Women Telling the Story

Without dispute, women’s voices in the local church have incredible significance, as these voices give way to a greater understanding of how women think and experience God and the Christian life. Any dispute generally has to do with the realm where these voices are heard, but for certain both men and women have much to learn about each other and how God is at work through these stories and experiences.

In her recent post, Tracey Bianchi wrote about the significance of women’s voices as teachers in the local church.

"…a woman proclaiming God’s Word with hands that smell like marinated artichokes can hit the heart of another woman in a way men cannot…women have stories to tell about life and God, just as our male partners on the journey do. The chance to preach from their perspectives is honoring God’s call to the community of Christ."

Though I am not committed to Tracey’s ultimate conclusions in terms of how this plays out in the pulpit, her position is clearly grounded in an authentic love for the community of believers and for God. And I embrace her core argument that there is tremendous value for men learning more about how women experience the Christian life. In further agreement, we as women teachers can reach women in ways men simply cannot—because of our shared experiences.
To what degree are women in your church equipped, encouraged, and positioned to proclaim God’s Word to one another?

Local churches need mature, believing women to mentor one on one—that’s a given—but also to teach in corporate settings. And yes, I mean the women in the local church and not the special speakers who, by default, do a bulk of this kind of teaching. It is necessary to add that these teaching gifts must be modeled to women by women in the local church so that recognition of these gifts in future leaders is not overshadowed by the notion of unattainable celebrity status.

But this is where we need to be very clear about the nature of corporate educational opportunities in women’s ministry. It’s not so much that Christ will be proclaimed from a woman’s perspective or point of view, because the Word of God contains objective and unchanging truths as well as timeless stories that ultimately bring us to the foot of the Cross—regardless of gender. We can think of this as a redeemed human point of view, not so much a gender-influenced perspective. Yet there is still something about the notion of a “woman’s perspective” that deserves consideration.

Dorothy Sayers, theologian and female-extraordinaire, deals with the question of the “woman’s point of view” in her book Are Women Human? While she recognizes that women often share a great deal common experience that she calls “special knowledge,” she poignantly asks …what in thunder is the women’s perspective on the devaluation of the franc or the abolition of the Danzig Corridor? You may be wondering what the Danzig Corridor is, something that a basic Google search can resolve, but I think you get the point, and we must be clear about this.

When Christ is proclaimed, we aren’t really proclaiming Christ from a woman’s perspective any more than we can explain America’s economic crisis from a woman’s perspective, though we can explain its effect in the experience and perspective of being a woman. What we are really doing is teaching how to apply the theological truths we gather from Scripture to our lives as women. We are reflecting on how we live out our faith, even giving consideration to how we once lived as children of wrath…as women.

How we actually understand the meaning of Scripture is not going to differ from how men understand it, and in fact many of our experiences—because we are human—will correlate. Of course, we bring life experience and a worldview framework to our interpretation of Scripture. But if we are doing what we are suppose to be doing, we are utilizing a historical-grammatical biblical hermeneutic that helps us to avoid interpreting through the lens of our own experiences and discover as much is possible the intended meaning of the writers. Great care needs to be taken so as to avoid a feminist hermeneutic that begins with the authority of the feminine experience instead of the authority of Scripture.

When women invite other women to the person of Christ through the message of Scripture, our experience as women permits us to communicate what it means to lead a God-centered life through the joys, trials, and tribulations that are associated with being a woman. We ought not underestimate the value of this as we consider whether or not women’s ministry plays an important role in the local church.

Modern Mentorship

My cell phone buzzes while I fix my kids lunch:

“omg my prof is telling us bout why Christians are judgmentl and there are many paths to God should I say something?? pls pray for me to b bold”

This is a text message I received from one of my favorite people: a bright-eyed, skinny-jean-wearing college senior named Jes. I think of her as my babysitter. I recently learned through a friend that she thinks of me as her “number one mentor.”

This is modern mentorship?

I met Jessica 18 months ago while volunteering at a youth event. Her spunky personality and natural affection for teenagers reminded me of myself at her age. We small-talked and joked around. We programmed numbers into each other’s phones. She needed some extra cash, she told me, and loves kids.

