On this episode, Jon, Denny, and Colin discuss the senseless murder of a young Ukrainian woman, Iryna Zarutska, on the public transit of Charlotte, NC, and how it points to a cultural need for what C.S. Lewis called “men with chests.”
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Should Women Serve as “Shepherds”? – CBMW Podcast
As I mentioned earlier this week, some churches are appointing female “shepherds” in an effort to get around the biblical prohibition on female “pastors.” On this episode of The CBMW Podcast, we discuss what the Bible says about gender, the office of pastor, and why it matters. [Watch below on YouTube, or listen below on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.]
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Is a Female “Shepherd” Different from a Female “Pastor”?
I have a read a couple reports over the last week or so about a Southern Baptist Church in Texas that has seven female pastors (Fielder Church in Arlington). According to one report, each of these female pastors is listed on the church’s website as a “shepherd.” Indeed, now all the church’s pastors are listed as shepherds, including the senior pastor. These reports have raised eyebrows across the convention because the Baptist Faith & Message says that pastors must be men as qualified by Scripture. According to one report, Fielder Church was referred to the credentials committee of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention (SBTC), and the committee decided not…
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Why I Do Not Favor the Moniker “Biblical Patriarchy”
Complementarian doctrine doesn’t require adherents to adopt a certain label for their view. It’s far more important for people to accept and affirm the Bible’s teaching on manhood and womanhood than for them to embrace any specific moniker for it. Having said that, there is great value in being precise and clear when thinking about and communicating Christian doctrine. For that reason, I still prefer and recommend the use of the term “complementarianism” to label our position over “biblical patriarchy.” I have made a positive case for “complementarianism” elsewhere. In this essay, I want to respond to some of the critiques in Doug Ponder’s thoughtful essay weighing the relative merits…
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Is Marriage a “Submission Competition”?
Andy Stanley posted on X about what the New Testament requires of husbands and wives. He writes: New Testament Marriage is a submission competition. “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” (Eph 5:21) “Walk in the way of love, JUST AS Christ loved us and gave himself up for us…” (Eph. 5:2) The only problem with this argument is that neither this text nor any other in the New Testament tells husbands to submit to their wives. Thus, egalitarians are mistaken to interpret “one another” to require mutual submission. The Greek term for “one another” does not always denote strict reciprocity. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t.…
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The Reports of Complementarian Demise Are Greatly Exagerrated
Aaron Renn is very insightful when he’s offering cultural and sociological analysis. However, his most recent essay on complementarianism doesn’t engage either theology or history. In this case, his analysis of complementarianism goes awry because he takes his generalizations about Boomers (which are generally correct) and then uses them as axioms to interrogate a biblical doctrine. The result is that he makes some pretty basic theological and the historical mistakes. Beyond Boomerism – Evangelical gender theology and why younger generations have to unshackle themselves from being overly wedded to Boomer thinking https://t.co/l2Kc93eC5v — Aaron M. Renn ?? (@aaron_renn) July 17, 2025 He claims that Piper and Grudem enjoy pope-like status…
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Some Reflections on SBC 2025
Earlier this week I served as a messenger at the 2025 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). I already shared a little bit about what happened with respect to the vote on the Sanchez/Law amendment. Here are some reflections on the rest of the meeting and some further thoughts on the amendment. The President Clint Pressley did a fabulous job as chair. I couldn’t be more grateful for his leadership and the spirit with which he presided over the meeting. I have heard almost universal praise for how he led us. To him, I say well done and congratulations on winning a second term. The Resolutions Andrew Walker…
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A Post-Mortem on the Sanchez/Law Amendment
The annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention wrapped-up last night. A strong majority of SBC messengers voted in favor of the Sanchez/Law amendment (61%), but it fell short of the required supermajority (66%). So that effort is now dead. Some take-aways: 1. It is very clear that majorities of messengers at the last three conventions want this amendment. But it is very difficult to get a supermajority to pass a measure when the platform opposes it. The platform mounted strong opposition the last two years. 2. I thought the amendment had a good chance of reaching a supermajority until the platform warned messengers during the debate that the amendment…
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Did Aristotle Really Say that Women Are Deformed?
Aristotle has regularly been pilloried by modern writers (and especially feminists) for saying that “The female is as it were a deformed male.”1 New feminist Prudence Allen, for example, argues that this statement from Aristotle among many others renders him morally retrograde in his views on women.2 It may be the case that he is guilty as charged. I do not intend to adjudicate that point. I do wonder, however, if his statement about women being “deformed” has been rightly understood on its own terms. The Greek term translated as “deformed” is peperomenon, and it literally means maimed or mutilated. Figuratively, it denotes something like incapacitated.3 But Aristotle’s usage of…
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How Rejecting Gender Essentialism Can Lead to Transgenderism
On this week’s CBMW podcast, we discuss how egalitarian error can lead to transgender error. In Christa McKirland’s chapter in Discovering Biblical Equality (3rd ed.), she argues that some transgender people need to discern whether sex-change surgeries or hormone therapies “can be done in submission to the Spirit and in order to become more like Christ.” It is astonishing that this perspective appears in what purports to be an evangelical work on gender. That is what we discuss below. How Rejecting Gender Essentialism Gets You Transgenderism – On this episode, @DennyBurk, @colinsmo, and Jon discuss a chapter from the egalitarian book Discovering Biblical Equality called “Image of God and Divine Presence:…
