She Was Told to Sit Down

“In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy... Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.” Acts 2:17–18 (NIV); see also Joel 2:28–29; Judges 4:4; Galatians 3:28

Most of us know a woman who used to be in church and is not anymore. Maybe she taught your Sunday school. Maybe she ran the kitchen, the choir, the youth program, the whole building when nobody was looking. Then one day she stopped coming. And if you asked her why, she had her answer ready.

I have a friend who told me that story when we met. She's a strong woman, always has been. Her parents made sure that she attended church, even times when they could not. They wanted her to have that foundation. She enjoyed it at first. Met other young ladies and enjoyed the fellowship with people her age. She liked the older pastor and was on her way to loving being in a church...

Then, the older pastor retired, and a new, younger pastor came in. One of the first things he did was teach that women were not to speak in the church. He pulled back the ways women had led there for as long as she could remember. He had verses for it. He was sure.

For her, that was the door closing. She is an independent Black woman who was just starting her journey in faith but this did not feel right. How do you tell a young woman in the 1980s to sit down and stay quiet in the one place that was supposed to feel like home. It took a long time, and a lot of conversations, before she would even try another church. The hurt that minister handed her did not stay behind when she walked out. It followed her.

My mother carried a quieter version of the same thing. She grew up believing a woman in the pulpit just did not sit right. Nobody argued her into that. It was the water she swam in. It was what church looked like where she came from. She was born in the 1920s.

I am not telling you these two stories to start a fight. I am telling you because they sit right next to each other in my own family, and I suspect some version of both sits in yours. One woman pushed out by the teaching. One woman shaped by it and at peace with it. Both love God. Both read the same Bible.

Two Verses and a Room Full of Women

So here is the question this whole series is going to wrestle with. Does God call women to lead and to carry His message? Or does the Bible save that for men?

People who say no are not making it up. They have text. Two passages do most of the heavy lifting. In 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 Paul writes that women should stay silent in the churches and are not permitted to speak. In 1 Timothy 2:11–12 he writes, “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.” Read those cold, with nothing around them, and they sound like a locked door.

That reading has a serious name and serious defenders. It is usually called the complementarian view. It holds that men and women are equal in worth before God but are made for different roles, and that Scripture reserves the office of pastor and elder for qualified men. And the case is bigger than one verse. In that same chapter of 1 Timothy, Paul does not point to the culture of his day. He reaches all the way back to creation, to Adam being formed first (1 Timothy 2:13). That matters. It is hard to wave the verse off as just a first century custom when Paul himself roots it in Genesis. Good and faithful people hold this view. They are trying to honor what they believe the text plainly says, and we are going to take their argument seriously.

But here is the other thing sitting in the same Bible. The same God who inspired those verses filled His own pages with women He called, used, and spoke through.

Deborah led the whole nation of Israel as a judge and a prophet, and the army would not even march without her (Judges 4:4–9). Miriam is called a prophet and led Israel in worship after the Red Sea (Exodus 15:20). When the lost book of the law turned up and the king needed someone to confirm it was really God’s word, the priest did not go find a man. He went to Huldah, a woman prophet, and she spoke for God (2 Kings 22:14–20).

It keeps going into the New Testament. Mary Magdalene was the first person to see the risen Jesus and the first one He sent to go tell the others (John 20:17–18). Paul called Phoebe a deacon and trusted her to carry the letter of Romans to the church (Romans 16:1–2). He greeted a woman named Junia and called her outstanding among the apostles (Romans 16:7). And Priscilla, a woman, helped teach a gifted male preacher named Apollos to understand the way of God more clearly (Acts 18:26).

So which is it? A locked door, or a room full of women God plainly trusted with His work? That tension is real. It is right there in the text. And anybody who tells you it is simple is selling you something.

What Makes This Honest Work

The real work lives in the gap between those two pictures. The folks on the other side of the complementarian view are usually called egalitarians. They argue that God hands out gifts to men and women alike, and that the few verses that seem to restrict women were written into specific problems in specific churches, not handed down as a rule for all time. They point to something easy to miss. Just three chapters before Paul tells the Corinthian women to be silent, he gives instructions for how a woman should pray and prophesy out loud in that very same church (1 Corinthians 11:5). A man does not write a rule for how women should speak and then, a few pages later, ban them from speaking, unless something more specific is going on in that room than we can see from here.

