Just One Story? by Laura Buffington

This summer the word "agency" has been on my mind... Our agency is at the essence of our humanity.  Deep within our soul, regardless of the external circumstances we are born into, we all yearn for the freedom to chart our course, to have an impact. Many of us feel a calling from God that strengthens our agency and connects it to God's purposes. For those of us who find ourselves in religious contexts which still seek to restrict women's sphere of agency in the world to limited roles, finding one's life path is complicated by sorting through competing and confusing messages.  I just read this woman's story of growing up in a Christian subculture very much like my own and wanted to pass it along.  Her story, so powerful and so vulnerable at the same time, mirrors the larger story of so many women in the church. We women who were loved and nurtured by the church, who love the church, who found our life call in the church, yet we often feel betrayed by this same church which still in some places does fully embrace our humanity and agency. Laura Buffington shares beautifully the internal and external struggles of hearing and staying true to the calling she learned through the same "submission" that is often used to prescribe women's sphere in the church.  It is definitely worth the read and really humanizes the debate some  conservative christian settings are still struggling to sort through.

If you grew up sitting around campfires at camp you will definitely relate to her journey!  Thank you Kaitlin Hasserly for passing this along.

Reposting from http://www.seejenwrite.com/?p=9119

Today my friend Laura Buffington shares her story about growing up in the Christian church, sensing a call to ministry, and trying to honor that call as a woman. I’m inspired and encouraged and saddened and challenged by her words, and I’m grateful for their honesty and humility. Simply put, I HAD to share this–thanks, Laura, for telling your story so well and allowing me to publish it here.

This will start out looking like a story about me.  But if I tell it right, hopefully it will end up being about much more. Even our seemingly small stories have that kind of potential, to communicate something giant about who God is, and why the world exists at all, and what the Gospel has to do with bringing the two together. Sometimes our narratives, and our church’s, matter even more than we can handle.

It would be fair to say I wasn’t just raised in the Christian Church, but by the Christian Church.  If my memory can be trusted, my parents had me and my sister at church whenever the doors were open. They had been a part of the group that planted the new church near Columbus, Ohio, so our lives were closely tied to the community.  I have vivid memories of refusing to sing along during children’s church, fighting with the boys during Vacation Bible School, and honing my crafting skills in the church basement.  I certainly went through seasons where I would have rather stayed home to play, but eventually I came to love the church and to feel loved by the church.  By middle school and all the identity crises it brings, I thought of the church as a safe haven, as a place I belonged.  Like a dutiful church kid, my summers always included a stint at camp.  One year, I was given the prestigious “camper of the week” award.  The next year, I had the quintessential “come to Jesus” moment as “I Have Decided” played quietly in the background and I stepped out to come forward for baptism.

My high school years were textbook enculturation in the Christian Church.  I was moving right along the “Five Finger Exercise.”  I went to youth group every Sunday night.  Occasionally, I sang into a giant puffy microphone accompanied by cassette tape tracks for the worship service.  I served every week at the local Christian-church sponsored nursing home.  I was part of a small group for discipleship.  My summers were packed full of mission trips and Christian college conferences.  I went to public school but I gathered every September to pray around the flagpole and I looked for opportunities to bring Jesus into conversations.  When it was time for me to get my first job, I applied at a Christian bookstore and they hired me to sell Sunday School and VBS curriculum.  A large part of my growing faith had to do with my youth minister and his wife, along with other adults in the church, nurturing me and modeling faithful lives for me.  With my parents’ blessing, the older Christians around me took me into their lives, encouraging me towards maturity.


The summer before my senior year of high school, after extensive conversations with mentors and friends about all the impending future decisions, I sat around the campfire and felt compelled to attach my future to the church.  It was the granddaddy of all camp “decision time” options: Full-time Christian Service. 

For some reason, I didn’t step forward to announce it.  I simply resolved in my heart that my career would somehow involve the church.  Up to this point, I didn’t have any other ideas so this made sense.  My life had been saturated in ministry.  The people around me affirmed this decision and encouraged me. I felt an inescapable sense of calling.  Looking back now, it’s hard to know exactly where the movement of God collided with my own desires, or the pressure of other people, or the emotional power of a good campfire with acoustic accompaniment, but at the time I was convinced that the next faithful step was to train for ministry.

For all my years spent inside the circle of the church, and for all my exposure to different missions and ministries, my calling came without any specific directions.  I had no idea what job I wanted to do, or was supposed to do, depending on your understanding of where freedom ends and God’s sovereignty begins.

Up to this point, after 18 years in the church, no one had ever told me what women could or could not do in the church.  When Christian leaders and preachers made appeals at camp, or during worship, for people to give their lives to service, it was a universal call.  We were all supposed to use our gifts, surrender our lives, join the big story God is telling.  So I went by what they said and not by what I saw—which were limits and roles reserved for certain genders.  I saw women sing, but only men could speak.  I saw women prepare the communion but only men could march down the aisles to serve it.  Women taught children and men taught adults.  I knew enough to know all of this had to do with Paul’s letters to the churches.  I trusted enough to see this as the way God must have wanted things to be.  I hoped that somewhere in this established order, I would find a place to fulfill my campfire promise.


