From the Archives: Church is for Women… Or is it?

Authour's Note: As I explained in this tab, occasionally I'll be wading through old articles I've posted. Part of that is to help me chronicle my own journey, and part of it is to shed light on just how much our views change through the years as we experience different things and learn from past mistakes. This article was posted originally on Saturday January 20, 2007, nearly three and a half years ago. Aside from the writing, which needed some editing but still didn't thrill me, the view here is one I now disagree with in a variety of ways. Following the article, I'll post my follow up, which I'll keep to five hundred words. (And if you've been on this blog before, you know that five hundred words is truly a summation for me.)This post, by the way, is dedicated to my friend Zack, who suggested this idea. Hope you enjoy the new feature, everyone. As always, comments are welcome.

Church is For Women

The door jingled as I walked inside Blessings, the small Christian bookstore I'd found when I'd first moved to Ottawa. I strolled through the store, amidst the tables of nic nacs and Jesus figurines while the music played softly in the background. Every time I entered a Christian bookstore I had a strange sense that I was walking into a women's section of the library. It hadn't bothered me in the past, as I was more at home in quiet bookstore than I was in a garage. Lately, however, I'd started to notice things. Mainly, I'd come to notice just how feminine the church had become.

I headed to the men's section. I browsed through the titles, and went to another aisle before realizing that the men's titles were all located on just the one shelf. Slim pickings. As usual. It wasn't the publisher's fault however, as every Christian writer knew that women purchased more than 85% of any books sold through Christian retail. No wonder they tailored their stores – with the soft music and rose colored walls – towards women. Still, it made me shake my head. When I finished my shopping and headed out a few minutes later, I wondered if my friends would have been comfortable in a store like that. Might as well be buying flowers.

Lately I'd been doing a fair bit of reading about the church, in particular the place of men within the church, and lately I'd begun to notice some discrepancies, discrepancies that had me and some others worried. Particularly the lack of men, especially 'manly men', in the church. I'd never really noticed it before, but there was a reason for that. The statistics for church attendance were alarming. George Barna had found a gender gap of over 13 million (more women attending church) in the U. S. As well, twenty to twenty-five per cent of married women in the church were going alone. Any one who had worked in a church understood this. I remembered my time as a pastor. I remembered the women who came alone, and I remembered how much we (the pastoral staff) leaned on the women to run the programs. Except for the deacons, it was hard to find men consistently in the building. Perhaps one of the greatest misperceptions of the modern church was the idea that it was patriarchal. More like a frosted cake, below the frosting of ministers and clergy, still predominantly men, most of the church's programs were run by and for women. This whole idea about men 'missing' in the church was something of a revelation to me, understandable I suppose for the fact that I related to the men and women who attended church quite well. I was artistic. I liked small conversations. I liked teaching. I also enjoyed singing and music and learning. Unfortunately, most men just weren't built that way. I decided that the next Sunday I would step back and take a closer look at the Sunday service, which so many authors seemed to suggest had only become increasingly feminine.

The first thing that struck me was how NICE-ly everything was arranged, how NICE the people were, and how it fit with the elevator style music softly leaking over the sound system. I hung up my jacket and strolled into the sanctuary, greeting people along the way. By the time the service started, I'd already had about ten small conversations filled with warm fluff and lots of smiles. After brief announcements, we started singing. We sang for a good thirty minutes before one of our pastors and some others delivered some more announcements, all of which were presented in soft, smiling voices. Our senior pastor finally rose to speak, and after a short prayer, delivered a forty-five minute teaching that was both interesting and long. I say 'long', because as I imagined myself as a non-artistic man in the congregation, I wondered how good it felt to be back in school for an hour and a half every Sunday morning. Not only school, but taking a feminist course on relationships and submission and passive interaction. And then there was the soft music, the emphasis on relationships and small talk, the almost desperate longing for people to be NICE. And through it all, if you listened closely enough, you could almost hear the unconscious murmur... Don't rock the boat. We're all safe here. What was dangerous and manly about that? Where was the adventure and pulsing life that men longed for?

