Keeping women out of leadership is hindering God's mission

"Speak the truth, even if your voice shakes."
I started writing this blog post over two years ago. Some things have gotten better, but many of the same things I started writing about are still true. I really think the evangelical church has failed in one major area. I kept on starting and stopping and not finishing this post. For one thing, it's because there are people I dearly love who believe something different than what I believe. And I don't want to damage those relationships. And to be honest, I hate difficult conversations. But I know this is a really important conversation to have. So I am writing this, and sharing it with you, even though it REALLY scares me to share it. But it's time.

This is also for all the men in my life, specifically the Christian men. I think you have failed us as women, and I think this has hindered God's mission in the world.

A short description of some experiences I have had (and daily have) that I really don't think men have experienced, and also a description of women's experiences in general
I once was on a short flight and was seated next to a very talkative middle-aged man. He said a lot of ridiculous things, like the race of Cape Breton Normans should rule the world. I agreed with about zero of what he said, but what did I know? I was a twenty-year old kid, and he was an engineer who seemed to think he was saving the country's economy by drilling in the oil patches. He told me that in our society, "Women don't need feminism. You guys have already arrived." Like I said, I was 20. It was a short flight. I did not want to start an argument with this fellow. I just wanted to read my book, to be honest. But that guy's attitude was indicative of lot of men I know. They have not experienced sexism, so they don't believe it exists. But let me tell you, it does.


I think of my high school years. I used to walk to and from high school every day from my home. It was about a 30-minute walk. About once a week, guys yelled/honked at me from cars or from the windows of the university residence I passed. I do not recall this happening if I walked with my brother. It seemed to happen more frequently when my sister and I were together.

I think of my time in university. When I first went to university, my mom had one word of advice for me: "Never leave your drink unattended." This was not advice about anything that had anything to do with the academic experience. It was a word of warning against date rape. When my brother came to university, Mom obviously did not give him this advice. Being a woman is unsafe.

I think of my experiences at church. The majority of the pastors I have known have been men; the board of elders at my church is made of men. I do not remember there ever being a woman on this board. The pastor of my current church is a man, and when he is away or not able to preach, there are a handful of lay members of the congregation who may be asked to preach. These tend to be married men over the age of 40. Women take care of the children in the nursery and the children's church (Note: since I wrote this, I moved and now go to a new church that seems to be more open to women preaching. And my home church now has men in charge of the nursery. Yay!). My dad is one of the people on the board of elders, and I asked him why women seem excluded from some leadership roles at church. Our church has no specific mandate prohibiting women from leadership roles; but the church has not been actively working to encourage women in leadership, and so for the most part, the old ways remain. I will add that soon after I brought up this issue, I was asked to preach. I was honoured at the opportunity but I felt pressure as both a young person and a woman. Because young people and women rarely get the opportunity to preach at my church, when I do I am a representative of these group. I will also add that I did not bring up the issue just because I wanted to preach, but because there are many women in my congregation who have God's Spirit working in them, and I believe that they should be given an opportunity to share their wisdom. I love love love my church, and I don't think this is only a problem with our church-- it is a problem in the church as a whole in North America.


And when we look at society as a whole, women continue to be vulnerable. As women, we are conditioned to be afraid of men. We are conditioned to hate our bodies. We are conditioned to put men in places of power and women in places of submission. And this is a huge problem. Nicholas D. Kristof writes that "Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined." In China, gendercide, mainly in the form of sex-selective abortions, has resulted in a difference of 40 million more males than females.  Closer to home, there have been at least 22 unsolved murders of women and girls since the 1970s in the Halifax area. According to the NS Advisory Council for the Status of Women, there were 2,026 female victims of domestic abuse in Nova Scotia in 2017. These are the situations that were reported to police. Between 1996 and 2015, 40 women in Nova Scotia were murdered by their intimate partner. Margaret Atwood is reported as saying: "Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them." In Nova Scotia, women only got the right to vote in 1918. That's about a hundred years ago, and the year my grandfather was born; my life has overlapped with the lives of women who were denied the right to vote. Less than a hundred years ago, women had basically no political power. Nova Scotia has had 28 premiers, and all of them are men. The United States has had 44 presidents, and none of them were women. In Canada's 149 years as a nation, a woman has served as prime minister for only 19 weeks. There is an incredible power differential in our world. Men have the power, and they are not using it for good.

