Truth Unites - Should Only Men Be Pastors? My Honest Reflection on a Controversial Topic

Episode Date: May 11, 2026

Gavin Ortlund reflects on one of the most debated questions in the church today, exploring Scripture, church history, and the theology of gender to explain why certain church offices are reserved for men while affirming the full dignity and ministry of women.Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/X: https://x.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

Is there an office in the church that should only be held by men? In this video, I'm going to argue yes, and I'll lay out a briefcase in three points. First, an argument from church history. Second, an argument from scripture. Third, a theological point about the ontology of gender. Now, this is one of the most volatile issues to address in the church today. I somewhat tremble before waiting into it, but I hope you'll feel the spirit in which I offer this video, hoping that this will serve and that this will bless, and that this will

bless and that this will edify. In a previous video, I've triaged this topic as a second-rank issue, defending the legitimacy of churches and denominations to have an agreed-upon position that they enforce in their doctrinal standards, but also recognizing that there are brothers and sisters in Christ who disagree on this topic. And one of the things I emphasize there is that we should not measure each side in this debate by its most extreme expressions. Unfortunately, that is very common. So in some circles, if you defend any notion of male headship, you are regarded as abusive and sexist and so forth. In other circles, we find a sort of hypermasculent approach that looks nothing like the character of Christ. And in this environment, the question that

comes back to me again and again, and I don't think I'm the only one who longs for this, is to ask, what does the beauty of the character of Christ look like on this topic? How do we, and in the view that we uphold and in the spirit with which we uphold it, what does that look like? And I have no place in my heart for church cultures that are domineering and harsh and so forth. You cannot behold the face of Christ in one moment, and then in the next moment, demean the dignity and gifting and service of any of his sheep, especially his daughters in the church, who are so important. And at the same time, I don't believe that the biblical pathway to the beauty of Christ is the sort

of default egalitarianism that we're inclined toward in the modern West. And I don't believe that the scripture calls us to treat every church office as the same. I think there are the higher office of governance and teaching and authority in the church. I'm going to use the term elder for that office, though it is used, there are different terms used for that, is reserved for men alone, and appropriately so. And there is a servant leadership that God specifically tasks upon men with respect to the church, and also with respect to marriage, those two institutions in particular. And so what I want to do in this video is lay out an explanation in three movements for why I think that's the biblical view. But the first appeal is not even going to be from the Bible. I first want to

make an appeal to church history because I think this will set us up to have a bit more of an open heart to look at the scripture. And what I want to note is that, to my awareness, all throughout pre-modern church history, Christians in all different traditions, have perceived a difference with respect to the teaching or governing office in the church. And there are differences here in the vocabulary about what do you call that office, how many offices exactly are there, and so on and so forth, but the general pattern of a difference in that there is an office in the church that is only for men. So, you know, in the Roman Catholic Church, male only priests, so also in the various Eastern

traditions, and then pretty much all the historic Protestants, that is consistent. And so the question that that raises in my conscience is, is a full-blown egalitarianism the result of modern Western influences? Because if you can't find any instantiation of that prior to the modern era, that's very telling. Now, one of the things that we'll hear, and I'll try to anticipate pushback that I think can come and try to be fair-minded about this, we'll often hear this appeal that complementarianism is also new. This is also an innovation and this kind of thing. Now, let's assume that that's true for the moment. Nonetheless, if we just leave labels aside, the idea that all

church offices are open to both men and women is still a novelty. And the idea that at least some church offices, at least one, is restricted to men, is universal until the modern west to my awareness. Now, you do have deaconesses in the early church. For example, when I argue for female deaconesses, which is a conviction of mine, I will appeal to the early church as well as to the New Testament. You have, for example, the canons of the first council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical council. I think it's canon 19. That's part of my case there. You also have female deaconesses, You have female prophetesses, not just in church history, but all throughout the Bible. We'll come back to that.

You have female preachers among the Quakers in the 17th century. And then we have the first widely recognized ordained female minister, Antoinette Blackwell, ordained in 1853. There could be a little debate depending on how you define ordination and maybe some fringe examples, especially in sectarian groups prior to that. But in general, it seems true that the or not. ordained leadership of the church was only men until, you know, anytime prior to 1850, for example. And so recognizing these other various absolutely essential and important roles and ministries for women

is not the same as establishing that all offices are open to both men and women. And that's actually going to be the theme of this video, which we're going to get into in just a moment in Scripture, is to say that the general ministries of the church are not the same as the essential. established instituted offices of the church. Now, two clarifications. Number one is, I'm not appealing to church history to just totally settle this question. I'm appealing to church history to induce humility to have us consider our own angle of approach and to question our assumptions.