Church, for whatever reason, had become an exercise for women and artists and passive types who relished security over risk, who longed for relationship over greatness, programs over projects. Something had happened between now and that daring New Testament church that was filled with 'manly men', risk takers and adventurous types who understood that becoming a Christian did not mean more tea and crumpets. I wasn't sure what we could do about it, but it was something I needed to think about, because the more we excluded men from our churches, the more feminine they would become...

(RESPONSE)

A Feminine Church? Huh?

You notice it most often when you go out to a bar or pub and people are drinking, and therefore more uninhibited, but you see in restaurants, too. The harshness in conversations, the veiled threats, the simmering arguments, the passive aggressive comments, all made by people who have voluntarily chosen to be out together. Family, friends with friends, or worse, two people involved in some kind of romantic relationship. Coming out of the church "bubble", the one thing you notice almost immediately is how often people are NOT nice to each other. And while we can argue that too often we use "niceness" as a measurement for a person's character, it is the sign of social discipline to be in a place where niceness is prevalent, and it has nothing to do with gender. It's about safety.

When I wrote that piece nearly four years ago, I was immersed in church culture. Since then I've changed cities and moved twice, and haven't really found a church home yet. These days I'm well outside the bubble. I'm outside the safety of a place that's warm and welcoming and filled with genial small talk. I no longer see it as some kind of challenge to my supposed "manliness", whatever that means, but a welcome respite from most days where that social discipline does not exist.

The idea that a church needs to be more "manly", is frankly ridiculous. And while some of the erotic tendencies within the "worship music" industry are disturbing – as a straight male, singing about Jesus as my lover is, err, uncomfortable – the service itself no more reflects a feminine nature than a library (the woman section of the library, was I kidding?) or gym reflects its purpose. The purpose of meeting together each week as Christians is not to raise our own particular idea of gender awareness and compensate for our insecurities. It is a time of encouragement, meditation, and corporate prayer designed to help us push each other towards a life that better reflects that of Jesus. Or at least, our idea of Jesus.

The idea that "church" is feminine speaks primarily to men who feel that they have somehow lost the "adventure" within their own lives, which is a result of feeling emasculated by either their jobs or relationships. But addressing it through gender stereotypes is a disaster waiting to happen. In fact, I can't think of another, single thing more capable of destroying both individuals and relationships than this emphasis on what is male and what is female. A quick glance at other cultures and history books reveals that gender distinctions are as real a dividing line as the Prime Meridian. What they end up doing is creating more insecurity in those who do not "fit" the normative male or female patterns. (I love to dance. I love to read and write. Does that make me feminine?) According to my old way of thinking, women not only don't like adventure, they don't enjoy challenges or anything outside of shopping, flowers and children, either.

Understand that none of this has anything to do with what it means to be a Christian. Sure, it gives us a sense of being safe in our roles, but the problem being safe is what walked us down this road in the first place. Want more adventure in your life? Stop taking crap from others telling you what to do and who you should be, get on your knees, and figure it out. Involve yourself in programs with people who need help, people who will challenge you. And when you go out for dinner, just listen to the conversations around your table. More often than not, you'll wish you were in church.

-Steve

Men Should NOT be Spiritual Leaders

The class was packed. Over sixty students listening to our professor in varying degrees of participation. Laptops filled about a third of the desks, and while some people listened closely, a number of others had already tuned the class out, sending emails or playing around on facebook. I watched them from a spot near the back, trying to stay calm. This graduate course in leadership had helped me in many ways, introduced me to a number of great tools and ideas I would use in the future, but today the focus would be different. For me, at least. Highly emotional and highly controversial.

"Okay, so what did you like about the textbooks we studied?" Dr. Magnus asked.

A few people responded, the class alternately nodding and nodding off. Of the three textbooks we'd been asked to read, one of them, Being Leaders by Aubrey Malphurs, had set my teeth on edge. It had confirmed my worst fears about the evangelical world, and at times, it was almost too much to handle. Mark had listened patiently when my rants on reading Malphurs had left me emotionally exhausted and discouraged. How could anyone even believe what this 'respected' leader had written? Why weren't my classmates more upset?

