The Danger of Role Reversals. Another important consideration is the negative impact of role reversal when a woman serves in the headship role of elder or pastor in the church. If male headship in the church is replaced by that of a woman, male headship in the family will be imperiled. The headship of a husband in his family can hardly remain unaffected if a woman or his own wife serves as the head of the congregation to which he belongs. What impact will this role reversal also have on the families of the congregations? Will it not at least tempt some women in the congregation to arrogate to themselves a position of headship in the family similar to the headship exercised in the church by their female pastor?

Consideration must also be given to the impact of the role modeling a female pastor can have on the children of divided families who have no father figure in their homes. To these children the pastor sometimes becomes the only positive father role model in their lives. A female pastor would deprive these children of an appropriate father role model.

Even more crucial is the negative impact that role reversal can have in our apprehension of God as our heavenly Father. Vern Poythress perceptively remarks that "the absence of godly, fatherly leadership within the church makes the affirmation of the Fatherhood of God closer to an abstraction. God’s Fatherhood is, of course, illustrated preeminently in the great deeds of the history of redemption that embody His fatherly rule, care, and discipline. But we are richer in our understanding of God because most of us have enjoyed having a human father, and we are richer still if we can see the fatherly care and rule of God embodied at a practical level in the older men of the church (Titus 2:2) and especially in the overseers."⁸⁴

C. S. Lewis rightly warns that "we have no authority to take the living and seminal figures which God has painted on the canvas of our nature and shift them about as if they were mere geometrical figures."⁸⁵ The sexual role distinctions, Lewis notes, go beyond physical appearance. They serve "to symbolize the hidden things of God."⁸⁶ Lewis warns that when we are in the church, "we are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature but as the live and awful shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge."⁸⁷

Lewis means that the male role of father in the home and of the pastor as spiritual father in the household of faith (1 Cor 4:15) points to a much greater reality, "largely beyond our direct knowledge," namely, that of the heavenly Father, the original and ultimate "Father" of the home, the church, and the human family. Paul clearly expresses this connection in Ephesians 3:14-15. "For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom all fatherhood (patria) in heaven and on earth derives its name" (NIV margin). The text suggests that all earthly fathers, whether biological fathers in the home or spiritual fathers in the church, reflect the image of the heavenly "Father," albeit in a human, creaturely way.

It is in no way derogatory to the female sex to affirm that an elder or pastor exercises fatherhood and not motherhood for God’s family, because as E. L. Mascall observes, "his office is a participation in God’s own relationship to his people and God is our Father in heaven and not our Mother."⁸⁸ The female sex has its own distinctive dignity and function, but it cannot represent the Fatherhood of God to His people, a dominant theme in both Old and New Testaments. The reason is simple. The sexual and symbolic role of a woman is that of mother and not of father. To change the nature of the symbol means to distort the apprehension of the reality to which the symbol points. To put it simply, a woman who stands for motherhood cannot appropriately represent the Fatherhood of God in the home or in the extended family of faith, the church.