Women Make History
Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History
When I went to Bible College back in 1982, I learned that women were prohibited from leading the Church because of their gender.
Up until that point it had not occurred to me that genitals factored into leadership in any aspect of life, including the Church. Well, they didn’t factor into leadership other than that involving your genitals in your work or in your leadership was generally a bad idea. It seemed very arbitrary to me as a new follower of Jesus, but I went with it because culture eats everything else in a Church environment.
When I went off to Bible College, I left behind a job I had worked at for about a year. My boss there was a woman, and she was amazing. Her leadership in the workplace was faultless. She created a healthy work culture and made all of us feel valued and empowered. A year before that, I worked in a store at the mall and my manager there was a woman as well. Fantastic leadership skills, excellent people skills, she ran a profitable shop. I didn’t experience other employees in either spot complaining about our bosses, critical of our workplace or saying anything having to do with the gender of the person we worked for.
But apparently, according to what I learned at Bible College, something happened when women became part of the Church. It was like Jesus was kryptonite to women and he made them lose all their leadership superpowers so that only those individuals with male genitals were immune and retained their ability to lead in the Church.
At that time, I was part of a group of churches, a large group that had been around for a while, that was big on doing things biblically. And one thing that was for sure about the Bible, women were not allowed to lead.
We had the verses. You want to talk clobber passages. We could take you to a pile of books, chapters and verses.
You might argue with our application, you might even try to argue the cultural background of the text had to be taken into consideration, but you could not say that the clear teaching of Scripture wasn’t that women should not be teaching or preaching to men or in the named leadership positions of elders/pastors in the Church.
Except for the passages that weren’t so clear, even contradictory to those other passages.
And then there are all the examples of women doing the very things that women aren’t allowed to do.
Some of them even empowered and encouraged by Jesus to do so.
It really shouldn’t surprise us that in a male dominated culture the rules and roles of leadership favor men. What should surprise us is the way that – nevertheless – God empowers women as leaders and their stories are included in the narrative anyway.
My personal dream would be for the Church to give all leadership roles and authority to women and let them have a go at it for the next 2000 years and see what happens.
But as long as we continue to live in a male dominated culture, we will continue to tell women that they don’t have the right genitals for the leadership roles.
One of my favorite pop culture moments from the last few years occurred at the 2015 Golden Globes. The night included honoring actor, George Clooney. Clooney had recently married human rights lawyer, married to accomplished lawyer Amal Alamuddin. Fey set it up this way, Alamuddin is a “human rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, an adviser to Kofi Annan on Syria and was appointed to a three-person commission investigating rules of war violations in the Gaza strip,” Fey said. “So tonight her husband is getting a lifetime achievement award.”
That’s a perfect snapshot of our dominant culture.
My best understanding of the story we are in is that Jesus inaugurated the kingdom of God coming into the world. Liberation of the oppressed and removing the walls that divide people were two of the key elements of his kingdom coming. It is not God’s will that makes women inferior to men or less capable of leadership or less chosen for roles of power – it is man’s will. The prohibitions against women, those pesky clobber passages that we find in Scripture, tell us more about systems of power and cultures dominated responsible for writing and translating Scripture by men for men than they do the will of God or the purposes of God for women.
My daughter was on a break at work one day. Another employee, who happened to also be a student at a local seminary, was also on break and smoking a little something to help him relax for the rest of his shift. He asked my daughter what her plans were for the future, and she told him she wanted to preach, maybe pastor a church. With as much seriousness as the joint he was smoking would allow him to emote, the young seminary student told my daughter, “You can’t preach, that would be a sin. Women will go to hell for preaching to men.”
While I appreciate the concern he expressed for her eternal soul, and the way in which he embodied his culture in that moment, he was wrong. And to think that other followers of Jesus looking on that scene would think that that young man was more qualified to preach than my daughter because he was born with a penis, is sad and mad and a sign that we’re more committed to our ideology than to good theology.
I believe that the work of the kingdom of God is found wherever we are demolishing these kinds of oppressive and wicked ideologies. And while I love individuals who participate in churches where women are not welcome to be and do what God has called them to be and do, I can’t participate in or go along with those systems of religion anymore.
My friend Peter wrote this statement in a paper he wrote to address this subject for the Canadian Vineyard family of churches. “For our part, we feel constrained by both interpretation and by conscience to the view that God's ultimate desire, as expressed in the Scriptures, is for women to minister freely in his Body and in the world. We therefore place no restrictions upon the role of women seeking ordination in our churches aside from the requirements of character, gifting, knowledge, and experience that we would also demand from men.”
That sounds like Jesus and the kingdom of God.
Over the last 35 years of ministry, I’ve read a book or two. And some of the books I’ve read have been impactful and life-changing. At the top of that list would be a book written by a young woman. The book, The Story of a Soul. The author, Thérèse of Lisieux. But the list is much longer than just Sister Thérèse. I’ve been taught through print, led to a deeper understanding of faith and God by women I’ve read like Rebecca Pippert, Teresa of Avila, Rachel Held Evans, Lisa Sharon Harper, Sandra Richter, Sarah Bessey, Tish Harrison Warren and Martha Elias Downey.
In the last few years, I’ve been learning the American history of the civil rights movement. Recently I was on a bus from Selma to Montgomery and passed the site where Viola Liuzzo was forced off the road and murdered by three men, Klan members, for transporting activists who had participated in the march for voting rights. I’ve learned a little about the women who were critical leaders in the civil rights movement, women like Diane Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Dorothy I. Height, and Ella Baker. These women were leaders and their leadership led to the kingdom work of liberation and justice – work often opposed by men in power.
It is not reasonable to argue these women didn’t have gifts of leadership. It is not reasonable to say that their leadership was ineffective or less important than the leadership of men in the civil rights efforts. These women brought change into a world resistant to change, they brought freedom to people oppressed and they spoke truth to power that changed the world in their time and for their children and grandchildren. The simple truth is this - leadership in the Church should be based on integrity, character and the fruit of the Spirit - never on our genitals.
We can see with our own eyes that women are gifted by God to lead.
We can see in the Bible that women have been gifted by God to lead.
We can see in the worlds of theology, business, politics, commerce, sports, and education that women have been gifted by God to lead.
And we’ve got to stop lining up for religious institutions that deny or oppose what we can see God is doing among women and the Church.
Or at least I do, and I’m starting a petition today, I just need 6 billion people to sign it, to turn everything over to women for the next 2000 years and see what they can do. Can I get your signature?