The question of whether women should be ordained to ecclesiastical offices remains a thorny, contested, and divisive issue within the Reformed Churches in South Africa (GKSA; Vorster 2016:33). However, with the most recent GKSA General Synod 2026 decision, this contestation seems to have taken another twist, approaching a breaking point that could lead to a possible schism within this denomination.

Previous research has identified hermeneutics as the underlying problem (Pieterse 2002; Van Deventer 2005:694). In addition, this article identifies missional and decolonial discourses as gaps that require urgent attention. It contends that the GKSA’s position is not based on a neutral reading of Scripture but on a decision influenced and shaped by conservative patriarchal lenses rooted in biblical, Jewish, Graeco-Roman, Western, and African socio-cultural systems (Van Rensburg 2002:731–732; Wielenga 2010:707). This position is further reinforced by colonial and apartheid power matrices that privilege male headship and restrict women’s roles to the kitchen and childbearing (Pieterse 2002:693).

Furthermore, the decision points to a missional misalignment not only with the missio Dei, Christ, and Paul’s missional praxis regarding women’s participation in leadership roles in the public but also with the current realities of a post-colonial and apartheid South Africa (Van Deventer 2005). In some black congregations within the GKSA, despite a lack of appetite to engage on the matter (Baloyi 2016:2), women already participate actively in leadership roles such as deacons, elders, teaching catechism, leading worship, and exercising pastoral influence in the absence of male leadership as well as during Easter services (Mudau & Khosa-Nkatini 2025:2).

Based on the foregoing, the overarching question this article seeks to investigate, is the following: How should a Reformed church discern and order its ecclesial praxis regarding women in office in a way that is hermeneutically faithful, missionally coherent, confessionally reformed, and accountable to the imperative of decoloniality?

This study is undertaken from a broader reformed missiological framework, with special focus on a qualitative, hermeneutical-missiological research design (Bosch 1991:390; Wright 2006:45). To critique the current GKSA’s decision to exclude women from ecclesiastical leadership and office, this article uses a reformed missional lens in decoloniality, as captured in Figure 1.

Missio Dei refers to the mission of God, and David Bosch, among others, is credited as a pioneer of this missional paradigm. This is a shift that seeks to rediscover the church’s mission as primarily the work of God, while the church remains an instrument in advancing what God is doing in the world. Bosch (1991:390) opines: ‘To participate in mission is to participate in the movement of God’s love toward people, since God is a fountain of sending love.’ It also reaffirms the sovereignty of God, who can work beyond the defined human parameters in any ecclesiastical praxis. Sanou (2018:301) asserts: ‘The Bible not only reveals God as the prime initiator and mover of mission, but it also reveals him as creative in ways that sometimes seem unorthodox to his creatures.’ The foregoing marks a radical shift from the theology of mission to a missional theology.

Missional theology refers to a biblical theology founded and grounded on the missio Dei (Sanou 2018:307). Sanou (2018:307–308) opines: ‘[T]his means that, for the sake of its own future, theology needs insights from missiology.’ In this case, missiology does not only serve as a gadfly that causes unrest in the house of theology (Bosch 1991:496) but also helps unmask and overcome cultural barriers that obscure the full reception of the gospel (Sanou 2018:310).

This kind of missional theology seeks to rediscover the church’s role in mission as a transformative agent of the missio Dei. In this case, the church’s agency, even when applied to the current discourse, is to stand where God stands concerning the truth, the unknown borders, those on the margins, and justice (Mashau 2018: 139–140). This understanding underscores the need to read Scripture through a reformed missional lens.

Missional hermeneutics is comprehensively defined and captured in the words of McKinzie (2024):

The lenses that biblical scholars must wear in reading Scripture must be biased towards the missio Dei. In this case, Wright (2006:40) speaks of ‘mission as a focus of hermeneutical coherence’. Therefore, if mission is a coherent thrust in the biblical narrative, it should also guide biblical scholars in addressing complex issues related to church structures. The question of women in the ecclesiastical office must also be evaluated based on their participation in or the obstruction of God’s redemptive historical footprint. Accordingly, Sanou (2018) says:

In this article, a decolonial missional lens, or decolonial missiology, refers to the missiological application of the Scripture in the context of the previously colonised and oppressed people as in the case of apartheid South Africa. Niemandt (2019:3) declares: ‘Decoloniality is the discovery of agency by theologians from Africa, South America and other emerging Christians.’

