Matt Chandler's Pastrix* Jen Wilkin - Part 2

All right, we are back.

It is Friday, and I hope you've had a good, productive, wonderful week.

I've had a good week, you know, it's a short week, but you know, it's been okay.

It's been okay.

We're gonna jump right back into this Jen Wilkin thing.

Before we do though, a couple of quick comments.

I had a brother, a pastor friend, who reached out to me, and he said, hey man, you know, I love you, but I could not finish your video.

And I said, well why? Why couldn't you finish my video? What did I do? He said, it's not you, it's Jen.

And I gotta be honest with you, I agree.

What he said was that this was just so blatant.

He said, it's not even subversive, it's just blatant rebellion.

And she's teaching others to join her in her rebellion against what God teaches about women in leadership and things like that.

And I agree, I'm honestly, I was a little taken aback.

You know, usually Gospel Coalition, I mean, it's usually awful, but you know, there's a lot more sneak to it.

It's a little more sneaky normally.

This is just blatant feminism being pushed in the church.

And so it's just crazy, it's absolutely crazy.

Crazy, I said crazy.

It's crazy.

I had a couple of other commenters too that were like, yeah man, she keeps saying, and they keep saying that she's got this gift for teaching, and I'm not so sure she does.

And I gotta be honest, I'm with you guys, I'm not so sure that she does.

And many people brought up her little comparison of menstruation with the cross of Christ.

Menstruation.

That's her gift of teaching.

Menstruation, as an example, as a metaphor or something about how if you menstruate, you understand the cross of Christ better.

Not kidding.

Anyway, let's jump right into it.

Let's let her speak.

And in our case, we could not reconcile that we had healthy practice as it related to our current theology, which meant that we went back and revisited theology, philosophy, and practice of ministry in these areas.

I mean, listen, I really don't think I'm making too much of this.

You see her using the we and our and us.

We did this.

We revisited our theology.

She is putting herself squarely in the role of elder there.

She doesn't have the title, and she wouldn't do it overtly, but she is very obviously considering her part of the leadership of Village Church.

Matt Chandler's church has Jen Wilkin as an elder.

I know that you might think, oh, you're misrepresenting them.

You're lying about them.

Look, there's more than one way to be an elder.

You don't necessarily have to have the title to be acting like it.

And in the way she uses these terms, she is a decision maker.

She is a leader.

She is someone that is exercising authority in that context.

She may not have the title, but my goodness, she does have the role, and she's telling on herself right here.

Well, I've read that paper, and one of the things, and this connects to the whole line that we have here, one of the things I've read in that paper and heard you talk about is the primary relationship in the church being that of siblings.

Can you flesh that out for us? Yeah.

I think that what many of us have come into in the discussion around complementarianism is the language of headship and submission or authority and submission being the primary notes that we sound over and over and over again.

And I'm not wanting to take authority and submission off the table, but I think what happened at our church is we began to ask, what is the Bible as a whole saying? Like, what's the overarching metaphor? The authority submission metaphor is heavily dependent on marriage as a central type for what we're looking at in Scripture from beginning to end.

And again, marriage is something that we should pay attention to as a type from beginning to end in Scriptures.

But when we ask, what is the Bible telling us is true about the church? And I think about Jesus' words when his family, his biological family comes to find him and he's told, your family's outside, they want to see you.

And he looks around and he says, who are my mother and my brothers and my sisters? Those who do the will of the father are my mother and my brothers and my sisters.

And of course, he's not discounting our biological families.

He's reframing and showing us that there is a true and better family for those who are Christ followers.

And then he begins expounding the law into one another's, right? He takes the Old Testament moral law.

I would argue that everything in the Ten Commandments can be found in some form in every single one of the New Testament, one another's.

And it's the great command, right? To love your neighbor as you love yourself.

But what we have done is said, who then is my neighbor? And men in the church in particular have said, well, my neighbor is my male fellow believer.

It's not my female fellow believer.

And this is all linked to the fact that we exist in a hyper-sexualized culture.

I think everybody would acknowledge that.

