Pastor Heidi in her church office

Part 1: The Dilemma

A few years ago I was in the middle of an evening seminary class on church history at the Fuller extension here in Seattle when something very unusual and important happened. I remember that we were discussing significant Christian women in history and the mood in the classroom was ordinary. Some of the 50 plus students where listening attentively, some were checking fantasy basketball scores on their laptops, some where staring off into oblivion, and some were drawing in their note pads. Everything was just normal. Personally, I was somewhere between paying attention and staring off into oblivion. All of a sudden the vibe of the room changed. Like, people sort of stopped what they were doing and started really engaging with what our professor was saying. I intuitively switched into full paying attention mode. Our professor was talking about how Christian women leaders in history had typically had a hard time living into their call because they had to deal with so much suspicion and lack of support from The Church and their fellow Christian brothers. Our professor then stepped from behind his podium, sat down, and looked at our class with a look of compassion and curiosity and asked this question: “Are there any women in here who have felt like their call has been thwarted or suppressed by The Church?” We sat in tense silence for about 60 seconds while we waited for somebody to respond. The first young woman to respond was timid yet earnest. She told a story about how when she was a teenager she had proudly announced to her youth pastor that she felt called to be a pastor when she grew up. Her youth pastor told her that her sense of call couldn’t be from God because the Bible doesn’t support women pastors. The effect this had on this young woman had apparently been devastating. It rocked her faith and made her feel cut off from the church. She described ten years of what she called a season of wilderness. She felt called and gifted to lead the church as a pastor and yet the communities she was involved in simply dismissed her with condescension and skepticism. The story, of course, had a silver lining because she finally found a mentor who told her that her call was legitimate and that she should enroll in seminary. By the end of the story half the class was sniffling and wiping their eyes with their shirtsleeves. But that was just the beginning. We spent the next hour of our class time listening to similar stories. It was like our professor had tapped into a secret well of tragedy and heartache. Not only did most of the women in our class have story after sad story about being suppressed or discarded by The Church, they also had never had a forum like this to talk about it. When I talked to my professor afterwards he told me that he asks that question of a class every once in a while when he senses God’s urging. He said that every time he hears the same story that we heard that night. It is the story of women who have not been able to explore their sense of calling and giftedness in The Church. It’s a story about an institution that, in my opinion, has too often failed at nurturing its potential female leaders.

I didn’t always think this way. I grew up thinking that women couldn’t be pastors. Not just shouldn’t, but couldn’t. The idea that men were the pastors and elders of the church was just how things were done. As a kid you don’t really question that stuff, you just accept it. Kind of like I just accepted that fact that I ate spam with my mac and cheese in the 80’s. I didn’t know any better. That’s just what we did. I grew up in an Evangelical Presbyterian Church that, along with my family, introduced me to Jesus. I have so much gratitude and appreciation for that church. In so many ways they did so many things so right. It wasn’t actually until I started working at a church with women pastors as a 24 year old that I realized that I didn’t agree with that part of my upbringing. It wasn’t a huge earth-shattering revelation either. It was more of an affirmation that I probably never really believed in an exclusively male lead Church in the first place. I sat in a pew and watched an ordained woman staff member give a sermon and just thought it was natural and credible. It was that simple.

This transition however has only lead me to feel an increased confusion and consternation with people and institutions that don’t affirm women pastors and elders. I know that there are distinct biblical passages that people believe they are adhering to.  The whole decision not to ordain women actually stems from an admirable attempt to submit to scripture. This is an awkward space for us Christians to exist in though because I have an equally earnest desire to submit myself to scripture. I just believe that The Church hasn’t done a very thorough and diligent job of wrestling with certain passages pertaining to women. The thing about the women in leadership conundrum is that there are valid, trustworthy, God fearing, orthodox Christian theologians and scholars who fully affirm the legitimacy of women pastors. That fact alone has been enough to tip the scales for me, but I see that it’s part of a deeper theological conviction that I have embraced. I have come to see that scripture itself is quite complicated and that a lot of what we think of as plain and simple “truths” are often times muddled by interpretation and commentary. This seemed confusing and overwhelming to me at first, but it’s ultimately been quite freeing. The problem with the women in leadership issue was that for the longest time I just assumed that scripture didn’t permit women pastors. That was until I started talking to some of my professors at Fuller and started becoming more familiar with guys like N.T. Wright, Dale Bruner, and Eugene Peterson. These scholars, along with many many others, showed me that it’s completely reasonable, biblically, to affirm the ordination of women pastors. Therefore, my choice isn’t whether or not I’m going to submit to scripture or not, the choice is what interpretation of scripture do I find to be the most consistent with the rest of scripture. What, theologically, helps me make the most sense of what I observe about my particular experience and context? At the end of the day I guess all I can say is that I have tried to come up with a thorough and robust way of engaging this topic and have found that there is just no way I could ever believe that God wouldn’t want to utilize the unique gifts, talents, and insights that women bring to the table in leadership and pastoral roles in The Church.