This is the church. This is our society. We women often feel unsafe-- for good reason. There are many ways we are silenced-- through violence, and through structures that don't make room for our voices. I believe that the church should be actively working to redeem our society and our culture. But that is not the way things are.
 
 

Keeping women out of leadership is hindering God's mission
 There is a school of thought called complementarianism, and that school of thought is shared by many men who you respect-- people like John Piper, Tim Keller, and Wayne Grudem. I believe this school of thought is ultimately damaging to women and damaging to the ministry of the Gospel.

According to one of the authorities on complementarianism, the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, "In the family, husbands should forsake harsh or selfish leadership and grow in love and care for their wives; wives should forsake resistance to their husbands’ authority and grow in willing, joyful submission to their husbands’ leadership (Eph 5:21-33; Col 3:18-19; Tit 2:3-5; 1 Pet 3:1-7). In the church, redemption in Christ gives men and women an equal share in the blessings of salvation; nevertheless, some governing and teaching roles within the church are restricted to men."

Thankfully, other people have taken the task of offering a thorough rebuke to this sort of thinking. This is the one, by James Choung, that really convinced me of another way. I invite you to thoughtfully and prayerfully read this, and think critically about the difficult Scriptures that are often used to justify leaving women out. This other way is often called egalitarianism.  

I encourage you to use your God-given brain and wisdom to be open to change your mind. What really changed my mind, other than the James Choung article, was the inconsistency of the complementarian viewpoint, as they tend to allow women to do things like teach Sunday school, and even be missionaries, but not be pastors. I asked these questions:

• So if women are allowed to teach male children, than at what point do children grow old enough that women are no longer allowed to teach them any more? What is that magical age where all of the sudden the lack of a penis in a teacher becomes an issue?
• And if women are allowed to be missionaries, what is the difference between pastoring in a cross-cultural context and pastoring at home? 
• Can this viewpoint be misused by evil, abusive men who use theology as an excuse to silence their victims?

Asking these questions made me realize: the complementarian viewpoint, while claiming to be supported by Scripture, is really based on something far more insidious: desire to uphold patriarchial and racist systems. It is based on an understanding of the white man as having authority over all other people.

But guess what.

God is not interested in that. In fact, I really believe that God hates it when people use devotion to Him as an excuse to grab power for themselves. Just read anywhere in the Bible where Jesus speaks to Pharisees. God pours out His Spirit, which has all authority to teach and to lead, to ALL PEOPLE.

Then afterward
    I will pour out my spirit on all flesh;
your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
    your old men shall dream dreams,
    and your young men shall see visions.
²⁹ Even on the male and female slaves,
    in those days, I will pour out my spirit

Joel 2:28-29

I believe that the days Joel is prophesying about are here, and here now. And I think that there are seriously men in the church who would rather maintain existing power structures than allow the women to share in the Spirit-empowered work. 

Men of the church, do you believe in the Great Commission? The last commandment that Jesus gave: "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,  and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:19-20). Do you believe that this job is only for men? NO. OF COURSE NOT. It is for all Christians. Men and women alike. I believe that when we restrict certain roles, we are restricting and even hindering God's mission to reach all people with the amazing hope of Jesus. At the end of the day, do you want to be known as someone who contributed to the Great Commission? Or do you want to be known as someone who stood in the way?

The way that men have held on to power in this culture is definitely contrary to the Gospel. I am not saying all men are bad. I love men. And this is why I am telling you this: Because I love you. But, as my good friend Sarah once legendarily said: "The number one rule about boys is: they're clueless. Rule number two: They're still clueless!" I love you guys so much that I don't want you to be clueless!

And here's what scares me: I am scared that you aren't clueless. I'm scared that you know that women are just as capable and Spirit-empowered for leadership as you are. I'm scared that you know that and choose to keep the status quo. I can see that this might be the case. The status quo in the evangelical church tends to be one where men's voices are amplified, where men have power. But our call is to be like Jesus, who set an incredible example of humility, who:

who, though he was in the form of God,
    did not regard equality with God
    as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a slave,
    being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form, 
     he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death—
    even death on a cross.
Philippians 2:6-8 



What does humbling yourself look like in the context of changing church culture?
I think it looks like making sure your leadership team is representative of the congregation. I think it looks like thinking about childcare when organizing events. I think it looks like rethinking the theology and Christian books you read-- are they all by white men? What different perspectives may other people have? I think it ultimately looks like trusting God: trusting God that if you let go of power, that His mission still continues. Trusting God that the work of leading and pastoring and teaching in the church is not your job: it's His.