The next week, she started babysitting for me. I began to notice something a little different about Jes. She always came early and stayed late. We lingered over cups of tea and cookies she bakes with the kids, talking about marriage, ministry, and what hair cuts work with our face shapes.

Jes walks in the door without knocking now. We talk sometimes for an entire hour, while the kids play around us or I start dinner. We talk theology and boyfriends. We talk about family, and faith, and the future. I give her books. She sends me texts.

This is modern mentorship.

Dictionary.com tells me that a mentor is a ”wise and trusted teacher.” At 32, describing myself as ‘wise and trusted’ seems as appropriate as the girls’ dresses on the Bachelor. But maybe that’s OK. Maybe it’s OK that I don’t think of myself as particularly wise, but I do think of myself as just a few steps further down the road than Jessica. Someone who can relate, but isn’t in the trenches with her. Someone who knows that one woman believing in me is priceless. I want to pass that on.

I recently conducted a very (un)official Facebook survey. Young women in their twenties overwhelming voted that a mentor in their life is someone “who offers consistent encouragement.” Spiritual Direction was a close second, with career direction a distant third. Interestingly enough, young women ranked the need for “face-to-face” interaction as relatively unimportant, saying email, texts, and Skype were good substitutes. Surely not a reliable study, but the results caught my attention.

Perhaps mentorship has to move beyond structured systems and canned questions. What might modern mentorship look like? Maybe it springs out of natural relationships. It’s not very organized but it’s real. To use a Christian-y catch phrase, maybe modern mentorship truly is “life-on-life discipleship.”

The Great Commission of Matthew 28:19 calls us to “go and make disciples of all nations.” Only intentional thought and prayer will help me to understand this commission on my life and places of influence. I believe that making disciples involves the “as you go” about our daily life discipleship, as well as the intentional “going” to the far corners of the earth. I want to take that seriously.

Today, Jes arrived, early again. She plopped down her bag while my two-year-old bowled her over in a hug. She plopped down her bag, picked up my son, and sighed, my toddler hanging off her hip. “All my friends are off in the real world doing internships this break.” I looked at her and laughed, “You don’t get any more real world than this, baby!”

What do you think? What does mentorship look like for today’s young women? How do we, as leaders, look behind us for the women that will shape tomorrow? Join the conversation. Join me—and Jessica—at GFL's Synergy Conference in Orlando, March 5-7.

Juggling Casseroles and a Calling

I preached a sermon several weeks ago. A big one for me. The biggest of my life actually. And while I do my very best not to mess up on a regular basis, we all know that some occasions press a little harder on your nervous system than others. This was one of them. “Just don’t screw this up,” I kept whispering to myself.

Of course, other, more important thoughts about preaching God’s Word also ran through my jittery little mind. Thoughts that reminded me this was really God’s sermon, not my opportunity to ramble. That the Spirit of God would use any effort, even a disjointed one, to work in people’s hearts. That less of me and more of God was all that anyone needed anyway.

And as I lived into all of these realities, I found myself in a fairly calm rhythm the night before my sermon. But what I slammed into that next morning, was the odd world that many women in ministry inhabit on a regular basis.

Like most pastors I know, I studied. I thought. I prayed. I prepared. I prayed more. And then I was ready to go. But what a woman brings to the pulpit, as we all know, is often so different than what men bring. Not better. Not inferior. Just different. And while I could camp out here on a thousand little theological and social nuances, I’d like to pause for a moment to hit the lighter side of what it takes for, in my case a married, mother of three, to offer a sermon on a Sunday morning.

You see, I woke up that morning and got myself all put together and as presentable as possible. But it so happens that my three children needed my help that morning as well. My husband was a shining star that day, but we are outnumbered. So with sermon notes in one hand and coffee in the other. I tumbled into my daughter’s room with high heels on and a dress I could not stain. Time to wake up the baby.

With a full diaper and snotty grin, she said “Hi, mama.” I delicately lifted her from the crib, careful not to cover my dress nasal goo, and spent a few moments getting her gussied up for church.