The next step towards a life of ministry seemed to be a Christian college so I ended up at Milligan College in Tennessee.  Choosing a college has always seemed like far too important a decision to leave to an 18-year old, but in my case, I think I ended up exactly where I needed to be. After years in public schools, it was both strange and refreshing to learn alongside other people of faith.  I loved the powerful experience of Christian community that is unique to the Christian college experience.   But more than anything, I loved having a safe place to ask tough questions.  We were encouraged to think about humanity, and art, and war, and faith, and what they all had to do with each other.  College is where I learned the value of asking the right questions over having all the right answers.

I loved my Bible classes.  I knew many of the stories but loved learning about authorship questions and translation issues and contextualization.  I loved learning about all the different hermeneutics we use without knowing we’re using them.  It felt like I was getting frames to put around all the great pictures the church had given me.  I learned that loving the Bible meant wrestling with the things it said.  Sometimes education and coming-of-age can threaten young faith and cast doubts and shadows onto Scripture.  But for me, Scripture became a living, breathing, choir of voices singing along to the world opening in front of me.

There were a million things I learned that had nothing to do with gender.  But since I was trying to sort out how to serve the church with my life, several gender-related conversations held my attention.


For all the Old Testament stories I had learned growing up, I couldn’t remember ever hearing about Deborah, or Huldah.  I started to appreciate how these stories of faithful women survived in a culture that thought of women as property to be traded along with the land and the livestock.

I listened carefully to the conversations about how Jesus destroyed cultural barriers by talking to women and valuing them.  I came to a new appreciation of his deep talk with the Samaritan woman at the well.  I saw new layers of meaning when he healed the bleeding woman and straightened the walk of the woman living with her head bent low.  In all my Easter mornings, I had never noticed it was the women tending to his tomb who were the first to know he was back on his feet.

I learned about the communities receiving Paul’s letters and how he tailored the nuances of the Gospel to their particular needs.  For the freewheeling, grace-abusing church at Corinth, Paul prescribed order.  For the rules-bound, grace-neglecting church at Galatia, Paul called for freedom.  I came to love how Paul always put the Gospel first.  When he had to decide between this new understanding of how God was reconciling the world through Christ and the traditional way of understanding law, he chose the new way.  When he had to decide between his own ego and reputation or the furthering of the Gospel, he never chose himself.

I learned about Paul’s co-workers and paid attention to his greetings and personal admonitions at the end of his letters.  I was surprised to meet Pheobe the Deacon, Junia the Apostle and Priscilla the co-teacher.  I imagined them getting together with the other women who figured prominently into the early days of the church, like Lydia the bi-vocational pastor, and Tabitha the mercy-worker, and Philip’s prophesying daughters.


With these new frames around the life of Jesus, the writings of Paul and the picture of the early church, I felt conflicted about the church of my youth.

I started to wonder if the Christian Church movement had tried so hard to be faithful to certain texts that they missed the beautiful complexity of the bigger story.  It seemed like so much work was going into obeying Paul’s note on keeping women from teaching but very little was said about anybody covering their heads.  When had it been decided which notes of Paul’s were meant for a certain time and place and which ones were for all times and all places? I wrestled with what it means to be a part of a church tradition so bent on restoring the idyllic days of the first century church that they sometimes forget to do what Paul actually did and translate the Gospel to the world right in front of them.

And when things got really quiet, I wondered how the church could treat me so well, and encourage me so much, but still see limits for how and where God could use me.  I never doubted, and still don’t doubt, that it’s out of an attempt to be faithful to their best understanding of what God wants.  But it made planning for the future a painful and confusing process. I knew all these questions and all this wrestling would eventually become intensely personal, as I tried to sort out what the calling by the campfire meant and how my gifts could or could not serve the church.


The first time I spoke to a large crowd was largely by accident.  I had been invited to speak during chapel and had politely refused.  Or at least I thought I refused.  Then I saw my name on the schedule to speak.  I was to deliver a “Senior Sermon,” a tradition in the school’s spring chapel lineup.  Despite my reservations, I got up and said some words.  I was sick the whole next week.  Depending on your interpretation, it was either a virus, or nerves, or God’s wrath.

I decided I needed more time, to learn and sort out what it meant for me, or for any of us, to further the story of God in our world.  I went on to pursue a Master’s of Divinity at Emmanuel Christian Seminary. As I learned and participated in the Christian community of east Tennessee, the professors and pastors, along with my friends, continued to encourage me towards teaching and preaching.  I accepted the occasional invitation to speak in chapel or to lead a class at church with some hesitation.  I knew stepping into that role came with burdens.  This is true for anyone who dares to stand in front of other people and speak to the mysteries of God but it felt particularly true as a female.  For those who supported full inclusion of women into the life of the church, I wanted to represent women well.  For those who did not, I struggled with creating conflict and having my girl-ness become a distraction from the greater purposes of gathering to hear from God.