"All right. So what didn't we like about the textbooks?" Dr. Magnus looked at me as my hand shot up and merely sighed.

"Go ahead, Steve."

With that, I proceeded to deliver a four-minute rant about Malphurs' book, a work that not only implied limitations on Christian leadership, but essentially stated that men were more qualified to lead than women. It was this last idea, so visible in his text, that had set me off.
When the class ended, one of the women thanked me for what I'd said. I thanked her, my mind still absorbed and frustrated by the apathy of the class. I understood all too well the dangers of apathy. That which we refused to consciously reject we unconsciously embraced. I sighed and thought about my paper.

In one of our essays for the course, we'd been asked to interact (academically) with our textbooks. I'd broken the rules, and instead written a zero star movie review of Malphurs' work. Here is a portion of what I wrote.

"...Being Leaders is a wonderful text on leadership, but only if read as satire. Malphurs' hyper-Calvinistic, modernistic, misogynistic viewpoint is so stifling and discouraging it is nearly impossible to wade through the endless sea of haughty missives to find anything useful. His 'tools' at the back of the book are exclusive, narrow and insulting (especially to women) which arouses nothing in the reader but a passionate distaste for not only Malphurs' ideas of leadership, but for the Christian publishers and other readers who found the book so helpful. It was so disturbing at times, that only when I focused on the book as if it was written as a satirical diatribe on what leadership should NOT be that I was able to continue. Harsh? Perhaps. But then, perhaps we should reconsider publishing a text that believes women to be nothing more than house wives who should teach Sunday school and 'love their children', with apparently no intellectual capabilities whatsoever..."

Needless to say, my professor was not impressed. That review would result in my lowest grade on a paper the entire year. Now, thinking back, I stand by what I've written, my mark be damned. This idea that men should be the spiritual leader (in both the church and relationships) inherently exacerbates the idea that women should not and that men are not only different, but better. It is a gender-based ideal, and one that the church must reject. Being a man no more qualifies me for being a leader than being a teacher or journalist. Much has been written about the dearth of leadership in the church, but when we are basing our choices on physiological differences, (dare I say the word) then what do we expect?

As passionately as I will argue for the equality of women within the church, understand that this has been a long process for me. Growing up in a traditional home and being educated in a conservative environment did much to prolong my own ideas of inequality, though I didn't see them that way. I have heard and used the "Trinity argument" - i.e. women are not less, just different, just like Jesus and God the Father and the Holy Spirit. I have heard and used the "moderate evangelical" argument - i.e. "yes, men are to lead, but they are to lead by serving."
What I've seen, however, reveals otherwise. That as long as people believe they should be leaders as a matter of entitlement (born a man, not a woman), we are destined to have bad leaders promulgate their prejudice like a subtle poison.

And the real tragedy... all of this is done in the name of Christ.

The biggest argument an evangelical will hear/use is the Apostle Paul's statement about a woman NOT having authourity over a man. I won't drag into hermeneutics here, because it gets a bit boring, even if it's informative. What I will say is that hegemony always seeks to sustain itself. It is the nature of power. Paradoxically, this very thing is the most compelling aspect of Jesus, this idea of a God who forsook power to become one of us. If hegemony is found in the male, or the white male, then the natural tendency of the white male will be to sustain and excuse itself.

Christians often quote the New Testament, tell others that we 'literally' accept the Bible, (even though this is impossible) and denote that as our benchmark for not allowing women the right to lead within the church.

That (phallic) argument is fallacy.

If you accept the Bible literally, why are women not wearing hats in your church? Why do you reject that verse but accept Paul's comment about the family? And if you are actually making women wear hats, (Lord help you all) then why don't you have slaves? Didn't Paul tell the slaves to submit?

