“Every Christian is called to be a minister (Matt. 28:18–20; Acts 1:8; 2 Cor. 5:18), so why bar women from serving in actual pastoral ministry? And if a woman is paid by a church to disciple people in the church, then why not call her a shepherd?” This recent trend to collapse the universal call to make disciples and the particular office of pastor is an example of “concept-creep.”[1] The concept of discipleship creeps into the discussion of the office of pastor. The result of blurring Scripture’s categories is semantic confusion and ecclesiological disorder. In this article, I will differentiate between the call of every Christian to make disciples and the call of some to serve the church in the office of pastor, and why that makes such a big difference in the debate on female pastors.
Make Disciples: The Call of Every Christian
1. As pointed out by Denny Burk (@DennyBurk), “Major concept-creep with the title pastor/shepherd. Many churches are confusing pastoring/shepherding with discipleship. …,” X, May 25, 2026.
Every Christian is called to make disciples. Jesus’s command in the Great Commission was not limited to ordained men. All believers are called to bear witness to Christ (Acts 1:8), instruct others on how to follow Jesus (Rom. 15:4), encourage the saints (1 Thess. 4:18; 5:11), and serve the body with their gifts (Rom. 12:6–8; 1 Cor. 12:4–31). Older women are to teach younger women (Titus 2:3). And parents should disciple their children (Deut. 6:4–8; Ps. 78:1–4; Eph. 6:4). The New Testament celebrates this kind of ordinary work of discipleship.
But we are witnessing in our modern moment an impulse to take these legitimate ministries and label them “pastoring.”[2] And the problem is compounded in our current age because churches created all sorts of positions within the congregation: administrative leaders, budget oversight personnel, sound technicians, and a host of other positions. These administrative duties are not necessarily wrong, but they start blurring the lines between what a pastor does and what non-pastoral staff and church members do.
2. For example, egalitarian Michael Bird does this in a recent article; see Michael F. Bird, “The Purge of Women as Pastors in the SBC,” Word from the Bird (Substack), May 25, 2026.
That is partly where the problem begins.
Shepherd the Flock: The Call of Biblically Qualified Men
Simply stated, the issue is not whether women can disciple, or help care for the needs of a congregation, or organize a Vacation Bible School, or serve in a number of other ways. Complementarians have long affirmed a plethora of ways women can and should serve the local church (Wayne Grudem affirmed this over thirty years ago in a helpful list[3]). In terms of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Law Amendment[4] from 2023–24 and the currently discussed Truth and Unity Amendment[5] put forward by Al Mohler do not negate ways women can or should minister the word in appropriate contexts (e.g., counseling, encouraging, and normal discipleship). The issue is whether the New Testament allows us to separate the work of pastoring from the office Christ established for pastors. Increasingly, many evangelicals want to say, “She is not a pastor in office, only in function,” or, “She pastors people without holding the office of elder.” Yet this distinction cannot bear the weight of New Testament evidence.
3. Wayne Grudem, “But What Should Women Do in the Church?” CBMW News 1, no. 2 (Fall 1995): 1, 3–7.
4. “From the Pastor’s Desk: Biblical Complementarity, the Law Amendment, and the Southern Baptist Convention,” CBMW, November 25, 2024.
5. R. Albert Mohler Jr., “Truth & Unity Amendment,” YouTube video, May 18, 2026.
The New Testament does not present “pastor,” “elder,” and “overseer” as three unrelated offices or functions. Rather, they are three descriptions of the same office.[6] In Acts 20, Paul summons the elders (presbuteros) of Ephesus and tells them that the Holy Spirit has made them overseers (episkopos) to shepherd (poimainō) the flock of God. Elders are called to oversee by pastoring (i.e., shepherding). The same group of men are called elders, overseers, and shepherds within a single passage. Likewise, in Titus 1, Paul tells Titus to “appoint elders (presbuteros) in every town” (Titus 1:5) and that these elders should meet certain qualifications. Then, Paul gives a ground for why Titus should appoint qualified elders: “for an overseer [episkopos], as God’s steward, must be above reproach” (Titus 1:7). So, as you can see, Paul moves seamlessly from “elders” to “overseers,” showing that these terms refer to the same office. Peter does the same when he exhorts the elders to “shepherd [i.e., pastor] the flock of God” while exercising oversight (1 Pet. 5:1–2). This helpful graphic from Colin Smothers encapsulates the evidence.
6. See Benjamin L. Merkle, The Elder and Overseer: One Office in the Early Church, Studies in Biblical Literature 57 (New York: Peter Lang, 2003); 40 Questions About Elders and Deacons (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2008).
