Voices: A towel, not a throne

This article is Part 4 of the “Some truth and unity for Texas Baptists” series.

I am 19 years old, sitting across the desk from my senior pastor, talking through my plans.

It is my first leadership role in a church. I am nervous, but I have ideas, a strategy, and a shiny new business card to prove it. I slide one across the desk, a little proud of it. “University Minister,” it says under my name.

He picks it up, looks at it, then looks at me, and says a thing I have never forgotten: “That is a fine card. But you will not really be the university minister until the university students decide you are, no matter what it says here.”

He was not being mean. He was being honest, and almost 40 years later, I am still living inside that sentence.

The authority I was so eager to have did not come with the card. It did not come from the church that hired me, or the title, or the salary line. It came slowly from the students themselves as they learned to trust I loved them and told them the truth. Some granted it quickly. Some made me earn it for years. A few never did. The card said the same thing the whole time.

How authority works

This is how authority almost always works in the church, and it feels like our theorizing has outpaced reality. Much of our debate is argued in the abstract, by people drawing fences around a word, deciding who may sit where with what power and authority.

But walk into any church on any given week and you will find what the fence-drawing misses. Hundreds of people already shepherding hundreds of others. A man who has taught the same class for 20 years. A woman the young mothers call first when a marriage is failing. A retired couple gathering volunteers to feed a grieving family on Tuesday.

Nobody checked a title before any of it began. The authority is real, it was earned, and no office conferred it.

So, set the titles aside. The fear underneath all the current conflict is older and simpler: for a woman to lead at all, to hold authority a man might have to follow, is to take something that was never hers. That is the fear Jesus walks straight into.

Musical chairs

Watch what Jesus does with the question, because it is not what we expect.

James and John want the two best chairs, one at his right and one at his left. The other 10 are furious, not because the request is unworthy, but because they wanted those chairs themselves. The assumption under all their jockeying is the seats are scarce, that for one man to sit, another must be pushed out of a seat.

That assumption has a name from childhood. Musical chairs. The music plays, everyone circles, and when it stops, there are fewer chairs than players, so someone is always left standing.

It is a game built on scarcity, and it is, I have come to believe, the game the Southern Baptist Convention thinks we are all playing in our churches. There are only so many chairs. If a woman sits, a man must lose.

Jesus sees it differently: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them. It shall not be so among you” (Matthew 20:25-26). Whoever would be great must serve. He didn’t rearrange the seating chart, but he does reveal the rules.

The kingdom does not run on chairs. It runs on towels. On the night he was betrayed, the Lord of glory tied one around his waist and knelt at the feet of men still arguing about rank.

There is no fixed number of towels. There is one for every pair of dirty feet in the room, as many as there are people willing to kneel. No one is sent out when the music stops, because there is no music and no out. There is only a floor full of work and a Lord who told all of us to lower ourselves to it.

So, when a woman picks up a towel in your church, when she shepherds and teaches and leads and kneels, she has taken nothing from any man. She has not won a chair he lost. Gifts multiply. Service multiplies. The world is full of lost and hurting people who need a shepherd. The only thing a servant’s towel takes from a room is the dirt.

Ex cathedra?

Someone will say: “Even if authority is servanthood, the man in the pulpit still holds real authority over the gathered church. When he opens the Bible and says, ‘Thus says the Lord,’ the people are bound to receive it. Did not Paul himself say a woman must not teach or have authority over a man?”

We will reach that verse in its own time, but the implication is a man has authority over a woman or a gathering of believers by virtue of his “office.”

But notice the picture of preaching hiding inside the objection, because it is not a Baptist picture at all. It imagines the preacher as a man whose word the congregation receives or somehow submits to by virtue of where he stands.

Rome has a name for that. They call it speaking ex cathedra, from the chair, the idea that authority resides in the office, so when the officeholder speaks, the word binds because of who said it.

