The Plan To Smuggle in Women Pastors

I was browsing the other day, and found this amazing admission:


"Aimee Byrd and the Egalitarians Explain Their Plan To Smuggle in Women Pastors"

In order for women to be accepted in leadership roles, we’ve got to put them in leadership roles… Lots of men have this story that their minds actually weren’t changed by what they read. Their minds were changed by hearing women. And hearing women teach and realizing they could be edified, that they could grow spiritually from hearing a woman.

So I would really like for more evangelical churches to put women in adult leadership roles… So I’m not expecting pastorate immediately. Everything takes time. But just put them in more spaces where they actually can use these gifts. Don’t confine them only to women’s ministry and to children’s ministry and to the dream team in the kitchen. Put them out in leadership roles… Let women teach the Bible. Let them teach actual theology and good stuff. And let’s see them do it… If I could change one thing, I would put more women in adult Sunday School and teaching places in churches.

 

This is why I believe the LCMS will have women's ordination in the next 20 years or so. It has now been some time since women started appearing as lectors, communion servers, and Adult Sunday School teachers in mixed audiences. Combine the visuals with the rather confused understanding of the deacon in the LCMS and the conditions exist for the next step.

 

Uh-oh, now you've done it! You've thrown down the "Summon Tiffy" card! Anything related to WO is like the bat-signal to Tiffy, so prepare yourselves.

As for me, I covered this ground pretty thoroughly when I posted in this thread some time ago.

The complementarian position is the only truly Biblical position, but it has been abandoned by nearly every Protestant church in creation in submission to modern egalitarianism (including the Anglicans, I'm sorry to say). WO is a done deal as far as the Anglican church is concerned, it would take an enormous amount of pain to reverse course at this point. ACNA may at some point decide to terminate the practice, but it'll be a project of decades because currently-ordained women certainly cannot be defrocked on that ground alone. And I don't sense any appetite in the ACNA leadership to open this particular can of worms any time soon.

I don't think it's a bad thing to allow women to have lay leadership roles in church. Women no less than men should have the opportunity to exercise their gifts in service to the Lord. But when it comes to pastoral roles, I am adamant that this is a role reserved to men by Biblical decree (and this decree does not simply hinge on the famous verses by Paul -- it is a thread that runs through both the Old Covenant and the New).

 

I believe that Aimee Bird is part of the OPC (Orthodox Presbyterian Church). I am surprised that such a conservative denomination is not standing firm on such issues. Issues like these push me to believe that the center of Christendom is shifting towards Asia, Russia, and Africa and away from the West. I pray that God will give his ministers a spine to fight back.

 

Oh, that center shifted long ago. Africa (and maybe Asia) is going to be the locus of Christianity for the rest of the the 21st century. Many orthodox Anglicans in the West assume that this will lead to a more orthodox expression of the faith, but I'm not so sure -- Africa no less than America is being buffeted by cultural changes (and violence from Muslim and pagan populations at the same time). The African and Asian churches are far more "charismatic" than some Western Christians feel comfortable with (much Anglicanism in Africa strikes me as Pentecostal rather than Evangelical). Christianity will continue to thrive, and we should all be happy about that -- but big changes are coming, and not all of them are good ones in terms of traditional Anglican orthodoxy.

The big danger I see in the African church generally is syncretism with local pagan and animistic faiths (like Vodoun or Santeria).

EDIT: But Americans should not wag their fingers at the Africans for syncretism, given that our own land is the source of Mormonism, Jehovah's Witness, and other syncretic cults.

 

The way forward to the for the ACNA is to remove them from ministry but continue to pay them until retirement. I can see that as the only just way

 

Aimee Byrd recently had a spat on her podcast she co-ran with Karl Trueman, where she began espousing radical feminist ideals… needless to say she’s no longer on that podcast, but yes, women can really fall victim to the radical feminist agenda

That’s what I thought too, until I saw these frank revelations from Aimee Byrd, that the way to embed feminism and Gender Ideology within the church, is precisely through assigning leadership roles to women, first

that seems to be precisely what she is saying above

 

I've said this before, and I'll say it again: this issue would not have nearly the prominence it does, had it not been for the Tractarians' rewriting of history. It is Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox assumptions about the priesthood that make this a problem. E.L. Mascall was a paradigmatic example of this. A thoroughgoing understanding of the Ministry of the Church that is in line with the Reformers (including the English Reformers) does not lead in that direction with necessity. People might still disagree about the topic on the basis of exegesis of particular passages (and that's ok), but it would not rise to the level of a church-splitting issue. The Methodists carried on what I take to have been the classical Anglican view of the Ministry (certainly there was no intention to do otherwise), and were a separate entity prior to the Oxford Movement, so the rewrite of history bypassed them, and they were ordaining women in some capacity almost from the beginning. That in itself is an important clue. (And that is setting aside the rather obvious observation that doing the things that clergy do - reading, speaking, listening, etc. - doesn’t depend on any uniquely male abilities or capacities.) This is a peculiarly Anglo-Catholic problem, and it is arguable that Anglo-Catholic revisionism was the #1 theological factor in opening the door to theological liberalism in Anglicanism. Speaking purely as an outside observer of the Continuing Movement, I take no pleasure in saying that I just do not see how groups like the ACNA can ultimately avoid the same kinds of controversies that have racked the Episcopal Church over the years. A lot of people seem to have just wanted to set the clock back to 1928, but the kind of "liberalism" protested against by such groups was already present in 1928, including in the revision of the Prayer Book approved that year. I pray I'm not out of line for saying such.

