More girls were killed in the last 50 years, precisely because they were girls, than men killed in all the wars in the 20th century.
The equivalent of 5 jumbo jets worth of women die in labor each day… life time risk of maternal death is 1,000x higher in a poor country than in the west. That should be an international scandal.
In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery. In the twentieth century, it was the battle against totalitarianism. We believe that in this century the paramount moral challenge will be the struggle for gender equality around the world – all quotes by Nicholas D. Kristof from “Half the Sky”
Indeed.
One of the challenges that the church faces is that it has often been, rightly, accused of being part of the problem rather than part of the solution when it comes to elevating the identity, calling, authority, strength, and leadership of women in the world. Women have been censored, marginalized, shut out from positions of spiritual leadership, treated as property, burned as witches, tortured and killed as heretics , and abused.
I, for one, would like the church I lead to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. This is why we’re presently in a series on “Called by God: Women of the Bible”. In this series my intent is to show how God has called women to frontline visible ministries as prophetesses, Apostles, judges, leaders in civil disobedience, teachers, and more. I’ll also be offering, both on this blog and on our church website, some further discussion about critical questions related to the subject of women in the Bible. I hope you’ll subscribe and join us for the discussion.
I’ve been in church settings where men have walked out when a woman opened the Bible and began to teach or preach. I grew up in a church where women had very confined roles, none of which had to do with teaching or decision making authority. I’m part of a generation that, for the most part, embraced the culturally defined gender roles of “Fiddler on the Roof”. None of this strident patriarchy was fabricated out of thin air. The views come from a certain way of reading the Bible. The reading creates the culture. The culture reinforces the prevailing reading, which deepens the culture still further. And so it goes.
Here’s what can change that:
1. Consider a fresh reading of the Bible. It’s vital to recognize the danger of “cherry picking” certain passages and building entire ethical constructs out of them. My own movement away from strong patriarchy began with the realization that not everything in the Bible that God proscribes applies for all time. We don’t continue executing disobedient children, for example. Women are no longer viewed as property as they so clearly were under Old Testament Law.
Ethics change because God’s revelation is ripening, ultimately to find its fullest blossoming in the person of Christ. In Jesus’ narrative, a woman becomes the first evangelist. Another becomes exemplary of what it means to love God. Two more are the first eyewitnesses to the resurrected Christ. Paul the apostle doesn’t miss a beat in his continuing liberation of women as he speaks of a female Apostle, and of “when” women prophesy in the gathered faith community. I know there are questions about particular texts that seem to indicate confinement to certain roles, and I’ll deal with these in forthcoming material. For now know this: Christ’s example liberates women from previously constrained roles. Paul, if somewhat covertly, continues to develop that same trajectory. So should we.
2. Recognize the difference between Biblical mandate and culture norms. Many women have grown up in a culture of unequal pay, in churches that silenced them, and in homes where the word ‘submission’ was unilaterally imposed on women by men, but never applied to men (as the Bible declares it should be). These women have a weight of cultural baggage to overcome. When Paul says that believers are to be transformed by the “renewing of their minds” this is a classic example of what he’s talking about. Transformation comes from recognizing cultural mores and swimming upstream against them. Men can help women do that by recognizing that they have unique callings
My wife’s perspective is that it’s difficult for a woman to find her true voice because there’s been a historical cultural weight of expectations that have kept women on a clearly defined and constricting path. She says, “Men have often thought of women as fish in a channel. Men have tried to help women get from point A to point B by ‘helping them’, which is tantamount to straightening the stream or building fish ladders. The intention is good, but still too confining. The problem is that women are actually birds, and we can get to God’s appointed destiny of our calling by making our own prayerful decisions, finding our own path with our own unique giftedness as women.”
3. Find your gifts and use them. In the end, one of the reasons I believe women are called to any position in the church is because the last thing I’d ever want to do is censor someone from using gifts that God has given them. In Romans 12, we read that some are called to, variously, give, serve, teach, and lead. Far be it from me to prevent someone from using a certain gift because of their gender! All of us must work at understanding our strengths and how God has created us, and as we do this we’ll find those endeavors which a) bring us great joy b) we’re naturally good at and c) are affirmed by others because others are blessed by our doing them. Those endeavors are where we must focus our time.
How many women, though, have been unable to do that because of the cultural and spiritual forces of patriarchy which shut them out?
It can be otherwise, and it often begins with deconstructing the notion that women have confined roles. They’re not fish in a stream. They’re birds, with a world of heights available to them. It’s time to fly.
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