All these tensions haunted me when it came time to find my first job.  I still wasn’t sure what kind of job description I could fit in many of our churches.  I knew there was a chance I would find myself serving a church that called me the “director” of something rather than a “minister” of anything.  I might only be able to teach high school kids or younger.  I also knew working at a bookstore instead of a church was a very real possibility.  I had watched a number of other female friends leave the Christian church for denominations that would hire them and allow them to use all of their gifts in every area of the church. In some cases, I also saw the job search lead only to wounds and bitterness.   Frozen with fear, I played an incredibly passive role in finding my first job.  Professors were kind enough to recommend me to churches and, before long, I was considering different options.  But truth be told, I only cared about one thing and it had nothing to do with being able to preach.  My only sister was dying of cancer and I knew I had to be in Ohio near my family.  That was my only condition for a job.

Through very little effort on my part, I was hired at a church in Dayton, Ohio.  Long before my arrival, this church had prayed and struggled through what role women would play in their young church.  The critical story for them was the very first one in the garden.  When they read the story, they noticed that the separation between men and women was a result of the fall, and not God’s intention.  They concluded that the coming of Christ was the ultimate do-over for creation and instead of living up to the world of the fall, the church should live up to the dream of the garden.  Women had already served as elders and had preached occasionally for their worship services.  To be in Ohio, to stay in the Christian church, and to be able to speak and preach seemed to be either an incredible stroke of luck or the hand of God.  As a seminary student, I was hesitant to speculate on which it was, but years later, I try just to be grateful.


I have now served in this church for ten years.  I’ve played different roles as the years have passed, in worship arts and discipleship.  I serve as the “preacher” for our weekend services a few times a year, as well as teaching other classes.  I have occasionally stepped into traditional pastoral roles, leading people through weddings or funerals.  But I have also learned that the official affirmation of church leadership does not end the struggle of being a woman in ministry.  Of course, ministry in itself is a difficult life for anyone, but there are issues I face as a woman that the girl by the fire never saw coming.

Even though the church affirms me in ministry, there are still cultural, perhaps even emotional, barriers for people to see me as a pastor.  I see the people who get up and leave the church when they realize I am up there to preach and not just to deliver the announcements.  More than once, I have had people from the church awkwardly introduce me to their friends as the “lady pastor.”  I have made myself available for weddings and funerals only to be asked not to do it because they wanted a male pastor.  If I get passed over for an opportunity or I’m left out of a meeting, I have to fight not to get swept up into assumptions about de facto sexism that wound me and everyone around me.

When I step outside of our church and take part in events involving the larger Christian Church movement, I hesitate to reveal what I really do at the church.  I know my life can easily become a divisive topic.  I know there are people from my home church who struggle with knowing their support led me to preaching.  I suspect they feel torn, supporting me personally but not supporting me ideologically.

This tension feels like nothing compared to the turmoil I often feel inside.  Something as small as filling out the “profession” line on forms at the doctor’s office becomes a struggle over identity.  Writing “pastor” feels somehow loaded, defiant, more complicated than paperwork should be.


When I listen in on the conversations going on in churches or online forums about the role of women in the church, I want to mourn, to battle, and sometimes hide.  On my better days, I’m at least glad the conversation is happening. So often churches settle on answers without ever going through the difficult work of holding Scripture up next to the world, and their own hearts, and letting them push on each other.  On my worse days, I find myself wanting to justify my own life and ministry.  I want to defend myself and my choices, to demand that people see me as worthy when the real truth is that none of us are.  I want to make the case that it’s exactly the submission people prescribe for me that brought me to where I am.  What do I do with the way submission brought me to leadership? What are people afraid God will do if I preach?  If I sense God on the move in my life, am I just being fooled?

There are also days when I see just how much bigger this all is than me.  I see how all of us are called to be conduits of the good news of Jesus in the world.  I see how the Gospel is written on our own lives through the work of God’s Spirit and how we are all called to tell the story.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s over a conversation, or in a meeting, or a church service.  Any one of us, on any given day, might be just the right person to proclaim the story of God at work in the world.  We may also be just the right hindrance for a person.  This is the chance God takes—to tell a perfect story through people whose only qualification is their unworthiness.  This is why the broken, beautiful church is the absolute wrong and right vehicle for a message about grace.


So if this is the call of the church, what story does our view on women tell the world about who God is and how God works?  More importantly, how does the life of the church reflect the reconciling work of God?  Are we modeling separation where we should be modeling cooperation?  What are we telling the women and the men of the world about who God calls us all to be?  Are we settling for a lesser picture of what the church can be, and ultimately a lesser kingdom than God wants to bring?