Downstairs there were pancakes on the table, two older brothers who needed to find socks and shoes, and a diaper bag to pack. And as my husband did his part, I dashed off to the kitchen to fix a salad and an appetizer for the meal we were sharing with friends after church. I glanced at my notes as I pried open a jar of marinated artichoke hearts and a bag of mozzarella cheese.

I reminded myself of my closing story while I rinsed out a casserole dish and hollered for my sons to stop arguing over trains.

And I laughed. “Do male pastors do this before church?” Maybe they do. But the ones I know spend less time with diapers than I do. And this is not a criticism, just a statement of reality. My goal here is not to embrace stereotypes, but to simply make a note of these nuances because this is also one of the many facts that reminds me of how deeply we need women in our pulpits.

Who else gets life from this angle other than another woman? How many men in that congregation juggled an appetizer and a career before leaving the house? Just like men understand the mind of a male better than a woman does, a woman proclaiming God’s word with hands that smell like marinated artichokes can hit the heart of another woman in a way men cannot.

I did not preach that morning about casseroles and missing socks. But my heart, my soul, my very presence that morning came from a place that manages those details on a daily basis. It was the Word of God from the perspective of a woman. And we need that in our churches today.

Whether that woman is single, married, is with or without children, or even has a domestic bone in her body is not the point. The point is that women have stories to tell about life and God, just as our male partners on the journey do. The chance to preach from their perspectives is honoring God’s call to the community of Christ.

We need both genders in the pulpit because God gave us all different stories, paths, and morning routines. And we can learn so much from those in our own high heel shoes, and from those in wing tips sitting next to us if we simply give one another the opportunity to speak. And then, follow that up by honoring that journey by listening.

Let's Talk About Sex

No matter where you are, they will find you. Flip on the television to watch your favorite show, there they are. Go to the supermarket and buy your groceries at the checkout stand, there they are. Drive down the freeway, there they are. Turn on the radio in the car or your home, there they are. Log on to the Internet and navigate to your favorite websites, and, yup, they are there. Sexual images are everywhere, and advertisers as well as media content programming executives know that “sex sells.” Yet, the most troublesome issue with these images is not their pervasiveness nor even sex itself, but rather the image of sex they are perpetuating. As Laurie Abraham, the executive editor of Elle magazine, stated, “The worst thing about women’s magazines is how much we lie about sex.”

Last month, I participated in a panel discussion at a local church on the topic of female sexuality in which over 800 women participated, either by attending the sessions in person or by logging in online. The number of attendees, along with the quantity and quality of their questions about biblical sexuality, made one thing clear: as Christian leaders, especially female Christian leaders, we need to talk more about sex and we need to talk about it more deeply.

It’s not that the Church, as a whole, is silent about the issue; it’s just that compared to the messages we receive from the culture about sex, the message we receive from church is something like comparing the pressurized gush of a fire hydrant to the trickle of a leaky faucet. As leaders, we need to be open about the topic of sexuality and move beyond the typical “Just don’t do it” answers. We need to present a compelling vision of healthy sexuality and talk about the emphatic “Yes” that God says to sex the way he intended it.

By far, the most common question (at least for single people) about sexuality is some variation of, “How far can I go in this or that area before I’m sinning?” As a person who has thought deeply about the matters of spiritual formation and the role our bodies play in how our spirits are formed, my response is: “That’s the wrong question.”

To move toward a more holistic image and healthy practice of sexuality in our lives, the critical question is: “Is what I’m doing making me more like God? Is what I’m doing with my body drawing me and those around me closer to God?”

Single or married, our bodies matter to God, and what we do with our bodies can either draw us closer to God or cause us to drift further away from him. This is the filter we should use when considering what it means to have a holy and healthy sex life. Approaching the question this way fundamentally shifts the focus from ourselves (i.e. what makes me feel good) back to God. It honors moral imperative Jesus issued in Matthew 22:37-40: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Like the Apostle Paul, who never shirked away from the topic of sex and devoted a large portion of his writing to matters of sexuality, as Christian leaders we need to make this issue prominent in our ministry in order to provide a meaningful corrective to the false image of sexuality portrayed in our culture.

Is sex something talked about much in your ministry?