“Prominent Southern Baptist Bible teacher Beth Moore has ignited a firestorm on Twitter after challenging a theologian who singled her out in a blog post for encouraging women to preach. Owen Strachan, associate professor of Christian theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri, said in the May 7 post he was surprised that both Moore and SBC President J. D. Greear support ‘a woman teaching and preaching to the corporate body.’ He followed that up on Twitter the next day, saying, ‘One thing we complementarians have massive agreement on: women do not preach on Sunday to the church. Doing so is functional egalitarianism. We will not capitulate here.’ Complementarians embrace the Scriptural view that the role of men and women is distinct and complements one another within the home and church. Moore responded to Strachan with a series of tweets. ‘Owen, I am going to say this with as much respect & as much self-restraint as I can possibly muster. I would be terrified to be a woman you’d approve of. And I would have wasted 40 years of my life encouraging women to come to know and love Jesus through the study of Scripture. I am compelled to my bones by the Holy Spirit—I don’t want to be but I am—to draw attention to the sexism & misogyny that is rampant in segments of the SBC, cloaked by piety & bearing the stench of hypocrisy.’ She wrote, ‘I had the eye opening experience of my life in 2016. A fog cleared for me that was the most disturbing, terrifying thing I’d ever seen. All these years I’d given the benefit of the doubt that these men were the way they were because they were trying to be obedient to Scripture. Then I realized it was not over Scripture at all. It was over sin. It was over power. It was over misogyny. Sexism. It was about arrogance. About protecting systems. It involved covering abuses & misuses of power. Shepherds guarding other shepherds instead of guarding the sheep.’ For Strachan and other complementarians, though, that path to serving is clearly defined in Scripture and is not negotiable. ‘For a woman to teach and preach to adult men is to defy God’s Word and God’s design,’ Strachan wrote in his blog post. ‘Elders must not allow such a sinful practice; to do so is to bring the church body into disobedience against God.’” “Beth Moore Challenges Theologian,” ChristianHeadlines.com, May 14, 2019 Comments are closed.
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