It is good and right to speak up about all women being respected in the church. It is good and right to acknowledge the many ways women contribute to the nurturing of the body of Christ. May Christian men continue to support and encourage their sisters in Christ in both large and small ways to use their gifts, talents, skills, wisdom, life experience, and efforts in all their vocations, including their calling in the church, to the glory of God alone.

There has been a lot of discussion recently about how to rightly love and respect women in the church. Here are nine ways Christian men can communicate to women that they are valued members of the body of Christ.

Let women know you care about them.

It doesn’t take a lot of time to let women know you care about them, and your efforts will almost always be appreciated. Women have a wide spectrum of interests that goes far beyond what are commonly considered women’s topics. Sometimes men can assume that women don’t care about theology, but this is often far from the mark. Women want to grow in theological knowledge, for theology is about life with God.
Both women and men are image-bearers of God and have many of the same concerns, anxieties, hopes, disappointments, and dreams. Women can tell if men are genuinely interested in talking with them. When a man shows interest in what a woman is saying and values her thoughts expressed, he is showing respect for her. Women want opportunities to care about their brothers in Christ in the same way.

Take women’s concerns with seriousness and respect.

A woman may approach you as a pastor, elder, deacon, or layperson in the church with a concern she has regarding the sinful behavior of someone in her family, church, or community toward her or someone she knows. Always give her the honor of taking her words seriously and with respect.
As you also take the necessary action to protect her and others from harm, keep in mind that the woman may need help going through the Matthew 18 process due to safety factors. While it’s possible that she could be lying, please remember that it often takes much courage for a woman to speak up. She or someone she knows may face retribution for bringing the problem to light. By reaching out to you a woman may be risking her own physical, emotional, and spiritual safety and that of all others connected to the matter. Don’t brush her off or devalue her concerns, hoping the problem will go away or be resolved on its own.

Encourage women to grow in theological knowledge.

It is often the case that women who love theology also enjoy teaching or mentoring other women. Perhaps they want to write about Christian topics and have their writing published. Even though women are not ordained as officers, growing in knowledge and wisdom in theology is for all the saints. Wonderful ways for women and men to grow in such knowledge are theological education in the church, robust reading, and even attending seminary (Col. 1:9-10; 3:1-2, 16). Point them to sound books and resources that will help them develop discernment on Christian doctrine and application.
If a woman is interested in studying theology at a more advanced level, encourage her to attend seminary to acquire a formal education. Being associated with a sound seminary brings with it the additional responsibility to represent the school honorably, both while in school and after graduation, and this is a good thing. This benefit of association is a blessing because it helps keep men and women safe within the confessional boundaries of the historical church. Furthermore, a seminary education benefits women in building professional connections in both academic and pastoral spheres that would be difficult to acquire otherwise.

Be open to opportunities to mentor women.

Women don’t have the same opportunities men have to connect with pastors and theologians (who are mostly male) on a casual level, such as meeting up at a local coffee shop to engage in robust theological debate. If you are someone with advanced knowledge of the Christian faith and nuanced theological matters, consider some God-honoring ways in which you could be of help to women.
It is clear wisdom that pastors cannot mentor women in the same way as men, but in group settings pastors and elders can create opportunities for women to participate in theological discussion. You could also take some time to review a woman’s written work to ensure her content is sound and a blessing to the church. It is far better to catch problematic teaching before it is published, especially when it comes to anything in print, as it is far more difficult to revise. While you don’t have to say yes to every request from a woman to advise her or review her writing, doing so now and then is a wonderful way to support a sister in Christ.

Treat women (and men) with grace.

