Personally, I am comfortable with a woman filling most roles, with the primary exception being minister. 1 Cor 14:33-35 is one of the clearest proof texts.
I am not a fan of proof texting for that approach is generally one whereby a text is taken out of its context. In the case of
1 Cor. 14:33-35 we have a number of issues: (1) it may be an interpolation, there is some MSS evidence to suggest this. (2) if it is not an interpolation what is Paul actually saying? Personally I am not convinced it's an interpolation (see Fee for the details) but the context Paul is dealing with is not women being ministers, indeed earlier on in 1 Cor. 11:5 that 'any woman who prays or prophesies with her head unveiled disgraces her head' which implies that Paul had no problem with women leading worship or preaching provided that they were veiled owing to the cultural norms at that time. The issue in 1 Cor. 14:33-35 is women in the congregation talking amongst themselves and so disrupting the service, it has nothing to do with leadership role. There are various explanations, the following is what N. T. Wright says:
I have always been attracted, ever since I heard it, to the explanation offered once more by Ken Bailey. In the Middle East, he says, it was taken for granted that men and women would sit apart in church, as still happens today in some circles. Equally important, the service would be held (in Lebanon, say, or Syria, or Egypt), in formal or classical Arabic, which the men would all know but which many of the women would not, since the women would only speak a local dialect or patois. Again, we may disapprove of such an arrangement, but one of the things you learn in real pastoral work as opposed to ivory-tower academic theorizing is that you simply cant take a community all the way from where it currently is to where you would ideally like it to be in a single flying leap. Anyway, the result would be that during the sermon in particular, the women, not understanding what was going on, would begin to get bored and talk among themselves. As Bailey describes the scene in such a church, the level of talking from the womens side would steadily rise in volume, until the minister would have to say loudly, Will the women please be quiet!, whereupon the talking would die down, but only for a few minutes. Then, at some point, the minister would again have to ask the women to be quiet; and he would often add that if they wanted to know what was being said, they should ask their husbands to explain it to them when they got home. I know there are other explanations sometimes offered for this passage, some of them quite plausible; this is the one that has struck me for many years as having the strongest claim to provide a context for understanding what Paul is saying. After all, his central concern in 1 Corinthians 14 is for order and decency in the churchs worship. This would fit extremely well.
