Women preaching at Irving Bible Church

In the beginning of 2008, Irving Bible Church (IBC) near Dallas, Texas released a position paper stating that they were going to change the 40-year tradition of their church and allow women to preach and hold some higher positions of authority in their church. This move garnered the interest and opinion of the Dallas Morning News among others while also becoming a national story. On August 24, 2008, the church began this new direction by allowing Jackie Roese (left), the Teaching Pastor to Women, to preach to some 3,500 congregants.

First off, I like IBC and it’s staff. I have family that attends IBC and have visited the church many times myself (as early as this past Christmas). I have met the likeable Senior Pastor Andy McQuitty personally and I truly believe that the worship band rivals any in the Dallas/Fort Worth area that I have heard. Also, I heard Roese preach this sermon live and remember thinking that she did an exceptional job. This is in no way a personal dig or insult to the church or to their staff as individuals. This is also not a slander against the abilities or worthiness of women. No, this is a concern for their view of Scripture and the dangers it could bring about.

“An ethic in progress” is a dangerous progress. This phrase is used in the following statement from the IBC position paper:

The accounts of creation and the fall (Genesis 1-3) reveal a fundamental equality between men and women.


Women exercised significant ministry roles of teaching and leading with God’s blessing in both Old and New Testaments.


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.


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.

Anytime you see ”an ethic in progress” being used, it’s just another phrase for “trajectory hermeneutics.” Trajectory hermeneutics are more of an emergent or post-modern view of Scripture. This idea states that parts or all of Scripture is not entirely inerrant as God’s universal principle, but rather specific to the certain culture and advances as we advance. This is the view that IBC has taken. They believe that female role in church as listed in the New Testament is culturally exclusive and that it does not apply to today’s culture because we are now more advanced or mature.

This framework of Scriptural interpretation leads to a liberal view of God’s Word and raises questions such as: Did God mean it? Has God learned something new or changed in some way? What else is merely cultural?

Tommie Nelson, a friend of McQuitty’s and pastor of Denton Bible Church in Denton, Texas said of IBC:

“If the Bible is not true and authoritative on the roles of men and women, then maybe the Bible will not be finally true on premarital sex, the homosexual issue, adultery or any other moral issue. I believe this issue is the carrier of a virus by which liberalism will enter the evangelical church.”

Nelson makes a very good point. Where does this interpretation limit itself? There is a serious danger of  slipping down a very slippery slope. It can lead to essentially nullifying sola Scriptura and it ignores 2,000 years of orthodoxy.

1 Timothy 2:11-13 shows unrivaled clarity on the issue. Though there are others that are more ambiguous, one of the most obvious cases that McQuitty and his church argue for is the cultural meaning behind Paul’s instructions to Timothy regarding this very matter. They say that it’s possible that the woman-dominant religions of that day and region were infiltrating the church. As any wise man would do, McQuitty argues, Paul made it a mandate that no women should teach so that heresies of these religions didn’t have a chance to be spread on a congregation-wide scale. We do not have any evidence of these cults infultrating the church, mind you, and 1 Timothy still stands on the principle of the created order, not on these pagan religions:

Let’s look at this verse in full context:

¹¹Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. ¹² I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. ¹³ For Adam was formed first, then Eve.

Paul states very clearly in verse 13 that this is because of God’s creative order. This is pre-Fall in the Garden, before sin had the chance to mar human ability for good or success. This is simply God’s design: equal in nature, separate in role and function. God Himself is three-parts, and it was no sin or insult for Jesus to submit to the Father, even though they are both equal in Godhood. We should not argue for an example not given by Paul while downplaying the example given.

This is dangerous water that IBC is treading, and I fear the compromise will come in the form of pro-choice positions or worse.