Where authority lies

Baptists have never believed that. We staked our existence on the opposite. I have stepped into a pulpit nearly every week for 40 years, and I have never once believed my words carried authority because they were mine or because of my title.

My sermon is authoritative in exactly one way and to one degree: insofar as it faithfully proclaims God’s word and insofar as the Spirit empowers it. The moment it departs from Scripture, it has no authority at all, and every believer in the room has the duty to weigh it and find it wanting.

The authority was never in the speaker. It was in God’s word, carried by the Spirit, received by a congregation with open Bibles and receptive hearts. If what is preached is heresy, the church can dismiss the preacher before heading to Luby’s for lunch. And in most Baptist churches, by the way, the majority of those voting would be women.

So, the question is not whether a woman in the pulpit would hold too much authority over the men. It is whether anyone in a Baptist pulpit holds that kind of authority at all. We do not. We never have.

The preacher stands under God’s word like everyone else. This does not yet answer who may preach. It answers only what authoritative preaching is and where its authority comes from.

Earned and mutual

So, let me say plainly what authority in the church actually is. It is earned through proven character and demonstrated gifting over time by men and women alike.

A church can give you an office. It cannot give you the trust that makes the office mean anything. Only the people give that, and only slowly.

What is earned can be lost. I know, because I have lost it, in the small ways that are the real texture of a minister’s life. I misspoke. I did not make it to the hospital the day a family needed me. I once used an illustration from the pulpit that landed wrong, and I watched it hit a face in the third row.

None were scandals, just the ordinary failures of a fallible man. But there will never be a day when I am not earning authority in someone’s life who rightly does not care what office I hold.

Now hear me carefully, because this cuts the other way too. None of this means authority is weak or that a congregation may follow no one. Scripture is plain: “Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls” (Hebrews 13:17).

When a shepherd has truly earned the right to lead, you are called to honor it and follow. The earned authority is not a suggestion. It binds.

And just as some leaders think the title is enough, some followers will submit to no one and dress the refusal up as discernment. The heart that weighs every word only to find a reason to dismiss it is not a noble Berean. It is the counterfeit.

The Bereans tested Paul and then received his word with joy when they found it true. Testing that never ends in trust is not humility. It is a refusal to be led, and Scripture names it a fault.

Which brings us to the sentence the whole debate rushes past: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Ephesians 5:21).

Before Paul says a word about wives or husbands, he says this: All of you, to each other. In a Baptist church, that is not a lofty ideal. It is how a healthy body works, and nowhere has it been plainer to me than with the women God placed beside me.

Mutual submission in reverence for Christ

For years the person who knew what was happening with the children of our church was not me. It was Beth.

She knew the kids by name, the joys and weights each one carried. She understood what would work in a room of restless 6-year-olds and what would fall flat, and sometimes the right Scripture for a moment better than I did.

So, when she came to me during Vacation Bible School and asked me to do a thing a certain way, I did it. Gladly. Not because I had run out of authority, but because she had earned the right to lead in that space, and I had the sense to know it. I submitted to her.

If you had watched it, you would not have seen a man surrendering authority or a woman seizing it. You would have seen two people who loved the same Lord and the same kids each deferring to the other out of reverence for Christ. That is not the exception to how authority works. It is the heart of it.

This is why the anxiety about women “taking authority” is so strange. The authority worth having is not the kind anyone can take. It is earned in hospital rooms at two in the morning, in the patient teaching of a class, in the thousand small fidelities that make a congregation finally say, “That one, I will follow.”

No amendment can hand that to a man, and none can keep it from a woman.

A harder question

There remains a harder question, the one that may worry people most. Granting that a woman may lead and shepherd and carry real authority, may she begin things? May she found a ministry, set its direction, gather and train the people who serve it, govern the work over years? Those are the very verbs some would reserve.

Next week, let us get honest about what the Bible says and what our own history reveals.

Brent Gentzel gives leadership to First Baptist Church in Kaufman. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.