You see, we all accept and reject certain verses. This sounds obvious, but it is astounding how many evangelicals actually believe they are 'interpreting' Scripture correctly. I'm not saying that any group is wrong or right, only that we are all wrong a lot. And if that's the case, sometimes we have to allow principle, the principles of scripture, to dictate our beliefs. In this case, as I often do, I think about William Wilberforce. I think about the Christians who rejected his notion of freedom based on two of Paul's letters in the New Testament. I think about the endless debates he had with other "Christians" who somehow thought slavery was acceptable. I also think about the women I've spoken to this past year, those who live in relationships, trapped and tormented by men who believe themselves to following Jesus, and yet who deny their wives the very personhood Jesus sought to grant us by his death on the cross. It is a tragic, horrible picture, and it haunts me.

Should men be spiritual leaders? It is the wrong question. We should all be spiritual leaders. We should all be working to lead and to serve in our lives. And those who lead in the church should be leading based on their giftings, not on their gender. We've all sat under bad leaders. Some were men. Some were women. The truth is that both genders are capable of good and bad leadership, and both genders are capable of producing terrible leaders.

As a church, however, we must get away from this idea that because "the Bible says so" when it comes to leadership, we must get away from the ignorant argument "that's how it is."

My prayer is that this week you will ask yourself some hard questions. Does it bother you if women are in a position of leadership? Do you really believe women are equal to men? Women need to answer these questions too. I have seen too many marriages on the verge of breakdown, heard too many tales of abuse and control, because this question was never addressed.
There is no difference in the potential of men and women, and throughout his ministry, Jesus did nothing but affirm the importance of women in a society that had little or no use for them. Whatever we believe, know that if we are unwilling to bend, if we are unwilling to ask why we believe the things we believe and be honest about it, man or woman, we will never grow into the people God wants us to be.

-Steve

Shut up, Woman! Aren't You a Christian?

Why Christian men despise women... And what you can do about it...

We were sitting on the couch, and Jer was leafing through a photo album of his trip to Florida. Heather, his wife, wasn't home. We were due back for class in an hour, but for now, we were content to chill and hang out. He showed me pictures of the beach, and I was nodding along until a picture of him and Heather made me sit up straight.

"You let her wear that?"

"Huh?"

I was almost afraid to look at it.

"Dude, your wife is wearing a bikini!"

He looked at me and laughed, and despite the obvious consternation on my face, he didn't bother pursuing it. He knew better.

At the time, you couldn't have convinced me of anything other than the simple fact that my friend was being loose with his wife. That he should be checking to ensure she didn't act in an inappropriate manner like that. Wasn't he her husband? If I ever married, my wife would never act in that manner, I reassured myself. A bikini? What was this world coming to?

I was twenty-one years old.

14 Years Later

The lecture had finished, and I stood inside the little foyer at the retreat center, pouring myself a coffee and trying not to eat too many cookies. I approached Patricia (all the names have been changed in this blog, but the stories are true) to thank her for her openness in the last session. She'd been a minister for eleven years, and as we talked, she began to share some of her experiences as a woman in ministry.

As an associate pastor, her and her church had put together a joint service with another church. The other church was currently being served by an interim pastor. When they spoke and began to plan the service, it made sense that she would be the one to preach. When the board of the other church found out, however, that a woman would be preaching, they cancelled the service. Patricia, showing great humility, did not force her way into the pulpit. Instead, she demurred, but in every other facet ran the joint service. As she greeted the people in the foyer afterwards, the women were genuinely surprised that she was an actual woman minister. The men, however, did not disguise their disgust, snarling and making snide comments as they exited the building.

This is the environment she has worked in for the past eleven years. Funny, gentle, disarming, educated, Patricia has all the qualities you hope for in a minister. Except she isn't a man.
A friend down in Texas has three kids, and she wrote me recently, telling me how trapped she feels in her marriage. Her husband controls every aspect of her life, he never helps around the house, and he is unwilling to admit when he is wrong, insisting that as a woman her role is to simply forgive and move on. He is a prominent pastor, and whenever she has had the courage to mention it to someone, she is told that he 'is working for the Lord.' That she is to be his helpmate. That she is to deny herself and follow Jesus. She no longer knows who she is, and inside her soul is dying, but she sucks it up because she thinks that maybe this is what God wants for her.

She is a woman.

