This past week, Dallas megachurch The Village Church made headlines for its poor handling of a moral failure within its community, most notably the prolonged bullying and intimidation of the man’s wife by church leadership as she sought to extricate herself from the damaging marriage and from her home church.
In the wake of the flood of criticism levied against TVC as details of their Church Discipline practices were made public, they have made both written and verbal statements where they accept some culpability for behaving badly, (admitting to a “domineering” manner), but at the end of the day they firmly defend their basic theology and their overall leadership structure.
This is simply not going to cut it anymore, fellas.
If you visit The Village Church’s website and take a look at their “Elders” page, (those who ultimately oversee church discipline, by the way), you’ll see something very telling: dudes—lots and lots of dudes. This is far more the rule than it is the exception in the world of organized Christian religion. In fact, this is the crux of the problem these massive modern megachurches face; the one they simply have to address if they are as sincere as they claim about moving forward in a more honorable, more responsible way.
These leadership teams may indeed need better church discipline policies and more precise institutional language and greater transparency and stronger accountability systems—but what they need really, is women.
They need them within their highest leadership ranks; female pastors and elders who are given the authority and the ability to influence the process and alter the organization in meaningful ways. If not, what we’ve seen at TVC will keep happening again and again, either subtly or overtly. This isn’t about gender as much as it is about human nature; about the constant, unavoidable pull toward self-preservation.
Whenever any group is underrepresented within a leadership structure, that group will always be vulnerable to mistreatment and marginalization within the community those leaders oversee. It’s just that simple.
We don’t champion leadership diversity of any kind, just because it’s some sweet pie-in-the-sky, Kumbaya aspiration that makes us all feel good in a photo session, but because it’s the strongest safeguard against institutional injustice. When it comes to being heard and seen and acknowledged, nothing is a substitute for presence, and on far too many church leadership teams women are all but invisible.
Though it may be couched in less blatantly offensive language, the prevailing mindset of the leaders of a good portion of these faith communities and of the leadership networks that fund and feed them, is that according to the Bible women are not spiritually equipped to lead at the highest levels. As a result, in their churches women may have some places on staff, (most often ministering to children or other women or through music), but ultimately they don’t get seats at the Big Table where policy is made and where culture is created. Those spots belong to the boys, as they say God intended.
Now we can debate the meaning, interpretation, relevance, cultural influences, and modern application of any of the select Scripture passages used to justify or defend the gender gap in the modern Church’s seats of power, but ultimately we have to face the reality that what we have simply isn’t working, especially when guys have moral failures. Leadership will always drift toward male privilege and bias, so long as men monopolize its membership. That’s the hard truth at work here at TVC and elsewhere, and we need to admit it, confront it, and ask if it really honors God.
Until churches like The Village Church fully embrace the giftedness and calling of women within the loftiest levels of their leadership teams, they will continue to unwillingly or purposefully foster an environment that protects and promotes men, (even ones who fall terribly), while devaluing and minimizing women in the process.
The gender diversifying of our pastoral/leadership teams won’t prevent all moral failures, (as those flaws are built into our shared humanity), but it will guard against the specific varieties of systematic abuse that we have become so known for and that have bubbled to the surface this past week in Dallas.
People both inside and outside of our faith tradition want and deserve better than we have given them. We need a truly diverse Church, not just in the seats and the pews on Sunday mornings, but from the platform and at the board meetings.
This isn’t only good business and good leadership—it’s good for us, period.