This is partly about what we should tell the young girls gathered around the fire. But it’s also about what it means for the whole world that the church is the Bride of Christ.

"It is easy to be for yesterday's change. It is quite another to make the change your own time requires." -Bill Clinton, in a speech honoring the slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

This is so true, especially in the call for gender justice. As Christians, we like to think that we would have been on the right side of the civil rights struggle, but why are so many Christians still uncomfortable with the basic concept that women are fully equal in the church and the home? Why is the church so behind on so many important issues to women? Those who hold to limiting gender role theology but claim to speak for justice are for the easy change of yesterday. Confronting the ways that our own flawed theology undermines women is the hard uncomfortable change that God calls us to today. Working to uplift women worldwide from the scourge of gender violence and abuse is indeed the moral challenge of our day. That there is resistance shows where the moral edge is in God's continuing call for a higher justice.

Do You See These Two Faces of Adam in Our World Today? by Emily Nielsen Jones

Women's Liberty Bell Blog is so grateful for all the male allies that have "chimed in" this past month about how they have seen and been apart of the movement of men "stepping up" to lay aside the privileged position religion has historically given to males. (See http://womens-libertybell-chime-in-with-us.blogspot.com/2013/04/enlisting-male-allies-stepping-up.html?m=1 and past postings to review the conversation.) I don't know about you, but I have always been so drawn to and touched by stories of people reaching across lines of difference to work for justice for another:  Christians hiding Jews during the Holocaust, white abolitionists fighting along side black abolitionists to end slavery, the 1% standing with the 99%, Protestants building a bridge with Catholics and vice versa, Israelis advocating for a just peace for Palestinians, the countless other examples of people/groups who have worked to transcend and dismantle an unjust ranking system which privileges one group over another.

Indeed, all of our world's great social movements which have continued to "bend the moral arc of the universe" toward justice (Martin Luther King) have been rooted in some movement of common humanity/empathy across lines of difference, a shared commitment to fight for justice not just for one's own particulular group but also for the rights and cause of another.  Without some sense of shared commitment connecting one group's struggle with the larger human struggle for Liberty and Justice for All all we are left with is separate groups vying for power and jockeying for their own rights and privileges at the expense of others.

When it comes to working for gender justice, empathy across the gender divide is what the world needs more than anything is to transcend our base we-them tendencies which see things in terms of a zero-sum gain, a gain for you is a loss of power for me.  We all know what gender battles look like and feel like on a personal level... either covertly or overtly trying to "man up" or "woman up" to get the upper-hand in a relationship.  On a collective level, gender battles are not different.  From the fledgling beginnings of the women's movement, advancements of women's sphere and rights have met resistance from men and from invisible forces in society to preserve the imbalance of power between the genders which have made females the "lesser than" gender with restricted rights, human agency, dignity, power to contribute to society and pursue life opportunities.

What is it that enables a man to transcend these "powering up" we-them dynamics and not feel threatened or diminished by women's advancement on both on a collective and an individual level?  I find it really interesting today to see the broad spectrum of different masculine "faces" responding in various ways to this particular stage of the "women's movement" where we see as a global culture a large scale commitment to gender balance as a human and social ideal to be worked toward but we also see forces of resistance every where in various forms, efforts to hit the rewind button and put some limit on what women can or cannot do, men's movements all over the world to "reclaim their rightful place as the leaders/decision-makers of the family, religious body, and society.  Change is hard, and always involves some level of backlash even as things are moving forward.  When it comes to changing deeply entrenched gender norms which govern how we all exercise are God-given power and agency and gifts in the world, change seems to be extra slow and vulnerable to backlash, regression, and either-or power dynamics.

How can we together transcend these tiring zero-sum power dynamics and find greater solidarity across the gender line to work toward a more gender-balanced world?  

What is the role of faith in transforming the women's movement from a "women's issue" into a broader movement of justice in our world?

Particularly within faith contexts, where religious gender ideology is appealed to as divine sanction for exclusive male authority models in the church and the family, without men coming along side of women in human solidarity with passion and conviction to take another look at the "sacred gender cows" which have been used by our religious traditions to justify exclusion and subordination of women, women's basic human equality will remain tenuous at best... in it's own separate category, separate from the larger stream of justice... a "women's issue" disconnected from the larger themes of scripture... a never-ending battle ground vulnerable to backlash and regression depending on the cultural and religious winds of the day.

