Partners in Ministry: How Men and Women Must Labor Together for the Good of the Church

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Jen Wilkin
“The family of God is essentially motherless,” is not that women stop looking for a mother, they go and find a mother outside of the local church in the form of someone who they can find in a virtual space.

Mike Kruger
I think some some elders operate, some some pastors, not all, operate with a paradigm that has a view of men and women that I think negatively affects their shepherding. I guess it helps us to see that

Collin Hansen
we shouldn’t be calibrating the biblical teaching to counterbalancing a biblical cultural narrative, because the Bible itself is the norm. The Bible itself is telling us what’s the beautiful story? It’s a beautiful story.

Heather Ferrell
Welcome to the gospel coalition podcast, equipping the next generation of believers, pastors and church leaders to shape life and ministry around the gospel. Today is a special episode titled partners in ministry, how men and women must labor together for the good of the church.

Collin Hansen
Welcome to the gospel coalition podcast. My name is Colin Hansen. I serve as the editor in chief of the gospel coalition, and we’ve got a very exciting topic today, partners in ministry, how men and women can labor together for the good of the church. I’m excited about this conversation in part because you often hear about the problems or the limitations, but we’re going to be talking especially about the positives, about encouragements and ways that we see God working well, between men and women in the church today, joined by some good friends here, you guys. Go ahead, Jen, start with us. Introduce yourself, and just keep going around.

Jen Wilkin
I’m Jen Wilkin, and I’m an author and Bible teacher and have served in the local church nigh on these many long years, four score.

Kori Porter
My name is Kori Porter. I work in background in campus ministry and right now in non profit life.

Mike Kruger
I’m Mike Kruger. I’m president and professor of New Testament at reform Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North

Collin Hansen
Carolina. So there are many things that we all share in common. There are ways that we would be different from each other as well, but one of the areas that we share in common within the gospel coalition is sharing a broad, complementarian perspective that the Office of pastor and elder is reserved for qualified, qualified men, and at the same time, we all agree that the body of Christ functions best when all of its members are valued and encouraged to use their gift. You know, often these conversations are about what women can’t do. Many of the denominational debates that we see are often focused on the things that women cannot do, and those can be important discussions. But we also want to continually affirm all the many, many things that God has called women to do in the church and alongside men. So I just want to start with the basic question of, how would you make the case that the church needs the Ministry of Women? And I thought, Mike, that we begin with you and just look at a historical perspective. One of the things that you teach and you’re an expert in is the early church. Talk about that, maybe even just bridge from the Bible. Some of the Bible, biblical examples are are a little bit more well known, but bridge from that into the early church?

Mike Kruger
Yeah. I mean, I’m excited about this conversation, because even in a few hours from now, I’ll be doing a whole talk on why we need women in ministry, and actually deals with a lot of the same issues here, and that whole talk is designed to be an encouragement along the same lines we’re discussing here, which is that men and women need each other, and that is what complementarianism is about, right? So some people take complementarianism as a way of saying, Let’s separate men and women from each other in ministry. They don’t really interact. I’m like, Well, no, it’s the opposite. We fit together. We need each other, and that’s true from the very beginning, and it’s true in the early church. As you noted, I’ve done a good bit of work on particularly second century Christianity, and I was rather shocked in the academic space. You’re not shocked by many things, but I actually was. I thought I knew what was going on there, and I was shocked by just how many women were popping up in the historical sources all over the place, and in my talk this afternoon, I’ll mention a bunch of them. But one example, you know, in very early second century, is Christianity spreading some pagan governors. Plenty of the younger is really upset about Christianity spreading. He’s looking to find a couple Christians to torture and find out what’s really going on in these secret meetings. And we’re told in the historical record that it’s two women. He finds it’s just very fascinating that the two people he picks to get more information about Christianity are women, because women were flocking to it in great numbers. So what you see in the very beginning is that in the early Christian church, women were involved in all kinds of exciting and positive ways. And I want to make sure we just keep that in mind as we think about those issues today,

Collin Hansen
when I teach in cultural apologetics, one of the second sessions that I lead, we focus on persecution in the early church and tell the story of Perpetua and Felicity, which was one of Augustine’s favorite stories to go back to. And tell a lot of female murderers that people don’t know about. Yeah, exactly. So two of them are well known ones there. Jen um. I think we need to frame this as this contribution of women is essential. It’s not just something that’s nice to have. It’s not just optional. It’s not just sort of a bonus. But help us understand by describing what makes it essential, like you can’t have a well functioning local church unless you’re seeing women contribute in these ways. Well,