Part 2: Pastor Heidi

The funny thing about all of this though is that, until recently, I had yet to experience a female senior pastor. I had served with ordained women pastors, but there was always a nagging suspicion in the back of my mind that perhaps a woman just wouldn’t have the toughness or grit that it took to be the head-honcho. I also had doubts as to whether I could look up to and follow a woman in the same way that I did a man. Then our church hired Heidi Huested Armstrong as our interim senior pastor and that has been the final nail-in-the-coffin to any lingering doubts that I may have had about a woman’s ability to lead a church.

Heidi came to us in a time when our church was sort of reeling from the loss of a truly great senior pastor. Dan Baumgartner had lead Bethany for 10 years and was leaving us to pursue a calling as senior pastor to First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood. Dan’s leaving was a challenging time for everyone at our church including myself. Dan had played so many different roles in my life so his absence was felt in multi-faceted ways. He was a close friend and mentor of mine so I felt slightly abandoned and alone. Not in a bitter or resentful way; just in a way you feel when anyone that’s truly close to you moves away. But Dan had also been my pastor and in that sense I felt a little bit like our church had lost it’s captain. Of course this became an excellent opportunity for our church and me to enter into a season of reaffirming that Jesus is our true captain and not a human personality, but the role of a pastor, I realized, is actually pretty important. A church is a busy and interrelated living organism made up of complicated lives that are filled with their own successes and tragedies. People are part of a church for an infinite number of elaborate reasons. Most people want a place where they can encounter God in the midst of a worshipping community and I think a lot of people also want to be a part of a community that is doing something. A pastor stands in the midst of all the confusion and offers prophetic insights or encouragement and vision. And a pastor is also a consistent and steady presence. The presence of the pastor alone in the midst of a community instills a sense of peace and order. Our church was okay without a pastor temporarily, but I’m trying to say that the absence was felt.

So after months of interviews and searches we hired pastor Heidi and eventually that confusion and disorientation began to subside. I don’t know how it happened exactly, but I know that Heidi’s poise and pastoral leadership had a lot to do with it. We live in a day and age when pastors are often times specialists. We have preaching pastors, administrative pastors, tech pastors, and so on and so on. I tend to think that pastors should be multi-dimensional. A pastor shouldn’t have to be great at everything, but they should be well rounded. Heidi happens to be extremely well rounded. She is an excellent preacher, a wise counselor and patient listener, a skilled administrator, a gracious host, and a seasoned leader who isn’t afraid to make tough decisions. Heidi has been at our church for almost a year now and to say that who she has been to us in that time has been crucial would be an understatement. Heidi has this uncanny ability (I would say uniquely pastoral ability) to be firm and direct one moment and then warm and welcoming the next. I remember a particular tough week at our church when Heidi was in the office everyday having meetings and making tough decisions. She seemed focused that week and even slightly beleaguered. On Sunday I snuck into service via a side door where Heidi was waiting with a huge smile on her face. She instantly darted over to me and gave me a gigantic hug. I was approaching church as a busy and distracted staff member that day, but in that moment my boss and pastor invited me into a space of belonging and worship. My entire demeanor changed and the crazy thing is that she was supposed to be the outsider. I’ve been here for seven years and she’s been here for less than one and she’s welcoming me? How does that happen? I don’t really have an answer. All I can say is that Heidi is a pastor who has been gifted and equipped for her call and that her gifts have served our church well.