It’s certainly in keeping with the golden rule to give people the benefit of the doubt where we can and show grace to them. For example, if someone has written something that concerns you, consider reaching out to the person personally before making a critical comment online. Just because the author is a woman, don’t rush to assume she meant to challenge the orthodox teachings of the historic church. It may be that her wording was not as clear as she meant it to be; it may also be that she is lacking in some knowledge.
While many people assume that anything posted publicly online is fair game for public criticism, that doesn’t mean it’s wise to immediately post your concerns. A significant problem with Christian blogging is that authors don’t always have their content adequately reviewed before posting it. While believers have liberty in Christ to publish God-honoring Christian content, they need to exercise much wisdom in doing so.
Women should be prepared to receive criticism when any content of theirs is published. If a woman wants to be respected at the same level as a man for her theological knowledge, she should expect to be treated the same in the public sphere. Still, we’re all human and make mistakes. Give her the opportunity to correct her error before pointing it out online. Most men would likely appreciate the same courtesy as well. This is one way to love one another in the church. Sadly, many online critiques are harsh and unnuanced, showing little or no effort made to pursue the truth in love. If you still think it’s best to criticize someone publicly, also pray for the person that your feedback would be received humbly with an open heart to correction.

Provide opportunities for women to serve.

It goes without saying that women can do a lot and do it well. Special officers in the church have only so much time to care for the congregation, and there are many opportunities for women to serve in the church in their general office (OPC BCO Ch. III). Women can build up fellow believers in the body of Christ by praying, gathering for group studies, and teaching children in Sunday School. They can meet practical needs by preparing meals, running errands for the sick and elderly, caring for expectant and new mothers, and being a trusted Christian sister to single and married women in the congregation.
If you hold special office in the church, ask the women in your congregation how you can support them in developing their gifts. Perhaps you could lead a Bible study for women or organize a group of congregants (women only or both men and women) to meet a particular need in the church such as hospitality. Encourage older women to mentor younger women by letting them know that their wisdom and life experience are valued by the church session (Tit. 2:3-5).

Protect women from sinning in their participation in the local church.

Women not only need protection from physical, emotional, and spiritual abuse, but they also need protection in how they participate in the life of their congregation. In the pursuit of seeking to treat women and men equally in the church, it has become increasingly popular to hold the wrong belief that to love women is to ordain them. Permitting women to hold special office in the church or even perform some of the roles restricted to special officers contradicts the clear teaching of Scripture (1 Cor. 14:33-35; 1 Tim. 2:11-15; 3:1-13). To encourage and allow women to serve in the very areas God has forbidden women to participate is not loving them.
Some Christians have argued that there was no hierarchical authority structure in Adam and Eve’s relationship in the garden of Eden prior to their fall into sin. According to this line of thinking, if there was no hierarchy before the fall, then authoritative male headship was not God’s original design but rather part of the post-fall curse. Thus, husbands and wives are to equally submit to each other, and all those verses in the New Testament about wifely submission and women not being able to teach authoritatively in the church must mean something else.
While the meaning of Genesis 3:16b has been highly debated (“‘Yet your desire will be for your husband, And he shall rule over you’”; NASB), sound exegesis of the verse cannot contradict New Testament passages on authority and submission in marriage or the roles of women in the church. The Forty-Fifth General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America is helpful here regarding the cohesiveness of the book of Genesis and the New Testament in its Report of the Ad Interim Committee on Women Serving in the Ministry of the Church: “Paul’s whole discussion in 1 Timothy 2:11-15 is squarely based on Genesis 1-3. Eve was deceived, but Adam is responsible (Rom. 5:12, 19; 1 Cor. 15:21-22) because he failed in his role as covenant keeper and federal head” (p. 22:20-23).
As theologian Claire Smith points out in her book God’s Good Design: What the Bible Really Says about Men and Women, “our task is to sit under God’s word and have it critique our culture, our lives, our relationships, our prejudices and our fears. Not vice versa” (p. 18). Acquiescing to prevailing cultural demands for equality in roles in the church is not only unloving but also harms both women and men, their congregation, their denomination, and Christ’s church around the world.

Be a friend to women.