Jen Wilkin
I was actually sitting here ready to edit the title of this session already, because it says how men and women can labor together, and I would change it to how they must, because the contributions of women are sometimes viewed as being nice but not necessary. You think about, in particular, the things that happen in the all pink spaces. You know, it’s like, well, that’s whatever they want to do over there. And I think in a lot of cases, the all female space can suffer from a benign neglect from church leadership, which is male, because it’s like, well, we don’t really understand what’s happening there, and we’re happy, as long as the women are happy, it’s not seen as a spiritual formation environment so much as it is just a place for women to gather. That would just be one example. But I think what we’re seeing in the New Testament one another’s is exactly that, that there should be interaction happening in ministry spaces between men and women. We shouldn’t have things just parsed into two different categories. And if you think about the way that Jesus speaks about the church when his mother and brothers come looking for him in the Gospels. He looks around at the people who are sitting under his teaching. He says, Who are my mother and my brothers and my sisters? Anyone who does the will of the Father. So he he describes the church as the family of God. And I worry that too often we have families in our local churches, that if it was a nuclear family attending our church, we’d be very concerned about we have a father who sets the rules, we have children who toe the line, and we have an absentee mother. So when we think about just a healthy family structure, we would expect that in our local churches, which are expressions of the family of God, that we would see fathers and mothers operating in that space. And again, as you mentioned, we would all agree at this table that the role of Pastor elder is reserved for qualified men, but what we often see in local church expressions is something that we would be concerned about if we saw just an actual family that operated along those lines.

Mike Kruger
I’ll add something to that, if I can, because I think the familial analogy is such a great illustration of what we’re talking about here. You mentioned Jen, you got a sort of a very prominent father and an absentee mother as an analogy of the church. I would say there’s another analogy you could use here, is that we wouldn’t want sort of normal families to have two fathers and no mothers, right? Or two mothers and no fathers. In fact, we we’ve been seeing this in our society for years, and we’re like no no families need both the father and mother to have the right the right balance and perspective. Well, that’s also true in the church, right? Because we’re a big family. So you know, whether it’s a father that’s prominent and a mother that’s absent, but also you don’t want a church as only fathers, because you end up with another imbalance there. So I think that familial analogy is key.

Kori Porter
Often I feel like the case for women in the church has seen more to be like you said, like what we cannot do versus what we can do. But when I was going to seminary, what I realized was in the garden how beautiful it is that I was told under being glad Dr GLAAD does a great job of explaining that the temple aspect of the garden and how we were put in together as CO laborers, right? And the first time we ever hear God’s eternal voice say out amongst his creation, it is not good. It’s in the absence of woman, right? And so what does that mean? It means that both male and female together, partnering, expresses the full image of God in the ministry or in the temple. And so we are the church, the temple here on Earth today. We want to express that fullness of God, of us co laboring together. So I do think that is essential. The case, I think is authored by God, established by God, and then shows itself throughout redemptive history, and even branching out into, as he said, the second century church today.

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, I think it’s interesting that the solution to Adam’s aloneness is not an elder board. It’s a woman so, and I’m not saying you know that it isn’t important for us to have elder boards, but yeah, I think we see it. I think the problem that you run into when the family of God is essentially motherless is not that women stop looking for a mother. They go and find a mother outside of the local church in the form of someone who they can find in a virtual space. And I think sometimes what I wish more church leaders understood was that when you reach that moment, you actually have no idea which voices these women are being influenced by I’m one of them. I hope I’m a credible, you know, remote church mother, but I can’t be an embodied church mother for the women in your church, which is also not to say that the only benefit of having embodied church mothers is for the women in your church. In the same way. Say that in the home, a mother has an important influence on sons. We need to have visible church mothers functioning in the local church. I

Collin Hansen
guess it wasn’t the solution to Adam, but it was kind of the solution to Moses’s problems.

