Podcast Episode #141
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Today on the podcast, Selma Wilson joins us to discuss the challenges and opportunities women face in leadership. Selma serves as vice president of organizational development at LifeWay Christian Resources and has been with LifeWay for more than 20 years.
Some highlights from today’s episode include:
- The diversity and strength of your team makes you a stronger leader.
- The team you put around you in leadership really matters.
- The diversity of gifts and strengths on your leadership team will make you a stronger leader.
- Don’t ignore critics, but don’t lead toward them. Keep the end in mind and don’t let the critics divert you.
- The role of pastor is one of the greatest leadership roles in the world.
- To manage your time well, you need structure for your time.
- There is no replacement for time. You can’t get it back.
- Half of a congregation is women. You need leaders in the church who can speak to women’s issues.
Sponsor
Vanderbloemen Search Group is the premier pastor search firm dedicated to helping churches and ministries build great teams. They’ve helped hundreds of churches just like yours find their church staff and are uniquely geared to help you discern who God is calling to lead your church. Find out more about Vanderbloemen Search Group by visiting WeStaffTheChurch.com.
Feedback
If you have a question you would like answered on the show, fill out the form on the podcast page here at ThomRainer.com. If we use your question, you’ll receive a free copy of Autopsy of a Deceased Church.
Such powerful words of direction and encouragement! Thank you, Dr. Rainer, for assembling a diverse team. Thank you, Selma Wilson, for your insight and courage. God is surely being glorified and His kingdom is growing as a direct result of your obedience to Him in your life.
As a ministry leader whose role is downplayed by her pastor, I seek encouragement from those who are on staff and whose instincts are valued and trusted.
I would like very much if you were to offer a workshop at the Lifeway Women’s Forum. I know many would benefit and that God would meet us there!
Thank you, Dolly. Selma is out of the country for about 10 days, but I’ll pass on your words to her. Blessings!
Actually, in most churches, women are decidedly in the majority yet often seem to have little or no voice.
Or their voices go through the leadership rather than directly to them
More of a question for Mr. Rainer. Are you endorsing women pastors and women teaching the word to men?
Nope. This podcast was on opportunities for women in leadership. It was not a post on egalitarianism.
Dr. Rainer, I am thankful every day for God’s calling to Women in Ministry, to be pastors and leaders in community. In my opinion, to limit God’s calling to women in any form of ministry is limiting God’s work in the world. We are all ministers in God’s world if we are Christian. I cannot explain God’s calling to seminary and to pastoral leadership. Intellectually, I remember that there is a place of mystery which I can only worship, obey and adore. Respectfully submitted,
Rev. Sherry (Bohlen) Edwards
Lyle –
Did you listen to the podcast? How could you have formulated that concern from it? You are so far off base, but such is the negativity of trolls on blogs.
Women were so close in Jesus’ ministry and played a big role. Let me put it in consideration and get someone in the church to care about them because they are many than men and more active than them, send my greatings to that lady of God. God bless you Dr Thom I love you so much if i would have hosted you in Uganda.
What do you folks do about the fact that Sandy Creek Baptist Church and Association had female eldresses, one in particular being Shubal Stearns sister, Martha Stearns Marshall who was instrumental in the conversion of Samuel Cartledge in Georgia, according to history and family traditions of the Cartledge family? Have you ever considered the possibility that a case could be made for women as ministers of churches. Did you know a woman built a goodly church and gave it to Southern Baptists and was told that it would never be acknowledged that she had anything to do with the founding of that church?
Thank you for allowing us to learn from this wonderful leader! Let’s continue to hear from strong female leaders… Especially those in our churches.
Amazing! I asked two questions and received no answers. Could it be due to the fact that no one has really investigated the history of Baptists on this issue? Have you never read the Puritan Matthew Poole and his comment on I Tim. 2, stating that the rule for men applies excepting in the cases of women specially called, gifted, and endowed by God. Then it is a sin not to hear them. Could it be that Shubal Stearns knew about Poole’s comment. And then there is the fact that the Puritans of New England, like the Baptists, were Congregationalists in church government, which presupposes that every member is an equal to every other member. No one is superior to the other, and authority is a function of position, a function which can be called into question. In other words, it is a question of checks and balances. Complementarianism as Carl F.H. Henry and others have set it forth will not fly biblically, especially in the light of Ephs.5:22 and I Peter5, where the Apostle expressly demands that the elders not lord it over others. Our whole system of church government is built upon the idea of free and open persuasion, not manipulation, not unquestioned obedience to another human, something owed only to God. The Ekklesia is body composed of members who are equals. Since the New Testament recognizes women as members of the local congregation, it follows from the nature of the congregational church government and the Greek’s understanding of Ekklesia in the first century, viz., Ephesus in Acts 19, Corinth, etc. Even though I am not a Landmarker, I do acknowledge that J.R. Graves made the finest exegesis of Acts 19, differentiating between the oklos and th ekklesia. K. Schmidt’s article on the ekklesia in Kittel’s is wanting, because he never had access to Graves, Intercommunion. Does anyone ever do research any more?
This whole deal is fixed to teach only the complementary position. Quite obviously there will be no replies, because the powers that be really do not have any. After all, if the church is the family of God, brothers and sisters, if the church is an ekklesia of equals, of people who have the same rights and privileges, a place where the lowliest person in the body can be set as judge in a case, if the Apostle Peter stated that the elders were not to lord it over the members but to serve as examples, it follows the complementary idea is wanting. And our Lord made it exceedingly plainly that whoever would chief of all must be the servant of all, and servant, actually the term is slave, can not be lord. He or she can be questioned, and he or she is expected to give an answer of truth.
I know of a nice sized church in another state that was founded by a woman, who built it up as a Bible believing church and gave it to Southern Baptists (she had been prior to that a visitor for a Southern Baptist Church in another city in that state, a visitor who shared the Gospel with 10,000 persons. One of her sons was in my Greek class some 55 years ago. She gave that church, that congregation, which had a very nice building to Southern Baptists, and they told her that it would never be acknowledged that she had founded the church, that it would be recognized as organized from the day it entered the association with no reference to her years of labor in establishing that congregation and training them in biblical teachings. She was a godly, humble woman, but she will not be recognized in this world due to what? Due to a misunderstanding of biblical doctrine, due to a method of biblical study that does not do full justice to the word of God written, due to a failure to apprehend the depth, the wisdom, the subtlety, the Divine intent in making male and female. There is also the error concerning authority and its relationship to position. It is a function of position, not an unchecked power of the position. In the US even the military has checks and balances, and the word of God provides checks and balances to every view and practice that it appoints. When we fail to recognize that reality, we fall into the egregious mistakes of group think with all of its consequent blunders.
God must, indeed, He does, have a sense of humor. He laughs at our follies like we laugh at some silly antics of our children, when they were small, but His humor has a more serious edge to it as we grow older and continue such antics. Just think of how African Americans were not even considered to have souls at one time in the history of this nation. Just think how the American Indians were treated and some still are. And, lest it be thought I am a moderate, let it be considered that I attended and voted for verbal inspiration, etc., beginning as far back as 1963, that my ancestors were connected with Southern Baptists from the earliest days before America was a nation.
O, and the method that we must use in study of the Bible is one that can encompass the rule and the exceptions to the rule, for the truth in such cases is the rule and the exceptions. Other wise, if we continue only with an analytical method, we shall wind up back on square one with the King as the unquestioned authority, and the last one who held that position lost his head due his obtuse and opaque one-sidedness.