I would like to take a moment to tie up the various concerns expressed about my two recent MTW/PCA posts, and deal with them in a bundle. Some of them came up in the comments, and one set came in a very gracious letter of concern from a PCA friend. Here are some thoughts, in no particular order.
One person asked about whether women’s ordination was grounds to “abstain from working with” particular groups, and I replied “you bet.” But in the subsequent discussion, this morphed into something else entirely — grounds for schism or separation. But there is a vast difference between “abstaining from working with” and “separating from.” I quite agree that conservative Protestants have to stop splitting at the drop of the hat, and the problem with the Presbytery of the True Flame is that there are only three churches in it any more and the average age of the average parishioner hovers in the eighties, allowing for seasonal fluctuations that one or two funerals might cause. But this is just another way of saying that grounds for not marrying someone are very different from grounds for divorce. I would never join a denomination that ordained women because I have enough troubles. But if I was already in such a denomination when they started ordaining them, I would remain and fight until they returned to the biblical position or I was kicked out. I fully agree with the concerns about the conservative tendency to cashier themselves. We should quit doing that.
Another concern has to do with posting on this before confirming it. Actually, the only thing about it that really needed confirmation was the precise nature of the relationship of the church in question to the MTW and through them to the PCA. I was confident enough about the basics of the story to talk about it publicly already. I was trying to go the second mile on this, although in retrospect my doing so may well have made my information look a more shaky or tenuous than it actually was. My apologies for that.
Another question had to do with the particulars of this arrangement. The church in question is European, no big surprise, and there is an official protocol there involving MTW missionaries and this denomination that ordains women. This protocol is such that MTW missionaries can plant a church, and when the church is first particularized in their local denomination, they can call a woman pastor. But their freedom is obviously someone else’s limitation. An MTW missionary who has biblically-grounded scruples about this (say about participating in an installation service) is the one who feels the pressure to conform. The pressure is on the orthodox to bend, and not the other way. Either that, or look for a call in another part of the world.
The rationalizations that have to be involved in this kind of thing are the reason for my comment in the second post — “the sum of the matter is that the PCA is not (yet) ordaining women to the ministry.” A very gracious correspondent asked me why I had to put that yet in there. It seems inflammatory to those many faithful PCA pastors who wouldn’t countenence that kind of thing in their presbyteries here at home for a second. Right, and I take the point. They really wouldn’t. So why did I say yet? Because the precedents are being established now. Although there are many PCA men who currently wouldn’t countenance such a thing, there are obviously a number of men in leadership in the MTW who do countenance it, and they are working with it right now. They are doing so far away, out on the edges, because they are not dummies.
Think of it this way — why does the Atlantic Ocean make any difference at all in whether a PCA minister would get in big trouble for helping to ordain a woman to the ministry? And once we allow an argument that the apostle Paul would have considered a theological irrelevancy (the Atlantic), this means that the compromise is headed this way. Once it gets to a point where you try to stop something similar over here, you will find out at that time that you have been out-maneuvered. The opinions of faithful PCA men won’t matter on the day they discover that the PCA has been doing this thing three thousand miles east of Atlanta for fifty years already. If three thousand miles east, why not three thousand miles west? He who says A must say B.
We need to pretend this is a chess game, and we need to start thinking three moves ahead.