Last year I took a Seminary course called “Gender in
Ministry.” We read many books and articles. We dove deeply into scriptures that are often
used to support the subordination of women and learned of the context and culture
surrounding them. I learned the origins
of beliefs that women are to be subordinate and discovered some of the many
holes in this doctrine. My heart had known
for many years that there was a problem with this doctrine. I suppose the first time I felt the stinging
injustice of it was when I was 16-years-old, stood up in church to tell a story from a
recent mission trip, and watched an older couple that I loved exit out the back. Hierarchical theology has affected my life in
more ways than I can or want to list here.
But the course I took last year and my continuing study since then has helped me reconcile the concerns of my
heart with the knowledge in my mind.
My concerns about the negative impacts of the
conservative church’s traditional views on women are vast. But for a moment I want to discuss how our
treatment of women in the church affects our children. As a children’s minister and mother of four,
I am passionate about what we are teaching our children as they grow in our
churches. We may believe that our churches
are welcoming and nurturing to young women.
We may value them and love them.
We may have only the best intentions toward them. But we seem to avoid the truth of how a
male-dominated church affects our daughters.
Even if no one tells them that they are less in the kingdom of God or
that their gifts are less welcome, children are brilliant, always piecing
puzzles together in their minds. When
their model is a male-dominated hierarchy, it affects them. When a little girl attends church every week
and only sees men stand in front of her as preachers, prayer and worship
leaders, communion presiders, etc. it sends her a message about who she is in
Christ. The message goes something like
this, “Jesus loves you. But he likes the
boys better.” Children don’t understand
these messages that are being written on
their hearts. But the messages are being
internalized all the same. And the message
doesn’t leave them when they walk out of the church building. They carry the message about their inferiority
in their souls. Our daughters are taught that they can do anything and be
anything in every area of their lives.
They can run corporations, lead schools, chair non-profits, and run for
President. But they walk into their churches, and
suddenly they have very palpable limits. Many young women are leaving traditional
churches because they cannot reconcile their calling with the limits that are forced upon them.
A while back I watched the movie The Greatest Showman. Phillip
Carlyle, a wealthy white man, was dating an African American trapeze artist
from the circus he managed. Set in the
1800s, this was certainly not socially acceptable. Phillip’s high-society parents caught them
out together. His father accused him of
having no shame and parading around with “the help”. His mother then said to
him, “You forget your place, Phillip.”
And Phillip replied immediately, “My place? Mother, if this is my place, then I don’t
want any part of it.” Like Phillip in
this movie, I think many of our young women are staring the church in the face
and hearing the messages it gives them of who they are and how they should be
restricted. And when the church tries to
mandate their place, they simply say, “If
this is my place, then I don’t want any part of it.” But the girls who stay, who embrace the
message and internalize it, those are the ones who may sustain the most
damage. Because many of those girls will
live with a narrative that tells them they need a man in order to be complete.
They will feel like they aren’t enough in and of themselves. As long as they carry these beliefs, they
will always feel a little less than whole.
It’s easy to see how an environment
that disqualifies women would have a negative
impact on our daughters. But surely
our sons are fine. They have a good thing going. They can live up to their potential and use
all their spiritual gifts. So, we don’t
have to worry about them. This system is
good for them, right? Absolutely not.
I venture to say that the systems in place are just as damaging, if not
more so, for our young boys. Our boys
receive the not-so-subtle message that they are superior to women, at least in
the kingdom of God. They are filled with doctrine
about how they are to be the leaders and
they deserve respect and submission by default.
They are taught to marginalize the women in their lives, and it is spiritualized for them as God’s will. They are
infused with a sense of entitlement from the very institution that
should teach them humility.
What kind of life are we molding for
our boys when we model this standard for them?
Well, as mentioned above, we are teaching them entitlement. They believe they deserve – fill in the blank
– by no accord of their own, but simply because they are male. At a minimum, we are setting many of them up
for dysfunctional marriages because we are teaching them to undervalue their
wives.
And at the extreme, we are giving abusive men spiritual backing. I recently read in one of my textbooks on
family therapy that men with more conservative Christian theology than their
wives are more likely to be guilty of domestic violence than the general
population. Allow the tragedy of that sentence to sink into your heart. Domestic abuse is rampant in our churches and
is very rarely discussed. Why? Because actually dealing with it would
require churches to admit that their theology is contributing to the problem,
and having to rework theology is daunting and fear-inducing.
Finally, we are teaching our boys to objectify women. We are priming them for a
life of pornography and/or sex addiction.
When young men are taught that women are supposed to be submissive and subordinate
to them, it is not a far leap to conclude that women exist (at least in part)
for the pleasure of men. The inability
to view a woman as a whole person in her own right is deadly to a young
man. Families are being destroyed in our churches due to
pornography and other forms of infidelity.
Christian men very often fall into these behaviors. And when women discover these behaviors by
their husbands, the church will often advise them to just forgive and move on.
After all, they say, “Most men struggle with purity. It’s just how God made them.” And they excuse an entire gender from
incredibly damaging behavior and leave the women who have been crushed to
suffer in silence. This all stems from the theology of
subordination we have embraced. Of
course, we would never say that our theology encourages these behaviors. But these behaviors seep out of the cracks of
our doctrine infecting every area of our lives.
Our precious young boys are given a picture of who they are supposed to
be that more closely mirrors worldly patriarchy than the heart of Jesus. And many of them will spend years in therapy
as adults learning for the first time that it’s okay for a man to have emotions
other than joy and anger. Our children
deserve better.
The truth is that in the church when any one group is marginalized we all become vulnerable. The enemy loves marginalization. And he certainly loves the thought of half
the people who love Jesus being quieted.
As men and women, we must join hands and work together to bring healing
to this world. God created us as
teammates, not as competitors. The idea
of competition in the church is completely foreign to the Gospel message. God calls us into relationships of humility,
gentleness, and oneness. Hierarchy and
power structures do not fit well within this framework. In the New Testament,
we read that the last shall be first and the first shall be last. The early Christian movement worked in
contrast to the power structures that were in place and called for radical
counter-cultural practices like mutual submission. The Bible and other ancient documents make it
clear that men and women, slave and free, Jew and Gentile, all joined forces in
working together to spread the good news of Jesus in the days of the early
church. They all had the same passion -
Jesus. And his message was spread
through this passion. An important
aspect of the message of Jesus was that everyone was on an equal playing field
in his kingdom. This was in stark contrast to the society of the time. Social class and pecking order meant
everything. A person’s worth in society was completely determined by his or her
station in life. But in this
kingdom, worth was defined by the
Savior. What a message of freedom to the
slaves, the women, the poor, the downcast!
They mattered! In Jesus’ kingdom,
they mattered.
Jesus sat with the outcast, healed the most forgotten,
forgave the most sinful, and met with the most reviled. He went beyond “not shaming” those who had no
status. He embraced and honored them. His treatment of women in a society that commonly
used and suppressed them was nothing short of extraordinary. Rather than marginalize them, he loved them,
defended them, elevated them. Jesus came
to free the oppressed. The Bible has
been used to defend oppression throughout history. It has been used to defend slavery, segregation,
the Holocaust, denying women the right to vote, mistreatment of immigrants, and
genocide. I cannot help but believe that
it grieves the heart of Christ when the Bible is
used as a tool of oppression. His
example shows us a completely different way, a healing way. May we follow his example in the way we teach
our sons and daughters. I believe the
future of the church depends on it. In
the wise words of Maya Angelou, “Do the best you can until you know
better. Then do better.”
