9Marks of a Healthy Church. Or is it 8Marks and change?

I agree with so much of the 9Marks paradigm, both in substance and in spirit.

Sound doctrine? Check! Preach the gospel? Right! Biblical preaching? Oh, yeah! Missions? Amen! Baptism? Discipleship? Right on, right on!!

No women in leadership? Hold on…

You see, they had me, then they lost me.

There is also a detailed discussion in this 9Marks book: Can Women By Pastors? No! The author “explains why God reserved the office of pastor and elder exclusively for men by examining the structures of authority God established from the very beginning.” While promising that the reader will now be able to “think biblically” about the theme, the book examines with any seriousness a mere 6 verses (with a couple of dozen side references) out of the (let’s see) 31,102 verses in the canon. And half those verses, found in 1 Timothy 2, are in a (God-inspired) text about which few people agree.

It’s not so much that I disagree with them on the point. (Which I do, by the way, but honorable people can disagree).

Rather, I’m dismayed that anyone could rank this as of PRIMARY (not SECONDARY or even TERTIARY) importance alongside the blessed gospel. To me this is where SOME complementarian believers go astray, and in the last couple of decades more than ever.

It is possible I am exaggerating how these themes are weighted – but I am guided by the rather crude metric that, “complementarian” is mentioned 215 times in the 9Marks website, compared to 174 hits for the trinity (and some of those come up in the discussion of female submission), 68 for biblical “inerrancy”. (“Missions” and “worship” top “complementarianism”).

I would no more rate all-male leadership as a doctrinal criterion of the FIRST RANK than I would, DOES THE RAPTURE OCCUR BEFORE OR AFTER THE TRIBULATION, or CAN A CHRISTIAN DRINK WINE, or WHAT VERSION OF THE BIBLE IS BEST?

Count me as having 8 and maybe 2/3 Marks.

“9Marks of a Healthy Church. Or is it 8Marks and change?” by Gary S. Shogren, Professor of New Testament, Seminario ESEPA, San José, Costa Rica. see my books on Amazon.com