And the problem with that is that the culture around us is telling us that you can't have friendship.

You can't have brother-sisterhood.

That any relationship, and I would say this doesn't mean just male-female, any relationship, someone you feel a strong emotion for who is not your spouse, it has to be sexual or romantic.

There's no such thing as just a pure friendship or a deep, true, and abiding friendship between men and men, women and women, men and women.

Watch any movie that's coming out of the theaters, and there's almost no friendship that endures for the full length of the movie.

At some point, any deep relationship turns romantic or sexual.

And so that means that for the church in a post-Christian culture, where else should we expect the culture to turn to know what true friendship and brother-sisterhood is going to look like if not us? And yet too often what we've done is we've taken in the message of a hyper-sexualized culture and said, you know what? It's just too dangerous.

I'm completely at a loss.

I'm completely at a loss.

That section, the way that it started, you would have expected to see some examples.

She said that men in the church have decided that the one-anothers don't apply to women.

So the law of God, like because she said that the law of God is found in the one-anothers and all that kind of thing, that's what she said.

Gospel Coalition loves that.

That's fine.

I'm okay with the one-anothers.

She said men in the church have decided that the one-anothers, we've said, who is my neighbor? That's what we've done.

The men in the church have said, who is my neighbor? And what we mean by that is that it's really only other believing men that apply in the one-anothers.

The women are, they're excluded from that.

That is quite a charge.

That is quite a charge.

And so what you would have expected to follow would have been a example.

At the very least, a example.

I'd like to see a few, but just one would be good.

Where does a man, in what ways do the men in the church decide that the law of God doesn't apply to women? It's really only about men in the church, other believing men in the church.

But that's not what followed.

You would have been right to expect that because if you're going to make a charge like that, you really want to back that one up.

You would have been right to expect it.

But instead, what you got is then she kind of shifted directions and said, well, you know, we live in a hyper-sexualized world where every relationship that's emotional is sexual.

And so the church needs to be against that.

We need to have male and female friends.

Just take those two things separately, for example.

Let's just say there's two points there, which I'm not quite sure that there really are.

But let's just say that she has a point in both of those areas.

How does that connect? What does that have to do with the one another's that we've decided? She's just asserting things.

She's just asserting things.

And she makes it seem like the only reason that women aren't in leadership in churches is one, because the one another's don't apply to women according to, I guess, according to Jen's fantasy world about what the church is all about.

And then two, that we live in a hyper-sexualized world and we don't want to be hyper-sexualized.

And so that's the only reason that these opportunities aren't given to women is because they're worried about the hyper-sexual.

This is all just stuff that she's saying, you know.

She's just saying it.

No expectation of any kind of proof, any kind of evidence.

She knows Jim Davis isn't going to ask her.

Jim Davis is going to be like, oh yeah, Jen, of course, of course.

She's just emoting stuff right now.

This is actually one of the primary reasons why she should not be teaching.

She's not, she does not have the gift that she thinks she has.

She does not have the gift that she thinks she has.

This is awful.

This is awful.

This is no different than pretty much any feminist presentation you've ever heard.

It's unhinged.

It's unhinged.

It's emotional.

It's just like, you ought not to listen to a woman like this.

There are plenty of women that think very logically and are smart and things like that.

Obviously, I'm not saying all women are like this, but usually they're not usurping leadership in churches because they're smart enough to know they should not be doing that.

The women that aren't smart enough to know or obedient or submissive enough to know they should not be usurping leadership roles in the church think like this.

That's why a key feature of almost every liberal church is female leadership, because they are so poor at leading that they...anyway.

A liberal view of scripture is required to be a woman usurping authority in the church.

It is a requirement.

Well, so Mike Aitchison and I, we're both, and we're very thankfully so, in the RTS Orlando orbit.

And as such, we have the blessing.

We both have women in our midst who have great teaching, gifting, lots of training.

And we are pastors that...I think I speak for both of us.

We desire to be that kind of pastor that would platform those gifts.

I would also say we don't always know how to perfectly do it.

And you know that from our conversations, but we want to do that.

