(OPINION) Ashley Wilkerson, senior co-pastor of Pacific Coast Church in Tacoma, Washington, which she leads with her husband JonFulton Wilkerson, has drawn criticism for suggesting that Bible translators altered Scripture to diminish evidence that women served as apostles, deacons and even pastors in the early church.
Online chatter about Wilkerson began with a clip posted online last month from a sermon she taught at a women’s conference last November at Trinity Church Miami called “Lead Like a Woman.”
“Prisca, Mary, Phoebe, Junia, Tryphena and Tryphosa — their names are my favorite to say — many others that were apostles, leaders in the early church.
Some of which, their names have been changed in Scripture because we understood, we thought, ‘Oh no, they can’t be women apostles.’ Yeah, they were,” Wilkerson said in the clip posted by The Holy Nope, a ministry of Reformation Frontline Missions run by Austin Keeler to “make Jesus unavoidable.”
“I’m not telling you this so you distrust Scripture. I’m not talking about that. I’m calling you to dig deeper because sometimes it gets muddled in our culture,” she said.
Reacting to Wilkerson’s argument, Pastor Carl A. Hargrove, associate professor of pastoral ministries at The Master’s Seminary, dismissed her sermon as “imaginations of a mind with an unbiblical agenda.”
“The imaginations of a mind with an unbiblical agenda posing as spiritually enlightening. Women apostles, some whose names were changed to hide the truth??!!” he asked on X incredulously.
When asked to elaborate on his response to Wilkerson’s argument in an interview with The Christian Post, Hargrove said Wilkerson has “no evidence” of her claim.
“Well, she has no evidence of names changed, of women who are apostles. She obviously didn’t put it forth, even to make such a claim and put forward the evidence, there is none,” he said.
“The unbiblical agenda is her role as a pastor when 1 Timothy 2 clearly states that that is a role for a man. And the issue, as some people may say, is cultural or even specific to issues at Ephesus are not true because Paul takes the argument all the way back to creation itself in order. Obviously, the issue is not one of capabilities, but simply order of God’s design,” he said.
The role of women in ministry has been debated for centuries. While prominent Christian denominations, such as the Southern Baptist Convention and Presbyterian Church in America, don’t permit women to serve in pastoral teaching roles, others, such as Wilkerson’s Assemblies of God and many Mainline Protestant denominations, allow women to serve as lead or teaching pastors or priests.
Wilkerson, the daughter-in-law of megachurch Pastors Rich and Robyn Wilkerson, defended her position in an interview with CP.
She described the theology of her three-year-old church as consistent with the Evangelical tradition coming out of the Assemblies of God denomination.
She maintains that while she has no problem with Scripture and believes God’s Word is infallible, translators aren’t.
Wilkerson said she was inspired to dig deeper into research by the work of Beth Allison Barr, an American historian who’s currently the James Vardaman Endowed Professor of History at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
“I don’t feel the need to respond at all to untrue and unfounded claims. I would encourage all people interested in this subject to research the history of the translations for themselves. The evidence is irrefutable if you’re willing to look,” she told CP before sharing an excerpt from Barr’s book.
It was Paul’s women in Romans 16 who finally changed my mind. On a whim, I asked one of the students to open their Bible and read Romans 16 out loud (at a Christian university I can always count on at least one student to have a Bible in hand). I asked the class to listen and to write down every female name they heard.
It was a powerful teaching moment — for the students and for me. I knew women filled those verses, but I had never listened to their names being read aloud, one after the other. Phoebe, the deacon, carried the letter from Paul and read it aloud to her house church. (READ MORE)