Jen Wilkin
But you know what’s interesting Go ahead, is that in Exodus, 18, do you know what his father in law says to him? He says, this thing you’re doing is not good, and then he gives him helpers. And so it’s actually a parallel, I think, to the Genesis account. Then,

Collin Hansen
well, let’s go back to an area that you and I have talked about, Jen offline, different areas, and I think it undergirds a lot of this conversation. When we look back on the biblical narrative, going back to Genesis, do we see the similarities between men and women emphasized, or their differences emphasized? Wanna jump in here.

Jen Wilkin
Well, I mean, we see both, but I think it matters the order in which we see them. And even as recently as a few months ago, I saw an article that was written that talked about how Genesis chapter two is showing us this beautiful picture of male female difference. But if you look at what Genesis chapter two is doing, basically Adam is shown a parade of animals that go in front of him who have been each created according to its kind. And so I actually have a secret pet theory that that’s potentially the animals going by two by two, as they will in another section in Genesis, because he looks on them, and every time an animal goes by and he’s giving them names, he’s basically categorizing them. He’s thinking that one’s not like me, that one’s not according to my kind, not according to my kind. And then when Eve is created, he sings a hymn to sameness. He says, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called Isha because she came from ish. In other words, she shall be like me because she came from me. And so when we don’t start with what we share, we have a tendency to over focus on difference, and any time you over focus on difference, you’re going to push people away. You’re going to objectify people. This is what happens in other settings, where I look at you and say, we have nothing in common. It’s easier for me to to push you down, to see you as just completely other than me. And the cultural narrative is, men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. The Genesis narrative is, men are from the same garden, created by the same God, tasked with the same cultural mandate, and made in the image of God together. So our differences matter. And in a day and age where differences are what are under attack. It’s understandable that we would talk about them, but when we lose sight of sameness as the starting point, I think we devalue women in that conversation.

Collin Hansen
I think, Jen, you highlighted a couple things there. Interesting. The men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. Question that is a dominant cultural narrative, but it’s alongside the other cultural narrative, excuse me, that you just you just identified there. So there are some that push us in the we’re different, and there are some that push us in we’re basically the same. We’re interchangeable in there. And those can all be overlapping. I guess it helps us to see that we shouldn’t be calibrating the biblical teaching to counterbalancing a biblical a cultural narrative, because the Bible itself is the norm, right? The Bible itself is telling us, what the beautiful story. It’s a beautiful story. And so we shouldn’t. It shouldn’t be enough for us to say, well, the world’s saying this, therefore we should say that. Well, the world will say this and that, but the Bible says this, and this is what God wants us to emphasize there. Related to that, I do want to find out what you guys think about gender specific spaces. Let’s talk about female specific spaces here. Is that still? Is that still valuable in this environment? I mean, we were talking about how they must work together, but is that still a place that we should be encouraging

Kori Porter
Absolutely? Yeah. I mean, I don’t think a female only space, therefore, is a zero sum game, like if, if I have a female led space in campus ministry, and being in parachurch is often the case, but we always congregate and come together and do fellowship together. So I really wouldn’t understand why we would bifurcate the two and keep them separate. I would think that the benefit would be of having a female led space, and only space would be the vulnerability and the maturity and the ability to be able to see a woman model her vulnerability in a way that’s safe, but then also you being able to also share and grow in that space. However, in the presence of men, that’s not always as accessible for different reasons and may not be as comfortable. So I do think a female led space and female only space, has its benefits, and it is pretty I think, foundational to any woman’s growth. And to Jen’s point as well, i. Think I love the gospel coalition. I love the work that’s being done. I think the downfall sometimes is in female spaces, we oftentimes only go to, like you said, the Jim Wilkins, the Jackie Hill, Perrys, or the other big names, because we don’t have access to women in our local congregation, because those women aren’t being trained or equipped to be able to know how to successfully mentor other women, and those women, the older women, are oftentimes intimidated. So I think that space needs to not only be there, but needs to be cultivated by the pastor and be resourced so that the women have a better opportunity to grow and flourish in their local settings as well as, like, national platforms and settings. Yeah.

