Why Ministers must be Men

is the title of a book by Douglas Wilson, reviewed in the current issue of Touchstone (that, you guessed it, arrived in my mailbox today). From the review by Alison Sailer, this delicious paragraph:

[Wilson] argues that not only must ministers of Word and Sacrament be male, they must also be masculine, or as he puts it, vertebrates--men with backbones, easy to approach but difficult to intimidate. While masculinity does not exclude qualities often associated with women, Wilson argues that the task of the minister is to sift, to study, and to say what needs to be said with the distinctively masculine authority of the distinctly masculine male. Christians will be on the road to recovery from their mistakes in these matters when they recognize that God "not only excludes women from becoming women ministers but also excludes men from becoming women ministers."

Or as the quotation I've heard attributed to Dr. Kenneth Korby, "God ordains men into the pastoral office. Be one."