Your gender proclaims God’s glory! In love he made you male or female. So to be faithful to God’s design we must wholeheartedly affirm the glory of both genders, retain the differences between the two, and practice what is specific to each.

In our historic moment, the categories of male and female are no longer assumed. What is a man? What is a woman? Neither is there consensus in the church on gender roles and relations.
But to know yourself and glorify God you must live as a gendered person. Kevin DeYoung is right: Humanity “is, always has been, and will be…comprised of two differentiated and complementary sexes…by God’s good design” (14). We may not diminish the differences between men and women; maleness or femaleness is basic to who you are. But neither does gender distinction suggest value hierarchy: men and women harmonize to show the beauty of being human.
DeYoung’s Men and Women in the Church (MWC) faithfully engages Scripture to provide clear and compassionate answers to critical questions of our day before offering concrete application.
What Is a Man? What Is a Woman?
The Old Testament Introduces the Two Genders
Scripture’s first three chapters are foundational. Its most basic teaching on gender is this: God made men and women in his image, equal in glory, to rule jointly over creation. And yet, while gender is inconsequential for salvation (Gal. 3:28), maleness and femaleness is humanity’s most basic distinction. Man was created first (1 Tim. 2:12–13), and in a different way. Man and woman were created in different realms and given different tasks; the man cultivated the earth, the woman cultivated the family. The man—and not the woman—had to name every creature. The man alone, as the other party in covenant with God, was tasked with maintaining the garden’s holiness.
And gender differences are good! Not in spite of their differences but because of them men and women can experience beautiful harmony and unity. The names “man” [ish] and “woman” [ishah] suggest interdependence. The woman must help the man; he must love, protect, and provide for her. In marriage, the man leaves his family and cleaves to his wife. The two came from one flesh and become one flesh, with the man reckoned as the head and representative of the couple. Tragically, sin disrupted this “very good” world; it activated God’s curse which interrupted the relational wholeness between man and woman, who experienced the curse in different, and telling ways (3:16–19).
The rest of the Old Testament clarifies gender roles and responsibilities. DeYoung identifies five patterns.

Men lead. “From start to finish, the leaders among God’s Old Testament people were men” (MWC 36). The few exceptions like Deborah, Miriam, Esther, and Athaliah were highly unusual, not always positive, and only prove the rule.
Women can be heroic. Male leadership doesn’t demand passive women. The Bible gives many examples of “Proverbs 31 women” who were trustworthy, industrious, entrepreneurial, strong, shrewd, determined, generous, brave, dignified, wise, kind, selfless, and respected. Jael’s warrior-like behavior was exceptional, but not her integrity and courage.

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Hospitality is especially important for elders because their teaching and ruling responsibilities do not necessarily require them, unlike deacons, to be mixing regularly with strangers, the lonely, widows, and the poor. And yet in too many churches pastors and other elders are not expected to exercise hospitality. Now this may be because churches are sensitive to the fact that pastors and their wives have a lot going on. But churches should at least ask about this gift, and seek to pray for and help pastors who are not exercising hospitality or, if necessary, have other elders pick up the slack if the pastoral household is unable to do this work. 