Mike Kruger
I mean, I would add to that, it’s not just whether there’s distinctive female space, but what’s the content of it? What’s the nature of it? What’s this? What’s the what’s the purpose of it? I mean, it’s funny, I asked that question sitting here at the National Conference, the Women’s National Conference, this is distinctively a female space. And, you know, call and I walk around with 9000 other women here, acutely,

Jen Wilkin
thank you for joining us. I

Mike Kruger
couldn’t find one, so they’ve taken over, but, but, no, I think that’s entirely legitimate. The question isn’t whether groups do that, because I think you have Men’s Ministry, women’s ministry of youth, Ministry of other kind. The question is, what is the what is the purpose of it? Right? And the idea that it’s just simply, well, we’re going to teach men theology, but we’re going to let our women just go and socialize. We’re going to teach, you know our men theology, but let the youth, as another example of a broken off group, go and just play games all the time. Any subgroup needs to be evaluated in terms of what we’re trying to do there, and so discipleship has to be the centerpiece of all that. Now that’s not to say you want all those groups cordoned off all the time. We found this problem at the seminary level. At RTS. We realized that because Seminary is mostly men, when we have a women’s only ministry at the seminary, it can sometimes even exacerbate the problem, because they feel even more isolated. So what we tried to do is do both allow them to have their opportunity to be together, for obvious reasons, but also make sure we’re working really hard to bring the male and female students together in spaces where they can interact with each other. And truthfully, when you’re training pastors, they need to know how to interact with women in their churches. If you have a seminary environment that’s supposed to train them, and they’re only interacting with their other guys, that actually isn’t a very good training ground for what the real world is going to be when they get into churches.

Collin Hansen
Jen, you can come back later. Well, let’s talk about that right now, of what of corey’s point of, how do we go from how do we raise up and encourage other women teachers and leaders so that alongside they’re doing their Jen Wilkins studies, they’re also learning themselves to teach. And I know this is your heart.

Jen Wilkin
It is. I don’t want to be, yeah, I don’t want to be the head on the screen. That’s the only female voice that women are hearing in the local church. It can be a starting point, but it shouldn’t be the terminus for what churches are doing with their women.

Collin Hansen
And 15 years ago, there weren’t nearly as many examples at a national level. There were some examples, but not nearly as many. Yeah. So it seems like we are making some progress there, but what’s the next step look like? Well,

Jen Wilkin
so it’s not an all female solution, right? Because the reality of the local church is, in a male led local church, is that men are going to control access to budgets and calendars and to resources as well. And that sounds, I don’t mean it to sound like control in a negative way. It’s just the reality of the way most church organizations function. I know that my ability to be to receive good training, my ability to even have a room to talk to was heavily related to whether there was a man in a ministry role who looked at what I was doing and said, this is valuable, this is important. This is essential. It’s not nice, but not necessary, and we need those door holders. And unfortunately, there’s a lot of subtext running in a lot of our churches that says Mike touched on this, says that that shouldn’t happen. And in women pick up on this. We know if a male pastor or pastoral staff doesn’t want to meet with us, but will meet with a man who’s in a comparable role in the local church. And the reality, our theological reality is, is that a non elder male is in the same space as a female in the local church, and so there should be access for a woman in the same way that there would be for any non elder male. And so that’s not always the case, and because I have had just an incredible gift in the male leaders that I’ve served under who have said, I value this, and I want to not just amplify this, but I want to resource this person so she can do the job. Well, it’s made all the difference in the world. For me, women need to see other women doing this. But that’s not enough. A lot of women will go home from this national conference having seen women do something that they didn’t even conceive of themselves doing, and they’ll return to a church where a woman doing that is so low on the list of. Things that people care about that they’ll meet with a lot of frustration, and I really believe it’s why we see so many women operating in a parachurch space.

Collin Hansen
I do think there’s a parallel to what happens to youth pastors as well. Even if they’re a male on a pastoral staff, they’re often regarded in the same way of simply not worthy of a lot of attention or investment there, I have to I’m not feigning ignorance here. I truly am ignorant. I don’t really understand how this happens, of why that neglect jumps in, or what the fear is coming from there. Mike, let’s we see, especially a major problem in discipline cases in the church, and problems where the leadership goes wrong, and that happens a lot, and one of the key areas where it goes wrong is between men and women. And if it’s a discipline case that rises to a certain level, it’s going to be the elders who are handling that, and those are going to be men, but they’re all often going to involve women. I’m just blown away by the ignorance that I see, the confusion, the just dumb things that I see elders do, and I just I don’t understand, why wouldn’t women be included, consulted, even women on their own staff. Why? Why would they proceed to make such dumb decisions? Yeah, without any, without even asking a woman for insight of how this might be received, where I can just, yeah, go ahead.

