denominations that feature female pastors are usually liberal candy-coated Christianity the last thing the church needs.
Some of the mainline denominations that have female clergy have gone out into the weeds by teaching false doctrine such as downplaying the importance of the Holy Trinity, and, in my view, profaning the liturgy, for example, by performing homosexual marriages, but others do not do this and are quite conservative; correlation is not causation. Also, even in some denominations where this is not officially the case, such as the United Methodist Church, there has been rampant disobedience by clergy, but some of the worst offenders, for example, Rev. Jeremy Smith, whose blog “Hacking Christianity” lives up to its name in every sense of the word “hacking” except the sense he meant (among computer programmers, hacking refers not to breaking into computer systems but rather writing clever solutions in the programming language you are computing in, which is what he intended in a view to being clever), in which he has falsely claimed that John Wesley was opposed to creeds (which is untrue, John Wesley loved the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, “I believe there is no liturgy in the world, either in ancient or modern language, which breathes more of a solid, scriptural, rational Piety, than the Common Prayer of the Church of England,” and the BCP includes all three creeds; furthermore, in the simplified version of the Book of Common Prayer that John Wesley assembled for use in the Methodist Episcopal Church of North America, he ensured that the Apostle’s Creed was retained in the main services of Morning and Evening Prayer and Holy Communion and elsewhere, as appropriate (this book is called The Sunday Service Book for Methodists in North America).
I don’t know of a single female Methodist cleric who has even come close to the level of disobedience to the UMC Book of Discipline, advocating disobedience of the Book of Discipline, and also promoting heresy (as defined by the Christian Forums Statement of Faith), but I do know of other Methodist ministers with similar dispositions, who were male, including one who manhandled a relative of mine when her father died to keep her from approaching the body to kiss him one last time, for reasons that are unfathomable, and in the process bruised her, which is shocking pastoral abuse (in the Orthodox Church the right of relatives to kiss their loved ones for the last time is ensured in the funeral liturgy itself by rubrics, so those who are desire to do that can do so), and another who supported homosexual marriage and told me he had “issues” with the Nicene Creed, specifically with how it describes the Son as being of one essence with the Father, which is, of course, the essential clause in the entire Nicene Creed, because the Arian controversy was primarily over whether or not our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is God, begotten of the Father before all ages, and of one substance with the Father (in Greek, the phrase is homoousios, meaning “same essence”), as the Creed teaches, or if rather, as Arius and his followers argued, Jesus Christ was created, and there were, after Nicaea, two factions that formed in Arianism, one of which argued that his essence was like that of the Father, but not the same (homoiousios) or among the more extreme Arians, that His essence was unlike that of the Father (heteroousios).
Thus we have the paradox of a mainline denomination that affirms the Nicene Creed, which is also part of our Statement of Faith on Christian Forums, that had a pastor of a parish who “had issues” (which is a Southern Californian expression for disagreeing with or being opposed to, as in “I have issues with you” or “I’m going to have to take issue with that”) with the Nicene Creed, which would technically make him a non-Christian according to the extremely generous doctrinal standards of this website.
Now, in contrast, the majority of female clergy known to me, including
@Paidiske , have orthodox views on the Trinity; indeed
@Paidiske has an admirable dedication to historic Anglicanism as expressed in the 39 Articles of Religion. Likewise my friend Rev. Bolton who runs a homeless shelter and works as a chaplain for our county Fire Department, which basically entails responding whenever firefighters, who in this part of the US also are paramedics, and are usually the first on scene whenever there is a medical 911 phone call (if you live in the Riverside that is in California, you know what I am talking about), consists of responding when the fire department is unable to resuscitate someone who has, for example, died in their home, and helping the family through a ministry of presence. Both women are leaders, who are intelligent, doctrinally orthodox on all essential points, who I would feel comfortable concelebrating a liturgy with, for example, Morning or Evening Prayer.
Furthermore, the early church, which did not tolerate homosexuality, contumacy among clergy, or other abuses, did have female clergy in the form of Deaconesses, who were ministers of the Baptismal Font in the same way that their counterparts, the Deacons, were ministers of the Chalice; in that Deaconesses were the ones who would go down into the water with women being baptized, rather than the male presbyters, for reasons of propriety (Deacons had a comparable role, which is twofold: in the liturgy, assisting in the distribution of Holy Communion, and also after the liturgy taking the consecrated Body and Blood of our Lord to the sick who were unable to attend.
In addition, the entire nation of Georgia owes its Christianity to the evangelism of St. Nino, an Armenian princess who spread the Gospel to Georgia. The Georgian Orthodox Church is one of the most traditional and conservative of the Eastern Orthodox Churches, and it was established as the result of evangelism by a woman. Now, they do not have female presbyters, although in Orthodox churches, the wives of pastors, called Presbyteras, are viewed as being the spiritual mothers of a parish in the same way that their husbands are the spiritual fathers of a parish, so the Presbyter and Presbytera are like the King and Queen, and the majority of Orthodox parish priests are married (indeed, the freedom to have married clergy has always been a point of divergence between the Eastern churches and the Roman Church; this issue was even discussed, I believe, at Nicaea, when the two Roman delegates (out of the 318 bishops present) brought up clerical celibacy, but found that the idea was not acceptable to the other churches. Indeed within the Roman Catholic Church itself, clerical celibacy is not required in most of the Eastern Catholic Churches such as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, nor is it required of clergy in the recently created “Anglican Ordinariates” which were established for the minority of Anglicans that since the 19th century had wanted to join the Catholic Church while retaining their Anglican liturgy.
