How I lost my faith in 'qualified men'

Do we choose pastors for character and maturity, or through corporate hiring practices and gender hierarchy?

The day our new 29-year-old elder gave his first sermon was the day I stopped believing only men should be pastors.

Up to that point, I was fully on board with complementarian teaching. I’d spent my entire life in churches that only permitted men in leadership. I’d read books and heard sermons explaining how men and women were “equal in value, but with different roles.” I’d given a talk at a church planting conference where I defended these practices.

But in my experience as women’s ministry leader and Bible teacher, I kept bumping up against something uncomfortable. A growing number of awkward or even painful moments exposed a disconnect: while I’d heard plenty of words about my value as a woman, the actions of the men around me communicated something else.

Photo by Thomas Vitali on Unsplash

Until that Sunday morning, I was able to keep my discouragement in check, to remind myself that our church was trying to include women in new ways.¹ I was willing to be patient. After all, I didn’t even want to be a pastor! I just wanted to know we were valued.

But as I listened to the sermon, things fell into place. I haven’t been able to unsee what I glimpsed that morning.

I wanted to be happy for the new pastor. I liked him personally, after all. We’d gotten to know his wife and family, had them over for dinner, tried to help them feel welcome.

Yet as I listened to his sermon, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed: the way he applied the text was generic and unfocused. I thought about a few ways these verses could have been used to address concerns and struggles of our church. But the new pastor couldn’t apply the passage to us. He didn’t know us.

I knew I’d never preach a sermon to this congregation. I’d never had an interest in doing that, but that Sunday morning prodded me to ask: why him, but not me?

“Only qualified men” was the phrase I’d always heard. Whenever our pastors discussed our practices, they emphasized this — limiting the pastoral office to men wasn’t primarily about gender. What mattered was character, whether a man fulfilled biblical qualifications.

The new hire was a man, of course. But other than that, what made him “qualified”?

Character? No way to know

Every New Testament passage about elders emphasizes the need for character, for someone who is “above reproach, temperate, self-controlled, respectable,” etc.² Our new elder seemed like a nice guy, but he’d just moved to our town and joined our church within the past couple months — how could any of us truly know him? The character problems the Bible warns about wouldn’t be obvious at a first or second interview.³

All we knew of his character came from recommendations by professors at his seminary, or pastors at his former church. Was it wise for our pastors to entrust the flock to a new hire based on the word of strangers? To hand someone the care of souls based on secondhand references?

Maturity? Unlikely

Then there was the issue of his youth. Our church referred to pastors as “elders” no matter how old they were, and we’d been told the biblical term didn’t refer exclusively to an age group. Our church was young, but at 29 the new hire was still younger than most of the congregation.

1 Timothy 3 seemed relevant — it warns against putting a new convert in the role of elder, “or he may become conceited.” Clearly, maturity and experience mattered. Maybe an elder didn’t have to be “old,” but it seemed to me they should at least have more wisdom than the average church attendee. This pastor simply couldn’t.

So far, we were 0-for-2 on what might make him a “qualified man.”

Good reputation? Not yet

Did he “have a good reputation with outsiders” (1 Timothy 3:7)? This wasn’t possible, since he hadn’t been in our community long enough to develop one.

A faithful parent? Too early to tell

According to Titus 1:6, did his children “believe,” and were they “not open to the charge of being wild and disobedient” (NIV) or, to choose another translation, “debauchery and insubordination” (ESV)?

His kids were little, at ages where children are almost by definition “wild and disobedient,” and certainly not old enough for “debauchery” — nor, for that matter, a mature profession of faith.

Doing it for the right reasons? … How could we know?

What about his motives? Was he serving “under compulsion” or “for dishonest gain”? Or willingly and eagerly caring for the flock? (1 Peter 5:2) There was no way to tell. He was at our church because we offered him a job. Surely he could develop a love for our congregation over time, but the paycheck was what made him leave his former church and join ours.

As I sat and listened to the sermon, the phrase “only qualified men” and the verses used to defend it suddenly stopped fitting together in my mind. Something much clearer came into view.

Qualifications are found through committed relationships

Everything that qualified a man to be an elder, biblically speaking, required a significant investment of time with a community. Apart from long-term relational investment, it isn’t possible for a church to know if a man fulfills the character requirements to serve as a pastor.

Yet here we were, ordaining as “elder” a 29-year-old who was a stranger to our community. We were calling him our pastor, giving him a paycheck and trusting him with the care of the congregation… because he’d paid to attend seminary and had responded to our job listing.

By contrast, there were older women in our church who’d been serving for years, loving and caring for the congregation faithfully and without compensation. Their characters were known in a way the new pastor’s simply couldn’t be. They had established themselves as “self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach” and had good reputations with outsiders. They had grown children and had managed their families well. They were qualified. But they weren’t men.

Even I — though I wasn’t old enough to be considered “elder” — had heard the lead pastor and other elders praise my teaching and my care for our women. My husband and I had served the church for more than eight years, opening our home weekly for small group. My character was known; I wasn’t in it for the money (I made none). But I wasn’t a man.

Why this young man and none of the faithful, older women? I couldn’t avoid the conclusion.

There was only one thing that truly “qualified” him: he was a man. A man who wanted to be paid to pastor.

My faith in complementarian practices had been taking hits, big and small, for the last couple of years. That morning, this sermon, this young guy qualified only by the fact of his maleness — it was the final blow. “Only qualified men” was broken to pieces, shattered by the hammer of the very words that had always been used to justify it.

At that moment, I had no clarity about what exactly women’s roles should be. But I knew I couldn’t return to what I’d believed before.

1. Our church in North Carolina was making changes in its treatment of women … until it decided to “run me out of town.” For background, you can catch my story on the Bodies Behind the Bus podcast.

2. The primary passages our church referred to were 1 Timothy 3:1-7, Titus 1:5-9, and 1 Peter 5:1-4. Though it isn’t my preferred translation, I’m mostly citing verses from the ESV in this post, since it’s what my former church used.

3. The above passages warn against things such as drunkenness, a violent character, being quarrelsome or “a lover of money.” These are sins that can be hidden under the surface of an attractive or charismatic personality. It takes lots of time getting to know someone, being in their home and around their family, to discern whether these sins are present. A job interview can’t accomplish this.