Glimpsing Adam
If you look around the world today, we see so many hopeful signs of women rising up within highly patriarchal cultures to claim their basic human rights, heal from abuse, reclaim their voices and their full God-given human agency and potential and also work for a more just world for all.  I wrote another article which I called "Glimpsing Eve" in which I shared how I see two faces of "Eve" in our world, in and through my work with the Imago Dei Fund:  Eve Rising up to Heal Our World and Eve Victimized & Submissive.  http://www.cbeinternational.org/?q=content/2011-10-20-glimpsing-eve-arise-e-newsletter

Both faces of Eve are alive and well today.  What about Adam?  What faces does He show today in this particular moment of time where gender equality/gender balance is a presumed ideal to be worked toward in most cultural contexts yet there are signs of regression and backlash everywhere.  In my work as a donor activist and in my involvement as a Christian in our local community and broader evangelical world, I see two faces of Adam, not the literal historical figure, more so the collective masculine life force in the world.

What flavor of masculinity do you see around you?  Do you see these two faces too?  Shades of gray in between?

the beautiful face of "Adam":  a redeemed, empowering masculinity
I was recently at a gathering of pastors and their wives in Haiti (there are not many female ministers in Haiti) convened by a group called Beyond Borders which is working to create a change of consciousness around the underlying power dynamics which underlie gender-based violence in Haiti.  It was the most inspiring, very tangible conversation around everyday gender dynamics, male presumption to power in all its forms, and the vision of moving from a hierarchical to a partnership model of gender relations.  One of the people leading the dialogue was this beautiful charismatic Haitian man who was so on-board with gender equality, so passionate and winsome in his demeanor, and so refreshing in his solidarity across the gender line with women who in that society still have such an uphill battle to have an equal voice and dignity in society.

I wish I had a better picture of this man, but I carry him in my heart as a "face of Adam", a beautiful empowering picture of a redeemed masculinity which is "man enough" to share power with women, affirm our differences yet find our common humanity, and embrace each of our forms of strength without any need to dominate or power-over the other.  What stuck with me most about this man was how he was not just "standing with" women, not just supporting a women's cause, rather he was invested himself in working toward a society where men and women in very practical tangible ways can live in mutuality, shared power, and true complementarity without needing to prop up one gender over the other.  I could not help but express to him and the group how beautiful men are when they are unambiguously onboard with gender equality, not just giving lip service to the idea of it, but putting some skin in the game and showing in tangible ways their solidarity across the gender divide to create a more gender-balanced world that is not just good for women but for all humankind.

Do you see this face in the men in your life?  I do!  Thank you to you all. : )

the threatened face of "Adam":  a retrenching, powering-up masculinity
I wish I could say that my world, our world was filled with only this beautiful "face of Adam", but the reality is there are forces of gender regression in our world, mostly wrapped in religion, that seem bent on preserving the unequal gender scales which have created a whole myriad of humanitarian problems which continue to keep girls and women around the world in a subordinate, victimized place and prop up male privilege to a greater sphere of agency, respect and power in society.  Pictures speak a thousand words.  This picture and article below featuring male students in Afghanistan protesting what should be seen as a very basic bill to protect women's human rights to me captures this other face of Adam that we see in various forms throughout our world:  the threatened male who has grown so accustomed to women being submissive and subordinate and diminished that he cannot even see how he is twisting religion to preserve his own presumption to being a "higher ranking" human.

http://dawn.com/2013/05/22/afhan-students-protest-womens-rights-decree/ AP

 22nd May, 2013

— File Photo by Reuters

KABUL: Hard-line Islamist students protested in the Afghan capital demanding the repeal of a presidential decree for women’s rights that they say is un-Islamic.

More than 200 male students protested in front of Kabul University on Wednesday against the decree, which includes a ban on child marriage and forced marriage, makes domestic violence a crime and says rape victims cannot be prosecuted for adultery.

Protester Fazel Hadi, 25, said the decree was ”imposed by foreigners” and violates Islamic Shariah law.

Conservative lawmakers on Saturday blocked enshrining the decree’s provisions in legislation.

The backlash highlights the tenuousness of women’s rights provisions enacted in the 12 years since the ouster of the hard-line Taliban regime.

The international force that toppled the Taliban is now preparing to withdraw.

Yes, this is an extremely scary face of masculinity struggling to preserve its place of power, but if look look beneath the surface of all of the religious "reasons" used across all faith traditions, all cultures, and across time to exclude, marginalize, or diminish women's spheres of agency in society--whether it be denying women the right to vote, to attend school, to avoid early marriage, to own property, to live free of violence, and to advance into positions of leadership however they are gifted--do not all these rationales boil down to men over the course of religious history being a little too willingly to accept at "face value" a religious interpretation which has given them an unfair advantage?  The same scene of an angry mob of men protesting women's expanding sphere of involvement has been repeated throughout the course of history.  (The very first gathering of women abolitionists (who were not even working yet for women's rights) was met with an angry male mob which burned down the building they were in justified in their "rightness" with their Bibles in hand.)

Yes, most people of faith, even those with conservative views of "gender roles" do not advocate violence.  However, in this world where gender equality is a presumed ideal and facet of our collective values, those who are advocating excluding women from leadership roles in any form based on some notion of it being "un-Christian" or "un-Muslim" or un-feminine are making a statement which to many girls and women today can feel aggressive and like a diminishment of who we are collectively as women.  Even little infringements much less egregious as this story below send ripples out into the world which if you "scale up" make women's standing in the world feel very tenuous.