I often find this as helpful. I'll just put it personally in my own life to say, the things that just seem right to me may not, in fact, be right. And I have to have the humility to consider and remember, you know, things that seem that just feel so right and normal to me, actually, if they're at odds with what seemed right to most human culture all throughout human history, that should raise some questions against me. It doesn't settle things, but it's helping me say, okay, I'm willing to consider a different perspective, right? And we should all try to have that humility on these topics, no matter what

view we hold. But our historical location especially brings that to mind. The second clarification is, I am not arguing that all pre-modern and or eastern cultures represent the building. I'm a biblical ideal concerning masculinity and femininity. No, no, no. My target on this topic, what my heart longs for is the beauty of Christ, which is strong and a church culture that reflects the beauty of Christ, and it has strength and gentleness together. Some of you watching this video have probably never seen that,

and I completely understand why you're rejecting to the ugliness you may have seen. But I believe the beauty of Christ is our target. I believe that will overturn and oppose modern Western egalitarian instincts and also ancient patriarchal instincts. It's different from both in various ways. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the most stunning, beautiful thing you can ever imagine. It's not going to land down, plunk down in any human culture and just do nothing. It's going to challenge all of us, but it challenges different cultures in different ways. So, for example, the call to sacrificial love from husbands to their wives,

runs very much counter to many of the instincts in a staunch patriarchal culture in the ancient world. I mean, this was absolutely shocking. The dignity that Jesus afforded women in his own first century Jewish context, welcoming them as his disciples and teaching them and doing ministry with them, traveling with them. This would be scandalous to many first century Jews. And so the beauty of Christ is going to challenge both ancient views and modern Western views in different ways. but I do maintain that the nature of that challenge is not to remove all distinctions of church office. And we do need to appreciate the way God has made men and women differently. That is just true.

I mean, you can make a good sociological case for that as well. But let's dive into scripture and make a scriptural case, having set things up from our angle of approach from church history. And let's just look a little bit at the text. We're not going to be comprehensive here. but I hope this could help just to lay out a kind of overview maybe. And let me start with this observation as we push into the Bible. And that is that women are involved in ministry and even spiritual influence and leadership in so many ways.

Sometimes people are surprised by this, and it does challenge some of the more restrictive views. So let me give one example, and that is the reality of female prophetesses. There are so many female prophetesses throughout the Old Testament, Miriam, Deborah, Holda, Noah Daya. In the New Testament, the gift of prophecy is given both to men and women. In fact, it's one of the distinctive features of the new covenant era that both men and women will prophesy, according to Peter's quotation on the day of Pentecost of Joel 2,

which you can see on screen. And then you see female prophetesses throughout the book of Acts like Phillips, four daughters. And in 1st Corinthians 11, Paul gives instructions. for how women should pray and prophesy apparently in the gathered assembly, and that is just prophecy. And there are so many other wonderful gifts that God gives to women. And by the way, those on the more traditional side of this issue should be enthusiastic about this. This shouldn't come across as a concession. We should delight and glory in the gifts that God gives to all members of the body of Christ,

men and women, children, young and old. There's something so beautiful in the day of Pentecost that Joel II passage about the democratization of the Holy Spirit and therefore spiritual gifts. Spiritual gifts are amazing. And God gives spiritual gifts scattershot to all his people in the New Covenant era. That's something we should celebrate. It should never come across as a concession. Okay, now here's the important point, though. The appeal is often made from this truth of women engaging in ministry and being pivotly involved in the operations of the people of God and spiritual leadership in general, as though that undermined the idea of a distinction of

office. But what we see in Scripture is both lots of gifting and ministry going on among men and women, while at the same time there is an ongoing office that God institutes of leadership and governance and teaching that is reserved for men. Throughout the Old Testament, for example, only men could serve as the Levittical priests. Now, this office was, of course, not the only form of leadership among God's people, but this was the regular covenantal office associated with sacrifice, sanctuary service, teaching the law, guarding holiness, and representing the people before God. Whereas other offices, like the office of prophet is more ad hoc, kind of, it's kind of diverse, too. There's more spontaneous expressions of it and that kind of thing. And what we want to observe is that the