This brings in the liberation motif of the missio Dei as reflected in the following words of Wright (1996:45): ‘… a missional hermeneutic of Scripture must have a liberationist dimension’. Niemandt (2019) also asserted:

Building on the works of decolonial scholars, decoloniality is used not only to unmask the colonial and apartheid patriarchal biases within ecclesiastical spaces but also to recentre marginalised voices, like those of women, in the efforts to reaffirm their agency. Decoloniality, therefore, is not only a political concept but one that should be applied in the context of both Christianity and African Christian theology (Podolecka 2025:157; Sakupapa 2018:406).

Accordingly, churches are also considered sites for the reproduction of coloniality that must also be decolonised (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013:11). The intention is not merely to reverse colonially inherited practices but to critically reconstruct a liberative framework that seeks to dismantle the colonial-patriarchal and ecclesiastical structures that undermine and marginalise the role of women in ecclesiastical office in the case of the current discourse.

In their efforts to challenge and dismantle male normativity as a colonial, apartheid, and Western Christendom hangover and to critique the colonial-patriarchal biases embedded in biblical interpretations and ecclesial policies, African women theologians developed post-colonial feminist, womanist (Kobo 2018a; Naicker 2024:6), and Bosadi [Womanhood] biblical hermeneutics and theorisations (Masenya 1997:439; 2005:744). According to Masenya (2005):

In the efforts to address the plight, silencing, and liberation of African women, it is through these decolonial lenses that ‘… the Bible is read in terms of the metanarrative of the missional intention of God’ (Van Aarde & Li-M 2017:5–6).

The history of the GKSA dates back to 1859 (Du Plooy 2003:485; Zgambo 2022:5). The church was formed as a protest against the alleged decay or rot within the Dutch Reformed Church, and as a result, became a breakaway movement. The GKSA with its roots in the Netherlands and a strong influence of Dutch Calvinism and Afrikaner nationalism, holds to the authority of the Scriptures, the Three Forms of Unity (the Canons of Dordt, the Belgic Confession, and the Heidelberg Catechism), and the Church Order. Based on their hermeneutical approach and desire to be faithful to the Scripture and confessions, the GKSA opted for an ecclesiology and ecclesial praxis dominated by male leadership.

Accordingly, ‘a woman’s primary role and task are limited to the home where she has to be a wife to her husband and a mother to her children’ (Pieterse 2002:691). This position extended to speak to their involvement in education and politics (Pieterse 2002:695). The literary approach to the reading and application of Pauline texts, such as 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Corinthians 14, is used to justify the exclusion and marginalisation of women regarding ecclesiastical leadership and offices. It is concluded, ‘This hermeneutical deficiency lies at the heart of the prohibition of women in offices of elder and minister’ (Vorster 2016:33); hence, the practice of other churches in ordaining women as deacons and elders.

Hermeneutics refers to the biblical interpretation of the Bible and its application to address social challenges of every generation, past, present, and future. Historically, the reformed churches, in the main, subscribe to a hermeneutical approach that seeks to honour the authority of the Scriptures and the Three Forms of Unity as set out in the Church Order of Dordt. This tradition has cultivated what some scholars identify as a biblical or proof-texting hermeneutic, frequently described as a literary approach (Nunes & Van Deventer 2009:756). Such an approach often employs Scripture to undergird particular doctrinal positions, while assuming the neutrality and universality of its own interpretive framework. The Bible is used to lend authority to a specific point of view (Snyman 2002:2), even though it subscribes to a particular political ideology. Snyman (2002:2) opines further: ‘The reading that wins is the reading that is supported by the political power of the day.’

At a deeper level, the reason that led to the use of Pauline texts that restrict women from office, such as 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Corinthians 14, is their normative or prescriptive character. White (1994) opines:

This theological grounding coupled with the Reformed commitment to a grammatical-historical method of exegesis, results in an interpretive priority on textual meaning, the immediate literary context, and the authorial intent of biblical authors.