May we all work to show our highest and best face to the world, both as men and as women, and seek to live in solidarity with one another creating a more just, gender-balanced world where all humans can thrive and flourish together.

Why I Can No Longer Defend the Ministry of Women in the Church by Steve Holmes

Why I Can No Longer Defend the Ministry of Women in the Church

Steve Holmes is a Baptist minister, currently teaching theology at St Mary’s College, St Andrews, Scotland. He blogs about theology and culture from an Evangelical perspective at Shored Fragments.

 The following column is posted with permission from his blog.

http://blog.cbeinternational.org/2013/05/no-defence-needed/ 

I have defended the ministry of women in the church in public for a while now, including on my blog. I don’t think I can do it any longer. Not because of any lack of calling or gifting in their ministry, but because of a lack in mine.

Take Phoebe Palmer. She began to be involved in leading a Bible study in New York around 1830. She soon received invitations to preach across the USA and in the UK. Something like 25,000 people were converted by her ministry. 25,000 people. Converted. Does that need defense? Really?

She visited prisons regularly, ran a society helping poor people in need of medical attention, and was involved in an ambitious project to challenge the new problem of urban poverty through the provision of low-cost housing, free schooling, and employment. She had a particular concern for orphans throughout her life. Challenging injustice on a grand scale. Do you want me to defend that?

In The Promise of the Father, and 20-odd other books, she stressed the idea that God could and would give the blessing of holiness in an instant to a believer, and taught that holiness would be gained by faith. This teaching gave rise to the Holiness Movement, which by 1900 had changed the beliefs and practices of almost every evangelical church in America and Britain. Her ideas shaped the early Pentecostal movement, and the modern charismatic movement.

She formed the spirituality that formed me. She changed the world. Who am I to even think of defending her? By any standards, she was one of the most powerful preachers, and most influential leaders, of nineteenth-century American evangelicalism. For me to try to defend her ministry would be as ridiculous as a worm trying to defend a lion.

She did not often encounter criticism for presuming to preach as a woman, but eventually she wrote a defense of the ministry of women, The Promise of the Father (1859). She argued that it was a clear mark that the gift of the Holy Spirit had come that women as well as men could “prophesy,” which to her meant preach powerfully and evangelistically to spread the gospel.

In the face of so evident a work of the Spirit as was seen in her life, who am I to even consider the question of whether God had called her to preach? It would be offensive, presumptuous—approaching blasphemous—to even accept that the question can be asked.

And then there’s Catherine Booth. And Mary Dyer. And Catherine of Sienna. And Mother Julian. And Rose Clapham, all-but forgotten, whose first sermon, preached when she was 18, saw 700 miners converted to Christ. Defend that? Why?

There’s a thousand stories like it that I know. Ten thousand times ten thousand that have gone untold, no doubt.

And I think of women who I have the privilege to know, who I sit in awe of, some of whom graciously allow me to call them friends. If I could preach one tenth as powerfully or effectively as Ness Wilson, or Bev Murrill, or Miriam Swaffield, or if I had a tiny portion of the vision and capacity to inspire change of Cathy Madavan or Natalie Collins, or if I had some little echo of the pastoral wisdom and visible holiness of Pat Took or Ruth Goldbourne, or if I could even once in my life make something happen the way Wendy Beech-Ward or Ann Holt do every day—then I might think the question of whether these women are permitted by God to lead and preach was worth thinking about.

As it is, no. I can’t defend their ministries. I am not worthy to.

I will continue to fight sexism and bad teaching wherever I see it. I will continue to explain, as well as I can, the truth of Scripture, that it is a crucial mark of the Kingdom that God calls women and men indifferently to every ministry. I want to give more time in coming months and years to tracing the real harm that bad theologies of gender do. I might even write my big book on a theology of gender one of these years. (The story roughly runs: Augustine meets Judith Butler and they get on surprisingly well…)

But I’m not going to try to illuminate the sun. And I’m not going to try to dampen the sea. And I’m not, any longer, going to try to defend the ministry of women in the church.

Do you agree? Disagree?

THIS ARTICLE IS REPRINTED FROM CBE’S WEEKLY ARISE COLUMN.

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Staying Humble as it Gets Personal by Rob Dixon

Sometimes, you can't own a value until it gets personal. 

At least that's the story of my journey regarding gender equality. Along the way, I've gone from someone who holds a value but has little conviction to someone who is a determined advocate.

God's grace to me was that I grew up in a church where women and men could exercise their gifts equally and without limitations with regard to gender. On top of that, as I grew in my faith, many of my early mentors were women. Still, when I got to college and my faith begain to bloom, gender equality remained something on the periphery, something that I merely valued, as opposed to a "hill to die on." I was no gender equality revolutionary.

