Women in Ministry (2)

The modern role we call “pastor” does not exist in the NT Testament. It is much closer to the role of CEO or managing director in a public company. Labelling the role “pastor” does not change its essence. Funnily enough, the role pastor does not seem to have existed in the NT. Pastor is only used once as a noun, apart from references to Jesus as the head shepherd. Pastoring is a verb in the NT and something that many people did. And there are no direct references saying whether a person shepherding should be male or female. There were plenty of female shepherds in biblical times, so there is no reason why we would deduce that it should be exclusively male. Anyway that it is beside the point, as the modern role is totally different, so any NT rules would be irrelevant, even if we apply the same label.

The other funny thing is that more of the real “shepherding” in many modern churches is done by the pastor’s wife, even though they are not given the label.

The modern task of preaching an instructional sermon to a group of Christians or leading a bible study does not really exist in the New Testament. Therefore scriptural rules about NT teachers are not really relevant, because the roles are quite different, even though we give them the same label.