Mike Kruger
No. I mean, I see these cases all the time. I mean, it happens in discipline cases. Happens in shepherding cases. It’s not just discipline cases, but yeah, families going through a crisis, and you’ve got to shepherd the family through it. Yeah, there does seem to be some real unawareness of the dynamics there that need attention, as you have an all male elder board and pastoral staff trying to address these complicated issues. So there’s probably, probably two layers of it. One layer, I think you can say why these things happen is just is genuine unawareness. I mean, I think there are well intended pastors who are just not attuned to some of these dynamics that aren’t necessarily nefarious in any fashion, but just dumb. Is different from militia exactly. I

Collin Hansen
don’t mean that it’s always malicious. Yeah,

Mike Kruger
no, and I’m not suggesting you meant that, but, but I’ll mention the second one, which I think is not just ignorance, but I think some, some elders operate, some, some pastors, not all, operate with a paradigm that has a view of men and women that I think negatively affects their shepherding. And so, for example, I see this all the time, is they think if you’re going to shepherd a family or you have to family, all you have to do is talk to the husband. And if I’m a pastor, I just shepherd the husband. All everything trickles down the food chain from there, and all’s well. And so women in that context are generally not even well known by the ministry, not even well known by the pastor, certainly not shepherded in any sort of meaningful way by the pastor. And everything is shielded behind other men for these women, so they’re way down the pecking order. And I hear that philosophy all the time, even

Collin Hansen
in a case when the man is the problem. Oh, in the situation, this is what I don’t understand, the

Mike Kruger
marriage. They ask the man, you’re like, Well, wait a second, you’re asking half the marriage here. And I mean, let’s be honest, men are always the most attuned at the sort of even their own the status of their own marriage. There’s all kinds of interesting statistics where they quiz married couples about how you think your marriage is going. And men are like, I think it’s about an eight, and the most women are like, it’s about a three. And you’re like, Whoa. What explains that difference? And so if you go to a family and say, we’re going to shepherd you through a marriage crisis, and you’re going to go mainly funneling through the man, you are missing a tremendous amount of things there. So I think there’s some some theological reasons for that that are misguided for doing it that way. And I think that’s that that needs to be addressed. Okay.

Collin Hansen
Corey or Jen, have you seen any positive examples of where this works? Well, where men and women are working with each other, collaborating in those shepherding cases. Have you seen any examples of that? Yeah, go ahead.

Kori Porter
In my early ministry opportunities, I was involved in a church discipline case where another staff person was not just racially disrespectful, but also became like sexually disrespectful, and it involved him and him bringing in a student in the involvement as well. And I think for years, I had dealt with the disrespect with racial things, and just by pulling them aside and trying to go to my brother and trying to explain, and then it continued to escalate and snowball. And so as soon as it turned sexual, the pastor stepped in. He knew about the racial experiences, but I don’t think he may have it was a very white, conservative context. I don’t think he felt equipped, possibly, to know the nuances of that, if you will. But when it went sexual, he stepped in, called the elders, and the guy got disciplined in the process of that, though, I think I was. I think as the person that was offended, I think I was maybe overly consulted, and I think I wanted to be shipped. I wanted to be protected. And I think, to your point, they didn’t want to hurt me, and so they probably asked too much of my input, whereas I wanted my elders and my pastors would be my pastors. I wanted protection. So it’s not, is this too far? Is this okay? Cory, it kind of more feels like you’re protecting yourself from a lawsuit. And it does feel like you’re actually, genuinely, you know, caring about my heart and my well being in the way I’m processing the gospel at this moment. And so again, you know, the Lord is gracious, and that particular person asked for forgiveness the first time, and I knew that he was kind of playing the game. And I said no, and then he came back. He said whether, whether you believe me or not, you saying no really made me look within myself and understand that I really was just trying to get out of trouble, and I really am repentant now, and I understand the ways in which I’ve disrespected you and transgressed against you. So I would ask that you would reconsider, and I did, you know, and that was allowing for the spirit to work, but in its time. And so I think that case really showed me the inner workings of the church, but also, you know, peer relationships, and then how that sets on you, and how you then, therefore see things moving forward. So

