Topic

Women in Ministry

Whether women may be ordained or hold the highest teaching and leadership roles in the church, and how Scripture’s passages on men and women in church and home should be read.

On one side, Egalitarianism holds that all roles are open to women and men alike. On the other, Complementarianism holds that men and women are equal in worth but that elder or pastoral leadership is reserved for men. The Catholic and Orthodox Male Priesthood reaches a similar practical result by a different, sacramental argument. The debate runs through many Protestant bodies rather than between them.

History

Roots

The New Testament gives both sides their texts. Women followed Jesus, funded his work and were the first witnesses of the resurrection. Paul greets Phoebe as a diakonos of the church at Cenchreae and Junia as “well known to the apostles” (Romans 16:1–7), names Priscilla before her husband as a teacher of Apollos (Acts 18:26), and assumes women pray and prophesy in worship (1 Corinthians 11:2–16). He also writes that “there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Against these stand two short passages: “the women should keep silent in the churches” (1 Corinthians 14:34–35) and “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man” (1 Timothy 2:11–15), the second grounded in the order of creation.

The Early Church read the restrictive texts as binding. Tertullian (c. 207) wrote that “it is not permitted to a woman to speak in the church; but neither (is it permitted her) to teach, nor to baptize, nor to offer” (On the Veiling of Virgins 9). Yet the church did keep an order of deaconesses, mentioned in canon 19 of the Council of Nicaea (canons), who assisted at the baptism of women and ministered to them. John Chrysostom, preaching on Romans 16, praised the devotion of Junia, “that she should be even counted worthy of the appellation of apostle” (Homily 31 on Romans). The deaconess order faded in the West by the early Middle Ages and in the East later.

Medieval theology gave the exclusion its classic reasoning. Thomas Aquinas held that a woman cannot validly receive holy orders, because a sacrament must signify what it gives, and “since it is not possible in the female sex to signify eminence of degree, for a woman is in the state of subjection, it follows that she cannot receive the sacrament of Order” (Summa Theologiae, Supplement q. 39 a. 1). Modern Catholic teaching dropped the subjection argument but kept the conclusion.

Causes

The Reformation widened the question without settling it. Martin Luther’s priesthood of all believers removed the sacramental priesthood, but the Reformers kept preaching and church office for men. The opening came from the radical and revivalist edges of Protestantism. Quakers allowed women to preach from the 1650s; Margaret Fell defended the practice in Womens Speaking Justified (1666). John Wesley at first resisted women preachers, then came to accept some, like Sarah Crosby and Mary Bosanquet, as having an “extraordinary call” (his letter to Bosanquet of 13 June 1771: “the strength of the cause rests there–on your having an extraordinary call”).

Nineteenth-century revivalism turned that exception into an argument. Phoebe Palmer, the Methodist holiness teacher, defended women’s preaching from Pentecost’s promise that “your sons and your daughters shall prophesy” (Acts 2:17–18) in The Promise of the Father (1859, transcription). Catherine Booth answered a minister who had attacked Palmer with her pamphlet Female Ministry (1859, 1870 edition), and the Salvation Army she co-founded gave women officers full preaching roles from the start. Antoinette Brown was ordained by a Congregational church in New York in 1853, the first woman ordained in a mainstream American denomination.

The Pentecostal movement, born at the Azusa Street Revival (1906), put the Spirit’s gifting ahead of office. Women preached, planted churches and led missions; Aimee Semple McPherson founded the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. Pentecostal bodies later grew more cautious about ordaining women as senior pastors, but the precedent of Spirit-given authority stayed (see Spiritual Gifts).