But then it got personal.

In my first year as the staff leader of my campus ministry chapter, a local pastor who barely knew me sat me down and told me that because I was allowing women to teach the Scriptures in the ministry I was leading, I would be held accountable for my false teaching.

Wow. The accusation was painful for me, and it sent me into a months-long quest to learn as much as possible about the theology around the topic of women in leadership. I read, studied, prayed, talked, debated and then read some more. And when I was done with that intense burst of learning, my understanding of the Scriptures continued to lead me to the conviction that men and women are to be full partners together in ministry and, in particular, that women are to be free (better yet, empowered) to lead in the Kingdom according to their gifting.

But here’s the catch. When I emerged from this season of learning, I was militant. I mean, if you disagreed with me on the issue, I had no time for you. Looking back, the experience of being rebuked very nearly turned me into a rebuker. Pretty quickly, the issue of women in authority became a litmus test for me: if you agreed with me, we were good. If you didn’t, we had problems.

Thankfully, God provoked a trusted mentor to challenge my posture. My friend sat me down one day and basically said, “Rob, I’m concerned that you’re headed toward becoming like that guy. You need to learn how to hold your convictions with humility.”

“Hold your convictions with humility.” That was the word I needed to hear.

Because we need that posture in order to engage with others around these issues in healthy ways. Particularly when things are unclear or in dispute, we must be humble.

These days, my journey has taken me into the world of thinking about my male privilege. Specifically, I'm considering how Christian men ought to respond to the reality of our socially-granted privilege and power. For the last 6 months, I've been blogging on this stuff twice a week, every week at challengingtertullian.com.

As I've gone along, I've experienced a wide range of emotions. This stuff is complex! At once it's been interesting and encouraging, uncomfortable and vexing.

And, above all else, it's been personal.

Struggling Together - Part One by Mickey Sanchez

Mickey Sanchez is a Harvard Chaplain, representing InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Graduate & Faculty Ministries.

In this post I’d like to share a bit about my own experience supporting my wife as she wrestled with gender equality issues while in seminary. (In a future post I hope to share about my experience supporting her as a full-time working mom in ministry)

My wife is a gifted woman and while we were both in seminary we tried to sort out what biblical gender roles meant for her work in the church and at home. We went to a seminary that had professors from each camp in the debate and my wife won a scholarship to do extensive research and interviews with some of the leading evangelical figures in that debate. That said, we each had personal challenges in looking into this issue.

We both came from a complementarian church that we loved. That church had a lot to do with my own initial growth in faith right after I became a Christian and it laid the groundwork for how I would approach God and the Bible, which is still operative for me today. My wife and I fell in love within that church’s community and hoped to serve with them in the future. So I was somewhat wary of moving toward an egalitarian position which would leave us outside that church/denomination’s doctrinal boundaries. Also, I thought much of what the main pastor taught was right and was worried that disagreeing with him meant I was making an intellectual error. Moreover, the time it took to rigorously look into this debate concerned me as I had other questions I wanted to look into as well. All that to say, I had reasons to be disinclined toward delving too deeply into this issue myself.

However, my church’s emphasis on the gospel and its implication paved the way for me to be supportive of my wife as she wrestled with the gender roles question. For one, the gospel gave me compassion for my wife and a desire to help with this time consuming project. If God could be so put upon to leave his royal throne for my sake, the least I could do for my wife was take the time to make this long journey with her. Also, Jesus empowered people for ministry and I wanted to make sure I did that for my wife as I thought she had a lot to offer the church from her giftings.  Beyond that, I became a Christian because I followed the evidence against my will and found the gospel to be true. Why should I stop following the evidence now with this issue just to save time or for comfort’s sake? And if the evidence pointed to the egalitarian position, then we’re keeping roughly half of the church from fully utilizing all their giftings!

Perhaps most practically, though, the gospel helped me to anchor my wife in the midst of her research. She had such a desire to get this question right, to please God and not disobey him, that she feared God’s judgment if she was wrong – a fear that some complementarians unfortunately encourage. But the gospel is not that we are saved because we have all our theology right or because we’re smarter than others. We’re saved by grace. So even if we made a mistake here, and we’re all likely mistaken on something as we’re not saved because of our intelligence, God’s grace would cover us. That allayed the fear and allowed us to think more clearly together.

It took a while to sort it all out, but I’m glad I journeyed with her on this. It opened my eyes to various struggles women go through and how men could do more to help them. For example, in seminary I learned that a number of women struggle with low confidence in their opinions and in their ability to disagree with others, even though they have good reasons to do so. Despite my wife’s natural confidence in other areas, she struggled in this debate to have confidence in her opinion at a point when I thought we both could be confident of the egalitarian position. I realized I could help her grow in this area, not by giving her another authority figure to trust, but by helping her trust the gospel so her fear would melt away. With that gone, she was better able to make up her own mind, thanks be to God.