And I think the women in our church, even if they have critiques of us, they would see our heart to see this happen.

And one of the core conversations that comes up goes back to 1 Timothy 2.12, where Paul says, I do not permit a woman neither to teach nor have authority.

So you have this authority issue.

You have the teaching issue.

How have you and your church, how have you fleshed that out and applied it? It gets to the heart of a lot of questions that pastors ask.

They've applied it and fleshed it out very poorly.

I mean, it doesn't need much more explanation than that.

Let's see what she has to say.

This should be very interesting.

Absolutely, it does.

And I have, if there's one thing I've learned, it's that trying to summarize a highly controversial passage's interpretation in a podcast is just giving fodder to the rest of us.

So I would say that.

And also, you know, according to everybody on Twitter, I've actually never heard that verse before because they're so faithful to tweet it at me on a regular basis.

The paper is there.

And I would say it's not that they think you've never heard it before.

It's that that verse so obviously and clearly shuts you down.

It is a knock down argument.

It's the end and the beginning of the discussion when it comes to you.

Nothing you can say can overcome it.

And so it's not about you've never heard it before.

It's that it defeated you the first time you decided to usurp authority and it'll continue to defeat you every time you decide to usurp authority.

It needs no elaboration.

It needs no explanation.

It needs nothing.

You don't need to add anything to it.

It covers it.

That's why people quote it to you.

It's pretty simple.

The exegesis is there that the elders did on this at my church.

And so you can go and read it.

And I think it is best understood framed out by the context.

There's a short version and a long version of that paper.

The long version is where all of the work is done around that particular passage.

One of the things that we wrestled with in the writing of the paper was how very proof-texted this particular discussion has become.

And that's why it was important to us to zoom out and ask what's the bigger idea and the bigger idea being the family of God.

Therefore, how can both men and women flourish in the church? And so what I will say about the question of authority and specifically teaching— Interestingly enough, it's like in the family of God, okay, we also have biological families as well, and actually the same principles apply in the biological family as well.

It's not different.

It's actually the same.

...authority.

And just for anyone who is curious, I do not preach at the Village Church.

I am not an elder, and we reserve that for preaching.

And I teach—my primary place of service is our Women's Bible Study.

That's where I'm teaching.

That's what I love.

I feel a call to teach women specifically.

But our paper, our position, does leave room for environments that do not require to be taught by an elder, pastor elder, to be taught by either a man or a woman.

And that doesn't mean that we stop there.

It means that we would actively seek to find both men and women to serve in those spaces.

And I think that's something that can be missing as a lot of churches, they feel good about having written a good paper, but they don't actually take the steps necessary to implement the paper that they have written in a way that means that it's doing what they were hoping that it would do.

Here is the thing that I think is not often talked about when we talk about teaching with authority.

Listen to this for a second.

Listen to this for a second.

She was asked by Jim a direct question, what about that passage, right? What about the passage, I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man.

Simple.

It seems pretty simple.

What do you say about that? We're about a minute and a half into her response.

So far, she said, people act like I've never heard it before.

We thought very carefully about it, and we've decided to actually decide that there are some circumstances where a woman can teach over a man.

I don't allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but we've decided that there are some circumstances, right? But we're asking, how does that comply? How does that comport? I think she's about to get into it.

And if you notice what she said, we'll actually, we'll rewind a little bit.

We'll rewind about 10 seconds.

She's about to get into it.

And what she said is teach with authority.

So they're trying to make a distinction between teaching without authority and teaching with authority.

So teaching the word of God without authority.

Let's let her talk.

To implement the paper that they have written in a way that means that it's doing what they were hoping that it would do.

Here is the thing that I think is not often talked about when we talk about teaching with authority.

And that's this, any teacher that you've ever sat under teaches with authority.

That's the nature of being a teacher, right? Your first grade teacher held authority when she taught you.

And so I think we have to ask a question of what kind of authority is in view in Paul's words.

Now, when I teach the women's Bible study, am I teaching with authority? Yes, I am.