Intersectionality and New Wine

I started this blog post months ago (back in October!) but never published it. Then, this week, I was saddened to hear of the death of Rachel Held Evans, a writer who inspired me with her love of Jesus and the way she was unafraid to engage with difficult topics. So to honour her legacy, I am publishing something that, for whatever reason, I was afraid to publish.

As an evangelical Christian and a sociology graduate student, I often find myself in spaces that challenge my ideas. Sometimes what I hear in church and what I hear in the academy seem pretty opposed, and yet I have found a place both in the pews and in the university.

I am writing this, I think, to unite, in some small way, these two identities of mine. And I am bit afraid that in writing this, neither evangelical Christians nor sociologists will agree with me. But I think that's OK. This is how I am making sense of the in-between space I occupy.

The other night, I got to hear civil-rights activist Angela Davis speak at Dalhousie. She is a controversial figure, having been involved in the Communist Party for many years and now being an activist for prison abolition. Her views might be seen as extreme by some, but it cannot be denied that she is brilliant. Much of her talk at the university was about intersectionality. Intersectionality is a term that originated from feminism-- it is this idea that feminists can't just fight for women's rights, because as it turns out, women are all different-- we each have an intersection of identities. As a white, Christian woman, women's rights look a lot different than women's rights for a black, Muslim woman, for example. So you eventually come to realize that to have equality, you can't only fight for women's equality, because even women's equality is unequal. You also have to fight for equality for black people, for immigrants, for prisoners, etc.... Davis talked about some difficult subjects. She talked about how in this current moment, our approach of just picking and punishing those who sexually assault women won't ultimately solve the problem of sexual assault.We want to believe that it's as easy to solve the problems as this: Maybe, if we put all the bad men away, then we will have a safe world. But this doesn't get to the root of the problem. We need to look broadly at the structures in our society that allow violence to happen.

I honestly was a bit frustrated at the end of Angela Davis' talk. Because I wanted her to lay it out-- so what ARE we fighting for? I could hear bits and pieces of this vision for a better world in her talk, but it was more about the struggle than what we're supposed to be struggling for. A world in which all of us truly feel like we belong/ An end to all oppression?

Anyway, that is why I am happy I am a Christian. I think Jesus' vision for the world is a beautiful one. Before the Angela Davis talk on Tuesday, I went to a Bible study at lunchtime with some other grad students. We studied Luke 4. When Jesus began his ministry, he read this:  
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
   for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released,
    that the blind will see,
that the oppressed will be set free, 
 and that the time of the Lord’s favor has come.”

Then he said: “The Scripture you’ve just heard has been fulfilled this very day!”

Then he told a story and everyone was about to kill him, because in the story he told, he indicated that maybe he wouldn't exclusively help them.  People were listening to Jesus and they had all of their specific hopes for what he was going to do. Perhaps when he said that captives would be released, they thought Jesus was talking about releasing them from Roman rule. Who knows. I really think that the people listening had a specific idea of what Jesus' purpose on earth was. But he did not fit that specific idea. 

And I think as Christians, we can also have those specific ideas. We can think that God's Kingdom is just for spiritual life-- just to save our souls. We can think that God's Kingdom is just for the here-and-now, for bringing justice to earthly nations. But I think that Angela Davis and Jesus agree in one area-- a better world will not come within the same structures as our current world. God's Kingdom, which I do believe will bring true justice and peace, will set the oppressed free. But God's Kingdom isn't setting the oppressed free just by oppressing others. God's Kingdom is all about laying down power and privilege (see Philippians 2 for example!). 

Let's hear one more thing Jesus says:

 “No one tears a piece from a new garment and sews it on an old garment; otherwise the new will be torn, and the piece from the new will not match the old^. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine desires new wine, but says, ‘The old is good.’ " (Luke 5:36-38).

God's Kingdom is bringing change. Jesus is bringing an end to all oppression in the world. But Jesus is not bringing it in the way we think he is- nobody puts new wine into old wineskins! I really do believe that a world ruled by Jesus is a world where all forms of oppression and injustice cease. 

OK now I am just gonna quote Chance the Rapper:
"I'm just gon' keep rappin' And y'all just keep clappin' and keep actin' 

Like Flint got clean water and y'all don't got teen daughters 

and black friends and gay cousins, y'all just gon' say nothin' 

Know that the day comin' 

Knees bowed, tongues confessin' 

The last ones gettin' first dibs on blessings"