Co-Conspiritors by Tom Yaccino

Dee and Tom Yaccino are co-connectors and founders of Del Camino Connection, an organization passionate about serving and supporting church based networks in Latin America that live out the call to be agents of change and reconcilers for Christ and the Kingdom of God here on earth. DCC offers consulting and coaching services to churches that are passionate about partnering with the Global Church. They help churches and organizations leverage their shared spiritual, human, and financial resources in response to Jesus’ mission to make all things new. Together, Tom and Dee work to facilitate global connections among churches to embody Christ's dream that we be One, as we participate in revealing the love and Justice of God in our communities. www.delcaminoconnection.org

My name is Tom Yaccino.  I am Dee Yaccino’s husband, friend, partner in ministry and parenthood, and co conspirator with her in God’s amazing and beautiful Kingdom project here on earth.  It is remarkable that the way I just introduced myself, as her husband, might seem odd to others, especially among many with whom I share a common faith and mission in Jesus Christ.  I say odd because for many, her role should be recognized as secondary or complimentary to mine such that I am seen as “above” her.

I must confess that, more often than not, I too easily fall into the cultural and religious framework, which places more importance and attention on the male in that partnership than the woman.  I confess that when Dee feels that sense of being invisible or a mere appendage to me in conversations or gatherings – even those of the Kingdom sort – and when she makes her uncomfortable feelings known to me, I have been known to question her feelings: “Really?  I don’t think they mean that!”  “Huh?!?  I didn’t catch that vibe at all in their interaction with us…”

I confess that I am a product of the cultural, socioeconomic, religious constructs that represent the patriarchal system that dominates our world and particular faith context in the west.  And I confess that it is incredibly easy for me to remain blind to how that system diminishes, controls and determines the role and responsibilities of women – of Dee, my covenant partner in life.

But as followers of Jesus, we have been redeemed by His blood and restored supernaturally to our true identities as icons of the Lord.  We are privileged participants in the amazing, grace-infused, holy community that God intended for humankind and all of creation.  In this light, my complicity with the dominant system is shaken to the foundations.  The Holy Spirit is breaking down the hard casing that the world has built up around my heart and mind which casts parts in this play with pre-determined roles for men and women. The Spirit is exposing me to the Way, the truth and the life that announces another Way – Way that was made possible and promotes community and connectedness without domination, or positional power.   

Dee and I lived for 25 years in Latin America, a strange and wonderful place where machismo (male domination) and marianismo (reverence for feminine virtue, purity and moral strength, as made in the image of Mary) co-exist, but where men definitely dominate the scene.  As a God-gifted leader in ministry, this was a challenging sea for Dee to navigate.  Not only did she survive, but she was able to influence leaders and communities, loving them into new understandings of Jesus and His Kingdom; not without pain and struggle, but with a lot of grace and perseverance.  Dee became a deep friend and partner in ministry with my own Dominican best friend, who when we first met, was prejudiced against “gringos” and women!  She served the bride of Christ as a teaching pastor, elder, counselor and dear friend.  In the ministry God has called us to, she is the mind and heart behind all of our awareness-raising, educational, paradigm-shifting materials and workshops. She is an anthropologist, a pastor & teacher, a researcher and now is currently a PhD fellow where she is being celebrated as a woman in a male-dominated academic institution.  She is being valued and invited to teach because of her capabilities and unique contribution. 

On the enneagram Dee is an “8”; I am a “4.”  We are both influencers and leaders but of a very different stripe.  Being a female “8” in a male-dominated world permeated with “type A” power-centered leadership models is no easy thing.  But Dee has stayed true to herself and has spoken up even in the face of the pain and rejection that often results.  She flows into who God has created her to be – despite the “man” made barriers, some that I admittedly have built – and she leads.

She is an incredible mom, who hasn’t stopped being a mom in our home, while she ministers and serves and leads ministry outside of the home.  I thank God for her example as she lives in the tension with grace and flows into her identity as a woman, created in the image and likeness of God, the creator and sustainer of life.  She leads, cares for, and parents with me our 4 wonderful children which include 3 amazingly talented girls (19, 17 and 13) who are like their mother (& father) gifted with leadership, as well as one amazing little boy (6).  They all see how God’s designs for life and wholeness are working out in males and females. I shudder to think that my girls will be limited in their full and free expression of who they were created to be by God, especially among well-intentioned fellow believers.  May they follow in their mother’s footsteps as women and grow into their full identity and design as God has intended for them be that leaders, artists, influencers, servants, etc., without being controlled, limited or “allowed”  by others.  

I am so thankful for Dee.  I am so impacted by her life.  As a man, who is recognized as a leader among my peers, I not only acknowledge that her support and encouragement have helped shape me into the servant leader that I hopefully am, but I acknowledge that her leadership is one that I am privileged to be able to follow."