Furthermore, when contradictory positions arise in Scripture, Coetsee and Goede (2022:25) call for the application of ‘[O]ne of the most foundational principles of Reformed exposition of Scripture’, namely that ‘holy Scripture is for itself its own (best) interpreter [sacra Scriptura sui ipsius interpres]’. However, this principle seems to be applied selectively, particularly when the exegete’s judgement is clouded by a literary approach or other biases, such as the preferred headship of men in some cultures.

Therefore, while efforts are made to remain faithful to the authority of Scripture, the discourse around the Reformed hermeneutical approach remains a site of ongoing conversation about the roles of history, context, and power in biblical interpretation. Consequently, this article calls for a reformed missional lens for reading biblical texts that address women in ecclesiastical office. The reformed missional lens allows God, in his missionary endeavours, to move in an unorthodox way (Sanou 2018:301).

The decision to bar women from ecclesiastical office is based on interpretations of biblical texts that align with this position, creation-order theology, and Reformed confessional interpretation. While there are many Reformed complementarian scholars, this article will focus on discussing John Calvin’s position, because his understanding and interpretation of Pauline texts on this subject have become a universal norm among Reformation scholars. It is asserted, ‘what is problematic about Calvin’s truncated reading and interpretation of the Bible, is how it becomes a universal way of reading and interpretation’ (Kobo 2018b:4). The reflection on this interpretation is: Paul’s instruction not to permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man in 1 Timothy 2:11–15.

This interpretation does not take away women’s responsibility for instructing their family; it does, however, remove them from occupying the office of teaching and preaching in public because it is reserved for men only (Calvin 1999b:50). This instruction is tied to the instruction to women not to exercise authority over men because women were formed to obey or subject themselves under the authority of men as in the punishment conveyed to a woman in Genesis 3:16; hence the reference to Eve to have been the one who sinned first. For Calvin (1999b:52), the issue of childbearing in 1 Timothy 2:15 offers women comfort, preventing them from despairing and keeping hope for their salvation, which still depends on their obedience to men. This argument contradicts the very Protestant teaching that human justification, including that of women, is by faith alone [sola fide].

A critique on women in office is conducted in the spirit of the reformed popular dictum, ecclesiae reformata semper reformanda [the church reformed, always reforming], and reformata secundum verbum Dei [reforming according to the Word of God] (Koffeman 2015:3). It presupposes that the decision is based on a multidimensional hermeneutical problem arising from the intersectionality of the literary interpretation of Scripture, proof-texting, tradition, and underlying cultural norms and biases. The following challenges are identified:

Having discussed and unmasked that the underlying challenges of the GKSA are not merely hermeneutical in nature, but also patriarchal and missional, the following reformed missional framework is proposed:

This article argued that the continued exclusion and marginalisation of women in ecclesiastical offices in the GKSA constitute a hermeneutical problem rooted in the selective reading of Pauline texts and missional misalignment with the missio Dei, while neglecting the broader canonical witness and Paul’s missional praxis. A Reformed hermeneutic – grounded in Scriptura sui ipsius interpres, sensitivity to socio-historical context, and missional coherence of the biblical grand narrative – unmasks that Pauline texts such as 1 Timothy 2:8–15 and 1 Corinthians 14:33–36 address disruptive contestations rooted in local challenges such as those of churches in Ephesus and Corinth, and therefore cannot constitute universal norms that apply in every generation. A renewed effort to make proper discernment is necessary in resolving the ongoing differences on women’s ecclesiastical offices within the GKSA, which aligns with the ecclesia reformata semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei slogan of the Reformation.

This is a result of clear canonical affirmations of the Pauline corpus pointing to women in the biblical texts who functioned as prophets, leaders, teachers, and co-workers in the preaching of the gospel and advancement of the Kingdom of God. Ultimately, a church that refuses to ordain women in ecclesiastical offices not only misreads Scripture but also risks silencing the Spirit of God and standing against the missio Dei. Therefore, a true and authentic Reformed church must be willing to reform when the Spirit of God unmasks blind spots that require correction.