Let's Talk About Sexual Entitlement

It started when I was only five years old. A neighbor boy, about a year older than me, with a couple of his friends, persuaded me to take off my clothes for them. My older sister was shocked and put a stop to it-- but it was the first lesson of many. The second lesson was on my first-grade playground, where I was caught by two third-grade boys and dragged to the notorious schoolyard kisser, where despite my struggles I endured being kissed by the boy while his friends laughed and jeered.

By second grade my female classmates and I had learned to consistently wear shorts under our skirts. Boys liked to run by and flip the skirts up, or crawl under the monkey bars and look up as we swung overhead. In fifth grade, the year I got plump before thinning down again in junior high, I became known as "fatso" and "bubble-butt."  My name seemed to have been forgotten, replaced by jokes about what I looked like.

It was the early 1970s, and all these things joined together to teach me that what mattered most about me, as a girl, was my body: how it looked, whether that was pleasing to boys or not, and how it could be turned into a source of fun and mockery. And when I started to develop breasts? Well, all I will say is that this didn't improve things.

In junior high, one day when I had to leave class before the bell rang (I don't remember why) a boy chased me through the empty halls, down the stairs of the school and across the parking lot, trying to touch my chest. But even worse, somehow, was the feeling of worthlessness because other boys wanted nothing to do with me, being too smart and not pretty or cute enough. A girl's worth was measured by whether a boy wanted to be her boyfriend, and I didn't measure up. I'm sure I'm not the only girl who invented a boyfriend who lived in another town, just to get a little respect as a girl whom a boy had claimed.

This continued throughout high school. Girls who were small and sweet, who acted childlike and not too smart so that boys could feel important and protective-- these were the valued ones. Not being one of these, I began to learn to find my value in other ways: through the speech team, through grades, and through my new-found faith.

One of the main draws of the spiritually abusive religious group I joined in college was that, whatever their faults, they required the guys and girls to treat one another as sisters and brothers. Girls were given opportunities to have a real voice in the church, too, though we couldn't aspire to anything greater than to someday be a pastor's wife. As sisters, though, we really were viewed as real people, not just as bodies that existed primarily for the enjoyment of men.

There was, in fact, actually a good reason at that time to be fearful of "the world" around me-- the university campus had developed a reputation for the ease and frequency with which rapes occurred. The campus was even referred to as "the candy store" because women were so vulnerable as they crossed the grounds and the surrounding streets. Those of us girls who lived outside the church's boarding house were requested to call the house for a brotherly escort any time we needed to walk after dusk.

The memory will always stay with me of the evening I hurried home just after sunset, having misjudged the hour, terrified of being noticed by anyone. At the sound of pounding footsteps approaching down the sidewalk behind me, I froze in panic. "It's all right! You're all right!" said the jogger as he passed me, leaving me weak with relief. Not all men were rapists. But we had no way of knowing who was and who wasn't.

I know I'm one of the lucky ones. Except for the occasional grab, I've never been physically assaulted by a man. But that doesn't mean I've escaped the pervasive sexual entitlement in our culture.

When I finished college I went to work at first for a woman boss, and that was lovely. But her company failed, and I found a job for a small technology-development company where all the bosses were male. I had to get used to comments being made about my legs, my figure, and my singleness. I was propositioned by the CEO, who was over 70 years old and apparently liked a little side action when his wife wasn't around.

But I was fortunate. None of them did anything more than talk, and the CEO didn't try to force the issue when I told him I was only interested in guys my own age. In fact, they were afraid I might report this to someone or get a lawyer. It was the mid 1980s, and "sexual harassment" was new terminology that had only recently been coined.

Not until I arrived at work with an engagement ring on my finger did the harassment stop. But this was not because they had decided to respect me. They only respected the fact that a man had now staked a claim to me.

I left that job for the paralegal position I have held ever since. The lawyers I have worked for have been men, with one brief exception-- but I have always been respected there as a person, not just as a female body that belongs to another male. As I have grown older, instances of disrespect and harassment elsewhere have also pretty much ceased. But the attitude that female bodies exist for the use and enjoyment of men has not died. Far from it.

When a young man in Isla Vista recently went on a killing spree because women refused to have sex with him, it touched a nerve on the Internet, resulting in the Twitter page #YesAllWomen.  Women everywhere added their voices to say that though not all men participate in this attitude, pretty much all women, young and old, have experienced it in one way or another in their lives.  It isn't just a problem from our society's more sexist past -- it's still going on now.

Today I was dismayed to learn that only a week after Isla Vista and #YesAllWomen, a new story of male entitlement is circulating, and in this case (presumably because he hasn't killed anyone or made an over-the-top video expressing terrible misogyny) this 17-year-old is being praised for dumping his girlfriend when she cheated on him-- apparently because he was clever in the way he did it, exclusively using Internet memes.  But if you really take an objective look at what happened, it isn't funny.  It's the same, "I own you, so I can punish you when you misbehave" attitude that women should not still be encountering.  A guy is certainly justified in breaking up with a girl who cheats on him, if they had promised each other an exclusive relationship.  But threatening to "do bad things to you" and to "murder your family," aren't funny even if meant in jest.  And the follow-up picture, which is supposed to be a joke, is nothing more than a gang-rape suggestion/threat.

I'm not laughing.

As blogger Sarah Over the Moon says:

Many people in our society respect women and, if asked, would tell you that women do not deserved to be threatened with violence. They don’t deserve to be shot down in the streets of Isla Vista, and they don’t deserve to receive a text from a young man threatening to murder their whole family. “Of course they don’t! Women are our mothers, our sisters, and our daughters! We would never want such a thing to happen to them,” a benevolent man might say. 

