Which leadership positions can women occupy in the local church? How can churches best platform women with teaching gifts? How we respond to these questions reveals as much about our ecclesiology as it does our complementarianism. Behind many of our complementarian debates are significant differences about how we view the church.
Two people can agree on the same complementarian principles, but they might put those principles into practice very differently because of their different assumptions about ecclesiology, such that the first person looks functionally egalitarian to the second, while the second looks functionally patriarchal to the first.
Once again, much hangs on our ecclesiology. Would you expect anything less from the 9Marks guys?
More to the point, faulty views of the church create complementarian chaos. The further our doctrine of the church strays from biblical norms, the more we find ourselves straining complementarian principles to fit our context. Wrong assumptions about the church and programmatic approaches to church ministry run the risk of undermining complementarian principles.
This point about the church is really the conversation behind many of our conversations about complementarianism. It’s the issue behind the issue. Our complementarian debates are often downstream from our ecclesiological ones.
In this article, I’ll
To continue...read the full-length post originally published on this site.
