Where the women aren’t

In a good post, Danny Zacharias shines a spotlight on the Gospel Coalition (a "fellowship of evangelical churches"). The Coalition stakes out a complementarian position in its confessional statement:
 

Adam and Eve were made to complement each other …. In God’s wise purposes, men and women are not simply interchangeable, but rather they complement each other in mutually enriching ways. God ordains that they assume distinctive roles which reflect the loving relationship between Christ and the church, the husband exercising headship in a way that displays the caring, sacrificial love of Christ, and the wife submitting to her husband in a way that models the love of the church for her Lord. (emphasis added)

The statement continues in the same vein, albeit more subtly, on the subject of church ministry:
 

In the ministry of the church, both men and women are encouraged to serve Christ and to be developed to their full potential in the manifold ministries of the people of God. The distinctive leadership role within the church given to qualified men is grounded in creation, fall, and redemption and must not be sidelined by appeals to cultural developments. (emphasis added)

What exactly does that statement mean? Here’s what it looks like in practice — a photograph of the Gospel Coalition’s council:

Danny comments:
 

When I see a council that is more than 60% white male with NO women, I start to wonder a bit. If it seeks to be a “gospel coalition” I would think they want to be representative of those who believe the gospel.

Here’s my view. I understand the argument that the Gospel shouldn’t be revised to suit cultural developments. Which isn’t to say that I agree with the argument. On the contrary, the Gospel has been continually revised to fit new cultural contexts throughout church history.

Cultural accommodation of a sort had already begun during the New Testament era:  for example, when narrowly Jewish titles (Son of Man, Son of David) faded into the background, to be replaced by titles with more resonance to a Gentile audience (Son of God, the Lord). The shift was introduced despite the fact that those titles had a markedly different set of associations in the Gentile world than those they had in the Jewish world.

That is, “Son of God” meant something rather different to a Gentile inquirer than it meant to a Jewish inquirer. The apostolic Church was prepared to go that far in order to successfully communicate the Gospel in a different culture.

Let me repeat:  I understand the argument that the Gospel shouldn’t be revised to suit cultural developments. But evangelicals don’t have to suffer through the modern era with their heads up their butts, either.

John Stott argued years ago:

• that “a strong prima facie biblical case can be made for an active female leadership in the church, including a teaching ministry.” (Stott lists Huldah, Miriam, Deborah, the first witnesses of Christ’s resurrection, Philip’s four unmarried daughters (who prophesied), the women who prayed and prophesied at Corinth, Priscilla, Euodia and Syntyche, Phoebe, Mary, Tryphena, Tryphosa, Persis, and Junia — that’s quite a list!)
• Stott agreed that female submission to male headship is a permanent and universal principle. On the other hand — in light of the prima facie case summarized above — the requirement that women remain silent and the prohibition of women teaching men were arguably first-century applications of the headship principle. Those applications were specific to a particular cultural context (comparable to the demand for a head covering in 1Co. 11), and may be modified or even set aside in a different culture.
• Thus Stott would permit women to teach men (making an accommodation for the sake of the Gospel) as long as the women are part of a ministry team, with a man acting as the head of the team (thereby preserving the permanent and universal principle of male headship).

(summarized from Decisive Issues Facing Christians Today — the chapter on "Women, Men, and God" )

To be sure, Stott’s position is far too conservative and far too restrictive for my liking. Nonetheless, it illustrates an important point:  the Gospel Coalition could respect the authority of scripture and yet find a place for a woman on its illustrious council!