A Christian man and a Christian woman can be friends, but there are particular boundaries when either one of them is married. Except in professional communication, with rare exception this friendship will take place in the public sphere and not in one-on-one meetings. Men and women who are married can spend wholesome time together with their fellow saints in many group activities and engage in a variety of edifying topics. During this time they will hopefully encourage each other to faithfully live out the Christian life with joy, dedication, and purpose.
Anything men or women discuss with someone of the opposite sex should only be something they would say in the presence of their spouses. While friendship between men and women in the church is vital for the flourishing of the body of Christ, it must be approached with much wisdom, all the while being aware of our sinful natures, as we still live in a fallen world and have not yet received our glorified bodies.

Value the work of women.

While it has become commonplace to give acclaim to show we value someone, particularly on social media platforms, there is much in the Bible that encourages the quiet service that no one sees. Scripture teaches that we should not perform works to be admired by others (Matt. 6:1-4; Col. 3:23). Recipients of frequent public praise may subsequently struggle with pride and self-idolatry.
Christians are to boast not in themselves or others but only in the Lord (Jer. 9:23-24). Yet, we also read in Scripture how the apostle Paul took time not only to encourage his fellow saints and give thanks for their faithfulness, particularly in his epistle greetings (e.g., Rom. 16:1-13; Eph. 1:15-21; Phil. 1:1-11; 2 Tim. 1:1-7; 1 Thess. 1:1-10; 2 Thess. 1:1-4) but also to exhort them to “encourage one another and build one another up” (1 Thess. 5:11). Some thoughtful ways men can show they value the work women do to serve the body of Christ include offering an encouraging word to a woman as she pursues various God-honoring endeavors, writing her a kind note of thanks, praying for her, or showing support in some other practical way.
It is good and right to speak up about all women being respected in the church. It is good and right to acknowledge the many ways women contribute to the nurturing of the body of Christ. May Christian men continue to support and encourage their sisters in Christ in both large and small ways to use their gifts, talents, skills, wisdom, life experience, and efforts in all their vocations, including their calling in the church, to the glory of God alone.
LeAnn Trees is a member of Escondido Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. This article is used with her permission.

“I sympathize with doubters who may feel drawn to Christianity but find plenty of objections to keep them at arm’s distance. If you’re drawn to the message of Jesus but can’t seem to get past your doubts, perhaps it would be helpful if I share how I worked through some of my doubts.” 

I was raised in an environment of skepticism, during a time of questioning, amid a culture that preferred sarcastic mocking over serious thinking. We liked simplistic slogans more than complex considerations. We loved to point out religious hypocrisy but rarely turned the light of inquiry on our own assumptions.
On top of all this, I was raised in a Jewish family who firmly believed that “Jews don’t believe in Jesus.” So, to say the least, I had many doubts about the Christian faith my friends encouraged me to consider. After all, it was hard to give much credence to a religion that supposedly dominated Germany as it incinerated six million of my fellow Jews. A “Christian nation” thought they had found “the final solution” to the world’s problems: get rid of people like me.
So, I sympathize with doubters who may feel drawn to Christianity but find plenty of objections to keep them at arm’s distance. If you’re drawn to the message of Jesus but can’t seem to get past your doubts, perhaps it would be helpful if I share how I worked through some of my doubts.
Out of Absurdism
As I’ve said, many factors pointed me away from accepting the Christian faith. In addition to those already mentioned, I immersed myself in absurd literature and comedy for several years as I began my university studies. I mixed together an intellectual cocktail of Samuel Beckett, Kurt Vonnegut, and Woody Allen — with large quantities of alcohol added in. It made for a lot of laughs, even more smirks, and a great deal of what felt like fun. But there were hangovers as well — and not just from the alcohol. After the intoxication of laughter wears off, absurdism leaves the mind and heart with existential emptiness.
Immersed in meaninglessness, I continued to seek something transcendent in the world of music. I attended concerts, practiced, performed, and listened desperately, hoping to find a portal to the supernatural or divine. But every piece, every concert, every experience left me disappointed.
I was experiencing the kind of chronic disappointment C.S. Lewis describes in his book Mere Christianity, in the chapter titled “Hope.” Although I had not read anything by Lewis at that point, my life bore out the truth of what he said. Since even my best experiences proved unsatisfying, I could essentially respond in one of three ways:

I could embrace godless hedonism and keep trying to chase momentary intoxicating pleasures.
I could embrace cynicism and reject any hope that life might have some ultimate meaning.
I could embrace the possibility, as Lewis so eloquently puts it, that “if I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world” (Mere Christianity, 136–37).