The qualifications for elders in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 mention that for a man to be a minister he must be a one-woman man, be sober-minded, and be self-controlled. In my experience, these and other qualifications are commonly noted in letters of reference for potential pastors. And this makes sense: after all, the Apostle Paul’s inspired letters to pastors put far more emphasis on character and godliness than they do on a candidate’s aptitude to teach.
Nonetheless, there are two packages of pastoral attributes that are not often emphasized by presbyteries or congregations when a man is being examined or called. I am not saying that most ministers do not meet these qualifications, or pastoral attributes. I believe that the vast majority of orthodox ministers do. But I am not sure that churches consistently ask about these qualifications, and I am concerned that presbyteries’ examination of men regarding these qualifications is often insufficient. Perhaps it is time to address both of these when search committees are considering candidates, or when presbyteries are conducting examinations.
First, there is the matter of reputation. Paul twice tells Titus that potential elders must be “above reproach.” This point is repeated in his first epistle to Timothy, to which the Apostle also adds that an elder candidate must be “respectable,” to which he further adds that an elder “must be well thought of by outsiders.” The last requirement is arresting, thought-provoking, and should perhaps be action-provoking. Actually, it seems to me that we need to take these qualifications more seriously than we have in the past and, in order to do so, Presbyterian churches should probably do two things.
On the one hand, we should require all incoming elders to have a letter of reference from an “outsider” – someone who is not a member of a church, and yet who knows the candidate well enough to vouch for his orderly conduct – perhaps a former employer (for a newly minted minister), or a neighbour (for an existing minister moving to a new church). We should ask the man or woman writing the letter of reference to address any concerns that he or she might have; character flaws that could inhibit good leadership; patterns of speech that fall short of the highest moral standards – or positive traits that they think would be an asset. This is not a high bar for a pastor, but if he could not produce such a letter, or it proved to be a hardship for him to do so, it would surely be telling to those seeking to call him.
On the other hand, we should require legal background checks, ensuring that a candidate’s disclosures of any past sins and lapses of judgement are honest and complete, so that any heart-work and repentance that needs to be done is addressed prior to the commencement of a ministry – if, after a careful review, we determine that there can be any ministry at all. Such accountability is no cure-all. But it seems like a must-do.
Second, there is the matter of hospitality. The Bible contains three infallible pastoral epistles and two of them stress that elders be hospitable. In his letter to Titus, Paul places “hospitality” in direct opposition to egotistical sins such as arrogance, quick temper, and greed. There we also see hospitality presented as a leading virtue, listed at the head of a brief catalogue of character strengths, such as the love of the good, self-control and discipline. In his first letter to Timothy, Paul closes his opening list of personal pastoral characteristics with an insistance that the elder be “hospitable.”
It may help to remind ourselves that hospitality is not “entertainment.” Hospitality is done for the good of the guest, not for the fun of the host. Hospitality can involve serving hotdogs; with us it often does. And we are not alone: when we were moving to a new town and didn’t know anyone, a pastor of a large church invited us to his home – for hotdogs.
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Queer theology is a mature, established theological subject of scholarship now in its third decade and armed with well-honed arguments that queerness is grounded in biblical texts and classic commentaries. Most newly minted ministers coming out of mainline divinity schools today have some exposure to queer theology, either through taking a queer course, reading queer authors in other courses, or through conversations with queer students and queer professors.

Vignettes from progressive Christianity today:

A Presbyterian church goes viral online for marking the Transgender Day of  Visibility with a public prayer to the “God of Pronouns.” The congregants of the church, First Presbyterian of Iowa City, pay obeisance to “the God of Trans Being,” giving due glory to “the Great They/Them.”
The United Methodist Church boasts the first drag queen in the world to become a certified candidate for ordination. This traveling minister, who describes drag ministry as a “divine duty,” is lauded by a Florida pastor as “an angel in heels” after appearing in that church in a sequin dress to deliver a children’s sermon and denounce the privilege of Whiteness and cis-ness.
At Duke University’s Methodist-affiliated divinity school, pastors-in-training and future religious leaders conduct a Pride worship service in which they glorify the Great Queer One, Fluid and Ever-Becoming One. The service leads off with a prayer honoring God as queerness incarnate: “You are drag queen and transman and genderfluid, incapable of limiting your vast expression of beauty.”
And the Presbyterian News Service offers online educational series such as “Queering the Bible” (2022) and “Queering the Prophets” (2023) during Pride Month. A commentary in the former refers to Jesus as “this eccentric ass freak” who challenged first-century gender norms.

