Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 05:2 (Fall 2023)
Article: A Biblical Eldership Is A Male Only Eldership
Author: Alexander Strauch

Eikon 5.2 (Fall 2023) p. 24

A Biblical Eldership Is A Male Only Eldership

Alexander Strauch

Alexander Strauch has served in the leadership and teaching ministry of Littleton Bible Chapel (near Denver, Colorado) for over 50 years. He is the author of Biblical Eldership, Paul’s Vision for the Deacons, Men and Women: Equal Yet Different, Leading with Love, Love or Die, If You Bite & Devour One Another, and The 15 Descriptions of Love (1 Corinthians 13). These books have been translated into over 40 languages. In recent years, he has also made an impact on churches around the world through the ministry of BiblicalEldership.com.

There are many books and articles on leadership. Too many. But few courageously address the issue of male only pastoral leadership and why it is necessary. The Bible teaches that the church’s elders are to be men, yet this foundational, biblical truth is relentlessly attacked and deemed totally irrelevant by most people.

In this brief article, I will focus on Paul’s instructions to his beloved church in Ephesus. Ephesus was one of the four major epicenters of early Christianity and where Paul labored in the gospel for nearly three years. What Paul writes to this believing community is Holy Scripture and essential to our theme of a male-only church eldership.

Eikon 5.2 (Fall 2023) p. 25

Male Leadership In Marriage And The Home

While in prison in Rome, Paul wrote his magisterial letter to the Ephesians. In this letter he makes this stunning and authoritative statement about husbands and wives in Christian marriage:

For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. (Eph. 5:23–27)

“As Christ Is The Head”

Paul’s basis for the husband’s headship (leadership) is not first-century Greco-Roman culture. Instead, it is Christ and his church. This is the most compelling argument that male headship in Christian marriage is not cultural, but of divine origin: the husband is the head of the wife (and here is the analogy), “as Christ is the head of the church.”1 Certainly, Christ’s headship over the church is not a re...