Mike Winger is a US pastor with a YouTube channel called Learn to Think Biblically.
While he covers a lot of topics, some of it is quite good, he is best known for his massive 80+ hours of videos on Complementarianism.
Now Complementarianism, with many variations, is a view that authority and teaching roles in the church such as the offices of pastor and elder are exclusively the remit of men.
I’ve known about Mike Winger for a while, I knew he was popular in American evangelical circles, but I underestimated how global his audience is.
I made a video with Andrew Bartlett and Terran Williams about Mike Winger’s Complementarianism and I was blown away by the huge number of views it received and the large number of very, very strongly worded comments it got. (Also, read Terran Williams for his point-by-point engagement with Mike Winger.)
I discussed this with someone at my church who informed me that many young people in our congregation have been watching Mike Winger videos. Some stuff he produces is quite good, but on women and church, I hope they have a broader diet.
That’s when I decided that I needed to pay a bit more attention to him and, along with others, offer an alternative to the views about women in the church that he is disseminating.
Now Winger is not the most extreme or restrictive Complementarian around. He’s moderate in many senses, especially when it comes to women’s ministry outside of church contexts. He disavows a patriarchialist position a lot of the time. But he is still advocating for a position that restricts women from church ministry and does not represent a biblical practice for today that I would endorse.
I am not going to provide 200K words or 200 hrs of content responding to Mike Winger’s 80 hrs of videos on women, wives, marriage, authority, and the church. But I am going to do several posts and videos responding to key elements of Mike Winger’s particular species of Complementarianism to get an alternative position out there and for my own students. I am going to focus mainly on Winger’s take on 1 Tim 2:11-15.
