God. Real. Right.

Some pertinent links for this article:
Irving Bible Church. The IBC Position Paper.
Denton Bible Church. DTS President Mark Bailey’s Clarification.
On August 24, 2008, for the first time in its forty year history, Irving Bible Church had a woman deliver the Sunday sermon to its congregation. For all I know (not being there but being in my home church instead) it was the best sermon they’ve heard in forty years, many people responded with commitments which will result in lifelong changes, and a burnt-over revival has begun in North Texas. But none of that determines whether it was the right decision.
The question remains, should a woman preach so to a congregation? To secularists it may understandably seem an absurd question. But to those who take obedience to New Testament teachings seriously, it is important. And to those who take the New Testament seriously and want to remain both relevant and prophetic in culture the question is not only important, but difficult.
What Catherine Albanese says about religion in general is also true about churches. That is, churches serve in both an ordinary and an extraordinary relationship with the culture in which they are active. Or, in still other words, they serve both culturally normative and prophetically disruptive roles. When churches recognize graduates in special worship services or host wedding ceremonies they are recognizing, reinforcing, or even restoring cultural norms. Where cultural norms have been established so that they are compatible with or even directly attributable to Christianity, this function of ministry is no problem at all. Similarly, where cultural norms are morally contemptible, it is the church’s responsibility to fill the prophetic role not only of condemning, but of extending the offer of transformation. So churches speak together about holocausts like abortion and other injustices like corruption, and individual believers represent culturally extraordinary behaviors like altruism.
Of course, there are times when churches have reinforced cultural norms which were anything but compatible with legitimate New Testament Christianity. Unfortunately, holding what is purely cultural as if it is part of Christianity necessarily muddies the clear water of truth the church does have, and almost certainly diminishes the significance of the legitimate truth in the eyes of the culture.
So the first question about whether a woman ought to preach in a biblical church in Twenty-First Century America is actually a question about whether the prohibition to it is biblical, cultural, or a mixture of both.
The elders at IBC studied the question of women in ministry for a considerable period of time (18 months) before coming to the following conclusions, according to an August 23 report in the Dallas Morning News, and more importantly, according to a 24 page report they have distributed, available here. Ultimately, they conclude that the prohibition of women preaching is cultural and not essentially Christian. Here is each finding followed by a very brief comment or rebuttal.
• The accounts of creation and the fall (Genesis 1-3) reveal a fundamental equality between men and women.
This conclusion is the point of Eve being made from Adam, and of Adam saying she is of him. But it has no meaning for the question at hand. Equality of what? Of material, of personal worth, of height and weight on statistical norms, or of function? Men and women do not both bear children, for instance. That fact alone reveals that there is an inequality of either purpose or function. More importantly, in the biblical account, the woman is created FOR the man. That fact may be noxious to contemporary culture, but it is as plain as the nose on a biblical hermeneut’s face. The recognition of that difference–the one that matters–is why honest biblical readers who promote feminism must claim not that Genesis 2:18 is not complementarian, but that scripture at that point is not prescriptive, and that it is the product of a masculinist society. Of course, inerrantists are instead stuck (or blessed) with a passage defining the matter and worth of men and women with equality but their purposes with distinction.
• Women exercised significant ministry roles of teaching and leading with God’s blessing in both Old and New Testaments.
God blessed David while he was a polygamist. (And no, being a woman is not like being a polygamist for those planning a rhetorical cheap-shot.) God blessed Israel when kings failed to remove profane places of worship. In fact, no matter what men do, it is not sufficient to merit God’s blessing; and when God blesses, it is proof only that He is blessing–perhaps in relation to obedience (as a long life for honoring mom and dad), perhaps in relation to His greater plan (as the victories of Rabshakeh under Sennacharib), perhaps purely in mercy (as Psalm 89 describes His keeping of the covenant despite the anticipated disobedience of David’s descendants). But God’s blessings are not proof of the obedience of those blessed unless there is other evidence that the behavior in question is morally praiseworthy and the reason for the blessing. Without both of those clarifications, inductive conclusions like those of the IBC elders are unjustified.
• Though the role of women was historically limited, the progress of revelation indicates an ethic in progress leading to full freedom for women to exercise their giftedness in the local church.
This conclusion is particularly troubling because of its dependence on what Denny Burk (and presumably Tommy Nelson of Denton Bible Church) refers to as trajectory hermeneutics. Trajectory hermeneutics takes some progressive element of scripture and extrapolates it beyond the end of the revelation itself to a desired but not revealed conclusion. It makes prescriptive readings of scripture meaningless. But specifically for this trajectory argument: first, the argument for the progress of women’s roles throughout the Bible either underestimates the roles of women throughout the Old Testament or overestimates the prescriptive roles of women in the New. Second, this portion of the elders’ argument (in their 24 page position paper) rests on the assumption that women’s differentiated roles throughout the Bible are a product of the fall. That observation is simply wrong, as Genesis 2:18 above makes obvious, and so any conclusion based on it dubious at best.
• Key New Testament passages restricting women’s roles were culturally and historically specific, not universal principles for all time and places.
• Though women are free to use all of their giftedness in teaching and leading in the church, the role of elder seems to be biblically relegated to men.
The last two go together because they are incompatible conclusions. They can be held together by sheer volition for a while. But it is possible neither in practice nor theory to maintain one without dismissing the other eventually. IBC will either accept that biblical distinctions between the roles and purposes of men and women are not simply culturally bound expressions, in which case all of the prior conclusions will have to be retracted; or they will dismiss the final conclusion, and realize that all of their arguments lead as inevitably to a woman serving as senior pastor as a woman preaching to the congregation.

All of those arguments aside, here is the real question. Is the relationship between men and women a moral issue or not? If it is, then to claim that women’s roles in scripture are bound by cultural and masculinist expectations is to claim that the Bible itself proliferates the moral error of subjugating women. If it is not, then the entire movement which generates interest in changing contemporary roles of women in church loses its voice and momentum. It may not be easy to admit, but those who promote conclusions like this do believe it is a moral issue and therefore (sometimes unwittingly) slip into believing that biblical passages actually foster immoral behavior. To put the cookies on the bottom shelf: that position is not a good one.