CLC

@A. Amos Love

Nice. Very insightful. It is foolish to be quibbling about who should and should not be a leader when we are all called to be disciples with one Leader.

Though…., it is a worthy cause to quibble about who should be able to prophesy. I would postulate that there are already women prophesying and being apostles, even in patriarchal churches.
I would postulate that Cheryl here is prophesying right now to a church with the rest of us able to contribute our own prophesies in comments.

What is a church?
What is a pastor?
What is an apostle?

Depends on what time period you live in, I guess. These days a church means either believers in Christ as a whole or a building; but the Bible says that the Church is the believers. It makes no mention of buildings being churches. Nor does it make mention of these buildings being “the house of God”. There was only one house of God in the past at a time. It was the Temple (whichever one was standing at the time) or the tabernacle.
Now Jesus said that He lives in our hearts. Our bodies are His temple. Wherever His temples gather is a church body. And this is a gathering of God’s temple.
And each of us, but especially Cheryl, is standing up and prophesying to this church. We have no “leader”. We only have an administrator named Cheryl who keeps order in the discourse, which makes her the overseer.

So what is a pastor? You won’t find the role of pastor in the Bible. You won’t find a church in the Bible where only one man stands up and preaches from the Word, while the rest sit and listen. No, rather you find churches where anyone may stand up and speak a prophesy from Scripture as long as they do it in an orderly fashion.
And I would propose that there are several women out there, even in patriarchal households, in a gathering of two or three believers who are prophesying to men and women alike. They just don’t have the high and mighty title of “pastor” or “leader”, only the function of one to the people listening at the moment, be it man or woman.

What is an apostle? According to church “leaders”, apostles are leaders of churches. They direct the affairs of those churches. They have dominion over them. But let’s look at what the Bible shows an apostle doing? He goes out to lands preaching the Good Word to those who have not heard it. And helps shepherd the new churches that grow in those lands until they are able to stand on their own. So what is an apostle but a missionary? Are there not female missionaries out there?
I would like to quote someone very witty that I have known by the name of James:
“Woman are permitted to preach in open air under two conditions:

a) the woman is in a foreign country or on an Indian Reservation;

and,

2) the listeners are at least two shades darker in skin color than the woman in question.”
How very true. Though it is very sad that the names of Rachael Saint and Elisabeth Elliot are being blotted out on some Christian sites that I have seen in favor of their brothers/husbands who, contrary to those sites, did not share the gospel with the Auca Indians because they were martyred by the Auca’s before they could. Still, there are still women functioning as missionaries to those “lowly” dark-skinned people. That makes them apostles without the flowery, uplifted title.
I was reading this article of Cheryl’s: http://strivetoenter.com/wim/2008/01/22/the-husband-as-king-over-the-wife/
And I ran into the comments of “Happy” Promise Keeper. And I read his so-called proof that Junia wasn’t female located here: http://www.cbmw.org/Resources/Articles/A-Female-Apostle
I will quote from that article: “I tentatively affirm that the second person was a man named Junias, although I cannot be certain about the matter.”
Well, dear sir, there are other female apostles here in modern times. Shall you give them a sex change, too? No, I suppose you shall just do the best to wipe their names from history. Those female apostles perform the function without the title because they love God and wish to share that love with other people. That is more than I can say for you who seeks after titles of importance. And, in the process, seek to denigrate the work of one of these fine people with this quote: “Therefore, in light of this evidence, I conclude that Andronicus and Junias were two prominent messengers that served Paul and the early churches by delivering important instructions from the former to the latter, and by relaying questions and concerns from the latter to the former.”
Man, they must have been some stupendously great messengers to get such high praise as that while still being stuck behind bars with Paul, meaning they are unable to deliver messages anymore. They were such great messengers that the Romans were bent on prosecuting these messengers but not the one delivering the book of Romans.
Or MAYBE they were arrested because they were, yes, messengers but messengers of God’s Word to those who have not heard it, where the term “apostle” likely came from.