One of Aesop\u2019s fables tells the story of a group of bulls who lived in a field. A lion tried to attack them, but together they drove him off.<\/p>\n
One day, the bulls quarreled over a single patch of grass and stubbornly parted ways, getting as far away from each other as possible. The lion seized this opportunity and devoured the bulls one by one.<\/p>\n
Women\u2019s ministry can sometimes feel like those bulls, each separating into its own \u201cpatch of grass\u201d away from the rest of the church. Critics of complementarianism argue that male leadership oppresses women. Perhaps it\u2019s tempting for complementarian churches to react to this criticism with a hands-off approach, allowing women\u2019s ministries to become a space where women are given independence from the elders\u2014a place for them to exercise their gifts free from the oversight of male pastors.<\/p>\n
I am convinced that while this grass may look greener, women, like men, need pastoral oversight and care.<\/p>\n
I am a member of the Evangelical Community Church of Abu Dhabi (ECC), where I serve as a deacon of women\u2019s ministry. Through the perseverance of faithful saints, ECC has changed and matured over the past fifty years.<\/p>\n
When my family<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When our pastors oversee women\u2019s ministry, it doesn\u2019t indicate distrust, but rather that when the wolves attack, the shepherds will bear the brunt, not the sheep.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":720,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[793],"tags":[312],"class_list":["post-55449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-9marks","tag-leadership","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/720"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55449"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55451,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55449\/revisions\/55451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}