Today on CNN.com a story was featured concerning the dismissal of a female Sunday School teacher from her longtime teaching position. This article can be accessed here. This is representative of a long-running debate within theological circles on the roles of men and women within the church. I personally hold to the complementarian understanding, which emphasizes that both men and women bear the image of God equally and yet have divinely-ordained roles to exercise that image within the Kingdom of God.
My question for discussion is more pastoral than theological: As a pastor (or lay church leader), how would you best approach this unique situation of removing a long-time female Sunday School teacher if you hold to the complementarian understanding of teaching and preaching roles in the Church?
I’ll try to post some thoughts of my own on this wider subject within a few days.
Good question. Scripture plainly states that a woman is not to teach or have authority over men in the church setting. So, let’s say you go to a church and there are 4 women SS teachers. What do you do?
I think the wise thing to do is realize that God has placed these women in these positions for some reason or another. They are doing their best to teach the church. In some churches, if these women were not teaching then there would be no teachers at all. What to do?
1) Keep the women teaching.
2) Do not make any new women teachers.
3) Call for more men to be teachers and start new classes. This will relieve the burden on these other classes and it will engender (pun intended) the men to step up and take more of an active leadership role. Most churches where women are teaching, these same churches have men only deacons. Encourage the deacons to teach and be more ‘visible’ leaders.
4) Preach the whole canon of Scripture and let the Holy Spirit work through imparting knowledge, wisdom and conviction to those open to Him.
5) Those women who teach who have hard hearts? Let God deal with them.
Interesting thoughts. Would you support enacting church discipline in severe cases of women who utterly refused to submit to your plan over time? I am referring to the “hard-hearted” cases.
All cases of church discipline are all different. A lot depends on the circumstances. But, I think the more important question for pastors to ask themselves is, “Is this removal of a woman sunday school teacher a hill on which to die?” Is this issue important enough to bring about immediate change? That question can only be answered by each pastor.