Either/Or: Mood'y Bible Institute's Men's...I Mean, Pastors Conference | Part 1

A few weeks ago, Moody Bible Institute’s Pastor’sConference took place and it drew in some 1,000 pastors in attendance. The conference featured exclusively male speakers, bands…and as usual, participants. Well almost anyway. The conference was not open for women to register—though “Women are allowed to attend General Sessions…with their husbands.” This conference, according to the school, is not a men’s conference per se but rather a place where Evangelical church leaders may go to equip, refocus, and refresh. Blogger and Moody graduate, Adam McLane’s twitter conversation with the school reveals as much:

 

Moody Conferences Twitter conversation with MBI graduate Adam McLane

For those of us who might participate in conferences such as Moody’s, this aspect of their operation might call for some careful consideration. Why would Moody not allow women to register for general sessions? And what about those female Moody graduates who go on to serve in pastoral roles and wish to continue benefiting from their alma mater? Is this decision part of a larger trend in Evangelicalism, or just adherence to a statement of belief?  

We will explore these questions and more in the next three posts. We begin with a brief  introduction, before to our first post - "The Either/Or Reading of Scripture."

First, a quick history lesson about Moody Bible Institute (MBI) and its relationship to supporting women in pastoral ministry. The school was initiated under the leadership of a woman named Emma Dryer in 1883; she would act as essentially the first dean of the school. The institute would be one of the first schools in the state to admit women. According to Janette Hassey in Discovering BiblicalEquality (pgs.39-58), beginning in 1889, Moody soon led all early Bible institutes in training women for pastoral ministry as its graduates openly served as pastors, preachers, and teachers. This was evidenced in 1927 as Moody’s publication, Alumni News, proudly told the fascinating account of Mable Thomas, a 1913 graduate, who served as a pastor in Kansas. In 1929, the school’s official publication, Moody Monthly, listed Lottie Sheidler as the first person to ever graduate from the pastor’s course. Then there is the fact that just before the turn of the century, D.L Moody forged an alliance with Frances Willard—one of America’s foremost pioneers for gender equality in the public and in the pulpit. While MBI may have never explicitly enforced women in pastoral roles, Hassey rightly concludes that the “implicit endorsement of women in those authoritative roles for over forty years cannot be denied.” Though some of these facts may seem less than “radical” remember that most of these events took place before women were even allowed to vote.

So, why would Moody—an institute which once stood-out as radically in support of women in the pastorate—decided to continue excluding them from pastoral conferences? In this post the the 2 that will follow, I think are a few causal reasons to explore. Essentially, I see Moody’s decision to be, at least in part, due to the influence of either/or thinking in areas where a both/and posture could be more appropriate. While this tendency is much more widespread than MBI, using the example of Moody’s Pastors Conference as a reference may help the trend become more visible. When it comes to either/or thinking in gender discussions, binary thought tends to surface in three prominent ways - the first of which we will begin with:

1) Either/Or Reading of Scripture: “Scripture is either complementarian or egalitarian in its instruction of church leadership.”

Both sides of the gender debate fall prey to this line of thinking, yet in choosing to acknowledge only one reading often leads to poor hermeneutics which oversimplifies the complexity of gender within the scriptures. While I (Michael Wiltshire) myself may be an Egalitarian, I have studied the text enough to know that a complementarian reading is not absent from the text. Though I think this reading is less in tune to the entirety of Scripture, for me to say it is not derivable from the text is to be exegetically irresponsible. It is surprising then, that Moody would communicate through their tradition of male-only registries that their conference reflects on only one particular reading of scripture when it comes to the office of pastor.

For the next two approaches to binary thinking on this topic come back and visit for posts 2 & 3.  We will follow up with a few more of these problematic either/or dichotomies and hopefully offer a way forward.

- Michael Wiltshire      

Want to read more? Check out Discovering Biblical Equality by Douglas Fee for issues of exegesis, hermeneutics, and church history. Or pick up Woman Caught in the Conflict by Rebecca Groothuis for info on Evangelical Feminism and the sociological side of gender equality.