Collin Hansen
in a in a disciplined case, the shepherds can become a jury in some ways, and that can kind of, that can be very difficult to experience positive examples or other exhortations. Yeah. I

Jen Wilkin
mean, I have seen positive examples. They came as a result of having to own very negative ones. Yeah,

Collin Hansen
that’s what I assume often, and

Jen Wilkin
that’s what I would just when you think about this in the local church, I talk to pastors about this occasionally, and they’ll say, Well, I’m sorry your church went through that. My church doesn’t really have a problem with this. And I just think you you don’t know that you’re you know the because we know that abuse is everywhere, you know. And so what that tells me is the stories are not getting past a certain point in your in your process, and you know so much of who we share our story with, and whether a story is heard or not relies on relational trust. And if male leaders in the church have deeper relational trust with the men in their church than they do with the women, which I would expect, is almost always the case, then it means when the man gives his side of the story, you’re more likely to believe him than you are the woman, when she gives hers, because you probably know what his favorite sports team is, and you probably know what his hobbies are, and you’ve probably shared meals together, golf or whatever, and her, you don’t Know anything about her. And so there’s a huge credibility gap there. And so you either need to be a person who’s more comfortable developing relationships, warm, appropriate relationships, with the women in your church, beyond what most people would say is, you know, appropriate for erring on the side of caution, my least favorite term in this conversation, or you need to have female advocates who are available to help in these these times. Now I will say that just having a female advocate doesn’t mean that you have a trust level with the female advocate to the same degree that you do with the men who might be speaking into the process. So whoever the female advocates are, they need to have your trust and your respect, and they need to be trained. They need to understand how to have a trauma informed response and and so it’s, it’s complex.

Collin Hansen
Let’s here’s a practical example that I that I don’t really know how to deal with, or just how I should handle it. I’ve been an elder for a long time in a large church, and I would say often about two thirds of the women, large numbers of new members who are coming in are young, single women. What does it look like for me to shepherd them. Does that look like? I know. It’s probably different from how I would be shepherding a 23 year old man in some ways, by necessity. I think it would have to be different ways. Cory

Jen Wilkin
and I would like to know how, well, I don’t really know, are you going on camp outs with the 23 year old like, you know? I mean, well, I

Collin Hansen
mean, I would be on a men’s retreat, and I would get a chance on a men’s retreat to have focused time that I wouldn’t have. I don’t have a lot of focus time in general with your average 23 year old male but I would have something like that in a Men’s Ministry context where I could do that. So that’s why I’m wondering, what does it look like? You know, otherwise, to do that,

Kori Porter
I was really blessed. I got the gospel was given to me by two campus male ministers, and one of them subsequently discipled me. So I got one on one time with my campus minister all the time. We had weekly meetings because of his input in my life, I quickly rose into leadership, which really gave me a hard look at myself and my things that I struggled with. So I got accountability, and those things are just pure disciples. Worship, those aren’t gender specific, being taught the Word of God, being held accountable for my actions, being given a vision and helping me pray through that vision and see what the Lord may do. But then also, what Stephen did really well was that there was no control, and that was something that I realized when I got into other discipleship relationships. I quicker to catch on to when someone’s trying to mold me or shape me in a way that’s nefarious versus something that’s healthy. So yeah, so I, if I walk into a church, and I was a young, 23 year old woman, and I had an older brother who had a wealth of knowledge, and I was theologically minded and wanted to know the Word of God, I probably honestly don’t want to talk about women things. I probably want to talk about the Word of God, and I probably have specific questions with you, and want to dig in, just like any male would, and I was just really blessed to have

Mike Kruger
actually, that’s one of the key things I think is missing in the whole conversation. Is that when lots of times when pastors think about a cycling a woman in their church, and they’re like, I don’t know if I should do that, part of the reason they make that is because they assume that the topic has to be about womanhood, or about female stuff, or about things like that. And this is one of the things I that I don’t get that paradigm problem. Yeah, why wouldn’t you just talk to him about Jesus and the gospel and the word and biblical theology and sound doctrine and basic discipleship categories? So it seems like there’s, there’s a sense in which when a pastor pastors a male, he thinks in theological categories, and he moves over to pastor and female, he thinks, oh and Alice, relational categories. And I don’t, I’m not equipped for that, so I just do the males and I don’t do the women. I think that’s itself. The problem is that, why would we assume that women don’t need those same categories? And I think that’s exactly maybe what you were describing, is that you got the benefit of someone who just wanted to talk to you about the gospel, you know, like, wow, how about that? I mean, that seems like an option. I think

