Women in Leadership

In many churches, women can teach children, lead the music and run the kitchen, but cannot preach to a room with men in it or serve as pastor. The rule is taught as God's design, and it usually comes with two verses from the letters. Women who feel called to teach are told, kindly or not, that the door is closed.

You're not imagining it. Churches that bar women from the pulpit say they are following the Bible, but the man the Gospels are about took a woman as a student and sent a woman to tell the men he was alive. The rule comes from a few lines in letters, and the Gospels point the other way.

Measured against the center