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There are moments in the life of the Church when questions we hoped were settled return—not because people enjoy controversy, but because the fruit of our settled answers has proved too costly to ignore. The question of women in leadership is one of those moments. For many, this conversation feels tired. Surely we have already said everything that needs to be said. Surely we have already chosen our position. Why keep revisiting this?
Because misunderstandings persist.
Because the consequences persist.
And because faithfulness to Christ requires more than defending inherited frameworks; it requires ongoing attentiveness to Scripture, to the Spirit, to the mission fields that await, and to the lived experience of God’s people.
This project, Think Again, is not an attempt to be current or provocative. It is a pastoral and theological invitation to look again at the biblical texts that have shaped how the Church understands women and leadership—and to ask whether we have handled them as faithfully as we imagine. Theology does not remain safely stored in documents or doctrinal statements. It shapes perception. It forms instinct. Over time, it trains us what to see—and, just as importantly, what not to see.
One of the great discoveries of my life in Scripture has been this: when each passage is read carefully in its own context, and when all passages are read together within the whole story of Scripture, the Bible does not limit women from leadership and preaching teams in the Church. On the contrary, the cumulative witness of Scripture consistently affirms God’s freedom to call, gift, and commission women alongside men. What often is presented as “biblical” to us is, in fact, a narrow reading of a few contested texts that have been allowed to override the wider narrative of shared vocation that runs from Genesis to Revelation.
Alongside this exegetical discovery has been a deeply practical one. As a serial church planter and now a movement leader, I have seen first-hand how much healthier churches feel when they are led and fed by mixed-gender leadership and preaching teams. Something shifts in the spiritual ecology of a community when women and men together shape vision, interpret Scripture, and pastor people. The quality of discernment deepens. The pastoral imagination widens. The culture becomes more humane, more self-aware, and more resilient. The Church does not merely become more inclusive; it becomes more faithful to the way God actually gifts his people.
One of the most sobering realisations in my own journey has been this: restrictive theology around women in church leadership does not only limit opportunity; it reshapes how women are perceived and how they learn to perceive themselves. Even in churches that sincerely want to honour women, the message communicated—often subtly—is that spiritual authority is, in the end, male. Women may be invited to contribute, but not in ways that truly direct, shape, and teach the community as a whole. The result is not merely fewer women preaching or leading; it is a Church that has trained itself to hear women with less weight, less expectation, and less trust.
Over the years, I have listened to many gifted, called women describe what it feels like to bring their discernment, ideas, and leadership into contexts where their voice is technically permitted but structurally constrained. Some speak of being repeatedly second-guessed in ways their male peers are not. Others describe the internal work of constantly asking whether it is even right to speak with conviction. Still others speak of slowly losing confidence in their own sense of calling because they have been told—explicitly or implicitly—that God would not call them in this way.
This is not only painful for those women. It is costly for the Church. When women are excluded from preaching, teaching, and leadership, the Church guarantees blind spots in its theology, its pastoral imagination, and its mission. Our reading of Scripture, our discernment of the Spirit, and our leadership of communities are shaped by a narrower range of experiences than God intends to use. The great irony is that structures claimed to protect “complementarity” often function to silence the very complement the Church most needs.
Think Again matters because the Bible itself tells a much larger story than our restrictive frameworks often allow. The arc of Scripture bends not toward hierarchy between men and women in God’s mission, but toward partnership. From Genesis to Revelation, we encounter a God who calls, anoints, commissions, and sends women alongside men. The contributions in this series refuse to let a small number of contested texts override the wider biblical narrative of shared vocation, mutual authority, and Spirit-gifted leadership. They do not flatten difficult passages or pretend interpretive work is easy. Instead, they model careful, whole-Bible reading that takes both Scripture and its impact on real people seriously.
There is another reason this work still matters: the next generation is watching closely. In many Western churches, we are rightly thanking God for the number of young men who are newly curious about faith, discipline, and meaning. But there is another story unfolding at the same time, and it is more uncomfortable to face: many Gen Z women are quietly leaving the Western church. They are not, in large numbers, rejecting Jesus. They are rejecting a church culture they experience as constraining, dismissive, or unsafe for their full humanity and calling. When young women consistently see leadership modeled as male, authority framed in gendered terms, and theological debates about women conducted without women’s voices at the centre, they draw conclusions. Often, the conclusion is not that Christianity is false, but that the church does not know what to do with them.
This should grieve us. A church that grows in male participation while losing women is not experiencing renewal; it is developing a theological imbalance that will shape its culture, its witness, and its future leadership. If our communities become places where young men find belonging and purpose while young women learn—implicitly—that their gifts are peripheral, we should not be surprised when women take their questions, their leadership capacity, and their spiritual hunger elsewhere.
For men, this moment calls for a particular kind of courage. It is one thing to affirm women in leadership in theory; it is another to create space in practice, to listen when it costs us something, and to allow our own assumptions to be challenged by Scripture and by the testimony of our sisters. Men do not lose authority by standing alongside women; we recover a more Christlike understanding of authority. In the kingdom of God, authority is not protected by exclusion but expressed through mutual submission, shared discernment, and the flourishing of others.
I have witnessed the difference it makes when churches genuinely release women into teaching, preaching, and leadership. Something shifts in the atmosphere. The imagination of the community widens. Young women begin to imagine their future with God not through the lens of limitation, but through the lens of calling. Young men learn to recognise spiritual authority in voices that do not mirror their own. The Church becomes more itself—more representative of the body Christ is forming, and more responsive to the Spirit who gifts without regard for gender.
The contributors to this series bring together theological rigour, pastoral sensitivity, and spiritual courage. They show that taking Scripture seriously does not require narrowing the Church’s obedience; it requires enlarging it. They demonstrate that the question is not whether women are gifted to lead—the Church has known the answer to that question in practice for centuries—but whether we are willing to align our theology with the gifts God is already giving.
This project exists because the need persists. But it also exists because hope persists. God has not stopped calling women. God has not stopped gifting women. And God has not stopped inviting the Church to repent where its theology has limited what he longs to release.
My prayer is that Think Again will help many to read Scripture with fresh humility, and to recover a vision of leadership that reflects the mutuality of the new creation. This is not a fringe issue, nor a finished one. It touches the heart of God and the credibility of the Church’s witness in the world.
The invitation before us is simple, but costly:
to look again,
to listen again,
and to allow the Word of God—read in the light of God’s redemptive story—to form communities where women and men lead together for the sake of the world God loves.
About Terran
Terran Williams is an avid surfer with a passion for building bridges between God’s Word and our world. He is the author of What’s So Amazing About Scripture, the Amazon-bestselling How God Sees Women, and I Will Build. After decades of planting and leading churches, he recently co-founded Nova Church in Cape Town, South Africa, and the A2 Movement, a global family of churches inspired by Acts 2. He is currently completing a PhD on Priscilla and Aquila, whose co-leadership model shapes the way he leads alongside his gifted wife, Julie. Together, they are also raising five children.