Mainline ordination and its reactions

The twentieth century brought formal ordination across the mainline. The Methodist Church in America granted women full clergy rights in 1956, and Lutheran bodies that later formed the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America began ordaining women in 1970. In the Anglican world, Florence Li Tim-Oi was ordained priest in Hong Kong in 1944 as a wartime emergency; eleven women were ordained irregularly in Philadelphia in 1974, and the Episcopal Church authorized women priests in 1976. The Church of England voted in 1992 and ordained its first women priests in 1994. It opened the episcopate in 2014 and consecrated its first woman bishop, Libby Lane, in 2015. In October 2025 Sarah Mullally was named Archbishop of Canterbury, the first woman to hold the office (CBC, secondary). Conservative Anglican provinces in the Global South said the appointment made Canterbury unable to serve as a focus of unity for the Communion.

The Roman Catholic Church answered the Anglican moves directly. Inter Insigniores (1976) argued that the priest acts in persona Christi, and that, as Aquinas put it, “sacramental signs … represent what they signify by natural resemblance,” so Christ’s role at the Eucharist calls for a male priest (text). In 1994, the year the first Church of England priests were ordained, John Paul II’s Ordinatio Sacerdotalis declared “that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful” (text). A 1995 response from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith added that this teaching “has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium” (text).

The evangelical split

Among Evangelical Protestants the debate became a contest of organized positions. “Biblical feminists” in the 1970s argued from Galatians 3:28 and the women of Romans 16. In response, a group including Wayne Grudem and John Piper founded the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and drafted the Danvers Statement in December 1987 (text). It affirmed that “Adam’s headship in marriage was established by God before the Fall, and was not a result of sin,” and that “some governing and teaching roles within the church are restricted to men.” Christians for Biblical Equality answered with Men, Women and Biblical Equality (1989), which affirms that “both men and women are divinely gifted and empowered to minister to the whole Body of Christ” (text). The labels “complementarian” and “egalitarian” date from these years. Piper and Grudem’s edited volume Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (1991, free PDF) became the complementarian reference work.

Influence

The issue now shapes denominational boundaries. The Southern Baptist Convention wrote into its Baptist Faith and Message (2000) that “the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture” (text). In 2023 it expelled Saddleback Church for having women pastors. A constitutional amendment barring churches with women pastors “of any kind” won about 61 percent in 2024 and 2025, short of the two-thirds required (Baptist Report, secondary). A broader “Truth and Unity Amendment” passed a first vote with 74.66 percent in June 2026 and needs a second vote in 2027 (Christian Post, secondary). Women’s ordination also became one of several markers dividing global Anglicanism, alongside sexuality (see Sexuality and Marriage).

Key ideas and contributors

The creation-order argument. Complementarians root male leadership in Genesis 2, before the Fall, because Paul does: “Adam was formed first, then Eve” (1 Timothy 2:13). On this reading the restriction is not cultural but tied to how God made humanity. Grudem’s Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth (2004) is the fullest statement, answering over a hundred egalitarian arguments one by one. Andreas Köstenberger, Thomas Schreiner and H. Scott Baldwin’s edited Women in the Church (1995) gave 1 Timothy 2 its detailed complementarian exegesis.

The new-creation argument. Egalitarians read Galatians 3:28 and Pentecost as the frame and the restrictive passages as local instructions to particular churches. Krister Stendahl’s The Bible and the Role of Women (1966) made the early case that Galatians 3:28 points beyond Paul’s own applications. Gilbert Bilezikian’s Beyond Sex Roles (1985), Craig Keener’s Paul, Women and Wives (1992) and Philip Payne’s Man and Woman, One in Christ (2009) built the scholarly egalitarian position. Payne argued that 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 may be a later addition to the text.

The sacramental argument. Catholic and Eastern Orthodox teaching rests less on Paul’s commands than on the nature of priesthood. Christ chose only men as the Twelve, and the priest represents Christ the bridegroom to the church his bride. The church, on this view, lacks the authority to change what Christ instituted (see Male Priesthood and Sacraments). Orthodox theologians such as Thomas Hopko defended this; others, such as Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, argued in the 1980s and 1990s that the question was open in Orthodoxy.