So based on this, I would argue that it cannot be said that women in the ministry is a causation of heterodox or heretical views. While it is true that the mainline Protestant denominations that are having doctrinal difficulties In the form of disobedient clergy, like the United Methodist Church, do have female clergy, in my experience it is usually male clergy who are responsible for the disastrous decisions which have led so many members to leave these churches, for example, Bishop Gene Robinson of the Episcopal Church, who, when he became a bishop, due to his homosexuality, caused a large number of Episcopalians to leave the denomination, this was due to male clergy. And likewise, in most of these denominations, the decision to have female clergy was made by men anyway, so it is really unfair to blame women for these issues.
Now, I am not saying all female clergy are inherently doctrinally orthodox; I did not greatly admire the former presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, who was a woman, because I felt her sermons were doctrinally weak, and her decision to sue dioceses that wanted to leave the Episcopal Church, which cost around $50 million in legal fees, proved to be the wrong one when the US Supreme Court allowed the DIocese of Fort Worth to leave the Episcopal Church and take with it the real estate. I also disagreed with what I perceived to be weak Christology in her homilies. However, the bishops who elected her were predominantly male, and to her credit, the rate at which the Episcopal Church contracted was less during her tenure than during the early 2000s in the aftermath of Gene Robinson becoming a bishop. However, all of this pales in comparison to those issues caused by male clergy.
Oh, and while we’re on it, here is an interesting fact: of the various heresies which have affected Christianity, following the Byzantine theory of Heresiology, which is a belief that all heresies after Iconoclasm (which in Byzantine theology is regarded as a heresy, and also the final distinctive form of heresy, except among some predominantly Old Calendarist Eastern Orthodox who talk about the “Pan-Heresy of Ecumenism”, which I disagree with insofar as I do not believe ecumenical dialogue or the reunification of churches separated by schisms is inherently heretical, but rather, it would only be heretical if one embraced a doctrinal heresy in order to re-establish communion with some schismatic sect, for example, to reunite the Mormons with a Christian church, declaring the Book of Mormon to be legitimate) are merely regurgitations of earlier heresies, which is logical, and if we follow that technique it is possible to deconstruct every heretical sect from Swedenborgianism to Christian Science to Mormonism to Unitarian Universalism back to ancient heresies of the first several centuries, it is worth noting that no heresies were established by women.
Indeed, even if we reject the Byzantine model of heresiology and say that there have been new heresies to appear since the seventh century, none can be said to have been established by women, unless one counts Theosophy as a heresy (I regard it as a separate denomination), with the sole exception of Christian Science, but even Christian Science was simply a permutation of a broader group of related denominations known as the “New Thought Movement”; Mary Baker Eddy contributed specifically her book “Health and Science with Key to the Scriptures,” and a few other distinctive heretical practices of that cult.
So that is exactly one heretical cult, maybe two, if one counts Theosophy (established by a Madame Blavatsky) established by a woman, out of literally thousands established by men.
Now, in the 1990s there was a cult, The Church Spiritual and Triumphant, whose televangelism was conducted by the wife of the founder, but she did not found it.
Lastly, the only seriously heterodox female pastor of a mainline denomination that I am aware of is the pastor of Ebenezer Lutheran Church in San Francisco, which she has rebranded as “herchurch”, which has adopted a radical feminist theology which departs from Christianity in a number of respects, including selling “Mother Goddess Rosaries” which instead of a crucifix, feature an idol of a female deity, which looks like it could be Venus or perhaps Athena or Aurora.
So really, we cannot say that women cause heretical activity in mainline churches except on the smallest scale, compared to men. There is not a causal relationship between women serving in various forms of ministry, and churches embracing heretical teaching. There may be correlation among some of the mainline churches, but other mainline churches had female clergy since the 19th century, and only recently have started to have doctrinal issues, and there are other Protestant churches which have had female clergy for even longer, which do not have these doctrinal issues. In the US I can think of several denominations which have for a long time had female clergy, but which are doctrinally well within the pale one would desire.
Thus my position remains that it is wrong and hurtful to simply dismiss the role of women in the ministry, since they have always had a role, and have done very important things, for example, St. Theclas aided St. Paul in his evangelism. She, along with St. Mary Magdalene (not to be confused with St. Mary of Bethany, the sister of St. Martha, which is often done in the West), and St. Nino the Illuminator of Georgia, are among the women venerated as Equal to the Apostles by the Eastern Orthodox Church.
It is legitimate to oppose the introduction of female clergy where this would cause a schism, in my opinion, because schisms are so disastrous when they occur, or where a majority of the people in the denomination including a majority of the women are opposed to it, and there are denominations where this is the case, but this does not warrant a general ban on women in the ministry across all churches. Indeed there are some churches where I believe a schism would have happened had women not been admitted to the ministry. Schisms are not worth it, which is why I am so upset about the forcing of a schism in the United Methodist Church.
Furthermore, even if one disagrees with having female presbyters or bishops, there are a vast array of other ministries women perform. For example, there is no conceivable way that one could argue that, for instance, the Roman Catholic church does not have women in ministry. Consider the various consecrated nuns, who have historically ministered through running schools, providing nursing staff at hospitals, and in many other roles. Indeed one of the most influential leaders of the Roman Catholic church in the late 20th century, for a time the most influential after Pope John Paul II, was Mother Theresa, an Albanian Catholic nun who set up the Sisters of Charity to take care of the dying in Calcutta, who is now, deservedly I think, venerated as a saint.
