女性は牧師や説教者になれるのか？それは教会によって異なります

Some churches allow women to serve as pastors and preachers, and others do not. The Catholic and Orthodox churches ordain only men as priests, and the Southern Baptist Convention limits the office of pastor to men. The United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Episcopal Church and the Assemblies of God ordain women.

Does the Bible forbid women to be pastors?

No verse uses the words “woman” and “pastor” together. The word “pastors” appears once in the King James New Testament, in a list of gifts: “some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers” (Ephesians 4:11). The New Testament more often calls church leaders elders or bishops, the second word meaning overseers.

The verse closest to a direct rule is 1 Timothy 2:12: “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” Churches that do not ordain women read it as a standing rule for the church’s teaching office. Churches that ordain women read it in the light of its own context and the rest of Scripture. The verse itself does not say which reading is right, so each church’s answer depends on how it reads the passages below together.

Which verses are cited against women pastors?

Four groups of passages carry most of the argument.

• 1 Timothy 2:11–14. After forbidding a woman “to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man,” Paul gives his reason: “For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.” Because Paul gives a reason from creation, readers who limit the pastoral office to men take the rule to apply to every church.
• 1 Corinthians 14:34–35. “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak.” The verses go on: “it is a shame for women to speak in the church.”
• The qualifications for overseers. A bishop “must be blameless, the husband of one wife” (1 Timothy 3:2), and an elder likewise (Titus 1:5–6). Readers who limit the office to men note that both lists assume a man.
• Headship and the Twelve. “The head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God” (1 Corinthians 11:3). Jesus chose twelve men “whom also he named apostles” (Luke 6:13).

The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, which does not ordain women, cites 1 Corinthians 14:33–36 and 1 Timothy 2:11–14. The Danvers Statement, drawn up in 1987 by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, cites 1 Timothy 2:12–14 for its claim that distinctions in the roles of men and women “are ordained by God as part of the created order,” and affirms that “some governing and teaching roles within the church are restricted to men.” This view is often called complementarian.

Which women taught, prophesied or led in the Bible?

Churches that ordain women point to women who spoke for God or led God’s people. “Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lapidoth, she judged Israel at that time” (Judges 4:4). When King Josiah’s officials needed a word from the Lord about the newly found book of the law, they “went unto Huldah the prophetess” (2 Kings 22:14). At Pentecost, Peter quoted the prophet Joel: “your sons and your daughters shall prophesy” (Acts 2:17). Philip the evangelist “had four daughters, virgins, which did prophesy” (Acts 21:9), and Paul assumes that women pray and prophesy when he gives rules for how they do it (1 Corinthians 11:5).

Several New Testament women worked with Paul. Priscilla and her husband Aquila took the preacher Apollos aside “and expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly” (Acts 18:26), and Paul calls them “my helpers in Christ Jesus” (Romans 16:3). Of Euodias and Syntyche he writes that they “laboured with me in the gospel” (Philippians 4:2–3). After the resurrection, Jesus sent Mary Magdalene to his disciples, and she “came and told the disciples that she had seen the LORD” (John 20:17–18).

Two verses in Romans 16 are disputed in translation. Paul commends “Phebe our sister, which is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea” (Romans 16:1). The Greek word is diakonos, the word elsewhere translated “deacon,” and the English Standard Version notes that it may be translated that way here. In Romans 16:7 Paul greets “Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen, and my fellow-prisoners, who are of note among the apostles.” The New International Version says they are “outstanding among the apostles.” The Revised Standard Version reads the name as the man’s name Junias. The English Standard Version keeps Junia but reads the phrase as “well known to the apostles.”

Christians for Biblical Equality, founded in 1988, sets out the case for women pastors in its statement “Men, Women, and Biblical Equality.” It cites Galatians 3:28, “there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus,” and says that the Holy Spirit “sovereignly distributes gifts without preference as to gender.” It holds that “the few isolated texts that appear to restrict the full redemptive freedom of women” must be read in the light of “the broader teaching of Scripture and their total context.” This view is often called egalitarian.

Is a pastor different from a preacher?

Many churches treat the two as different, and some that do not ordain women still allow women to preach in some settings. A pastor holds an office: the New Testament describes elders who “feed the flock of God” and take “the oversight thereof” (1 Peter 5:2). Preaching is a task. Paul calls himself “a preacher, and an apostle” (1 Timothy 2:7). The difference between a reverend, a minister and a pastor also varies from one denomination to the next.

Catholic canon law draws the line at the Mass. Canon 766 allows that “lay persons can be permitted to preach in a church or oratory” when necessity or advantage calls for it, but canon 767 reserves the homily, the sermon within the liturgy, “to a priest or deacon.” Southern Baptists are moving to draw the line more tightly. Some of their churches had given women on staff the title of pastor, holding that only the senior pastor had to be a man, or had let women preach on Sunday mornings. An amendment the convention approved in June 2026 would exclude churches that do either.

Can women be Catholic priests?

No. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1577, states: “Only a baptized man (vir) validly receives sacred ordination.” It gives the reason: “The Lord Jesus chose men (viri) to form the college of the twelve apostles,” and “the Church recognizes herself to be bound by this choice made by the Lord himself. For this reason, the ordination of women is not possible.”

