A Woman's place in the Church

Yesterday I wrote about the model of marriage. It occurred to me as I wrote it, that that subject is closely related to the position of women in the church.
The Bible has been attacked as being anti-women. There are certainly some elements in it that cast women in a bad light, but, if you really read it, the men are never depicted as being perfect, either. I have mentioned before that David is identified as a man after God’s own heart, and yet, he had a man killed in order to take that man’s wife. I think that there are very few women in the Bible that did anything comparable (Jezebel, of course, but she wasn’t even Jewish).
I made reference to the Scripture yesterday that says that a woman should keep silent in the church. I was in a service one time where the pastor announced that he was going to preach on that verse the next Sunday, and immediately asked one of the women in the church to come up and share a testimony about what God had done in her life, and then asked another woman to sing, and then asked another woman to lead in prayer.
That same verse says that a woman should not usurp authority over a man. I mentioned yesterday that can put a woman in an awkward position, because if her husband starts doing things that he shouldn’t, she should try to influence him to straighten out, but she shouldn’t take authority over him. She could go to their pastor about it, though.
It has become common practice in a lot of churches to ordain women as pastors. A lot of churches have found that this increases attendance, even when the pastor isn’t young and attractive. Of course, this calls into question why are more people coming to church with a woman pastor, rather than a man. When the Word is being preached without fear, then it shouldn’t make any difference to the hearers who is doing the preaching. Of course, there are a lot of people who come to church every Sunday morning who don’t let that affect how they live their lives the rest of the week. A lot of them don’t really care whether their pastor is a man or a woman, but I do think that’s it’s easier to ignore a woman pastor than a man. If people aren’t coming to church for the right reason, then is it really doing them any good to come to church?
It has been suggested that if a woman cannot be a pastor, then that somehow implies that women are ‘less saved’ than men. In the Old Testament, only descendents of Levi could become priests. Does that mean that the rest of Israel was ‘less saved’ than the Levites? I don’t think so. I can certainly understand how some Benjamites might have felt that they were less saved, if they had a desire to be a priest, and were not allowed to, but they were just as much a part of Israel as the Levites. Apostle Paul talks at length about the different callings in the church, about how, we together, form the body of Christ. He makes the allusion that if the foot thinks that because it’s not the hand, then it is somehow less important to the body. Of course, those of us who are not ‘feet’ can look at the foot’s situation a little more objectively, and see how important it really is. By the same token, there are women that feel that they should be teachers and leaders (and some of them really should be), and think that they have to be a pastor to do that. We need Godly women in the church to teach the children and even younger women. These women are no less important to the ministry than the pastor is, even though they must be subject to a pastor. Does that make sense?
I realize that this is a controversial topic, and a lot of people will disagree with me on much of this. I welcome your comments; I don’t get many comments anyway, and I’d rather get somebody to disagree with me, so I at least know that somebody is paying attention… So comment, already, before I say something you’re really not going to like!

By the way, the picture above is a woman named Louise Weld, who pastors a church attended by a flickr.com contributer known as BillRead. Bill probably wouldn't approve of my using this picture this way, but it was the best picture I could find under creative commons license to go with this post.