The Word teaches that gender distinctions are important to our Creator, and especially so in public worship of the church.[3] What reader of the Bible is actually surprised by this? We are told that God made man in His own image, male and female, placed them in a Garden and befriended them. With multi-faceted beauty and giftedness, they were to be fruitful and multiply, tend the garden, and live in communion with each other and the living Lord of the universe. Adam was the head and Eve the mother of all living. Tragically, the Fall shattered everything—communion with God, harmonious yet distinct gender roles, the safety and security of Eden, and the hope of a godly seed. 

When it comes to gender and evangelicalism, it is abundantly clear that the barbarians are at the gates.

Christendom’s simple commitment to the creation binary of male and female is being challenged by a new (old) “gender continuum” which, despite loud protestations to the contrary, invariably proceeds to a signal act of rebellion against God and His nature: Gender reassignment surgery, a “procedure” that is advocated even for children—some of whom have just barely avoided the related horror of abortion.

But the revolutionaries aren’t directly storming the gates. Instead, they are playing the old one-stringed violin of fear: Their mournful music announces that the church, with her fossilized categories of fixed genders and roles, risks becoming irrelevant. They are here to help us, and many evangelicals appear to be carrying their tune. Some advocate an urgent reworking of gender norms. Others tell us that after two millennia of settled order, it is now (now!) high time to incorporate women into non-traditional teaching and worship roles. Others go further, calling the church to make unique accommodations for the LGBTQ+ community. Such changes, we are told, are necessary gospel-bridges to a changing world.

But will such changes actually help us bring the gospel to a fallen world? Consideration of an oft-overlooked passage from Paul’s first letter to Corinth (I Cor. 11:216) gives us a clear answer.

Paul’s letter to Corinth repeatedly discusses human sexuality and worship. The apostle publicly calls out sexual sin (I Cor. 5) and notes that real Christians abandon former proclivities, including homosexuality(I Cor. 6:9-11) and prostitution (I Cor. 6:15-20). He also teaches on the Lord’s Supper (I Cor. 10 & 11), spiritual gifts (I Cor. 12), and good order in worship (I Cor. 14). In I Cor. 11:2-16, he deals with both sexuality and worship, and is concerned with the way in which men and women, as members of one body, participate variously in the public worship of God.

I don’t think that the apostle was mandating veils, Derby hats, or any other headgear for the ladies of the First Church of Corinth. The grammar makes that case hard to prove as Paul uses verbs and adjectives to describe the act of “covering” or a “covered” head, but only once does the passage use a noun to describe a concrete “thing” to which the verbs and adjectives relate. That noun appears in 11:15b: “for her hair is given to her for a covering.”

This curious mention of hair runs throughout the passage (I Cor. 11:5, 6, 14, 15), and is connected to a profound principle: “Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair it is a disgrace to him?” (I Cor. 15:14). Paul posits this sexual dimorphism to be a fixed principle in the original created order.[1] He then adds to his rebuke of overly hairy men another commendation of the natural order of things: “If a woman has long hair, it is her glory” (I Cor. 11:15). The passage in its broader context teaches a simple lesson: God intends natural gender distinctions to be visible and obvious in the worshiping assembly.[2]

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