If there is any member of the fairer sex who has been so brainwashed by the culture around us that she finds the word of God difficult to accept in these things, and finds something welling up within her that would resist it and say, ‘No I don't want this. I want men and women to have the same roles and to be exactly the same’, she will spoil everything. Says the apostle, there is a tremendous and most glorious and fulfilling role for all the gifts of Christian women. But trust the word of God, continue in faith; don't be drawn away from it by the nonsense of this vain world.
Don't be influenced by all this patriarchal teaching which comes out of the USA right now. It's only a minority of people there holding to it, but they make a lot of noise on the Internet. ‘Oh, the husband must be the tyrant ruler. He is to be the priest of the family in a very authoritarian way. The girls mustn't go to university.’ All this nonsense, which comes just from appalling exegesis from some of these folk. Yet some of them are good people, and they are believers, but they have got themselves carried away into patriarchalism. We are not going for that, because Christian women are easily as intelligent as Christian men, and also have their distinctive gifts. So we are not having this superior, inferior teaching, but we learn our different roles and stations from the Scripture, and the women are not teachers and not leaders in the church.
In World War I, so many men died. There weren't any husbands. There weren't enough to go round. I was given a yearbook from the 1930s of Surrey Gardens Church including the membership list. It had about 500 members. Page after page of members were listed: Miss so and so, Miss so and so, Miss so and so. The majority of members in the 1930s were single women. Why? There were no husbands because of World War I. So many men were lost in the trenches. What did those ladies do? Many of them were teachers. When I was a boy, almost all the teachers were women. There were many single women who could never have husbands, because of World War I, and they went into the teaching profession. They upheld it; it was their life's work. There were also doctors, nurses, and the caring professions, of course, but the Scripture here picks out the rising generation, the care of the young. This is the great ministry of Christian women, whether in Sunday schools, in their own families, or in their professions. There are Christian ladies in the Scriptures who were business women: Lydia of Thyatira, Priscilla, the wife of Aquila of Rome, Dorcas, also called Tabitha of Joppa. All these women served society, in their case, as business women: a dyer of purple, a seamstress, a tentmaker. There is the Proverbs 31 woman. What an entrepreneur she was! It is not just the rearing of the young, but this is what is singled out here.