The Potter’s House has never had a female pastor, and that is not an accident of history. Their own books state the reason plainly. A church shaped by women is treated as a defect, and the office belongs to men. So a woman may sing, mind the nursery, and marry a pastor, but she may not hold the pulpit. That is doctrine, written down and defended, and it is worth holding against the text it claims to obey.
Why there is no female pastor, in the church’s own words
Ron Simpkins set out the premise in An Open Door. The church published his history through its own press in 1985. Under a section he titles Masculine, he argues that “most of Christianity has been unconsciously dominated by the female.” Women have always made up the largest share of converts, he writes, and this produced a gospel he judges too soft, too submissive, and pitched in a key men will not sing. The cure, in his telling, was to move men to the front. A female pastor was never on the table. Simpkins concedes that Mitchell had been saved under a woman preacher. Even so, Mitchell decided God could use women only when men would not respond. Then he ruled the Bible was clear and would stand with it. Ian Wilson frames the calling differently in Unto the Ends of the Earth. He calls it a shared yoke whose “division of labor within it differs.” She keeps the house, minds the children, and visits the sick. She also sits through her husband’s sermons three times a week while he prepares them. A former member said the same thing to a reporter who spent months inside the Arizona churches. Her summary: “The highest position you could be is the pastor’s wife.”
The two verses the rule stands on
The case rests on two passages. Take 1 Corinthians 14:34 first. Paul writes, “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak.” Then 1 Timothy 2:12. He adds, “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” Read by themselves, the two verses look decisive, and any man who wants a male-only altar has his prooftext. So the bar on a female pastor is presented as obedience to Scripture. But the difficulty is the rest of the letters in which they sit.
The situation each verse was written into
Neither verse floats free of a setting, and both letters name theirs. First Corinthians 14 is a chapter about order in a service that had slid into noise, with tongues and prophecy competing until Paul ruled that God is not the author of confusion. The word he uses for the women, “keep silence,” is sigao, the same word he applies twice more in the same chapter. A man speaking in tongues must keep silence when no one interprets. A prophet must keep silence when another receives a revelation. So the silence is a rule for taking turns, not a verdict on a class of people. The next verse names the real problem, since some wives were interrupting to ask questions, and Paul tells them to ask at home. Three chapters earlier he had already assumed that a woman “prayeth or prophesieth” aloud in that same assembly. So a blanket ban on her voice is the one reading the chapter will not bear.
First Timothy is plainer still about its occasion. Paul opens by telling Timothy to stay in Ephesus and stop certain people from teaching false doctrine, and the whole letter circles that one fire. Ephesus was the seat of the Artemis cult. It was the temple the city defended when it roared for hours that “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” That religion was built around a goddess and her priestesses, a setting where ideas exalting the female over the male were in the air. So when Paul insists that Adam came first, and that Eve was deceived, he is rebutting a particular error, not decreeing a permanent bar on a female pastor. He is correcting women who had been handed falsehood before they were handed the gospel. That is why the instruction opens by commanding what the culture did not, that the women learn. And the thing he forbids is authentein, a seizing of authority Paul names nowhere else, not the ordinary work of teaching. So the King James translators heard the difference and chose usurp.
Whom Paul actually trusted
Set the two verses in that light, and Paul’s own record finishes the argument. When Paul names the workers he trusts, the wall falls. He calls Phoebe a servant of the church at Cenchrea and a succourer of many. That word, the Greek prostatis, means a patron who stands before others. He greets Junia as “of note among the apostles,” a woman counted among them. Chrysostom still read her that way four centuries later. Priscilla, often named before her husband, took Apollos aside and expounded the way of God to him more perfectly. So a woman taught a man the gospel. Over all of it stands Galatians 3:28, that in Christ there is “neither male nor female.”
The claim that the Bible is clear
So the claim that the Bible is clear is doing work the Bible does not do. The same apostle the church quotes to bar women names three of them himself: a woman deacon, a woman apostle, and a woman who corrected a man’s theology. Simpkins is honest enough to record the irony. The founder was himself saved under a woman preacher before deciding women should not preach. The egalitarian reading rests on the text read in its own setting, not on sentiment. Men and women are called alike. Yet a hierarchy that caps a girl at pastor’s wife is human arrangement, propped with proof-texts, not God’s order. Text without context is pretext. So the church built an office wall out of two verses while stepping over everyone Paul actually commended.
The cost is not abstract. The reporter met a young woman who left in part over this. She recalled Sunday school classes where half the girls wanted to grow up to be a pastor’s wife. Now she asks why not a pastor, why not a doctor. After all, the doctrine teaches girls to aim at the wife of the man with authority, never the authority, and it forms them long before they can weigh it. It does so inside a system that already teaches every member that God assigned them their place. Decades on, there is still no female pastor.
Sources
Ron Simpkins, An Open Door: A Story of the Restoration of the Local Church, Potters Press, 1985. Ian Wilson, Unto the Ends of the Earth, Christian Fellowship Ministries. Feature reporting on the Arizona congregations, nau-neumann.atavist.com. Scripture quoted from the King James Version.
