What the Bible Says About Women Preachers
The short answer
Anyone asking what the Bible says about women preachers quickly discovers something uncomfortable: the Bible's own witness is not monolithic. The same apostle Paul who writes to the Galatians that in Christ "there can be no male and female" (Galatians 3:28) also tells the Corinthians that women should "keep silent in the assemblies" (1 Corinthians 14:34). And in 1 Timothy, the writer says he does not "permit a woman to teach" (1 Timothy 2:12). Meanwhile, the same New Testament shows women doing exactly the things those verses seem to forbid: Priscilla instructing the eloquent preacher Apollos (Acts 18:26), Philip's four daughters prophesying (Acts 21:9), Phoebe carrying Paul's letter to Rome as a "servant of the assembly" (Romans 16:1), and women praying and prophesying in the Corinthian church itself (1 Corinthians 11:5).
So the honest answer to the question is not a single verse but a conversation among verses. Readers on both sides of the debate can produce proof texts, and both sets of texts are really there. The harder and more faithful work is deciding how they fit together—which passages speak to a particular first-century situation, and which express the deep grain of the gospel.
This is where the preaching scholar Thomas G. Long offers real help. Drawing on David Bartlett, he suggests that because Scripture sometimes argues with itself, faithful readers are invited into what Bartlett calls "a lover's quarrel" with particular texts. On some questions, saying "the Bible says" settles the matter; on others, as Bartlett puts it, it is only the beginning. The question of women preachers is a prime example: the tension between Paul's declarations is not an embarrassment to be hidden but an invitation to read more carefully, more prayerfully, and more whole-heartedly.
What scholars say
In this passage from The Witness of Preaching, Thomas G. Long asks how preachers can be faithful to a Bible that sometimes disagrees with itself—citing David Bartlett's observation that Paul's views on women are not always consistent, and that such tensions invite readers into a loving argument with the text.
“To put it bluntly, a theological tradition gives us permission not only to receive what texts have to say to us but sometimes to argue with texts, to engage in what biblical scholar and homiletician David Bartlett has described as “a lover’s quarrel” with particular texts. 14 The Bible itself invites such quarrels, Bartlett says, because there are disagreements in the Bible itself. Take Paul’s not-always-consistent views on women. “We read 1 Corinthians,” says Bartlett, “and discover that the Paul who says that ‘in Christ there is neither male nor female’ sometimes says other things that seem contradictory. As preachers, how are we faithful to a Bible that sometimes argues with itself? Sometimes when we preach ‘the Bible says,’ that is the end of the matter. Sometimes it is just the beginning.”
What it means for you
If you are wrestling with this question—perhaps because a woman's preaching has blessed you, or because certain verses trouble you—you do not have to choose between honesty and faithfulness. You can hold the restrictive passages and the liberating ones side by side, ask what situation each was addressing, and let Scripture interpret Scripture. That kind of engaged, loving argument with the text is itself a form of taking the Bible seriously.
Practically, that means resisting the urge to settle the matter with one verse, whichever side it favors. Read the whole witness: Galatians 3, 1 Corinthians 11 and 14, 1 Timothy 2, Romans 16, Acts 18 and 21. Then weigh them together, in community, with humility.
In context
The passages usually cited in this debate cluster in Paul's letters. Galatians 3:28 comes in an argument that faith, not law or status, makes people children of God. First Corinthians 11 and 14 address disorder in Corinthian worship—where, notably, chapter 11 assumes women pray and prophesy aloud. First Timothy 2 gives instructions for a church threatened by false teaching. Romans 16 closes Paul's greatest letter with greetings to his coworkers, many of them women, including Phoebe and Junia. Each text has a setting; none was written as an isolated rulebook entry.