Doug Ponder goes even further and shows that the idea of shepherding in the New Testament is either tied to Jesus, the act of literally shepherding sheep, the activity of the apostles or false teachers, or the work of elders. His point in reference to pastor/elders is particularly important:
The role of “pastors [shepherds] and teachers” (Eph. 4:11), which shares a single definite article in the Greek [tous de poimenas kai didaskalous], linking the two terms as either being (a) synonymous or (b) related in some categorical fashion. Dan Wallace argues for the latter in his Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (pg. 284[7]), saying that Paul seems to envision a distinction between pastors who shepherd and pastors who both shepherd and teach with authority (cf. 1 Tim. 5:17).[8]
7. Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 284.
8. Doug Ponder (@dougponder), “A friend of mine returned from TGC this past week…,” X, April 26, 2025.
Therefore, Ponder rightly concludes, “referring to the activity of women (or unordained men) in the church as ‘shepherding’ lacks biblical precedent.”[9] The New Testament consistently joins the function of shepherding with the office of elder-overseer. The shepherding task is not detached from the office. Again, that does not negate the reality that both non-pastoral men and women will care for other believers in significant ways within the local church. It does mean that in the New Testament, shepherding/pastoring is the function of those who hold the office of pastor/elder/overseer.
9. Doug Ponder (@dougponder), “A friend of mine returned from TGC this past week…,” X, April 26, 2025.
Furthermore, Scripture gives qualifications for this office. In 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, Paul does not merely describe gifted Christians generally; he specifies the qualifications for qualified men who hold governing and teaching authority in the church. This is not a statement of male superiority but of divine ordering. And when you live in accord with God’s designs, it leads to human flourishing. Christ loves His church enough to tell her how she is to be governed.
What has happened in many churches is that the therapeutic spirit of modern culture has overtaken biblical precision.[10] We have become uncomfortable with distinguishing roles, perhaps because we fear doing so will diminish the ministry of others. Or, given the impact of woke culture, we are allergic to anything that sniffs of marginalizing a whole category of people (i.e., women). In a desire to be nice to everyone, or give them a “seat at the table,” many have started to create confusion in this egalitarian moment we’ve found ourselves in.
10. See Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020); and David F. Wells, No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Eerdmans, 1993) and God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (Eerdmans, 1994).
The Beauty of Following God’s Wisdom
Creating distinctions between pastors and non-pastoral roles does not need to diminish anyone. I’ve served in the military for over fifteen years. Roles are distinguished at every level. And yet each person makes a vital contribution to the success of the mission. In a similar way, in the Bible God dignifies every Christian precisely by giving each member a distinct and important role (cf. Rom. 12:6–8; 1 Cor. 12:4–31). Not every teacher is a pastor. Not every discipler is an elder. Not every gifted counselor is an overseer. And not every overseer/elder/pastor has all the gifting the church needs.
When we flatten all ministry into one undifferentiated category, we subtly undermine the beauty of Christ’s ordered church. The New Testament envisions a body with diversity, structure, and ordained leadership. Christ gives shepherds to His church not as celebrities or executives, but as under-shepherds who will give an account for souls (Heb. 13:17). That office carries authority, responsibility, and qualification.
This is why language matters.
A Christian woman who faithfully disciples younger women is doing glorious kingdom work. A seminary professor teaching theology is doing important ministry. A layman leading a Bible study serves the church in Christ-exalting ways. But none of these realities require us to redefine “pastor.” The impulse to broaden the term often arises less from exegesis and more from cultural pressure and, in my view, the particularly egalitarian moment that dominates at the present.
But the church does not belong to the spirit of the age. The church belongs to Christ. We do not play fast and loose with the organization of the blood-bought Bride. Instead, we submit to His lordship in all of life, even in how we order the church and speak of the offices within. There is, moreover, something profoundly freeing about embracing biblical categories rather than resisting them. The church flourishes when Christians joyfully embrace the roles God has assigned. He is, after all, wiser than us (Isa. 55:9; Rom. 16:27).
The call, then, is not to diminish discipleship but to preserve the church’s biblical structure while unleashing every believer for faithful ministry. All Christians should aim to make disciples, share the good news of Jesus with their lost friends, counsel with wisdom those who need help, teach others to press the gospel into the corners of their lives, and serve those created in God’s image in self-sacrificial ways. But we should also honor the distinctions and specific roles Christ Himself established.
Conclusion
The church does not need less ministry. It needs clearer theology.
And when theology becomes clear again, the people of God can stop chasing borrowed categories from modern culture and return to the beautiful simplicity of Scripture: every believer—man or woman—is called to make disciples, but not every believer is called to shepherd Christ’s church as a pastor-elder-overseer. And to argue otherwise is to call into question the very wisdom of God.