Because I'm opening up the scriptures, right? This is the other thing that I think we don't often distinguish.

The Bible has authority.

So if I were to stand and just read the Bible to a room of women, in some sense, there is an authoritative thing happening, right? Right, right.

You ever see the montages of soccer own goals where they kick the ball into their own net? If I felt like editing this, I'd edit a little montage of that in here.

But is that the kind of authority that Paul has in view? Now, some people would say yes, and they will not even allow for a woman to read scripture.

She's only allowed to share her testimony.

My church did not land there.

Now, am I teaching with elder authority when I teach in the women's Bible study? No, I am not an elder.

But I am teaching under their authority, and I am teaching according to the doctrine that they have set and they guard.

So in another sense, I am teaching with a delegated authority out of the elder room.

And so when you think about authority...

So Jen, how do you respond to people who say that Paul says in the scripture, I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over men.

I mean, what do you say? Oh yeah, you know, I do teach with authority.

Yeah, a delegated authority.

She's open about it, at least.

I guess you could say that.

She's open about it.

Here's the other piece that I think is often foggy in the minds of some.

And that is that elder authority is something that we guard in the elder room.

It's a little bucket, and we keep it there.

And we elders are the ones who are responsible for it.

I would say that what my church has done is seen elder authority as something that is to be pushed out of the elder room into the priesthood of all believers.

And so therefore, it's not a question of just what are we going to do with women and where can women teach? It's a question of what are we going to do with all of the non-elders, male and female, who have a teaching ability or have a leadership ability in the church.

In a church the size of mine, we would never assume that the pastor or the other pastors on staff, the lead pastor or all the pastors on staff would be sufficient to the needs of the people in our church.

And so I think some of these things can seem a little more clear to us just simply because of the size of the church that we're in.

But again, if authority is something that is guarded and kept in a room behind closed doors, then you're going to think differently about the way that those who are in your church who have gifts and abilities they bring to the table are going to be exercising them.

You guys in the SBC have a tremendous problem on your hands.

It's just very, very clear.

You guys have a huge problem on your hands because you've got the churches, of course, that have female pastors and they don't give a rip.

They're just doing it.

And it seems like you're kind of headed in the right direction there.

But you still have a lot of work to do there.

But it seems like at least, at the very least, you're heading in the right direction when it comes to that level of rebellion.

But this level of rebellion is almost as concerning, maybe even more concerning because it's a little bit, well, maybe it's because it's more popular.

It's more popular.

You guys have a huge problem.

If you cannot see the egalitarianism in what she just said, I've got, I don't know what I could say to convince you of it.

You've probably got to do your own soul searching.

This is abject rebellion.

There's no other word for it.

The village church is in rebellion to God's design about men and women in the church.

Rebellion.

Jen Wilkin is outlining a rebellion against Christ in this video clip.

And this Ninja Turtle is all about it.

He's here for it.

Jim Davis, he's here for it.

And they're going to promote it.

And they're going to tell you that if you're not promoting it, then you're a misogynist.

I mean, just listen to that last section.

How do you explain this scripture where Paul says, I don't allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man.

I do exercise authority.

I do teach men and exercise authority.

It's a delegated authority.

What? This is making stuff up now.

I'm just going to make stuff up now.

Unbelievable.

Unbelievable.

Your kid's kindergarten teacher exercise authority.

You can't not teach with authority.

So what was Paul talking about then? I mean, if you can't not teach with authority and Paul's like, I don't allow women to teach or exercise authority.

What was he talking about? Oh, the elder authority.

Oh, you mean the other authority that you just made up right now? There's no distinction there in the text.

That authority that you're talking about? Oh, the delegated authority.

That's what he was talking about.

He does not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority that's not delegated to her by a righteous male who delegates it to her.

It's just unreal, man.

It's unreal.

It is unreal.

I think I've had just about enough and I'm sure you have as well.

When we get back, we're going to hear Mr.

Ninja Turtle himself talk and I'm sure he's going to have some wisdom to drop on us.

And I'm looking forward to that.

I hope you found this video helpful.

God bless.