Collin Hansen
Mike, it’s also because we’re professors, meaning that there are certain people gravitate toward us. There are a lot of men in my church that I don’t, they don’t really care about and they don’t, they don’t seek me out. And as I’m thinking about my own question in that, I’m realizing it has happened a lot. It’s often classes in classroom settings. You’ve talked about the importance of those classroom settings in the church, and so it’s worked there, and then that translates into our professional space. And then it has often worked in home groups as well, where there have been a number of women that I’ve led to the Lord and become very dear to me and our family from there. But it’s usually been in, I guess I didn’t realize how much of that was already happening in a group context that then spun off a level of trust for personally and then as a group that led to a lot of disciples,

Jen Wilkin
well? And I think we’re back to Genesis chapter two. If you lead with difference, then it means you objectify someone into

Mike Kruger
it. As soon as you see a female, you’re like, I don’t see a Christian. I see a female, yeah, and obviously you don’t want to discount the fact that they’re female, because guys played them that way too, but that the common ground is you start with the common ground, if

Jen Wilkin
you lead with sameness, then that’s different. And, you know, I think we forget, like I have more in common with Mike Kruger than I have with a female cat. It is not my femaleness. It is my defining feature. You know, it’s my humanness, it’s our shared humanness. And I think that’s something we’ve lost sight of in the local church. We do have a men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, mentality a lot of times. And then there’s the underlying narrative of, won’t someone think this is sketchy if I’m if I’m meeting with a woman to disciple her? And certainly there are sketchy ways you could do that, but the sheer number of non sketchy ways that you could also do that boggles the mind, and I think we’ve lacked creative imagination, or the sheer number of places where you could have that discipleship relationship, and no one question whether it’s inappropriate or not, and that’s what I think I’d love to see us reclaim, because when a father disciples a daughter, there’s no there’s no script running around. Is this appropriate or not when a brother or sister are interacting with one another, there’s no script about inappropriateness. And we have, we have, I believe in many cases, we have taken in the hyper sexualization of the culture and said, Yep, we’re going to buy into that too. And I think if the local church can’t reclaim the beauty of male female interaction along appropriate lines, what hope does the culture have? And we also cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that two men meeting alone can be every bit as inappropriate as a man and a woman meeting alone. We should say that I don’t think it’s, I don’t think women should have to carry this burden around all the time that we’re at particular risk category when it comes to relationship forming.

Collin Hansen
Is, that’s a good clip, right there. We’re gonna clip that is, there, is there an above reproach element that I do need to be mindful of?

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, no, don’t be an idiot. Is what

Collin Hansen
I always say. I have problems not being

Jen Wilkin
you have to, you have to know your own weaknesses. But in my experience, most men in a position of authority are not avoiding meeting with women because they’re afraid they’ll accidentally have an affair. It’s because. They’re afraid of perception, okay? And that’s different, right? And so that means you have to ask, well, then how can I mitigate the perception problem as far as possible, so that people don’t look at what I’m doing and think, you know, that’s sketchy. You know, it matters how healthy your marriage. There are a lot of factors to take into consideration, but when our default setting is too dangerous.

Kori Porter
Coming up on time, just very two quick ones is public. I mean, when I met with Steven, it was all the time, yeah, on campus, in public settings, at coffee shops. When we did go to his home, if we were there for a loan, it was for maybe a moment or two before somebody else came over. It wasn’t like long, drawn out conversations. But then also, something I do is, when I have relationships with me, and I have quite a few pastors and men in my life, I’m oftentimes group texting with your wife, so I’ll text the pastor and the wife, and usually the wife just stops texting, then she doesn’t want to be a part of the conversation anymore, and she trusts me with her husband. So it’s like, you’re gonna, you know, be respectful. But that’s not the goal here. My goal is to grow in Christ, and it’s to get a wisdom from my brother and I feel like wives and they understand that. We

