A Profile in Courage

Zondervan has recently released a book with the title: How I Changed my Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals. One oddity about the book, which I haven't read, is that it seems all the authors changed their minds in the same direction.

This made me recall a conversation I had about 15 years ago with a young woman who was about to graduate from Princeton Theological Seminary. A graduate of Davidson college, she spoke of how she had fully embraced modern secular feminism in her late teens that was fully supported by her professors and peers in these convictions throughout her college years. Her family sacrificed financially to help her attend Princeton Theological Seminary in order that she could be trained to serve as a Minister of Word and Sacrament. Yet, as she studied Scripture she came to the conclusion that Christ had restricted the ordained offices in his Church to men only.

Talk about being between a rock and a hard place: What could she possibly do in such a situation? At the time we spoke, this woman was in the process of transferring her membership from the PCUSA to the PCA precisely over this issue. This young lady personified courage. Men are sometimes branded as bigots or neanderthals for opposing the ordination of women, but this young lady was essentially seen as betraying the cause. She had to live with fact that she had received generous financial support to prepare for a vocation that she no longer believed she was free to pursue. And, she had to figure out how to graciously navigate her personal life in an environment where many of her closest friends were women who were about to be ordained to calling that she was explicitly saying no woman should enter into.

Where does a person get the courage to take this sort of stand? When I asked her how she was managing she replied: "I simply ask anyone who questions me to show me from the Bible that God's word authorizes women pastors." That is a profound answer for all of us. Courage is not something that she nor we need to seek. If we seek to cling to Jesus and to His word, courage is merely the byproduct of putting Christ first. That is why Luther taught us to sing: "Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also; the body they may kill: God's truth abideth still; His kingdom is forever."