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From Desiring God: Randy Newman, our longtime friend, wrote this article just weeks ago to be published May 30 at Desiring God. Last week Randy died unexpectedly of heart complications. We publish this article with the blessing of his wife and family, and in gratitude to God for Randy’s faithful ministry and contagious joy in Jesus.
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The idea is to take an existing church and alter it so that it can be lean, effective, and build owned space. The goals are to make the institutional church cheaper, more agile, and more effective, whilst making the Christian community more resilient in the face of hostility and change.

Strategic Thinking for the Negative World
The church needs to change. I find this hard to accept. I am a rusted-on, curmudgeonly, conservative, traditional Presbyterian. I do not want to change anything. I’m the kind of Presbyterian that thinks Charles Hodge was a bit loose. But even Christians like me, perhaps especially Christians like me, need to face the fact that the church in the post-Christian West needs to rethink how it does things.
This is not a Rob Bell-style call for a watered-down faith nor Brian McLaren-style attempt to cloak liberalism in emergent church “orthodoxy.” You won’t catch me wandering off the reservation on doctrine or even ecclesiology. As I said, I am a curmudgeonly, traditional Presbyterian.
I am talking about how we organize our institutions. We need to rethink at a strategic level how we operate, how we spend money, how we invest in the future of our institutions, and how we create resilient Christian communities. The world of the twentieth century is passing away and the institutional arrangements that have undergirded the church will need to alter in the face of this.
My motives are not theological — hence my distance from Bell, McLaren, and even people like Mike Frost and Alan Hirsch. They imagined an ecclesial revolution from the perspective of either theological liberalism or a sort of Anabaptist primitivism. They were driven by ideals. The emerging and emergent church types believed change was theologically necessary. I do not agree with this.
I believe that change is necessary because of practical and political reality. It may turn out that some of the ideas I outline below will have some positive spin-offs for discipleship and community, some that people like Frost and Hirsch would welcome. Indeed, some of the ideas are needed for that reason, but this is not theologically necessary, nor are my prescriptions driven by high ideals. They are driven by that thing that every anabaptist primitivist despises: lucre.
The Future
I am no prophet. Even worse, I’m a cessationist. But I know that the future won’t look a lot like the past. Here are a few predictions, hopefully, founded upon reasonable suppositions, that undergird my analysis and constructive suggestions:

The world as a whole is going to get poorer and more dangerous. To see why this is, read Peter Zeihan’s The End of the World is Just the Beginning. We might differ with some of the details in this book, but the basis of Zeihan’s analysis is demographics, and demographics, as they say, is destiny. Demographics concerning the number of workers, tax-payers, potential soldiers, retirees, and people drawing on their pension funds, are set for the next 20 years. So, too, is the number of deaths. Demographic decline is set to swallow the better part of the world. The economic decline will follow fast. And geopolitical and military chaos will ensue. Which will lead to trade chaos. Which will lead to more economic and military chaos. And so on. Add to this the reality that the United States world police force is going to withdraw from protecting the globalist economic trade order with its navy, and it is hard not to be pessimistic. Other outcomes are possible; e.g. during the Black Death, people and communities increased in wealth. But something akin to the scenario Zeihan outlines should be one we plan for.
Churches will decline in numbers and wealth, mainly because of the demographic shift. Boomers are dying. They built, funded, and shaped the cultures of, the Western church. Boomers are the reason the church is the way it is in an aesthetic sense (bad CCM anyone?), but they are also the reason we have so many privately-funded parachurch organizations and Christian education institutions. They are the reason why churches can afford multiple ministry staff. They were rich, they are rich, and they are … going to take that wealth to the grave. It will be gone before we know it, all of the greyheads that currently make up 50% or more of our churches will disappear, and even if they were all replaced numerically, there is almost no way that their wealth will be replaced. We have peaked, and it is downhill from here.
Persecution will increase. This should be obvious, given what the scriptures say about the normal mode of operation for the church. We have had it sweet for a long time, but in the West, that is coming to an end. Even if we recede into a form of out-of-favourism, where no one hates us but everyone ignores us, things will be hard. But if it ends up worse, if we are outlawed, if our schools are outlawed, if we lose tax exemptions for churches, if we are actively ostracised from society, then this will impact churches’ operations at an institutional level and also place a lot of pressure on laypeople.