Jen Wilkin
acknowledge it as a factor, but we don’t make it the standard

Collin Hansen
and and there are all sorts of other ways where it can go wrong, not just with an older man with a younger woman, all sorts of different people are crazy as well. Yeah, well, because they’re people right, not because they’re men and women, right? Because they’re people. Let’s close by any other positive examples where you see this working? Well, I’ll

Mike Kruger
give you a positive example historically, I mean, and I’m going to talk about this in my session this afternoon. And this was well known. Everyone at this table knows it. And you think about what’s a good example of a pastor showing great relations with women historically, in a way that he knows their names, he knows their ministries, he encourages them. And I have to say, the apostle Paul is that. Now that sounds crazy, because people are like, whoa, not Paul. Paul’s the problem, right? Ephesians five, yeah, exactly. Well, you gotta look at the whole picture of Paul, right? And the passage, of course I’ll be looking at this afternoon, is Romans 16, and the final greetings, where it’s as long as final greeting, which is probably the reason it skipped over most, because he has so many names, but nearly half the names are female. And not only are they female names, but he mentions their involvement in ministry, mentions his relationship with them, mentions how he’d been blessed by them, even at one point, saying then she was a mother to me, to one of the women in the list and talks about how they’re hosting churches in their homes, how they’re doing this, how they’re doing that. So here’s a guy who clearly has healthy, positive relationships with women. Those are names, encourages them and and even praises them in this letter. That’s not everything that can be said about the way a pastor can do their work, but man, if a pastor did one thing, know the women’s names, know what ministry they’re doing, and encourage them in their ministries. Wow, that would be a milestone. If you just did that, you would find such a healthy response amongst the women in your church. If you just knew them, knew what their ministries were, and encouraged them in their ministries, I think you’d find a lot of things would fall

Kori Porter
into place, and arc and DC, the BDA relay does this really well. He meets with the older women in his church who all have some type of responsibility within the church, and so he’s oftentimes discipling them to disciple. And so there’s a real relationship of a pastor knowing the concerns of the woman in his church, knowing it from the woman perspective, having that trusted relationship. So if something happens, he’s quickly able to adjust or to move. So I think him and his elder board do a really good job of highlighting women, making sure that they’re identified in the church, training them up, and then making sure that they can serve within the church and outside of the church with their gifts.

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, yeah. I’ve challenged the guys at the church that I’ve served at, you know? I’ll say, Hey, who’s had the name three people who’ve had the greatest impact on your faith, and typically, they name all men. And then I’ll just say, it’s not wrong, it’s not wrong answer. But I’ll say, what if you had a woman on that list and not your mom? Like, who would you put? And then say, if you don’t know the answer to that, why don’t you try to figure out the answer to that? And there’s been a lot of fruit that’s come from that. I think a lot of it is just we haven’t even allowed ourselves to conceive of what it would like to have a mother in the faith, if you’re a son in the church or or what it would look like to operate as brothers and sisters instead of as as two risk categories. And we have seen a lot of fruit from this in in my local church, and we found out that it was a more beautiful story to tell than the story that is told in a lot of local churches and and it’s been a church that I have been thrilled to raise my children in, because that’s what I want them to see is that the church is actually the true and better family. It’s what you’re if you had a great nuclear family, it’s what that whispered toward. And if you had a terrible nuclear family, it’s what you knew you needed as a result. And that that happens when we function as mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters, it’s the more beautiful story.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, do they? Would those names be older women in the congregation or authors?

Jen Wilkin
It could be either. I think I would say all of us know that we have been mentored from afar and we’ve been mentored in person. I don’t think we have to feel like it’s wrong that. I mean, just to give an obvious like that, Augustine shaped your faith. You know, no one’s saying that’s terrible. There will always be people from afar, and there should also be people who, you know, who are embodied to

Collin Hansen
I like ending there. Thank you guys for talking down partners in ministry, how men and women must labor together for the good of the church. Normally, when I’ve done these panels over the years at the gospel coalition, it’s John Piper who always hates my titles again, correct my questions and titles. I appreciate it. Thanks guys for venturing into some difficult ground, but trust it’s been a helpful conversation for others, as it has been for me. Thank you.

Heather Ferrell
Thanks for listening to today’s episode of the gospel coalition podcast. Check out more gospel centered resources at the gospel coalition.org.