Voices: Your daughters shall prophesy

This article is Part 3 of “Some truth and unity for Texas Baptists” series.

It is a Wednesday night again, in our clapboard building, and it is “Ask Anything” night.

My high school students put their hardest questions about God and the universe into a bowl, and I pull them out one at a time. But there is a catch: Before I answer, someone has to open a Bible and try answering from it first. I do not want them outsourcing their thinking to the preacher.

A hard question comes. I will not pretend to remember which one. I remember the silence after it, the kind that makes eyes grow large.

Then Beth James raises her hand.

She opens her Bible, finds a passage, then turns to another, and begins to speak. What comes out of her is kind, thoughtful, faithful to the text, and better than what I was going to say.

The room feels the power in it. I feel it. It is the first time I ever heard Beth teach a roomful of people, though I would hear it many times across the years. I knew the underclassmen in that room would never forget what God taught them through her that night.

No one was trying to make a statement. There were no “feminist” objectives in mind. But all these years later I want to talk about what happened, because Scripture has a word for it, and the word feels forgotten, perhaps even under attack.

This is that

At Pentecost, the Spirit falls on the men and women in the upper room, and the church spills into the street proclaiming the gospel.

Peter stands to explain. He reaches back 700 years to a prophecy from Joel and alerts everyone: This is that.

“I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy” (Acts 2:17).

Luke later tells us Philip’s daughters were prophets (Acts 21:9), and Paul simply assumes women prophesy aloud in the gathered church. The church is born in a mixed-voice proclamation, and Peter names it the fulfillment of the word of God.

What an incredible day this must have been, and what a strange way to launch the church if the daughters are meant to fall silent for the next 2,000 years.

What prophecy is

Prophecy and teaching are not the same word, any more than pastor and overseer are.

Teaching says, “Here is what was written, and here is what it has always meant.” It faces the past, hands on a fixed deposit, and can be checked against the Book.

Prophecy faces the other way. It says, “Here is what God is pressing on us now, in this room, this hour, the present word of God to the present people.” Its mark is it pierces, laying the heart bare until the outsider falls down and says, “God is really among you” (1 Corinthians 14:24-25).

But the difference is not a difference of rank.

Some now call prophecy the lesser thing, a flash of impression to be checked like a weather report, so that granting women prophesy grants nothing. That will not survive the text.

When Jesus promises the Spirit, he says he will guide you into all truth (John 16:13). The truth that teaching hands on is truth the Spirit gave. The giving and the guarding are one of the Spirit’s works in two motions, and you cannot rank the second above the first.

Paul does the opposite of ranking prophecy low. He puts it near the top and tells the whole church to eagerly desire it (1 Corinthians 14:1). Yes, prophecy is weighed, but so is teaching.

The Bereans weighed Paul and were called noble for it (Acts 17:11). Weighing is what a responsible church does with every word, not the mark of a weak church. You cannot call the gift Paul most prized a lesser thing and claim to be reading Paul honestly.

And look at what it does: “The one who prophesies speaks to people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation” (1 Corinthians 14:3). That work is pastoral.

Paul lists prophecy in Ephesians 4 beside the apostle, evangelist, pastor, and teacher—every one a gift given “to equip the saints for the work of ministry” (Ephesians 4:11-12).

Whatever column you file it under, the work prophecy produces is pastoral to its core, and it was poured out on sons and daughters alike.

A gift poured out

Here is what we forget: This gift was never meant for a rare few.

Like pastoring, Paul assumes an ordinary congregation is full of it: You can all prophesy one by one, so all may learn and all be encouraged (1 Corinthians 14:31). All.

He has to give traffic rules for it, take turns, do not all speak at once. You do not write crowd control for a gift only three people have.

We are the people of the priesthood of all believers, who have always confessed the Spirit is poured out on the whole body, not funneled through a chosen few.

These are the last days Joel named, ours included, and the Spirit is still poured out on all flesh. The sons still prophesy. So do the daughters.

To imagine the gift switched off after one generation while every other gift kept flowing is not careful reading. It is the fence looking for a board.

So, when someone says he has never met a prophet, the truth is he has met dozens; he has called them something else.

The woman who opens God’s word in a mixed Bible study and makes the connection land, what it meant and what it means now, until the whole table sees Christ and goes home changed, is doing the very thing Paul describes.

We have been watching prophecy our whole lives. We just filed it under “she is really good at leading that study.” Indeed, I know very few people who prefer a sermon that is teaching without prophecy in the mix.

However, granting that prophecy and teaching differ, a sharp division does not end the matter of female leadership in the life of the church. It only moves it.

The work and the office

Let me claim no more than Scripture does. We have already granted a sincere reader may conclude God’s design is for the overseer of a church to be a man. Believers have held that position in good conscience for centuries, and if your church is convinced of it, I will not quarrel with you. That is a question about the office, and the office is not what this essay is about.

What is not defensible is the further claim that women may not function in the very ways the Bible plainly shows them functioning in the first church.

The act of prophecy is the same we see at Pentecost, in Philip’s daughters, and in the women in your church who will speak God’s truth in God’s power this week: a person, empowered by the Spirit, declaring the word of God to God’s people. Their words are not Scripture; the canon is closed. But the act has never been the property of men alone.

Notice what is absent from Acts 2: Peter does not pause to say Joel’s promise applies only to private conversations or women’s classes. Joel said sons and daughters would prophesy. Peter says it is being fulfilled before the nations. Every reading that narrows it must explain why the New Testament later took back what Peter deliberately left broad.

And Paul knew women were prophesying in the assembly, not only in private. In the same letter he takes for granted that women pray and prophesy aloud in the gathered church and does not forbid it. He regulates it (1 Corinthians 11:5), giving instructions for how a woman should prophesy in the assembly, a strange thing to do about an act you mean to prohibit.

Mohler’s amendment reaches past the office to police the function, and the function it polices is the very pastoral work, the building up and encouraging—not the primary work of the overseer—Scripture shows these women doing. Sincere people want to keep these gifts in separate boxes. In a real church, they overlap all the time.

We will get there

There is a verse a few chapters later some of you are already reaching for, the one about women keeping silent in the churches (1 Corinthians 14:34). We will face it squarely before this series is done.

For now, only this: Paul cannot mean utter silence, because three chapters earlier he assumes women prophesy aloud in the gathered church. Whatever the silence verse means, it cannot mean what it has been made to mean, or your Bible is no longer inerrant.

For now, it is enough to say what that Wednesday night said all those years ago. A young woman opened her Bible, and the Spirit used her to lay the truth bare in a way that built us up, encouraged us, and drew us nearer to God. It was the truth of the text, with something Spirit-empowered driving it home to the heart.

Even if we rarely use the word “prophecy” today, it is the biblical word for that moment. I have known it for 30 years, and because I love and trust God’s word, I am not willing to pretend it means nothing, or that the women in our church do not exercise this gift regularly when the church is gathered.

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