Christianity Today published short essays by two moderate voices in the Complementarian vs. Egalitarian debate called Wounds of a Friend: Complementarian and Wounds of a Friend: Egalitarian respectively.

John Koessler and Sarah Sumner do a good job of each pointing out the pitfalls of each view and how some problems can be remedied.

If someone forced me to be pick a side I would choose Egalitarian, but for the life of me I have been seeking a third way out of this mess.  I think the problem lays not in Male/Female but in the immense discrepancies between titled roles within the early church and what they are called today.  Bishop, Deacon, Elder, and Pastor are all viewed differently by different denominations and mean different things than they did two thousand years ago.  This makes the problem very complex. ... more