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Chatter spoke with two IBC elders, chairman Peter Wayman and Wayne Smith and Jodie Niznik, one of the women who met with the Elder Board during the last year. Even though they all began from different starting points, their journey brought all four to the same place. Here are their stories.

Pete Wayman: Elder

Right after college I came to know the Lord at a small fundamental Plymouth Brethren Church. In that tradition women sing, but they do not speak at all during services. They also wear head coverings. We always went along with that as an act of submission to the elders, who pointed to Bible verses that supported those ideas. Yet the Bible also said that men should raise holy hands in prayer and great each other with a kiss, and we didn’t do that part. I thought that was interesting.

Despite these traditions, everyone was called to use their spiritual gifts, men and women alike. I noticed that we never had women preach or become elders, but beyond that, we were all called to serve and work, and women worked alongside men in other respects.
That’s basically where I started from, and I grew spiritually at that church for 16 years, but I later began to question what the Bible really had to say about women and the Church. I had my own challenges with the quest to understand God’s direction on this issue. There are clearly verses that are confusing or contradictory, and you can line up a lot of very godly Bible scholars on both sides of the issue who believe with all their heart that their interpretation of God’s Word is correct.

We [IBC elders and leadership] studied, analyzed, meditated and prayed about the ministry role of women in the Church. We engaged people and sought godly wisdom, progressed at a diligent pace, and are now engaging others. We acknowledge that many godly scholars support very different views of the same text. Realizing that Scripture isn’t always easy to discern, we need unity on the essentials and grace on the nonessentials. We allowed the Holy Spirit to work amongst us and reached a conclusion much like the Apostles did in the Council at Jerusalem in Acts 15, when they were considering how to deal with Gentile believers.

God says that we are all saved in the same way and endowed with spiritual gifts. It’s very clear that God is blessing women in a variety of ways across the globe, including in roles as pastors and teachers. We want to remove anything that might sideline an individual from being all he or she can be in serving God.

I don’t see this view of women as a giant step but rather a progression of our understanding of how God’s Word applies to us today. We are not the first church to get here, and we’re probably not going to be the last.

Jodie Niznik: Former IBC Intern

I was raised by a very strong single mom who taught me I could be anything I wanted to be in life—no holds barred. And I believed her.

But when I started to get more serious about my faith in college and became more exposed to the Christian culture, I saw walls go up based solely on my gender, and I began to pull back. I perceived based on what I was seeing that I, as a woman, could not, in fact, do anything.

When I decided to attend seminary, a pastor questioned my reason for doing so. He implied that, as a woman, I really didn’t need to go. I had other such encounters that showed me how controversial this topic really was. I found I was gifted in administration and leadership, but it was my leadership gifting that seemed restricted.

I needed to know where I stood and what I believed about women’s roles in the Church. Because while I didn’t desire to be a senior pastor or an elder (which seemed to me to be the two major issues) there definitely seemed, and still seems, to be a line in the sand. As I began unpacking what I’d learned about this issue and working through the various positions, I found my own position changing. It’s very hard to be dogmatic. I don’t think we will know this side of the kingdom truly what God wants for us in this area. So we must go forward with grace and love.

As one of my seminary professors said, “This is a discussion for the family dinner table. This is not a discussion of ‘us and them,’ like one we may have over a topic like Christ's deity or something like that…this is a family discussion and we need to have it with a lot of care.”

What IBC has been doing, working through these issues, doing the research, inviting women to share their journey, dealing with this issue honestly, could have a great impact even beyond IBC.

It is a joy to see men come at these scriptures and say, “I’m willing to look at them in a different way, and I’m willing to hear all sides of the argument. And I’m willing to get on my knees to see what the Lord has for our church.” I love that IBC’s elders invited women to be part of this process and share their thoughts and experiences as well. This was a one-year process that included many voices, books and viewpoints taken into account and prayed for.

Instead of using only half of the body of Christ, limping along, IBC empowers and uses the whole body of Christ. Personally, this has made me very hopeful for my own future in ministry.

Wayne Smith: Elder

While attending TCU, I was involved in Young Life whose focus was to be Christ-centered and take the Gospel to those who are outside the Church. It didn’t really matter who was doing that, and it was kind of an all-hands-on-deck philosophy. I had also become involved with a great bible church where I was exposed to a lot of men and women who where very talented and gifted.

During that time, Young Life began wrestling with the issue of where women fit into its mission. The first round of that was fairly difficult because we were met with a lot of angry women who demanded their place and that kind of put people off. At the same time we were watching some really talented women hit a glass ceiling. I thought, “These people can be very, very effective, and we are holding them back.”

In my journey I’ve had some internal conflict where I had this relatively high view of women and what they can do in the marketplace, and then I kind of bought into what’s traditionally been taught about women’s role in the Church.
Over the past few years I have moved much closer to where I want to be in understanding that, not only do I see women as very gifted, and very much needing to be a part of the mainstream of what we are doing in the missional church, but also having a much better grasp theologically of why I believe what I do.

On the one hand, you have godly humble scholars who say, at the very extreme, that women should have no place other than being silent in church. Then, on the other hand, you have godly humble scholars who are saying women need to be unleashed.

It does point to the complexity of our culture and the fact that there are no easy answers for this one. But I believe that everything I think about should theologically drive me back to the person of Jesus. So, for me, it comes down to Jesus and how he related to women. What was his intention with them, and what can we learn from that?

One of the passages that helped guide and impact me is John 4:1-42, where Jesus’ life intersects with the woman at the well. In that exchange, he has a very personal conversation with her which, in that day, would never have happened between a male and female Jew, let alone a male Jew and a female Samaritan.

Beyond that, Jesus essentially entrusts her with the Good News, and she goes back and becomes one of the first evangelists of the New Testament. That has impacted me. In Galatians it says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female…for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

This basically leads us to believe that scripture gives freedom to all to express their gifts and that, to the best of our knowledge, there is only one role that is exclusively male, which is elder and therefore by extension senior pastor.

At IBC, I believe we’ll experience the positive impact of further unleashing. Who knows what God will do when his body is set free to express all the gifts and talents he has given us. We can ultimately be a missional church that will impact this community, the greater region and the globe. My hope is that the kingdom impact will be significant.

At IBC we recognize that God created both man and woman in His image, that He offers the same Holy Spirit to both men and women at salvation, and that the same spiritual gifts are available to both men and women for service. While the New Testament seems to imply that eldership is reserved for men, the elders of IBC affirm that women in all other roles are scripturally qualified, spiritually blessed, and directly called to use their spiritual gifts to build Christ’s Kingdom.

Photography: Brittany Frey

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