Dr Paul Allen

I know the premise may sound crazy – gender role theology as a slippery slope to LGBTQ+?!? – but bear with me, and I’ll try not to disappoint. In evangelical patriarchy/hierarchalism/complementarianism, it is often assumed that gender role equality in the church is a slippery slope to acceptance of LGBTQ+ ideology.  The argument goes something like this:  when a woman exercises spiritual authority over men in a church, she rejects her divinely ordained sexual nature as man’s subordinate. This permissiveness paves the way for the takeover of liberal theology, in which God’s intention for sexual activity between a man and a woman, and the sacredness of one’s created gender, are similarly subverted. Many evangelical egalitarians have demonstrated how this argument is beset both by a causal fallacy and a misunderstanding of gender differences. I will briefly summarize their counterarguments and present a new idea, namely, that the exclusion of women from church leadership as “God’...