It helps to know what one of these words actually meant. When Scripture says a woman “prophesied,” it is not just talk about predicting the future. To prophesy was to speak God’s message to God’s people, out loud, in public, with authority. That is what Miriam did. That is what Huldah did. That is exactly what God promised would happen to daughters and to women servants when He poured out His Spirit, and what Peter said came true on the day the church was born (Acts 2:17–18).

This has never been abstract for the Black church. Walk into most any Black congregation and the women are the spine of the place. They teach. They organize. They pray the church through its hardest seasons. They keep the doors open. And yet for generations the pulpit itself got treated as men’s ground. Renita Weems, the first Black woman in this country to earn a doctorate in Old Testament, wrote a whole book reading the women of Scripture as real people with real callings, and she wrote it with Black women in mind, because their experience had been left out of the conversation far too long.

Go back two hundred years and you find Jarena Lee. A free Black woman who felt God call her to preach. She went to Richard Allen, founder of the AME Church, and asked for permission. He told her no. The church had no place for women preachers. She waited years. Then one Sunday a visiting preacher froze in the middle of his sermon and could not go on, and Jarena Lee stood up and finished it. Allen was in the room. He changed his mind on the spot and authorized her to preach. The first woman the AME Church ever recognized got there because the man holding the power finally admitted what God had been doing all along.

The question was never whether God uses women. The pages are full of the women He used. The question is whether we have been reading the whole Bible, or only the parts we were handed.

What This Means for Where You Are

So where does that leave you, reading this on your phone on a Sunday afternoon?

If you are like my relative, pushed out by a teaching that told you to sit down, hear me. Your hurt is real, and it is not proof that you failed God. But the man who handed you that hurt is not the whole story, and he does not get the last word. There is more in this book than what he showed you.

If you are like my mother, and a woman in the pulpit just does not sit right with you, I am not here to shame you out of it. You came by it honestly. All I am asking is that you come look at the whole text with me, the hard verses and the women God used both, and see if the picture is bigger than the one you were handed.

And if you are a man who has never had to think about this for one second, that might be the very reason you should. The people most certain women cannot lead are often the people who never needed the question answered for themselves.

So let me be clear about what this series is and is not. It is not me telling you what to think. I am a first year divinity student, not a man with all the answers, and I am still wrestling with parts of this myself. What I am going to do is lay it out honest. We will sit with the verses that seem to slam the door shut. We will walk through Deborah, the judge nobody preaches. The prophets who spoke for God. The women standing at the empty tomb. The women Paul worked beside and named with honor. We will take both sides seriously, because both sides are full of people who love God and take the Bible seriously.

My job is to put the whole Bible in front of you and let you do business with God about it. That is the wrestling this place is named for.

So come on. Let us go to the text and see.

REFLECT & RESPOND

• What did you grow up believing about women leading or preaching in church? Where did that belief come from, and have you ever actually gone to the text to test it?

• Is there a woman in your life who walked away from church over how she was treated? What do you think she saw that pushed her out the door?

• Read 1 Corinthians 14:34 and 1 Corinthians 11:5 back to back. What do you notice? What questions does that raise for you?

• Before this series goes one step further, where do you honestly land right now, and how open are you to letting the text stretch you?

SOURCES

[1] Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. “The Danvers Statement on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.” 1988. https://cbmw.org/about/danvers-statement/.

[2] Christians for Biblical Equality International. “Men, Women, and Biblical Equality.” 1989. https://www.cbeinternational.org/resource/men-women-and-biblical-equality/.

[3] Beck, James R., ed. Two Views on Women in Ministry. Rev. ed. Counterpoints. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005. A balanced academic volume laying the complementarian and egalitarian cases side by side; used copies are inexpensive.

[4] Lee, Jarena. The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a Coloured Lady. Philadelphia, 1836. Excerpt freely available at Teaching American History, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/my-call-to-preach-the-gospel/. See also “Lee, Jarena (1783–185?),” BlackPast, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/lee-jarena-1783/.

[5] Epp, Eldon Jay. Junia: The First Woman Apostle. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. For a freely accessible treatment, see Bernadette J. Brooten, “‘Junia ... Outstanding among the Apostles’ (Romans 16:7),” https://people.brandeis.edu/~brooten/Articles/Junia_Outstanding_among_Apostles.pdf.

[6] Weems, Renita J. Just a Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women’s Relationships in the Bible. San Diego: LuraMedia, 1988. Used copies are widely available and inexpensive.

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