As far as the ministry roles you mention, I think churches should make very clear which roles women should take on, and why this is so. Decisions coming from bias or cultural mores are not authoritative.

For our church, the difference between leadership of a bible study and leadership of a church boils down to the role of teaching during a church service. It doesn't have anything to do with a mind/heart issue.

Personally, I've seen it happen all the time. I was raised as a missionary kid in Africa & Southeast Asia where women preaching and teaching was not a big deal at all.

The denomination I currently belong to (Christian and Missionary Alliance) ordains women who become missionaries overseas or even if they, get this, pastor at a non-English speaking church here in the U.S. (such as a Chinese Alliance church).

Interestingly enough, the CMA will not ordain women as pastors if the church is a regular old WASP congregation that speaks English like the one I attend. It sounds crazy, but my wife and I have personally encountered this obstacle because she's interested in preaching/ordination but the gender restrictions are applied very inconsistently (i.e. certain kinds of leadership and teaching are ok in mixed groups, but not others).

Mimi Haddad is right on the money. The idea of “gender-based ministry roles” that prohibit all women (regardless of gifting or ability) from positions of “spiritual authority” is too often used as a standard selectively applied to ordination and preaching, but not to other influential positions such as worship leader, youth minister (which is often called “director” so that the position sounds more administrative/occupational), overseas missionary (as long as you're single), book author, biblical/theological academic scholar, conference speaker or devotional/bible study leader who is allowed to “share from her heart” (implying that too much use of her mind might cross the line into territory reserved for men only).

This too shall pass.

Is this a common phenomenon? I haven't heard of a church that holds to the complimentarian view sending women to preach. If we send missionaries to preach, it is because they are either forming or joining a local church. Of course, missionaries of either gender are encouraged to use their leadership gifts, but that is a different matter.

As I slowly read through Mimi Haddad's post, the thought kept coming that before she finished writing, that she might speculate on why it is that it's ok for women to be missionairies but not minister here at home. Before I had scrolled down to your comment, I had reached the same conclusion as you.

But, a church deacon is an appointed position and therefore it has to be a masculine noun.

I have known women who were missionaries, pastors, evangelists and even Bible teachers. My own mother was a Bible teacher to adults in an Assembly of God when I was growing up. The pastor of that church was a woman.

I knew two women while they were pastors of an Assembly of God in Aiea, Hawaii in the Pearl Harbor Area and they also had AG missionary status. I attended their church on Sunday both of the times I was on R&R in Hawaii while I was stationed in South Vietnam.

One of my professors at George Fox Evangelical Seminary made a bold, startling statement regarding this practice. He believed the practice was certainly deeply sinful toward women, but it was also deeply racial. If women are “appropriately” responsible for teaching children, but not WASP men, then what does that really say about attitudes toward minority or non-western men if we can place women over them? It is a powerful and insidious reinforcement of inequity and hierarchy toward the non-western male, as well as toward women.