The Spirit-gift argument. Holiness and Pentecostal writers from Palmer onward argued that if the Spirit gifts a woman to preach, the church should recognize the gift. This view sits closer to egalitarianism in practice but rests on experience of calling more than on exegesis.

Key controversies

What 1 Timothy 2:12 forbids. The verb authentein, used only here in the New Testament, is translated “exercise authority” by most versions. Richard and Catherine Kroeger’s I Suffer Not a Woman (1992) argued it meant something closer to “domineer” or even “claim to be the originator of man,” tied to a local heresy at Ephesus. Complementarian scholars, including the contributors to Köstenberger’s volume, answered that the word’s attested uses are mostly neutral and that Paul’s reason is creation, not local conditions. Whether “teach” means all teaching to mixed audiences or only the authoritative teaching of elders is debated even among complementarians.

Junia and Phoebe. Was Junia a woman and an apostle? Chrysostom thought so. Some later manuscripts and translations made the name masculine (Junias), and the ESV reads “well known to the apostles” where others read “prominent among the apostles.” Eldon Jay Epp’s Junia: The First Woman Apostle (2005) argued for the female name and the inclusive reading; Michael Burer and Daniel Wallace argued for the exclusive one in New Testament Studies (2001). Whether Phoebe held an office of deacon or was a servant in a general sense divides along the same lines.

Headship in the home and church. Complementarians tie church office to male headship in marriage (Ephesians 5:22–33). Egalitarians answer that the passage opens with mutual submission (5:21) and that “head” (kephalē) can mean “source” more than “authority.” Grudem has written repeatedly against the “source” reading; Payne and others defend it.

The Trinity as a model. In 2016 a dispute broke out among complementarians themselves. Grudem and Bruce Ware had argued that the Son’s eternal submission to the Father models a wife’s submission to her husband. Reformed critics, including Liam Goligher and Carl Trueman, called this a departure from Nicene orthodoxy. Kevin Giles had made a similar egalitarian critique for years. The exchange pushed many complementarians to separate their case from claims about the inner life of the Trinity (see God and Trinity).

History as evidence. Egalitarians point to deaconesses, abbesses and women preachers as a buried tradition. Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood (2021) argued that modern complementarianism is a recent construction. Complementarians answer that the near-universal restriction of the presbyterate and episcopate to men for nineteen centuries is itself the strongest historical evidence. Catholics read the same consensus as binding tradition (see Authority).

Women deacons. For Catholics and Orthodox the live question is the diaconate, not the priesthood. Pope Francis set up commissions in 2016 and 2020. The second, chaired by Cardinal Giuseppe Petrocchi, reported in 2025 that women could not be admitted to the diaconate “understood as a degree of Holy Orders,” while saying its judgment was not definitive (Vatican News). In Orthodoxy the Patriarchate of Alexandria consecrated a “deaconess of the missions” in Congo in 2017 (OrthoChristian, secondary) and ordained a deaconess in Zimbabwe in 2024 (Episcopal News Service, secondary). Other Orthodox clergy disputed whether these were true ordinations.

Authority and the reading of Scripture. Underneath the exegesis is a question of method. Complementarians often argue that egalitarian readings set a trajectory beyond the text and loosen biblical authority, and some see women’s ordination as a first step toward revising sexual ethics. Egalitarians reply that they hold the same high view of Scripture (see Scripture and Inerrancy) and that the slavery debate shows how a church can misread texts for centuries.

What remains unresolved

Both evangelical sides affirm equal worth and the authority of Scripture, and both read the same handful of verses. They disagree about which texts set the frame and which are local applications. Catholic and Orthodox teaching asks a different question, about what the priesthood signifies, and so is untouched by most of the Protestant exegesis. In practice the churches have sorted themselves: mainline and Pentecostal bodies mostly ordain women, while Catholics, Orthodox and many Baptist and Reformed bodies do not. The open fronts are narrower now: women deacons, the scope of “teaching,” and how far complementarian churches will go in policing one another.