Campus Ministries: Standing in the Gender Gap

Debate over women in leadership forces para-church groups to rethink their unwritten policies.

Campus Crusade for Christ staff member Pamela Miller was in for a surprise when she arrived at a ministry Christmas conference in 1982. Unlike previous years, she was not assigned to lead a discussion group. The reason: Miller had been married earlier that year. “I assumed it was an oversight,” she says, “but the leadership responded as if they just didn’t know what to do with me, a married woman with no children.”

During her seven years with the ministry, Miller also grew disturbed by Crusade’s “wife days.” In her view, the weekly half-day off seemed “blatantly sexist.” And when she asked if she and her husband could alternate taking the time off, or share a half-day off every two weeks, the suggestions “were not taken seriously,” she says. “The attitude this policy promotes is that wives are dispensable, but husbands are not, and that wives are expected to do the housework on these days off.”

Miller’s experience is typical of the tightrope that ministries such as Campus Crusade, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), and the Navigators walk when dealing with sensitive “secondary” doctrinal issues. But the topic of women’s roles, which has sparked intense debate among evangelical denominations and other institutions, is one the nondenominational ministries find even harder to avoid.

All three campus groups have tried to maintain an official “no policy” approach. But insiders say that undeniable, unspoken policies exist. And in the past two years, all three have formally or informally re-examined their policies on women’s roles.

Politically Correct?

If Miller’s experience represents one side of the coin, David Green’s might be the other. For six years, Green successfully nurtured a regional InterVarsity ministry to 17 campuses in Pennsylvania. But in late April, he was fired.

Green says disagreement between him and his two immediate superiors over his “more conservative” views on the role of women in ministry, as well as the proper way to ensure ethnically diverse student groups, contributed greatly to his dismissal. His superiors say that while gender and ethnic policies were involved, the larger issue was Green’s insubordination to authority.

However, part of a mediated agreement between Green and his regional director (which was forged just before his firing) said that Green, who had an all-male staff of seven, must hire two women staff members by June 1994. The agreement also said Green must “select women and people of color to speak at area events, affirm female speakers at InterVarsity events, and attend area and regional events regardless of the speaker’s gender.”

Green’s analysis is frank: “I have experienced some difficulties that would be considered in the realm of politically correct issues.”

Bob Fryling, IVCF vice-president and director of campus ministries, explains such requirements by pointing to the fact that 56 percent of all college students are female. IVCF needs to reflect that, he says. “They are asking questions in terms of role models in terms of [the] place of women.”

Five of IVCF’s estimated 46 area directors are women; one of 13 regional directors is female. The organization’s 480 campus staff are encouraged to seek out and promote female leaders.

In fact, IVCF’s history indicates that women have always had freedom to minister, says Linda Doll, former director of InterVarsity Press and former IVCF staff member. “This … has been going on since the beginning of InterVarsity,” she says. While a minority of IVCF staff are, like Green, resisting a more solid, working policy that promotes women to all levels of leadership, some women involved with Navigators and Crusade say their groups operate with predominantly male leadership structures.

Currently, only 2 of Campus Crusade’s 164 campus directors are female; both oversee all-female colleges. This is despite the fact that Campus Crusade has 791 women compared to 660 men on its staff on U.S. campuses. (It allows a woman to serve as associate campus director, who answers to the male campus director.) Campus Crusade has no written policy regarding women in leadership, though its Family Ministry division teaches that men are to be “servant/leader[s]” and women “helper/homemaker[s].”

“We are not saying [women] can’t do anything, and we aren’t saying that they can do everything,” says Steve Sellers, director of Campus Crusade’s U.S. campus ministries. “We felt like trying to address the issue, and coming out with something totally definitive is a limitation, as opposed to a solution.”

Sellers says Campus Crusade does not discourage women from becoming campus directors. “We don’t have a lot of women clamoring to be campus directors, so it’s not that we are saying, ‘No, you can’t be.’ ”

But Karen Masters, who worked 12 years overseas with Crusade, says female staff members are not encouraged to aspire to such leadership. “I think a lot of women come in and they haven’t studied the issue, and so they just assume [they cannot be a campus director] and they don’t knock down the door.”

Authority Of Position

A recent restructuring of the Navigators organization has helped allow women to use their gifts more freely, some of its staff members say. The Navigators U.S. campus ministry division has 182 couples, 40 single men, and 25 single women serving on 130 campuses. Leadership now rests with a ten-member national collegiate leadership team (eight men and two women), says Bill Tell, associate director campus ministries. Because the Navigators started among military personnel, the ministry historically has been predisposed toward male leadership, he says. Under a new leadership model, however, women and men alike now serve according to their spiritual gifts and abilities, based on a biblical understanding of Christians working together in community, rather than a culture-dictated hierarchy. Still, there are limits to what women staff members can do.

“I think a woman can teach the Bible, and based on the Scriptures, they could say something like, ‘We should do this,’ ” Tell says. “But we would probably hesitate to say a women can say, ‘We will do this’ in terms of leadership over men.… So women can teach with the authority of the Scriptures but not necessarily with the authority of position.”

Becky Brodin, who has served about ten years with the Navigators in its community division (one of 13 ministry divisions, with campus ministry being another), still thinks the Navigators are “fairly male-dominated.… There are more restrictions for women on Navigator staff than there are opportunities,” she says. But she and another female Navigator staff member told CT they are encouraged that the ministry’s new structure, which removed a lot of midlevel leadership, has helped open new opportunities.

Vulnerable Position

The cautious way in which the campus ministries have approached the issue of women in leadership reflects a general dilemma that many nondenominational ministries encounter: They desire to promote strong, biblical teaching, while avoiding doctrinal positions more indicative of a denomination.

“Parachurch agencies are vulnerable in terms of taking a particular [doctrinal] stand,” says Joel Carpenter, program director for religion for the Pew Charitable Trusts and a historian of parachurch ministries. Because of their dependence on donations, they are “incredibly sensitive to their constituency.” To come down on one side or the other of controversial doctrinal issues is to risk losing support. “So they really try to take a mediating role if they can.”

That approach seems to satisfy many women in the campus ministries. Within Campus Crusade, even those women who express frustration with the unwritten policy praise the ministry’s overall work. And they acknowledge that more than one responsible, biblical interpretation exists concerning women’s roles.

Still, women in all three organizations say they would benefit from more precise statements concerning what women can and cannot do. Without a clear policy, women’s roles are sometimes left to the convictions of campus or regional directors, who may not have worked out a solid stance on the issue. Or women may face a succession of different directors and views.

In fact, Crusade and IVCF have considered creating policy statements in recent years. IVCF’s Fryling confirmed to CT that IVCF senior women leaders recently asked the top leadership to start developing a policy affirming a woman’s right to minister on equal ground with a man. He says that leaders are working on a paper outlining “our biblical reasons” for advancing gifted women into leadership.

IVCF area director Jeanette Yep says she expects that a policy statement will eventually evolve. “Some people in the fellowship would say we are leaning toward an interpretation of Scripture that allows women to participate in a full range of ministry,” she says.

Currently, Campus Crusade—like the Navigators—is initiating a massive restructuring plan, though it is not clear what effect that will have on women’s ministry roles.

One thing is clear, however: As the issue of women in ministry continues to fuel denominational debates, campus parachurch ministries will find it harder and harder to plot a middle road.

By Joe Maxwell.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.