No prophet to be sure, but I am willing to predict that the churches that have women voting now will have women preaching within fifteen years and LGBT pastors within twenty.
Many still think women voting is about making sure they are represented adequately. No, voting in the church has always been about two things: taking responsibility and exercising authority. (Whether or not there should be voting in the church is another matter, but where it exists in America it’s about those two things, no matter how laissez-faire you portray it.) Ergo, granting women the franchise is about feminism, and feminism inevitably leads to homosexuality, and now we know homosexuality leads perforce to the alphabet soup of LGBT possibly with a Q in their somewhere.
You may say that the following “proof” is only anecdotal, but then so we’re the stories of Nazi atrocities until they were seen. The July 11, 2015 issue of World (“Blindsided”, 33-38) tells the sad story of City Church, San Francisco. It started out in 1997 as conservative Presbyterian Church in American church based on Biblical preaching and teaching maintaining the truth against the high tide of homosexuality that characterizes that city to this day. In March 2015 the church leaders announced that sexually active homosexuals could become members. Most members were stunned. They thought this came out of the blue. Or did it?
When Marvin Olasky, one of the best investigative journalist in or outside of the Church Militant, investigated, he found that the shift wasn’t all that sudden. The switch from hetero to gay did happen without open discussion by fiat, but in retrospect some members pointed to a decision made in 2006 after much discussion. They decided to ordain women elders, and in so doing they voted to leave the Presbyterian Church America for the Reformed Church in America.
It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time – said the frog when the temperature went up 1 degree. The most frequently asked question in the meetings before the decision was “Are we on a slippery slope?” “We can turn the temperature back down any time you get uncomfortable,” the frog was told. The leaders assured the people by pointing to the examples – more accurately labeled “exceptions” – of women leaders in the Bible, and said homosexuality is a completely different issue because the Bible is so clear about that. The frog is assured, “This pan of water on this stove is completely different from a hot pan of water.”
Right now the Lutheran Church Melanchthon Synod maintains the Bible is not clear about women voting or the order of creation outside the pulpit or home but it is very clear about women not being pastors. When this bulwark fails as it did in the case of City Church, the pulpit is not only open to women but to gays and then LGBT-ites. It will happen the way it did at City Church. The much-loved founding pastor has a gay son. Don’t laugh; the good ship Missouri almost sank in the late 80s because then President Ralph Bohlmann didn’t know how to tell his young daughter her desire to be a pastor was wrong. And now 30 years later no one in America can tell someone it is wrong to desire the same sex for relations or a different sex for their reality.
If you’re not telling your women it is wrong for them to take responsibility for men and exercise authority over them by voting, it won’t be long before you hem and haw over telling them they can’t be pastors. Then the floodgates are open because the Order of Creation has been breached in the House of the Creator.
Begin the walk back this year or be prepared to be marched out within twenty.