Another friend recently married. Her family life has been marred by a litany of emotional struggle and abuse, but this man, this Christian man, seemed like a dream. Until she got sick. He has decided that she is not positive enough, and he has walked away until she is more joyful for the Lord. He is commended within his community for being a strong, positive role model. Meanwhile, she faces an uphill battle with a life of unsurety, while he 'pursues the Lord'.

She is a woman.

Another friend recently wrote me about her situation. She has three kids, and hasn't worked since she and her husband married nine years ago. She asked him about work, but he has always discouraged her, reminding her that the first years are important. He also controls her life. She has no bank account of her own, because her husband claims that there should be no secrets within the marriage. When she spends money, he always wants to know why. When she calls or speaks with a man, he wants to know why. He is allowed to speak to whomever he chooses. However, openness is important to the Lord. She bravely tries to live on the compliments of the church. That she is such a wonderful role model, that her husband is very lucky. But lately these comments don't mean very much, because she realizes exactly what she is.

She is a woman.

Over and over, I am besieged this past year of stories from friends and coworkers and colleagues, of women trapped and frustrated by these seemingly loving Christian men they have chosen as their life mates. It is, in a word, heartbreaking.

Especially so because I have been there. That is, I too, once believed as these men believed. That women were designed for a different role. This past month, we were forced to read a textbook on leadership that gave two forms to fill out when examining some things we need for leadership. The form for women did not include any intellectual capacity, and filled with terms like 'loving your children'. It was a harrowing and distasteful read.

At what point did we decide that women were not equal to men? At what point did women simply start accepting it?

We know in our society that men dominate women. One in four women willed be sexually attacked by the time they are twenty, and that is the women who report it. But shouldn't the church be different? How have we turned the ministry of Jesus, who radically upended the view of how women should be treated, and reverted to this idea that everyone is equal... except for women? How have we turned the cultural letters of Paul into a doctrine for this continual, systematic abuse? Had William Wilberforce simply echoed the cry of the confederates, that slavery was in the Bible (the book of Philemon) without understanding the Biblical principle of equality for all, perhaps we would still have slavery today. Most Christians would agree slavery is wrong, but when it comes to women, well, Steve, don't you need to be more moderate?

This past semester, I have been pursued, sent angry emails, called out and castigated for my 'radical' views. I am followed, frowned at, and as I've recently found out, am talked about in churches outside the school. Most of the time, the people who are most upset are men. White males, specifically. But occasionally it is a woman. I don't say this because I am special, but because the nature of what I teach is so... mundane. Women are equal to men. Every person is deserving of our love. Doctrine can be dangerous. Mercy is always first. Isn't that what Jesus taught?

I ask this because, and as this blog is especially painful to write, I have not always thought that way. I, too, once believed that I was better than women. Better than quite a few people, actually. Better than the sinners and God-haters out there, I was always quick to delineate what made me special.

However, only one truth matters.

I am special because God loves me.

So are you.

It doesn't matter that I am a man, or that I am white, or that I am straight. What matters is that Jesus died for me, that there is now no longer black or white, Greek or Jew, male or female.

Except there is...

Because, I am a man.

The truth is that we have embraced this seeming bland form of inequality and hatred within our fold without challenging it. We use doctrine to keep people in place, without addressing the person. Didn't Jesus opppose that?

Dear woman, do you believe that you deserve to be happy? Do you deserve to be treated as an equal? How does God consider you? Has the Bible been used as a hammer to enforce your station? My prayer this week is that you will see yourself as God sees you. Fully equal to every other human on the planet. It is time to stop letting other Christians, especially men, walk over you because you are the 'lesser' of the sexes.

There are men, like myself, who needed to be completely shattered before God could slowly work on my heart. But maybe it starts with you. Maybe it's time we started asking questions and demanding some answers. Why is a man's ministry so much more important than you? Why is it okay that he has freedom to pursue life, when yours is locked into a corner of small expectations?

You are not less than a man. You are fully, deeply, and equally loved by the Creator of the universe, who sent His only Son (supported by women throughout his ministry) to remind you of that.

You are a woman.

May God help you see that this week and beyond, and to no longer take a back seat to anyone who says otherwise.

-Steve