Are there any limitations on how women speak in church?

Watch the complete sermon here: https://www.bridges.church/messages/women-and-men-in-church-1-corinthians-11-2-16-14-33-40/

Hey, thanks again for sending in questions related to our recent sermons. This last week, we went through sections of 1 Corinthians that largely deal with gender roles serving in church. And we covered where Paul says women must be silent and if they have questions, they should ask their husbands when they get home.

And so we said probably what was going on is that there were some women who were being disruptive in Corinth and Paul was telling them not to be disruptive. I don’t believe that that verse would be a general prohibition of women speaking in church, if for no other reason than his qualifier is if you have questions, ask them at home.

So it doesn’t seem there seems to be a particular type of speaking that is the problem. We knew, we said from chapter 11, that women were praying and prophesying. And we find, and we’ll cover this in the week coming up. Chapter 14, Paul says he wishes all of them would prophesy a lot. And so it seems like there’s many ways that women were speaking in Corinth when they were encouraged to speak in those ways, because he’s saying, I want all of you to prophesy and do it a lot, do it a lot more than you speak in tongues.

And so they’re not generally prohibited from speaking. But the question comes in this week, are there any limitations on how women speak in church? And so I would say not from the verses that we just read. However, over in 1 Timothy, chapter 2, verse 12, Paul makes this other statement, I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man.

And the way that we understand that section in First Timothy in our church is that it’s the beginning of a section talking about the responsibilities of elders.

Indeed, later in First Timothy, we see elders should have respect in the church, especially those who teach. So it seems like the two kind of roles of elders are teaching and having authority. And so, so we believe it’s saying essentially women should not be in an elder role. That’s how we understand it here and then.

So in terms of speaking, and occasionally we have women speak during our message time on a Sunday, and we will continue to do so.

But I would say, I would caution, if you have a woman in that role, we’ll say every week, you say 52 weeks a year, a woman delivering the message during the sermon time, I would say functionally she is serving in an elder type role. And so we wouldn’t. I don’t believe it’s in line with what Paul is saying for a woman to speak during that time.

Every single week over the course of the year. But occasionally, you know, somebody who’s on our staff or we bring in an outside speaker, as we have in the past, occasionally a woman speaking in that role, she’s not, she’s not functioning as an elder.

And so are there any limitations? I would say yes, but it’s. It has to do with frequency. In my estimation. If it’s occasional, she’s not functioning in an elder role.

If it’s all the time, she definitely is. She’d be carrying the weight of the teaching ministry of the church, which is what an elder would do. So we hope that that is helpful and we’ll see you next time.