“Women’s Service in the Church: The Biblical Basis”

The following essay can be found at: http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Women_Service_Church.htm

This is a topic about which I’ve been thinking a lot recently. The following essay by N.T. Wright is lengthy, but please, if you’re interested in Gender Issues when it comes to Christianity and the Church, please read and respond in the comments with your thoughts.

Women’s Service in the Church: The Biblical Basis 

a conference paper for the Symposium, ‘Men, Women and the Church’

St John’s College, Durham, September 4 2004

by the Bishop of Durham, Dr N. T. Wright 

I am very grateful to the organisers for inviting me to address this important conference, and only sorry that because of other duties I have been unable to take any other part in your gathering. I come to you fresh from celebrating the 900th anniversary of the translation of the bones of St Cuthbert into the Cathedral across the street, and with a consequent sense both of our enormous indebtedness to generations long ago, not least to those who, like Cuthbert, were determined through lives of holiness, celebrating God’s good creation and mourning over the human wickedness that defaces it and us with it, to strike a path through the ways of the world to the different way of God’s kingdom. And I take it that, appropriately applied, this is roughly what this conference is seeking to do: to renounce the moulds into which the world around tries to squeeze us, and to embrace the different way which is the way of God’s kingdom, in which, yet, we discover the fulfilment of God’s created plan and order. It is in that spirit that I want to offer you some reflections which are, I fear, very far from complete or fully worked out. Today’s topic has not been an area of primary research for me and many of you will know the secondary literature much better than I do. Nor is this going to be one of those complete trawls through all the relevant biblical texts. But there are one or two things I may be able to add, and indeed my reflections on 1 Timothy 2, which I shall save for towards the end, are the main reason I allowed myself to be persuaded to accept this invitation.