These examples from this year and last are just a few illustrating how progressive churches are moving beyond gay rights, even beyond transgender acceptance, and venturing into the realm of “queer theology.” Rather than merely settling for the acceptance of gender-nonconforming people within existing marital norms and social expectations, queer theology questions heterosexual assumptions and binary gender norms as limiting, oppressive and anti-biblical, and centers queerness as the redemptive message of Christianity.
In this form of worship, “queering” encourages the faithful to problematize, disrupt, and destabilize the assumptions behind heteronormativity and related social structures such as monogamy, marriage, and capitalism. These provocative theologians and ministers assert that queerness is not only natural and healthy but biblically celebrated. They assert that God is not the patron deity of the respectable, the privileged, and the comfortable, but rather God has a “preferential option” for the promiscuous, the outcast, the excluded and the impure.
Thus it is in the presence of the sexually marginalized—such as in a gay bathhouse or bondage dungeon—where we find the presence of Jesus. In the language of queer theology, queerness is a sign of God’s love because “queer flesh is sacramental flesh,” and authentic “Christian theology is a fundamentally queer enterprise,” whereas traditional Christianity has been corrupted into “a systematic calumny against hedonist love.”
Such claims may seem outrageous and offensive to the uninitiated, as do the antics of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, the group of provocative drag queen nun impersonators scheduled to be honored at a Los Angeles Dodgers’ “Pride Night” on June 16—this coming Friday.
But queer theology is a mature, established theological subject of scholarship now in its third decade and armed with well-honed arguments that queerness is grounded in biblical texts and classic commentaries. Most newly minted ministers coming out of mainline divinity schools today have some exposure to queer theology, either through taking a queer course, reading queer authors in other courses, or through conversations with queer students and queer professors, said Ellen Armour, chair of feminist theology and director of the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality at the Vanderbilt Divinity School.
Courses on queer theology are offered at the leading progressive divinity schools, such as Harvard Divinity School, whose spring 2023 catalog lists “Queering Congregations: Contextual Approaches for Dismantling Heteronormativity.” The class trains ministers and educators in “subverting the heterosexist paradigms and binary assumptions that perpetuate oppression in American ecclesial spaces.”
Wake Forest University’s divinity program offers a course called “Readings in Queer Theology” and another course, “Queer Theologies.” The latter course’s catalog description shows how the field has proliferated and branched out into its own subspecialties: LGBTQ+ inclusive theologies, intersectional queer of color critiques, queer sexual ethics and activism, and queer ecotheologies.
Back in 2018, Duke divinity students walked out in protest during the divinity dean’s State of the School speech to demand a queer theology course. Today Duke Divinity School offers a certificate in Gender, Sexuality, Theology, and Ministry, “where we privilege questions of gender and sexuality in the academic study and practices of theology, ministry, and lived religion.”
Queer theology is punctuated by a penchant for the outrageous and the scandalous, deploying graphic, carnal—and at times pornographic—imagery for shock value and dramatic effect, but its core religious claims are dead serious.
“Critics will say that a ‘Queer Jesus’ is a perverse or blasphemous fiction, invented by queer folks for reasons of self-justification, or accuse me and other LGBTQI Christians of being deviant,” queer minister and author Robert E. Shore-Goss wrote in 2021.
Shore-Goss is an ordained Catholic Jesuit priest who fell in love with another Jesuit, resigned from the Society of Jesus, and worked as a pastor in the MCC United Church of Christ in the Valley, in North Hollywood, Calif. MCC stands for the Metropolitan Community Church, reputedly the world’s most queer-affirming denomination that includes churches that perform polyamory nuptial rites to marry multiple partners.
“Jesus has been hijacked by ecclesial and political powers since the time of Constantine and right up to the present,” Shore-Goss wrote. “Jesus’s empowered companionship or God’s reign is radically queer in its inclusivity attracting queer outsiders. … Jesus is out of place with heteronormativity; he subverts the prevailing heteropatriarchal, cis-gender ideologies, welcoming outsiders.”
Perverse, blasphemous, narcissistic, heathenish, heretical and cultish are the ways in which queer theology will appear to traditional Christians and to many nonreligious people with a conventional notion of religion. Robert Gagnon, a professor of New Testament theology at Houston Baptist Seminary, described the movement as a form of Gnosticism, referring to a heresy that has surfaced in various periods of church history. Followers of Gnostic cults claimed they possessed esoteric or mystical knowledge that is not accessible to the uninitiated and the impure, Gagnon said, a belief that often leads to obsessive or outlandish sexual practices, like radical abstinence and purity, or libertinism and licentiousness.
Beneath the theological posturing about disrupting power, he said, is an insatiable will to accumulate power.
“They’re only for subversion until they’re in power,” Gagnon said. “And then they’re adamantly opposed to subversion.”
Shore-Goss initially agreed to a phone interview for this article, then canceled with a rushed email: “Wait a second I searched Real Clear Investigations and it is a GOP organization, and I will not help you in the GOP cultural genocide of LGBTQ+ people. They are full of grace and healthy spirituality.” Isaac Simmons, the Methodist drag queen known as Penny Cost, also initially agreed to an interview, excited to hear that this reporter had read six queer theology books, sections of other books, along with other materials: “Just about all of those books are on my bookshelf!! You are definitely hitting the nail on the head!” But Simmons/Cost never responded to follow-up emails to set up a phone call. Other queer theology experts either declined comment or did not respond. One, based in England, requested a “consultation fee.”
Encountering the established scholarly oeuvre of queer theology is an introduction to titles like “Radical Love,” “Rethinking the Western Body,” “Indecent Theology,” “The Queer God,” and “The Queer Bible Commentary,” a tome co-edited by Shore-Goss that “queers” every book in the Old Testament and New Testament, exceeding 1,000 pages. Queer theologians invite readers to see God as a sodomite, Jesus as a pervert, the disciples as gay, the Trinity as an orgy, and Christian unconditional love as a “glory hole.”
By “queering” holy writ and “cruising” the scriptures—two of the ways in which queer theologians use gay slang to describe their hermeneutical strategy—God’s revelation is “coming out” (of the closet), and those who opt to transition their gender experience the power of Christ’s resurrection. In the apocalyptic proclamation of the pioneering queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid: “The kenosis [self-emptying] of omnisexuality in God is a truly genderfucking process worthy of being explored.”
Queer theology presents itself as an apocalyptic, revival movement, rendering queer people as angels and saints who are a living foretaste of what’s to come, when all binaries and man-made social constructs fall away as remnants of heterosexual oppression and European colonialism. There is a sense in which to be queer is to be the chosen people, those favored by God to spread the good news.
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