Out of all of these considerable pastoral gifts that Heidi has I would say my favorite has been her preaching. It took some getting used to at first because it’s unique. Heidi preaches slowly and deliberately. You can tell that she is not blathering on and that she has chosen her words carefully. She has an authority when she preaches that commands attention, but she also has a tenderness that pulls you in. I think she really turns preaching into an art form. Heidi has pushed us in ways that have left me wondering, “How did she get away with that”? Heidi has gotten in our faces from the pulpit on sensitive issues like money, having unhealthy expectations for our pastors, and lukewarm commitments to the church. Most importantly, however, her weekly preaching has brought an identity and a cohesion to our community. William Willimon says that the pastor is “the one who keeps pointing the congregation to the presence of Christ in our midst; keeps narrating our lives in a manner quite different from that of the world”. I can’t think of a better explanation of what Heidi has done for us through her preaching on Sunday mornings. I find it fascinating that the mark of a truly good pastor would be that they would necessarily point people to Jesus instead of themselves, but that’s how it works. Heidi is the sort of pastor who simply tries to tell the church what she thinks Jesus is up to in our midst and I have noticed a lot of fruit as a result of her efforts. And isn’t fruit a great way to measure the validity of a pastor?

Ultimately I think Heidi shows that the church has so much to lose by not calling out and nurturing its potential female leaders. Recently I had a jarring experience with my son Jack. I had noticed that he hadn’t typically been that aggressive while playing sports so I started telling him that I think he would be good at activities like golf and swimming. I told him that these were the types of sports where you competed against yourself and it didn’t require a lot of aggressive physical contact with other players. One day Marisa was attempting to sign Jack up for a basketball camp and Jack repeated my words back to her verbatim. “I think I’m more of a golf and swimming type of person”, he said. He hasn’t even tried basketball yet and I had preemptively stifled the exploration of his talents and gifts. It was frightening. I think this is a great metaphor for what the church has done to women over centuries and centuries. We have communicated the message that they shouldn’t be pastors and leaders in the church and a lot of them believe it. They haven’t even felt free to ask the question and therefore the church is missing out on a massive population of gifted and talented pastors. This proposition is doubly haunting to me. On one level I’m concerned that churches aren’t tapping into an invaluable resource for their communities and on another level I’m concerned that churches are stifling a God given gift and call in its women. To me that seems so counter to what churches are supposed to be doing. Ever since Heidi took the pulpit on her first Sunday at our church I have had this unanticipated thrill knowing that the young women I work with in our youth program are seeing that it’s completely rational for them to dream about being an ordained senior pastor at a church someday. What’s even more exciting is that I have a daughter who will always have Heidi as a reference point. Avery knows and talks about pastor Heidi. I want Avery to be whatever God calls her to be and there is a large chance she won’t be called to be a pastor. However, as a dad who wants to support and affirm his daughter in the exploration of her vocational calling and giftedness I am thankful that she will always have real women pastors to reference.

I know that this is a divisive topic for so many people, but for me the answer has been clear for quite sometime and I felt like putting some thoughts out there to clarify where I’m coming from. I understand and certainly respect people that see things differently. I think there is room for continued dialogue. I would just say that an actual experience with a woman pastor has made all the difference for me. Recently I saw an interview with John Piper where he addressed this topic. When asked about a man being pastored by a woman Piper’s response was, “that would be an unhealthy thing for a man to do”. Look, I really actually love John Piper, but I think the whole point of what I’m trying to say here is that I’ve been participating in a church with a woman pastor and I can’t see on any level how it has been unhealthy. I’m not saying that Heidi is perfect and there are most certainly bad women pastors in the world just as there are bad male pastors. I think the questions we should be asking, along with “is this Biblical?”, are questions like: Does this draw me closer to Jesus? Do we sense God’s spirit speaking through this individual? Is this producing fruit in our congregation? I think at the end of the day, as Christians, we want to be strong followers of Jesus and a pastor is supposed to help us do that. For me, it has become clear that a woman is just as capable at helping a people do that as a man and I’m proud to be a part of a community that is supporting, nurturing, and modeling a potential call to pastoral leadership in its women.

Here is the John Piper video if you care to see it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyBEoQFrids

And here is an excellent article by N.T. Wright who does a very thorough job explaining a Biblical rationale for women pastors and elders.

http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Women_Service_Church.htm