institution of the Levittical priesthood was by direct divine appointment, not a cultural accident. So, for example, on the screen are several passages where God himself directly tells Moses that Aaron and his sons should constitute the priesthood. And the male-only priesthood in the Old Testament does not take away from the dignity and the gifts and the spiritual agency of women, the same Old Testament that establishes the male priesthood also tells us about Deborah and Holda and Hannah and Abigail and the wise women of Takaoa and the Proverbs 31 woman and so on and so forth. And so what this shows is you can have both, A, women being integral to the spiritual life of the people of God, and B, not every office being

open to both men and women. So those are both the case. And sometimes egalitarian arguments try to set these two things against. They try to take A to overturn B. And so you'll hear all these appeals about all these things that women are doing. And then we stop short of kind of the ecclesiology side of this. That means doctrine of the church. You still have a restriction of church office. And I would argue that you find a similar pattern in the New Testament, not because there's a direct analog to the Levitical priesthood. The Levitical priesthood is fulfilled in Christ. Nonetheless, you do find off the higher office of leadership restricted to men. Let me make the case for that. The first thing to observe would be, again, which is not an exact parallel, but the male-only apostolate that Jesus

establishes in the gospel, specifically this inner 12 group of disciples. And it is a fact that Jesus chooses 12 men. Sometimes it suggested that he was just sort of accommodating to the culture there, but we've already seen Jesus didn't accommodate to first century Jewish norms. He was very willing to challenge them. He elevated women in their status in that society, and yet he chose 12 men when he could have chosen six and six, six women, six men, or any other combination, you know, five and 12 or something, I can't do bad. It's late at night, five and seven to get the 12, any other combination of numbers, but he chose 12 men. And so what that means is you combine that fact with, you know, the women traveling and doing ministry in Luke 8, 1 through 3, and this kind of thing.

and you see the same pattern of democratized giftedness and ministry in general, and yet the restriction to men of a particular governing office. And I think that general pattern can help us make sense of the New Testament epistles and some of the apparent tensions that we find there. Because on the one hand, we can't deny that we have very clear teaching in New Testament epistles that seem to restrict certain roles in the church to men. There's about five passages that are clearest on this front, and I'll mention several of them.

The clearest one, most famous one, is probably 1st Timothy 2, where Paul says, I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, rather she is to remain silent. And then, actually, in addition to those four others I just mentioned, which we'll get to some of them, another relevant strand of teaching is the qualifications lists for the office of overseer or presbyter,

which I think those terms are being used interchangeably in these passages, referring to one particular office, this office of governance and authority and teaching in the local church. And what we see is that this office is described in male terms in those passages, for example, husband of one wife. It does seem different, actually, from the office of deacon in that score, but that's a case. for another video. Then, but but, so you have some restrictive passages. I'll get to a few others.

But on the other hand, we also have, again, just like in the Old Testament, this glorious reality of God spreading, gifting, and ministry influence in general all throughout the people of God. Even if you just restrict your focus to Romans chapter 16, that one chapter alone, we have Phoebe, arguably a deaconess in the church. We have Priscilla and Aquila, whom Paul calls fellow co-workers, and then we have Junia. There's a lot of translation questions that come up there in Romans 16, 7.

What do we mean when we say outstanding among the apostles or to the apostles? And this is very disputed. I'll come back to Junia in a moment. Even so, what we can recognize is that the New Testament epistles very clearly affirmed the contribution of women to the ministry of the gospel, while still seeming to make some kind of distinction. You can frame this if you set in parallel with one another, 1 Corinthians 11 and 1st Corinthians 14. And what you have is, on the one hand, in chapter 11, the women are praying and prophesying in church, just like we see in the book of Acts. And then a few chapters later,

Paul says the women should keep silent in the church. And so you say, well, which is it? You know, surely if they're praying and prophesying, they're not silent. So how do we understand this? Well, one reasonable way to resolve the tension here is to recognize that the silence that Paul is referring to here is not absolute, but is silence with respect to a particular kind of speech, namely the authoritative teaching associated with the teaching office of the church, which in that context may have had something to do with kind of rendering judgment about prophecies being given. If that's right, that would fit the pattern that we've already seen and would explain a lot of these diverse. strands of New Testament teaching. Now, one possible exception would be Junia, because, you know, someone might say she's called an apostle in Romans 16, 7, and that is a little disputed. But even if she, and there's so much more that we need to be said about this one verse, but just one observation is even if she is called an apostle here, we have to remember that that term

