Women and Authority

There is a particular kind of grief that shows up in comment sections. You can watch it happen in real time: a denomination votes, a doctrine gets codified, and somewhere in the replies a woman who has spent decades quietly faithful to a local church goes silent, or worse, finally says out loud what she has carried for years. That is what happened last month (June 2026), when a sector of the Christian world voted on whether women may serve as pastors. I watched the comments. I read the threads. And underneath the theological argument was something else entirely: spiritual trauma, surfacing all at once, in women who run nonprofits, lead ministries, and have served faithfully for years, only to be told, again, that the answer is no.

I want to be honest about where I started. I did not walk into this conversation looking for a doctrine that would make me comfortable. I have studied this from multiple angles, in the Greek, in the cultural context of Paul's letters, because I was not willing to step into ministry on a doctrine I hadn't tested. If truth matters, it has to survive scrutiny. So I brought the question honestly to the Lord: I don't know the answer. Will you help me?

The answer came somewhere as ordinary as a sink full of dishes.

The Blunt Force Truth

Scripture tells wives to submit to their own husbands. It never tells women to submit to all men.

Ephesians 5:22 does not say "women, submit to men." It says wives submit to their own husbands, as the church submits to Christ. That is a specific, covenantal instruction inside a specific relationship. It was never a blanket command handing every woman over to the authority of every man, and it was certainly never meant to be applied by a denominational vote to every woman in every pulpit. Somewhere between Paul's letter and a modern constitution, "submit to your own husband" quietly became "submit to men in general," and nobody seems to have noticed the swap.

That distinction is not a technicality. It is the hinge the whole argument turns on.

The Precedent Scripture Already Set

If you want to argue that women cannot hold spiritual authority, you have to explain Deborah. She is not a footnote; she is a judge over Israel and a prophet, meaning God spoke through her directly (Judges 4:4). When Barak, the military commander of Israel, is told to go to war, his response is not confidence, it is a condition: "If you will go with me, I will go; but if you will not go with me, I will not go" (Judges 4:8). The commanding general of Israel would not go to battle without a woman beside him. And when the moment for courage finally came, it was not Barak who ended the enemy commander's life. It was Jael, with a tent peg (Judges 4:21).

Miriam is harder to pin down. She is called a prophet in her own right (Exodus 15:20) and she leads Israel in worship, which is no small office, but she is also the one who gets rebuked when she oversteps her lane with Moses (Numbers 12). Her story is not a clean case for either side, and I think that is worth saying honestly rather than only reaching for the examples that flatter my position. But even her rebuke assumes she had real standing to begin with. You do not rebuke someone for overstepping an office they were never given.

Then there is Esther, who walks into the throne room of the most powerful man in the empire, uninvited, and reverses a genocide (Esther 4:14-16). And there is the woman at the well in John 4, a Samaritan, a woman with a complicated history, whom Jesus commissions as the first evangelist in the Gospel of John. He tells her who He is before He tells almost anyone else. If God trusts a woman to be the first witness to the Messiah, the question of whether He trusts women to lead a Bible study starts to look very small by comparison.

None of this is trivia. It is precedent, and precedent set by God does not expire because a modern committee finds it inconvenient.

Two Rungs, Not Three

Here is the structural error underneath the whole debate. The church is not organized as Jesus, then men, then women. That is a three-rung ladder, and scripture never builds one. The actual structure is Jesus and His church, His one bride, undivided (Ephesians 5:23-32; Revelation 19:7). There are two rungs. Christ, and everyone who belongs to Him.

Marriage on earth is given, in part, to mirror that relationship: the husband loves his wife as Christ loved the church, and the wife submits to her husband as the church submits to Christ (Ephesians 5:25). It is a picture of one union, not a chain of command with women at the bottom. Galatians 3:28 says there is no longer male or female in Christ, and Jesus Himself says that in the resurrection there is no marriage at all (Matthew 22:30). If the eternal reality has no second tier for women, and marriage is meant to reflect the eternal reality, then a permanent doctrine of female subordination is reading something into scripture that scripture's own structure does not support.

Why This Matters More Than a Job Title

Scripture says that in the last days God will pour out His Spirit "on your sons and your daughters," and they will prophesy (Joel 2:28-29; Acts 2:17-18). Prophecy is not a decorative gift. The gift of Prophesy is given to us to edify, exhort, and comfort each other. The Prophet's function is to direct, correct, and carry God's authority into a room. Given the fact that "your sons and daughters will prophesy" is written in scripture, that means Prophets exist in the end times. If a woman can be a Prophet (the Old Testament proves this), then they can be given a word that corrects a pastor, an elder, or an apostle. Scripture has examples where Prophets do exactly that. A Female Prophet can be given those kinds of words. They're not reserved for just the men. The claim that women are constitutionally unfit to hold spiritual authority collapses under its own weight. If a female Prophet may correct leadership under the anointing of the Spirit, then it cannot be said that a women may not lead under that same Spirit. Romans 16:7 names a woman, Junia, among the apostles. The evidence was never as thin as it has been made to sound.

I also want to say something for the sake of every pastor's wife who reads this. If two become one flesh in marriage, and your husband carries the pastoral mantle, you are not a bystander to it. You carry it with him. To act as though his calling belongs to him alone diminishes something scripture already joined.

What I Am Not Saying

I am not saying scripture is unclear or that Paul was wrong. I am saying that "wives submit to your own husbands" and "women submit to men" are two different sentences, and only one of them is in the Bible. I am saying the weight of the pattern: Miriam's worship leadership, Deborah's judgment seat, Esther's courage, the woman at Jesus' well, Mary at the Tomb, all deserves an honest hearing rather than a vote that treats half the church as a category to be managed.

A Word for the Wounded

If you have left the church, or stopped going altogether, because of how you were treated for wanting to teach, lead, or simply be taken seriously, I am sorry. That grief is real and it deserves to be named honestly rather than explained away. Healing has to come before forgiveness can hold; do not skip the wound to get to the resolution, or it will need to be reopened.

Take this to the Lord yourself. Do not take my word for it, and do not take anyone else's word for it either. Ask Him to show you the truth in scripture, and hold whatever you're taught up against the plain example of Jesus. He is not afraid of the question, and He will not leave you without an answer.

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You don't have to figure this out alone.