RE: Voices: Silent on Sunday, manager on Monday
The main thrust I gleaned from Ms. Lukefahr’s opinion piece is it seems unfair women can run a boardroom but not a church, because the Southern Baptist Convention has made clear they cannot be pastors.
Lukefahr notes: “Secular employers increasingly embrace diversity and champion gender equality for all positions of authority. Apple, for example, commits to ‘inclusion that reflects the world around us’ and publicly posts statistics for accountability.”
The lament, it seems, is that SBC churches fail to focus on equality of opportunities like Apple does. Yet, the church does not exist to commit itself to the changing cultural landscape. I am unsure if Ms. Lukefahr has recently looked at “the world around us,” but it seems abysmally outside the confines of God’s desires.
To argue Apple—or any of the corporations that slap a rainbow veneer over their corporate logo in June—are the stalwarts of moral and social progress concerns me greatly, coming from another Christian voice.
Discussions of church polity and who is or is not qualified should rest on the weight of Scripture. Yet, what was presented was an argument from the surrounding culture. That is no argument at all.
Our surrounding culture overwhelmingly affirms abortion as a right, marriage as anything that goes, and gender as a construct rather than something designed by God, binary in its nature and determined based on the organs one is born with. The culture cannot even manage itself, let alone the complexities of God’s expression of himself and his kingdom today.
The slope is steep and slippery if your theology relies first on your sociology. We can debate Paul’s writings from within, but never whether the culture can speak into Christ’s church from without.
Nathan Feinberg, pastor
Adamsville Baptist Church
Lampasas, Texas
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