Introduction

Introduction from Dr. Alice Mathews

Welcome to the Our Daily Bread University course Women and Church Leadership. I am Dr. Alice Mathews, your professor.

Here in the summer of 2012 as I build this course for you, I am turning 82. I mention that simply to alert you to the fact that I have lived with this subject matter for more than six decades. Many of the authors cited throughout this course are personal acquaintances, people on all sides of the questions this course raises. Over the years, I’ve benefited from long conversations with any number of them as I have wrestled with the issues of women and church leadership.

On a personal level, I met my husband (Randall Mathews) in college, and we married shortly after we graduated from college. Over the years, God gave us four splendid children who moved with us around the USA in pastoral ministries in Michigan, Colorado, and Wyoming before we spent 17 years serving churches in France and Austria. When we returned to the USA in 1980, my life changed significantly as our adult children married and I moved into one or another aspect of theological education.  Along the way I had earlier picked up a master’s degree in clinical psychology at Michigan State University; and in the late 1980s I returned to school for a PhD in Religion and Social Change at the University of Denver/the Iliff School of Theology. By then, my focus, while strongly academic, was on the place of women in the Christian Church, and my doctoral program was shaped to enable me to go much more deeply into the biblical, theological, and sociological issues many Christian women wrestle with. Along the way I’ve been involved with several seminaries (schools of theology), most recently as the Lois W. Bennett Distinguished Professor (now Emerita) of women’s ministries and educational ministries at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary near Boston, Massachusetts. I am now retired but continue to teach on the doctoral level at Gordon-Conwell.

Basic information for this course

I want to make a comment on my approach to teaching and learning. Adult learning is not the same as children’s learning, so andragogy is different from pedagogy. Adults learn best when they interact with the material. You may prefer a more passive posture, taking notes on a lecture. But the reality is that you will not make the material truly your own in that passive posture. I want to see you wrestle with the content of the course.          

In building this course for you, I have made two assumptions about you. First, I assume that you are an adult with adult learning patterns and needs. Second, I assume that you’re taking this course because you’re interested in the subject matter. On the basis of those two assumptions, I have structured this course without any exams and with limited short reading assignments. I am not into “busywork” just to make a course look hefty. However, you will gain more from this course if you interact with the Additional Resources content found in several of the lessons. This is your opportunity to explore the subject matter for yourself, and this course is your guide through the thicket of books and opinions that abound around the issues of women and church leadership.

A word about nomenclature in this course

Over the years, a number of different words were used to describe various positions on the issue of women and church leadership. The most frequent term used by those who restrict church leadership to men to describe that position was “traditionalist.” Others used the term “male leadership.” The most frequent term used by those who do not restrict church leadership to men to describe that position has been “egalitarian” or the “plural ministry view.” In the late 1980s, a new term was introduced by John Piper and Wayne Grudem for those who restrict church leadership to men, that of “complementarian.” While this has become widespread in its use among traditionalists, egalitarians have objected that they are also complementarian, shunning any sense of unisex and embracing God-given gender differences. They describe the egalitarian position as “complementarity without hierarchy.” Because both groups use the same term but with entirely different meanings, this course will not use the term. Instead, the term “traditionalist” will be used to describe those who restrict church leadership to men, and “egalitarian” will be used for those who do not restrict it.