Soft Complementarians: Holding to Headship and the Gifting of Women

But don’t all complementarians believe in both headship and spiritual gifts given to both genders? Yes, they do. Soft complementarians include all spiritual gifts listed in the Bible, such as pastoring and preaching, as gifts women receive and exercise for the whole body while still holding to biblical headship. This happens by dividing roles and gifts (such as separating the role of elder from the role of pastor or the gift of pastoring), rather than assuming they must always be combined.

Elders and Pastors

Many of my narrow complementarian friends equate elder and pastor as the same role. They point to passages like 1 Peter 5:1-5 where the elders are encouraged to pastor/shepherd the people as evidence that the roles are the same. Soft complementarians point to Ephesians 4:11, where gender is not mentioned, as being the only place where “pastor” is in the noun form to describe a role, and that while elders must shepherd (verb form) people, their role as elder is different from the role of pastor. Meaning someone can be a pastor without being an elder just as someone can be an evangelist without being an elder. Similarly, an elder would also do the work of evangelism but not be an evangelist.

Soft complementarians often separate the role of pastor and elder into two distinct roles. In a soft complementarian context, women with the gift of pastoring and teaching and leading are encouraged to use those gifts under the leadership of the elders. Practically, being soft complementarian often means male headship is expressed in the role of husband at home and elder and senior pastor at church.

Separating Elder and Pastor (It Is Not Only Soft Complementarians)

Some churches who insist elder and pastor are synonymous divide the two roles anyway; they just don’t give those doing the actual overseeing the title “elders” and may actually be more egalitarian in their structure than the soft complementarians they criticize of compromise. To be clearer, some churches who describe themselves as “complementarian because we only have male pastors” have pastors receive direction and accountability from a group of trustees or a personnel team consisting of men and women—meaning the headship in the church was placed in an egalitarian group of men and women. For all the emphasis on “pastor” and “elder” being the same office, there is a lot of oversight being conducted by non-pastors. Some churches who say the role of elder and pastor are synonymous have pastors on their church staff who are not elders and elders who are not pastors. There are other common inconsistencies too, such as a man in a youth ministry role being called pastor while his predecessor was a woman in the exact same role but was called director and neither of them were elders.

The inconsistencies in some narrow complementarian contexts are not the reasons for being soft complementarian, however. They must not be. The theological conviction of both headship and gifts to both genders that flows from the text must be what gets one to a soft complementarian position. And of the God-breathed text, what about?

What About Preaching and 1 Timothy 2:12?

Almost any time a woman preaches or teaches, someone will post on social media, “I do not allow a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; instead, she is to remain quiet” (1 Timothy 2:12) as a slam dunk on the church or the woman who has taught. Or to let us know, because surely, we just never read the passage! There are multiple interpretations of the passage held by scholars who believe the Scripture is inerrant.

• The complementarians who view the role of elder, pastor, and bishop as synonymous, view the passage as a clear prohibition from women teaching in mixed church gatherings. There is debate among them as to what gathering this applies to: only Sunday worship services, large Sunday school classes with both men and women, all gatherings during the week, and if this applies to teenagers, etc.
• Some soft complementarians believe the passage is connected to the role of elder. They believe since the following verses focus on the qualifications of an elder that “teaching with authority” is about the elders defining and declaring the doctrines of the church. The elders define and teach doctrine, and since women in the early church exhorted and prophesied (1 Corinthians 11:5), women can and should do so today under the leadership of the elders.
• Other soft complementarians, including J.I. Packer, believe no one exercises 1 Timothy 2:12 today—that this was a command during the times of the apostles, that the Word is now complete, and that all of us who preach are simply applying and encouraging people in what has already been handed down once and for all from the apostles.

Soft complementarians aren’t eliminating the verse from their Bibles or merely articulating contextual differences; they have wrestled with and thought through that passage in light of the whole counsel of Scripture.