing of God’s people.

ENDNOTE

¹Find the study at http://www.barna.org/barna-update/
article/17-leadership/304-number-of-female-senior-pastors-in-
protestant-churches-doubles-in-past-decade.

²The recent move by formerly ELCA churches like St. Mark
Lutheran Church (Lindenhurst, IL) to leave the denomination in
light of its embrace of homosexual ordination, for example, is an
example of a mainline church opposing unscriptural teaching.

³For more on this trend, see Dave Shiflett, Exodus: Why Americans
Are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity (New
York: Sentinel, 2005).

⁴Wayne Grudem has made this connection in Evangelical Femi-
nism: A New Path to Liberalism? (Wheaton: Crossway, 2006).

⁵For a good cultural overview of this trend, see Christina Hoff
Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harm-
ing Our Young Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

⁶We are reminded here of a fascinating chapter by Richard Wight-
man Fox entitled “Experience and Explanation in Twentieth-Cen-
tury History” in the technical historical work edited by Harry S.
Stout and D. G. Hart, New Directions in American Religious History
(Oxford: Oxford University, 1998), 398-413, in which Fox muses
out loud about whether liberal Christianity was destined by its cul-
turally accommodating nature to phase itself out by adopting con-
temporary thought. See especially 398-406. The point is by no
means proven, and Fox (and Stout and Hart) has no bone to pick
on the gender question before us, but this is a matter worthy of
consideration as we think about the fate of liberal Christianity and
Protestantism more broadly.

⁷To develop your understanding of the holiness of God, see R. C.
Sproul, The Holiness of God (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House,
2000); and Bruce A. Ware, Big Truths for Young Hearts: Teaching
and Learning the Greatness of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2009).

⁸See C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh, Kierkegaard: Fear and
Trembling, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cam-
bridge University, 2006).

⁹Andreas Köstenberger and David Jones offer helpful biblical exe-
gesis and counsel related to these spheres in God, Marriage & Fam-
ily: Rebuilding the Biblical Foundation (Wheaton: Crossway, 2004).

¹⁰For a scorching popular take on the infantilism of contemporary
men, access the recent sermon on 1 Pet 3:1–7 by Pastor Mark Dis-
coll of Mars Hill Church (Seattle, Washington) at marshillchurch.
org/sermons.

¹¹For a primer on what to teach a boy, see R. Albert Mohler Jr., From
Boy to Man: The Marks of Manhood (online at albertmohler.com).