These are the main reasons the Christian church needs to rethink the way it does things. I firmly believe in God’s sovereignty. The Lord reigns, and earth ought to rejoice (Ps. 97:1). Nothing that God plans is thwarted, and there is no event, whether personal or world-historical, that is beyond God’s control (Job 42:2, Matt. 10:29–31). In other words, there is nothing about any of this is out of God’s control, and Christians should not worry.
But we should plan and we should be strategic. And note an important distinctive of what I am doing here: note the lack of theology. My reasoning is pragmatic. We will almost certainly have fewer people, less money, and therefore far fewer resources taken as a whole. Even if we don’t get squeezed by civil governments for more taxes or get the rug pulled some other way, we will have less money. Those darker possibilities need to be prepared for, too. But the even best-case scenario is not a good one, and the plausible scenarios are even worse.
In short, we need to consider changing. The church needs to change to survive and thrive. To use Nassim Taleb’s concept, we need to make our churches antifragile in a world that will despise us and possibly hate us.
Key Ideas for the Church in a Dangerous World
What should we do? How should we respond to this possible, perhaps plausible future? This is where things get uncomfortable. For a Presbyterian who is wedded to traditional denominational structures, theological colleges, and other such niceties of Protestant Christendom, this is hard. However, these prejudices are also a strength, because I am going to posit some models which could work even in traditional denominational structures.
I believe in the Presbyterian polity. You might believe in episcopacy, or something different. You might not really care about church polity. Let me again emphasize that the ideas below are not meant to make you think of (once again) Mike Frost and Anabaptist primitivism. They should make you think of keeping the ecclesial scaffolding you already have but changing the building inside the scaffolding.
To properly understand my prescriptions and ideas, on top of the basic assumptions about the future outlined above, there are two ideas that readers should grasp.

Ecclesial institutions will need to be lean.
The church, in its organic form, will need owned space.

Put another way, the institutional church will ideally operate with less real estate, whilst the organic church needs more. This may seem contradictory, but there is reason behind this.
An Institutional Church that is Lean
In the first instance, the institutional church is, at this point, a big target for people who hate Christ and his Church. And it has a big target on its back — property. Property makes the church more vulnerable. The church is more vulnerable to being inflexible, to be unwilling to adjust to the environment around her when she is laden with sanctuaries, seminaries, and office buildings. These are blessings when things are going well. These could be blessings when things are not going well.
But my sense is this will not be the case moving forward. They are a target. People who hate God and what Christians stand for can get at us via our property through legal avenues. Who is going to be targeting the church? Well, the same people who are chasing us now. Activists from left-wing groups, but possibly governments as well. This woke revolution is not just going to blow over. This is one reason to make the institutional church leaner.
But there is another one: mission. Buildings can be a vehicle for mission, certainly. But into the next age of the church in the West, I believe they will be a barrier to mission. They will create big legal and financial headaches for an institution that is under siege, and they will burden the church’s mission.
The church in the developing world offers a model. Where there is a high level of difficulty in establishing a local church ministry, churches grow and multiply when the church is lean. Churches grow and multiply when they use a model that is focused on homes and is, in turn, replicable. It is low on staff, low on overheads, and big on house churches with local pastoral leadership. It is a house church which, when it gets too big, plants a further house church with a new leader.
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