 

This is a problem that has been decades (more than a century, actually) in the making. Protestant churches failed to set boundaries and enforce established canon law. American political ideology is extremely egalitarian in the 20th and 21st centuries, and it was inevitable that this would filter into the churches. The churches have only themselves to blame for not setting (and enforcing!) their Scriptural boundaries back when it might have made a difference.

There is also the problem that women are much more "churchy" than men are, and pastors often find it difficult if not impossible to fill lay leadership roles if they restrict the offices to men. Women predominate in the "music leader" role at most churches I've ever gone to, as well as preschool and bible-study groups. I think a lot of pastors fear that women will simply leave the church if they are not given "room to grow" -- an attitude which strikes me as prideful and opposite to Biblical humility, but there is no doubt that this is what's driving a lot of the feminist incursion into church leadership (and the abdication of men at the same time). Western women (whether consciously or unconsciously) carry their political and cultural feminist ideology into the church with them. And it's a thousand times worse with college-educated Millennials and Zoomers. After twenty years of indoctrination in Godless schools and colleges, they are essentially unfit for the Christian faith -- they basically have to be broken of their brainwashing and completely re-educated.

 

It has been sad to see so many churches infected by charismatics in Africa, but really throughout the world. I just find it a bit too emotionalized and pagan-esc for my tastes. Theologically and traditionally, I also tend to feel that it has some serious issues. There are many oneness Pentecostals that believe and act like they have the "spirit." Charismaticism seems really prone to self-delusion and many odd characters.

 

The problem is epidemic among Protestant churches, not just the Anglican communion. Doesn't matter if you talk to Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, Reformed, even Eastern Orthodox: this is a fight that transcends sectarian lines.

Ultimately, I take this battle back to Schleiermacher and Barth. Schleiermacher wanted to center the Christian faith on an inward-turning, emotional state that is only loosely connected to fixed external referents (like the inerrancy of Scripture, the reality of the Trinity, etc.). Barth attempted to yank back Protestant Christianity to a more orthodox posture, but in so doing he broke his own theology by redefining what orthodoxy meant to more closely conform to "realities" of modern culture and life. In the end and in many ways, Barth was just as much a relativist as Schleiermacher. (In fact he was one of the pioneers of the liberal habit of taking well-understood theological terms, redefining them to mean something else, and then using them in the new context and accusing others of misunderstanding him when they complained.)


If post-Puritan Protestantism has one signal failing, it is a complete inability to draw theological and canonical boundaries and enforce them. Relativism has rotted the theology of the Reformation completely through. It amounts to a civilizational mental illness.

 

I actually agree with that, because any kind of revisionism had set the stage, prepared the internal culture, for further revisionisms in the future. Of course my own thought is that the Anglo-Catholics weren't the first revisionists, but rather late 18th century low-church evangelicals ("the Clapham Sect"), who were the first to 'revise' Anglicanism into being more compatible with what passed for protestantism in those times (mostly the giant wave of Methodism). You can find very high church Anglican expressions even into the 1810s, 1820s, long before the Tractarians set in. That is the Anglican culture which the Evangelicals sought to "revise". Then the Anglo-Catholics appeared and decided to "revise". Then finally the Liberals appeared and decided to revise.

But more to your point, I don't know that Anglo-Catholics are uniquely responsible for women's ordination. Let's look at the Continuing Churches: they are mainly safe from this, aren't they. The Roman church - is mostly safe on this (although changing). The Eastern Orthodox have been safe on this until recent times. Then you look at Baptists, and they're really struggling to articulate what (if anything) is wrong with women's ministry. Why is Aimee Byrd wrong, if "priesthood of all believers"?

Let's not forget the Quakers. They embraced the "priesthood of all believers" and therefore they had women ministers back in the 1600s! (It was one of the reasons Anglicans called them heretics). I don't believe that "priesthood of all believers" is a core Protestant concept; it was made into one by revivalist modernist groups like the Quakers, the Methodists. None of the Reformers would've agreed with this theology.

So by contrast, why have Anglo-Catholics successfully rejected it so far? Because they believe the ordained ministry is something special, something set aside. They don't believe you can put it on or take it off like a cloak. They believe it is something sacred, and something you protect. And that's why they've protected it. But if you don't believe it is anything worth protecting, there is a very slim branch on which you can rest any rejections of it.

 

I agree with that as far as it goes, but I'm not sure I would consider it to be controversial among Orthodox (at all, really), and among the other groups, they seem to have settled into an understanding about it a long time ago. It seems - again, bear in mind I am to some extent an outsider in this respect - to only be truly raging still within Anglicanism.

