To Ordain or Not

I talked with a friend the other day. He wanted my advice about an issue that dealt with ordination and women. Here’s the scenario, which he gave me permission to talk about if I didn’t use his name. He will be reading and enjoying our dialog, so I hope I have understood it correctly.

My friend is a Baptist denominational guy, and a Korean church under his leadership called him and asked him to participate in the ordination of a female. This lady had been on staff of this Korean church but is being led to a position, not as senior pastor, at a church in Korea. In Korean culture, ordination is very necessary. The Korean culture has a great emphasis on following authority, they are very communal in that way, so they wanted my friend to participate because of his position.

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A Churchless Faith

Some have expressed an interest in dialogging about a book, and I suggested A Churchless Faith by Alan Jamieson. The book has to be ordered used from amazon or can be gotten from abebooks.com as well. If you are interested, here is a little about the book:

At the time of writing his book, Dr Jamieson had been involved in evangelical, Pentecostal and charismatic (”EPC”) churches for over 20 years, the last 12 in full-time ministry. He is currently co-pastor of Central Baptist Church in Wellington, New Zealand. His research was conducted over six years, based in the Sociology department at Canterbury University, and was centred on in-depth taped interviews with 104 church-leavers and 52 church leaders, mainly in New Zealand. It is therefore a qualitative study.

Unlike Richter and Francis, Dr. Jamieson chose to focus entirely on people leaving EPC churches, where the level of commitment is typically very high. In fact, all the church leavers he interviewed had been committed adult members of such churches, for an average of 15.8 years. Most had been in positions of significant responsibility in their churches; many had undertaken theological training and/or had been in full-time ministry.

What he found was that the reasons these church leavers gave for their decision to leave their churches was not the same as most church leaders assumed. Many of them were on a faith journey which they felt unable to pursue within the church. Dr. Jamieson now runs a weekly gathering, called Spirited Exchanges, at which people on such faith journeys can interact and support one another.