ClobberBlog | Mormonism, Evangelical Christianity

My soapboxing at fMh yesterday got me mulling over my own church situation. I’ve always attended egalitarian denominations in the past (Church of the Nazarene, Presbyterian Church {USA}, Assembly of God) and it wasn’t until last year that I began attending a complementarian denomination—NewFrontiers.¹ I had not been going to church very much at the time due to a lot of factors which I won’t bore you with now, but I began attending New Community Church of Tacoma in the depths of my depression over my mother’s terminal illness. The people there have provided wonderful fellowship, they were there for me through my mother’s sickness and death, and I thoroughly enjoy the worship and preaching there. A few Sundays ago we had a special speaker from a NewFrontiers church in South Africa who preached the best message on the gift of the Holy Spirit that I’ve ever heard, the kind of message that I wish all evangelicals were teaching more regularly. It is clear to me that there are many, many people in the denomination who are empowered by the Spirit of God.

Still, the entire time I have attended, there has been a lingering question in my mind of how the denomination as a whole treats women. My local church is considered a church plant, too small to have more than a pastor and a few others on the staff. We have a Sunday evening service and a “Sunday school” class that meets on a weekday night, plus individual weekly small groups. On the third Sunday of the month we meet in the mornings for a special prayer & worship meeting and to take communion. In other words, there aren’t really any opportunities for me to feel marginalized or barred from leadership on a local level; our activity is too limited to worry about it.

Many of the LDS commentators at fMh relayed good, progressive experiences with local Mormon leadership which were better than what one would expect from the religion on the international level, but I kind of chided them for continuing to support a religion that marginalizes women institutionally. Then the question occurred to me… am I any better? My experience with NewFrontiers on the local level may be neutral-to-positive, but is my denomination any better at the worldwide level? I decided that maybe I should find out.

Soft complementarian v. Hard complementarian

It may be pertinent to list some of the differences between soft complementarians and hard complementarians in evangelicalism.

~ Neither allow women to be senior pastors or elders.

~ Soft c.’s acknowledge that women were deacons in the Bible and can be deacons now (Romans 16:1-2, 1 Timothy 3:11). Hard c.’s insist that Phoebe was just a “servant” and “the women” in 1 Tim. 3:11 refers to wives of male deacons, not female deacons.

~ Soft c.’s will let women lead worship, lead women’s ministries, teach co-ed Sunday school and some very rare, very liberal soft c. churches will even let them be assistant pastors. Hard c.’s try not to let women do anything that involves teaching men, including Sunday school and speaking at the pulpit, and generally won’t let them lead worship or offer prayers from the pulpit for the congregation. Hard c.’s may or may not allow women to participate on the worship team, but not lead it.

~ Soft c.’s may set up a council of women to advise the council of elders in lieu of allowing them to actually be elders. Hard c.’s will not.

If you want to see a well-written position statement from a soft complementarian church, check out the statement from Imago Dei Community Church in Portland. Even though I disagree with the soft complementarian position, I applaud Imago Dei for being up front about their position and acknowledging that this is a valid point of disagreement within the body of Christ.

NewFrontiers

This is what I’ve learned about NewFrontiers and women:

~ The official web site says nothing about their position on women, which is usually not a good sign. It means they aren’t listing it because it’s unpopular and they don’t want to have to publicly defend it.

~ The official web site only refers to male leadership in conjunction with Ephesians 4. This is odd since most people understand the gifts in Ephesians 4 to be available to both men and women; “men” could mean “men and women” in Greek and, in the New Testament, it usually does.

~ I checked the official web site for every local NewFrontiers church in the United States. Pastors and elders were mentioned (all male), but not deacons. No offices were mentioned as a substitution for deacons which women had available to them. The only women listed on any local church staffs were secretaries and children’s ministry directors. I did not even see any special women’s ministry leaders.

~ Finally I did a web search for “NewFrontiers and Women” and came across this blog post by Dave Warnock, an egalitarian Methodist minister, and the evidence he presents there is not good. A NewFrontiers leadership conference last year featured 37 speakers: 35 men and 2 women, and the 2 women were wives of other speakers who do not hold any kind of leadership position within NewFrontiers. That’s even worse than the ratio at LDS General Conference, especially if you count the Relief Society/YW session.

~ Warnock also notes that NewFrontiers is terribly cozy with Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill in Seattle, and a huge fan of his stance on gender roles. I only recently learned of Driscoll. BrianJand I were discussing the possibility of meeting up in Seattle to attend Mars Hill on Easter, so I did a little looking into Driscoll. In response to the Episcopalian church’s decision to ordain female bishops, Driscoll remarked:

Yup, you heard that right. Driscoll views his sisters in Christ as “fluffy baby bunny rabbits.” With an attitude like that, I think I’d much rather have a fluffy baby bunny rabbit as my pastor than a turd like Driscoll. This guy makes Boyd K. Packer look like a flaming feminist.

Needless to say, the fact that NewFrontiers is apparently a huge fan of Driscoll’s stance on gender roles is a little disturbing to me.

Conclusion

I wrote to the official NewFrontiers contact e-mail address to ask them point blank what their position on women is. I’ll update this article if they do write back to me, but so far it appears that they are fairly hard complementarian.

I’m not going to stop attending New Community Church in Tacoma, not when I’m moving in five months anyways. This issue really makes me heartsick. The people there have been good to me and I would feel like a jerk for abandoning them when it is not their fault that the denomination on the whole has a rather poor attitude towards women.

However, once I do move in the fall, from here on out I’m taking my own advice. Churches are not going to change their attitudes and re-examine the biblical basis for women’s leadership unless people stop supporting them in their error, so it’s probably about time I paid attention to this issue when I search for a church home. Unless I feel compelled by the Spirit to do otherwise, from August onward I’m only attending egalitarian churches or extremely soft complementarian churches.

Hmm. You know, this is the closest I think I’ve ever come to feminist activism, and it feels good.

h/t: Complegalitarian for the Imago Dei church statement on gender.

¹ NewFrontiers is apparently a “family of churches” and not a denomination. My church is officially considered non-denominational but it is affiliated with NewFrontiers. I have no idea what the functional difference is between a church with a denomination and a church with an official affiliation to a “church family” as they sound like the same thing to me, but for simplicity’s sake, I’m referring to NewFrontiers as a denomination.