I came into this thing from a fairly complementarian view- though I'd
have to say I was prepared to do whatever I could to get around that. I
saw a male "elder" board for our community that handled the shepherding
and a co-ed "leadership team" that really handled details and ministry
stuff.

In the process, what I found was that this is a HUGE issue for the
people we have built this community with. Most of them fall into the
category of either unchurched, formerly churched or
dang-close-to-formerly churched... and this was heavy on their
thinking. Now, I certainly don't want to do/be church by public
opinion... but I was telling them that THEY are the community, they
would drive things, etc- a very different form of leadership than most
institutional places...

So- when I combined what my community felt/believed with what I was also
thinking and feeling, I knew I had to start a "process" where we would
work through this again. If we arrived at the complementarian view,
fine. At least we did our homework and didn't ascribe to it "just
because." If we arrived elsewhere... well, we knew there would be
implications, but we'd deal with those.


We had many long discussions on our forum... you can still see them
there, though some are filed in the "forum graveyard" at the bottom. I
had the elders read the Sumner book. We prayed. We talked. We prayed
and talked some more. At the end of that process- about 7 months or so,
we were at something different than complementarian, though not quite...
ever so close, but not quite, egalitarian (though to tell you the truth,
the difference is so miniscule that most wouldn't really see it).

The Sumner book was good, but I think of it more as the grease which
helped the process along. There were a few really instrumental
realizations that got us where we ultimately ended up...

In no particular order of importance...

The first was that in the New Testament context, particularly for the
Jewish believers, women in leadership positions may have been a
hinderance for the Gospel. In our context, NOT having women in ministry,
or at least not having that role open to them,
was a HUGE hinderance to the people we were trying to impact. We looked
at that, asked ourself "Is this an "A" level issue?" and when we realized
that it wasn't (at least to us) we became more comfortable with either
outcome. We knew that good, Christian churches existed on both sides of
the spectrum, we knew that our commitment to the Gospel was strong...
and so we began to worry a little less about "creeping egalitarianism
in the emerging church." If our mission was to reach these people, we
wanted the offense to be in the Gospel, not our polity, ecclesiastical
structure, bad coffee... whatever.

Secondly, we realized that God had placed women in positions of
leadership and/or spiritual influence in Scripture. Whether Deborah the
Judge, Huldah the Prophet, Anna the Prohet, Priscilla the teacher... It
was impossible for us to say "It is a universal principle that God does
not desire women to be in leadership." It was clearly not the case. And
if these are exceptions to a universal rule, then at least we know
there are exceptions, don't we? We had to come to a place where we
could say, "If God puts a Deborah in our midst, an Anna in our midst, a
Priscilla in our midst... we had better be prepared to recognize that."
So, just like that, we became open to women in leadership, if God put
them there. I guess we thought that if God was laying down an absolute
law in the NT and backing it up by the order of creation, He would have
been a little more consistent in His application of the principle
throughout the entire narrative of Scripture.

So- How to deal with the big passage- 1 Tim 2? I'm less concerned about
1 Cor 14...
You can read our unpacking of that here:
http://evergreenlife.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=410
It's the second post on the thread...
But, suffice it to say, I came to the conclusion a long time ago that
"women will be saved through childbearing" was a very unclear statement
(at least in english) meant to correct, not to lay out new doctrine. I
(and here's where we went as elders) came to see that "I do not allow a
woman to teach or exercise authority over a man" (and the order of
creation stuff that follows) probably fits into the same category:
unclear, meant to correct some weird proto-gnostic thoughts/bad
practice going around... and I had a hard time any longer using this
one verse as the foundation of my entire view of the role of women in
ministry.

So where are we now? "Open" would be the best word. We are open to
whomever God raises up and gifts as an elder in our midst. We have no
set number for balance between men and women... If, the elders look out
at our community for those exercising the gifts and role of elder so we
can then give them the title, and we see no women doing that, we may
end up with a male elder board for a bit. But I don't think that will
happen. God has placed some amazing women in our midst, and most likely
during the next year, one or more of them will be asked to fill this
role, because they are already "feeding My sheep."

And to be honest, going through this shift was amazingly anticlimatic.
We posted our conclusions on our forum, dropped them in our weekly
email... and everyone pretty much said "Yeah? Cool..." and went on with
life. I don't know what we were so scared about. I honestly thought we
"would lose people either way." Nobody left.

...this was an amazing process for a recovering Baptist such as
myself. Every part of my ecclesiastical upbringing was bathed in
complementarianism... and much like coming to this emergent thing, this
was also a "freeing" process for me. I believe deeply in the Word of
God. I have a better relationship with it than ever before... and feel
like honestly, before God, we have done the right thing. I'm prepared
as the pastor of this church to accept correction from Him if we're
wrong on this, but... It seems (and I want to be careful here) God has
been telling us we're doing okay.