I can see what you mean about Schleiermacher but I think the jury may still be out on Barth. I have not read all of Barth but what I have read, I found to be insightful. He does put a new spin on some things, but then, all theologians do that to some extent. Aquinas may be the purest 'orthodoxy' in Roman Catholicism now, but he was considered quite innovative at the time (and more often than not, that wasn't a compliment). At one point I think the University of Paris even banned his works. Anyway, I am in the process of delving into Barth's soteriology, with an eye to seeing just how closely his dogmatic system relies on exegesis, which is really where the rubber meets the road. A nineteenth century theologian like Charles Hodge was, in my mind, the paragon of how 'confessional' dogmatics should be done. Everything was backed up by careful, thoughtful exegesis. If I find that Barth didn't really do that, then I'll have to reevaluate.

 

But that's the whole point: Anglo-Catholics haven't rejected it so far. There are hordes of Anglo-Catholics in the Episcopal Church and in the ACNA who support WO, and among the latter that includes actual practices in several dioceses, if I'm not mistaken. Not only has Anglo-Catholicism not acted as a brake on innovation, it now seems to be leading the charge (at least in the Episcopal Church) to pursue causes deemed 'progressive'. Those issues can be argued on the merits and it's not my intention to do so here, only to point out that Anglo-Catholicism has been consistently non- or even anti-traditional on these things once the full implications of their position were realized. The Vincentian canon is not the Anglican rule of faith; Anglo-Catholicism's ongoing search for beliefs and practices, no matter how obscure, having even greater antiquity, broader universality, and more continuous consent, means that the goal posts keep moving. This brochure is a good example of what I'm talking about.

 

Right, I keep forgetting that you're still in the Episcopal Church, so your experience is going to be different. Yeah in the TEC context, the Anglo-Catholics are all lavender and rainbow, while the true Bible-believing Evangelicals are complementarian and traditionalist.

So yeah I totally get your vantage point. But I think it's an aberration if you zoom out and see the total landscape. In the Roman church, who are the "catholics" that push for women's ordination? It's not your Tridentine latin-mass traditionalists. It's your limp-wristed rainbow-vested clerics who don't even believe most of the stuff the Roman church teaches.

You have people who play-act as Roman Catholics (same vestments & liturgies), without having the same beliefs. The same analogy can be transported even back to the Anglo-Catholics in the Episcopal Church. I don't think these are the real ones. And I'm not a big fan of Anglo-Catholicism, so don't see this as me defending it, but they're not the real ones. @Shane R, in the Continuing Movement, is a real one. There's nothing interiorly Anglo-Catholic about those in the Episcopal Church, so they shouldn't be a reference point of how Anglo-Catholics think and approach spirituality.

I think there is a real and obvious value to a viewpoint that places a premium on ordained ministry, says it is something special and set aside.

 

I had to smile at this. Nobody has read all of Barth (maybe not even Barth himself -- rumor has it that his research assistant and paramour Charlotte von Kirschbaum actually contributed some material). Church Dogmatics runs to about six million words more or less, and that in academic German translated (in mediocre fashion) into academic English. If you want a pretty good reader that gives you a bite-sized portion of Barth before you dive into the full meal, you can try R. Michael Allen's Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics: An Introduction and Reader. At about 230 pages, it's a mere pamphlet compared to the formidable edifice of Barth's full opus, yet it's valuable as a precis and roadmap.

 

That's basically the crux of the matter (no pun intended). As C.S. Lewis is sometimes quoted as saying (though I have not been able to locate the source for it), such people are ultimately "loyal to neither Canterbury nor Rome". The Bible as understood in the Creeds and as taught by the Reformers was the basis for Anglicanism; that is not the basis for Roman Catholicism. The Oxford Movement went a long way toward destroying the foundations of Anglicanism, but without replacing it with anything. Roman Catholics do not have that problem: they have the permanent teaching office of the Church, the Magisterium. People can say whatever they want to about the Bible and it doesn't matter. That's why there's really not much of a debate within Roman Catholicism (or Eastern Orthodoxy) about changing prerequisites for ordination. Nor is there much of one within (non-Anglican) Protestantism because most of the arguments based on Scripture ultimately amount to arguments from silence. The debate still rages between liberal and conservative Anglo-Catholicism because the movement as a whole never agreed on what it wanted to be. Resolve that dilemma and the debate goes away.

 

I couldn’t have said this better myself

 

BTW they say the Church Dogmatics was unfinished when Barth died. I don’t see how that’s possible. I will say that Barth meanders a lot in his presentation, in that he uses fifty words where ten will do just fine. One can also detect the influence of Hegel in his thought rather clearly.

 

Barth is interesting to me… I have found strong Reformed critiques showing a profound heterodoxy in his thought, deep beneath his mountains of words.. I’ve come away feeling that he is very far from this champion of orthodoxy he presented himself as? Is anyone interested in looking at those Reformed critiques of him together with me? perhaps we should start a thread to discuss