Scripture records no saying of Jesus on the question. The Catholic argument rests on what he did, in choosing twelve men. In the apostolic letter 『オルディナティオ・サチェルドタリス』 of 22 May 1994, Pope John Paul II declared “that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.” The same letter says the teaching “cannot mean that women are of lesser dignity,” and calls the role of women in the Church “absolutely necessary and irreplaceable.”

Women deacons are a separate question. A commission chaired by Cardinal Giuseppe Petrocchi studied the question at the request of Pope Francis and reported to Pope Leo XIV; its report was published on 4 December 2025. In July 2022 the commission voted seven to one to rule out “admitting women to the diaconate understood as a degree of the sacrament of Holy Orders,” while saying this assessment did not yet allow “a definitive judgment” of the kind made on the priesthood. Since 10 January 2021, under Pope Francis’s letter スピリトゥス・ドミニ, women can be formally installed as lectors and acolytes.

What does the Orthodox Church teach?

The Orthodox churches also ordain only men as priests and bishops. In 1988 the Ecumenical Patriarchate convened a consultation of the Orthodox churches at Rhodes on the place of women in the Church and the ordination of women. It reaffirmed the “male character of the sacramental priesthood,” citing Christ’s choice of male apostles, the example of the Virgin Mary, who did not exercise the priesthood, apostolic tradition and “some Pauline teachings.” The same consultation said that “the apostolic order of deaconesses should be revived,” noting that the deaconess was once “ordained within the sanctuary during the Divine Liturgy.”

バプテスト教会で女性が牧師になることはできますか？

Baptist churches have pastors, not priests, and each congregation calls its own. Baptist bodies disagree about women pastors.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s statement of faith, the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, says in Article VI: “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” In 2023 the convention amended the article to read “the office of pastor/elder/overseer.” It also expelled Saddleback Church in California in 2023 over its women pastors. Adding the rule to the convention’s constitution requires a two-thirds vote in two consecutive years. An amendment passed in 2023 failed to reach two-thirds in 2024, and another failed in 2025. On 10 June 2026 in Orlando, 74.6% of messengers voted for a new version, the Truth and Unity Amendment. It must pass again in 2027 to take effect.

Other Baptists ordain women. On 24 June 2023 the board of American Baptist Home Mission Societies, part of American Baptist Churches USA, said it “wholeheartedly affirms women pastors” and called the matter “a settled issue,” adding: “We are on strong biblical ground and stand firm within the conviction of the priesthood of all believers.”

Which other churches ordain women?

Methodist women preached long before they were ordained: John Wesley licensed Sarah Crosby to preach in 1761. The Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal church, concluded in its 2010 position paper that “we cannot find convincing evidence that the ministry of women is restricted according to some sacred or immutable principle,” and that God “pours out His Spirit upon both men and women and thereby gifts both sexes for ministry.” The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod opposes the ordination of women “on Scriptural grounds” but has concluded that Scripture does not forbid women to vote in congregational matters.

Why can women be pastors in the Protestant church in Germany?

All the regional churches of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) ordain women. Most introduced women’s ordination in the 1950s and early 1960s, and Schaumburg-Lippe was the last, in 1991. A statement published by the EKD says: “Das geistliche Amt steht in der evangelischen Kirche Frauen wie Männern offen” (“In the Protestant church the ordained ministry is open to women as to men”).

The EKD gives two reasons. The first is baptism: all Christians are called by baptism to be members of the Church and to share in its priesthood, and the statement quotes Galatians 3:28. The second is a way of reading the Bible. The EKD rejects isolating single verses as proof texts apart from their context, and concludes that neither Holy Scripture nor the church’s confession gives any grounds for excluding women from the pastorate.

How has the church’s view changed over time?

For most of Christian history the churches reserved ordained office to men. The early Latin theologian Tertullian wrote in 『処女のベールについて』: “It is not permitted to a woman to speak in the church; but neither (is it permitted her) to teach, nor to baptize, nor to offer, nor to claim to herself a lot in any manly function, not to say (in any) sacerdotal office.”

Change began among Protestants. In September 1853 Antoinette Brown was ordained minister of the Congregational church in South Butler, New York, the first woman ordained by a recognized denomination in the United States. Elizabeth Cady Stanton published The Woman’s Bible, a commentary in two volumes (1895–98), and Katharine Bushnell, a former Methodist medical missionary in China, published God’s Word to Women (1923), a course of Bible lessons arguing that passages about women had been mistranslated. Many of the large Protestant churches in the United States, Britain and Germany began ordaining women between the 1950s and the 1990s. Over the same years the Catholic Church restated its teaching in 『インテル・インシニオーレス』 (1976) and 『オルディナティオ・サチェルドタリス』 (1994), and the Southern Baptist Convention wrote its limit into the Baptist Faith and Message in 2000.

関連資料

• Bible verses about elders and pastors
• 女性はカトリックの司祭になれますか？
• Female figures of the Bible
• カトリック、メソジスト、バプテストの比較