can be used in different ways. It can be used more broadly for commissioned missionary messengers in the church, not just for the foundational office of the 12 or eyewitnesses to the resurrection like the Apostle Paul. I give a fuller case for that at 46 minutes, 40 seconds of this video on screen about the cessationist documentary. I'll link to that in the video description. And I make the case there, and I'm talking about how the word apostolos is used in the New Testament. It's put into spiritual gifts lists. It's used for people like Apaphroditis and so on and so forth. So I'm saying there's ambiguity in that term. And by the way, the same thing is true for the term pastor. It can be used in more and less technical ways. But the big picture point to step back and make

the, this is not a comprehensive video to chase down all of these rabbit trails. I'm trying to big picture here. If we step back from terminology, there remains this underlying reality that both men and women are vital to the operation of the ministry of the gospel while there are distinctions of office. And I think that's the best way to put the data together. We're all struggling to synthesize all the data in the Bible. And I think that's the best way to put the data together. For example, one of the other more egalitarian options is to put the emphasis upon particular background aspects of the cultural context in these restrictive texts. So for example, in 1 Timothy 2, some people are saying, well, in this context, in Ephesus, women were less,

educated and they were more susceptible to false teaching. And people note that in 2 Timothy 3.6, there's reference to women being captured by false teaching. And so that's why there's the restriction in that context. But there's a problem here. And I thought about how do I say this? I don't want to step on anyone's toes. This kind of argumentation runs the risk of making Paul sound sexist. Because Paul universalizes this along lines of gender as such. And he grounds that in the creation order of Adam and Eve? You know, if the problem is just in Ephesus with women who are, because they're susceptible to false teaching, Paul could have addressed that particular situation while leaving room for the women who aren't susceptible to that false teaching. And

the fact is, not only is this grounded, as you can see on screen 1st Timothy 2, 13, and 14 in Paul's theology of creation, but actually Paul specifies in 1st Corinthians 14, 33, and 34 that his restriction of this kind of silence he's calling for from women in the churches is for all the churches of the saints. So that makes it very hard to pin it down to just one particular context. So what I am suggesting here is that the Bible gives us a pattern. Men and women are equal in their value to God. They are both gifted and deeply embedded into the mission of God's people, the ministry of the gospel. And yet, at the same time, there are certain, appointed offices of leadership among God's people that are not thereby opened to both men and

women. So in the Old Testament, you have women who will prophesy and judge and teach wisdom and exercise immense spiritual influence, while the priesthood remains male. In the New Testament, you have women who will pray and prophesy, and in my view, serve as deaconesses and are co-laborers with Christ and with the apostles in the ministry of the gospel, while the office of elder or overseer, and prior to that, the unique office of apostle in its technical sense are still restricted to qualified men. So the question is not about whether women should do ministry. Sometimes this framed is like, should women be in ministry? Yes, the question, the issue is that ministry and office are not interchangeable categories. Okay. Now someone at this point in the video might

feel. All right, I can see that pattern in scripture, but it feels arbitrary. After all, if God gives gifts and skills to women, including gifts involving their speech, like prophesying, for example, why do we restrict the teaching office to men? You know, someone might say, this feels like you're telling me I can walk five yards, but I can't walk six yards, and I don't see the difference between five and six. It feels like a random stopping point. Okay, fair concern. Let's address that with a final point, even though this will not resolve every particular question of what this should look like, it can help reinforce a framework that might be helpful. And that's the ontology of gender. And here I just want to make, I know that's a big, a certain more technical way of putting that,

but here I just want to make the appeal that is very reasonable from the scripture to say that God has made men and women to be different and to play different roles. We are equal, in our value, in our status, in our access to God. Neither one is better or worse than the other. We have to ward off all these things. How I hope no one's mind would go in those directions. Nonetheless, we have different roles in the purpose of God, and that is most particularly instituted with respect to the marriage relationship and the church.

Just starting with marriage, for example. In Ephesians chapter 5, we have perhaps the most profound passage in the Bible on the meaning of marriage, And we learn here that marriage is ordained by God at creation. This is a divine institution. Democracy is a human invention. Marriage is a divine invention. God made marriage. It's the first human institution.

Before there's government, there's marriage. And I gave a talk last fall about marriage. It was so fun to study and just think about the glory of what marriage is. One point to make for this video is that there are different roles for the husband and wife in the marriage relationship. That is very clear in Ephesians 5. For example, there is the calling of submission, which is very unpopular in our culture.

