Baptized Into Christ

The Church, Women, and Christian Ministry

To find ourselves justified by faith in Christ means our lives are now located among God’s new creation. Yet history has shown the struggle to grasp what it means for the church to live as participants in God’s new creation rather than continuing in the ways of the old creation.

In the New Testament writing of Galatians, part of the struggle was with Jewish believers struggling with the implications of being justified by faith in Christ. Consequently, instead of living as people in God’s new creation, these Jewish believers returned to the old creation by submitting again to the Torah. In particular, they taught that living in a right relationship with God (justification) required circumcision. Those who were not circumcised were without the status of one of God’s children. So Galatians is Paul’s response and corrective instruction. According to Paul, “Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the new creation.”¹

Justification by faith in Christ is redemption into God’s future of new creation rather than the past of the old creation. However, to understand the implications, we have to go back and read a passage from Galatians 3:26-28:

So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male nor female, for you are all one in Christ.

Paul’s language of being baptized into Christ is locative language. As baptized people, the church, as I have already pointed out, lives among God’s new creation. Consequently, the church must live as a witness to this future where the boundaries of ethnicity, social status, and gender no longer define participation.² However, too often, Christians have struggled with and even failed to embody the implications of this text in various ways.

The Galatians text offers an example of one early church struggling to live out the implications. In Galatians 2:11-14, Paul writes about confronting the apostle Peter (Cephas) over his failure to embody the implications. When we read about the history of Western civilization and Christianity in the Western church, both Catholic and Protestant, the reality of colonialism and slavery is another example of how Christians have returned to the old creation rather than living as a witness of God’s new creation.

One of the ways that Christians have failed to embody the implications of our baptism described in Galatians 3 is by allowing ethnicity, social status, and gender to decide whom God has gifted to serve in ministry. In 1857, a Black Christian named Peter Lowery planted the first Black congregation in Nashville associated with the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement. In doing so, Lowery had to petition the city council for permission to hold church services in the evening. The council’s response was to unanimously deny the petition because nothing good came “from negro preaching.” The reason was that “Negro preachers could not explain the fundamental principles of Christianity; they were not competent.”³ It’s safe to assume that at least some of the city council members identified as Christians. Yet for the council members, Lowery’s race, rather than his baptism (and presumably their baptisms), was the determining factor in his ability to serve as a church-planting minister.

It’s easy to see the racism at work in the case of Peter Lowery. Today we know that a person’s race and ethnicity have nothing to do with whom God has to serve as a minister of the gospel. Whether our ancestry is African, Asian, or European origin or some combination, we know that God is impartial in gifting people to serve in ministry. So when we see that the Spirit has gifted someone to preach, teach, pastor, and lead others in the way of Jesus Christ, we affirm their calling regardless of race and ethnicity.

The same affirmation of a calling to ministry falls short regarding gender. In many churches, a person’s gender is the basis for determining how the Spirit has gifted someone to serve. If a person is a male, they may serve without restriction, but if the person is a female, their gender precludes them from serving in some or all aspects of ministry. So some Christians are seemingly incapable of even recognizing when the Spirit is gifting a woman to serve in ministry because they have already concluded that God would never gift a woman to preach, teach, pastor, and lead others in the way of Jesus Christ. The problem is the same as in the case of Peter Lowery, with the only difference being gender instead of racism.

The baptismal claim of Galatians 3 is that ethnicity, social status, and gender are now relativized.⁴ The coming of Christ and subsequently the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on all flesh (cf. Acts 2:17-21) has changed everything because the eschatological future of God's new creation is now breaking into the present. All believers baptized into Christ have received the Spirit who empowers them to serve equally within the church. It also seems clear, based on observation, that God has gifted some women to preach, teach, pastor, and lead others in the way of Jesus Christ. That is unless we don't begin with the premise of old creation where gender determines how the Spirit gifts men and women for ministry.

I realize that one single post on this matter leaves many questions unanswered. Some will try making the creation order in Genesis 1-2 carry more freight than initially intended to dismiss any possibility that God might raise a woman in Christ to preach. Some will immediately recall texts like 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 and 1 Timothy 2:11-12 as proof-texts to counter any claim of accepting the full participation of women in Christian ministry.⁵ Before rushing to such proof texts, remember that it's easy to make the Bible justify a reality rooted in the old creation. White slave owners did so with slavery and racism, and we can do so in other ways that pertain to gender. My hope is that we could look at this matter through the theological lens of what has changed in the coming of Christ.

1. Unless otherwise noted, all scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

2. Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, and New Creation: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1996, 440.

3. “City Council,” Republican Banner, May 29, 1857. I am indebted to John Mark Hicks for sharing this source on his Facebook wall on Friday, February 3, 2023 (last accessed on Monday, February 6, 2023).

4. James D.G. Dunn, The Epistle to the Galatians, Black’s New Testament Commentaries, Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 1993, 197, points out that the claim of the text is not that a person’s description as a Jew or Gentile, male or female, slave or free is vanquished but rather that they are relativized and therefore cannot be used to define status, worth, value, or privilege.

5. K. Rex Butts, Gospel Portraits: Reading Scripture as Participants in the Mission of God, Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2022. I address the subject matter of women serving in ministry at more length in the final chapter of this book, titled “The Spirit-Filled Church.”