Journal: Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Volume: JBMW 08:1 (Spring 2003)
Article: Executive Director’s Column Exposition of the Danvers Statement: Affirmations 8,9, and 10
Author: Randy L. Stinson

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JBMW 8:1 (Spring 03) p. 4

Executive Director’s Column
Exposition of the Danvers Statement:
Affirmations 8,9, and 10

Randy L. Stinson

Executive Director,
Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Louisville, Kentucky

Affirmation 8

In both men and women a heartfelt sense of call to ministry should never be used to set aside biblical criteria for particular ministries (1 Tim 2:11–15, 3:1–13; Tit 1:5–9). Rather, biblical teaching should remain the authority for testing our subjective discernment of God’s will.

On many occasions, there are those who object to the complementarian position on the basis of their own “call” to ministry. Their contention is that complementarians cannot tell men and women how God has directed their life and that if they feel called to a particular ministry, then that should be the end of the discussion. Affirmation 8 recognizes the sincerity of many of those in this particular category but at the same time, places Scripture as the final authority over and above one’s experience. Regardless of a sincere, heartfelt sense of a particular call, one should never do anything that is prohibited by Scripture.

In the local church, each body of believers should ensure that men and women have the opportunity to exercise their spiritual gifts for the edification of the body, including teaching and leadership gifts. However, all things must be done inside the parameters that God’s Word establishes for his people. We must submit to the authority of Scripture as we minister to one another. For those who claim that this limits the involvement of women, it should be noted that many opportunities and needs exist for women to teach and lead other women, which would be a faithful application of Titus 2:3–5:

Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled. (ESV)

Affirmation 9

With half the world’s population outside the reach of indigenous evangelism; with countless other lost people in those societies that have heard the gospel; with the stresses and miseries of sickness, malnutrition, homelessness, illiteracy, ignorance, aging, addiction, crime, incarceration, neuroses, and loneliness, no man or woman who feels a passion from God to make His grace known in word and deed need ever live without a fulfilling mi...

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