And yet it is very clear in the text. And it is, you know, while there is mutual submission in the sense that all Christians submit to one another, nonetheless, with respect to the more specific husband-wife relationship, it's not, the arrows don't point equally in both directions. And what is, what we want to observe is, that Paul ties that into the gospel itself. So for Paul, the relationship between the husband and wife points us to Christ and his relationship to the church, as we see in verse 32 here on

screen. Now what does that mean? What is going on there? Well, more than we could say in this one video. But here's a helpful entry point, perhaps. In 1948, C.S. Lewis wrote an essay entitled priestesses in the church. And it's amazing. He's, you know, for him to establish female priests in the Church of England would be a revolutionary step, cutting them off from the past and from other Christians alive at that time. And he says it would reflect his terms an almost wanton degree of imprudence. That's a strong statement. Now, why is that? For Lewis, the reason is not just a prudential consideration. You know, he's very clear that it's not that men are necessarily better in the execution of practical responsibilities than women or something like that. No, not at all. It's clearly not.

You know, if you've ever been around a church, oh, man. Yeah, enough said on that. We're not necessarily better. We're often way worse. But what Lewis is saying is there something's fundamental about creation. And so in other words, C.S. Lewis in this article is not even just saying like, well, you're going against 1 Timothy 2 or well you're going against 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Corinthians 14 plus all of church history prior to 1850 and most of it since and that kind of thing he's not making he's getting into a deeper vision of why our gendered existence is here to begin with it's doing something god made us this way on purpose and for a reason here's how he puts it one of the ends for which sex was created was to symbolize to us the hidden things of God. One of the functions of human

marriage is to express the nature of the union between Christ and the church. We have no authority to take the living and submitive figures which God has painted on the canvas of our nature and shift them about as if they were mere geometrical figures. In other words, Lewis is saying male and female are not simply interchangeable biological containers for human sources. souls, male and female have a deeper significance that ultimately, in marriage especially, points to the gospel itself. And that broader vision can help us understand why the restrictions on church office are not arbitrary. They come in this much larger theological structure, and they cohere with God's intended purposes for creating us specifically as men and women.

Now, there is so much more to say about that. I actually think C.S. Lewis's fiction has been the most helpful thing to me on this topic. Paralandra and that hideous strength in particular. But we can also benefit, I'd love to recommend to you the short collection of John Chrysostom's writings on marriage and family life. You'll see he upholds male and female as not simply interchangeable while he's also very harsh to condemn husbands who are too domineering. And he talks a lot about sacrificial love.

So that's a great resource I'll link to as well in the video description. But let me end by saying this. if marriage and sexuality and gender tie into deeper theology, which is what we're suggesting here. That is all the more reason why harsh and domineering expressions of male headship are so deeply wrong and destructive. Let me put it like this. Biblical headship is cruciform. It looks like sacrifice. It looks like courage. It looks like service to the other. It looks like protection. It looks like responsibility. It looks like giving up your rights for the sake of the other. It looks like the gospel itself. That's what we, that's those of us, oh man, how we should

tremble to serve in pastoral leadership in the church because this is not something that's going to make us feel exalted and tough. It's going to be humbling. And we need leadership in the church today that looks like Jesus, not the macho, fake masculinity that is so common. We need the gentle and strength of Christ, the beauty of Christ to be conveyed in our church cultures. And all Christians, men and women, should imitate that beautiful character. But there is also this structure with respect to church offices that we should honor. And so my final comment is that our posture toward this topic should not mainly be about correcting those wrong Christians over there. Right? Like we're just being defensive. I'm right and you're wrong. If that's the main thing people hear from us, we're not doing our job well.

the main thing people should hear from us is to be caught up into this glorious vision of who God is, be humbled under the beauty of Christ. This should make us feel humble to see, I've got room to grow. I need to look more like the measure of the stature of Christ in my life. And all of us have so much. We should feel like we're climbing up a steep mountain and we can't see the top of it because the beauty of Christ is our target and all of us fall short of that. So I hope this video will be useful to others who are wrestling with this topic,

even though this is not an easy issue to work through in the church, of course we can't just avoid it either. It's got to come up. You're going to go to a church and they're either, they're going to have to do something. And so I'm in this video hoping that my case for male-only eldership is useful and worth consideration. God bless you for watching. Thank you.