But that same exact benevolent man is likely to change his mind quickly as soon as a woman steps outside of a “proper” role for women to fill. As soon as a woman stops acting like an innocent, romanticized mother, sister, or daughter, and starts acting like a “bitch,”or a “slut,” or a cheater, the hostile sexism begins to fly. There is research backing this up. . .

This is why CNN and Buzzfeed can mourn a tragic shooting one week, and interview a “Twitter hero” who threatens women with violence the next. .  

I’d like to think society is improving in its views toward women. I’d like to think the success of #YesAllWomen shows that men are starting to learn and listen. But then Kane Zipperman goes viral, and I put my fists back up.  

We’ve still got a lot more fighting to do.

A May 29th ThinkProgress article examines several studies that show how the media, and male readers, still frequently categorize women as adjuncts for the benefit of men, rather than as full people in with their own goals, rights and needs.  It concludes:

There are serious consequences to this pervasive cultural attitude about women as objects of men’s desires. When men believe that they are entitled to sex, they often respond violently when women deny it from them. . . 

These attitudes have been so deeply embedded in our culture, young women believe that forfeiting their consent is a normal aspect of gender relations, according to a recent study. “Objectification, sexual harassment, and abuse appear to be part of the fabric of young women’s lives,” the study’s authors noted.

Unfortunately, Christian churches, including the one I fled to for refuge from male sexual entitlement, often also participate in the objectification of women and the commodification of their bodies through Purity Culture and its insistence on women dressing modestly for fear of "causing their brothers to stumble".  But if we can leave all that aside, the idea that unless a man and a woman have both consented to become romantically involved, they should treat one another as brothers and sisters, is a pretty good thing. There's a reason why Jesus and the apostles used "brothers and sisters" as their main terminology for referring to Christians in community.  As Michael Kruse of the Kruse Kronicle puts it:

Remember that in the obsessively status oriented Greco-Roman world, the sibling relationship was the most egalitarian of all relationships. Harmony and solidarity was expected among brothers. If folks followed Jesus instruction of sibling relatedness, then status questions would evaporate. In verses 8-12, Jesus rejects all status seeking preoccupations and reiterates his upside down paradigm where the way you get to the top is by going to the very bottom. This is just one way in which the fictive family metaphor regulates the life of the community.

Kids growing up in the same family do usually imbibe the idea that their siblings are fellow human beings and not objects or adjuncts.  Sharing, respect, and asking first before you take, are all part of being good sisters and brothers.  So can't we do better at teaching these basic principles not just in our churches, but in society as a whole?

We're all still in many ways imbibing the message that women's bodies exist for the use and possession of men.  We're still imparting it to our young people, in the church and out of it.  We're still unquestioning of it on TV and movies and magazine covers.  We're still proof-texting it from our Bibles-- but this is not what the Bible as a whole teaches.

We've got to break this cycle, for everyone's sake.  I would love someday to have my grandchildren struggle to grasp the concept of sexual entitlement in a unit of their high school history classes.  I would love to have respect and consent simply be an integral part of their world.

It's not impossible.  Let's see if, by the grace of God, we can make it true.

"Only Believe" - Jesus, the Little Girl and the Woman with the Issue of Blood

This double story appears in three of the four gospels.  Matthew's version (Matt. 9:18-26) is an abbreviated version.  Luke's version (Luke 8:40-56) and Mark's (Mark 5:21-43) are similar, but I will print Mark's here as it shows the most detail:

When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd gathered around him while he was by the lake. Then one of the synagogue leaders, named Jairus, came, and when he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet. He pleaded earnestly with him, “My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.” So Jesus went with him.
A large crowd followed and pressed around him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.
At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”
You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ”
But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
While Jesus was still speaking, some people came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue leader. “Your daughter is dead,” they said. “Why bother the teacher anymore?”
Overhearing what they said, Jesus told him, “Don’t be afraid; just believe.”
He did not let anyone follow him except Peter, James and John the brother of James. When they came to the home of the synagogue leader, Jesus saw a commotion, with people crying and wailing loudly. He went in and said to them,“Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep.” But they laughed at him.
After he put them all out, he took the child’s father and mother and the disciples who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha koum!” (which means “Little girl, I say to you, get up!”). Immediately the girl stood up and began to walk around (she was twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished. He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this, and told them to give her something to eat.

Two females, one the privileged daughter of a prominent synagogue leader, the other an impoverished and ill woman who had spent all her money on doctors and whose impurity made her an outcast among her people.  The privileged girl takes no active part in the story; she is ill, and later she dies. When Jesus touches and speaks to her, she rises and is given back to her parents.  In keeping with the propriety of the day, the man to whom the girl belongs-- in this case, her father-- acts for her in public places.  Thus it is not just the girl who is juxtaposed to the hemorrhaging woman, but the girl's respected and influential father.

The woman, however, has no man to act for her.  She has been ritually unclean for so long that it is likely her husband divorced her long ago (see Lev. 18:19).  Where Jairus is at the center of the religious community, this woman has long been outcast from it. Jairus boldly and publicly calls on Jesus for aid on his daughter's behalf.  The woman must take action for herself, but she dares not do it openly. As I have shown earlier in this "Jesus and Women" series, respectable women did not cry out after rabbis on public streets.  Furthermore, unclean women were not supposed to push through crowds of people, as this article on Jewish Laws on Women's Purity in Jesus' Day explains:

According to the Bible, a woman is impure for seven days from the beginning of her menstrual flow (Lev. 12:2; 15:19). Anyone who touches a menstruous woman becomes unclean until evening (Lev. 15:19). Whoever touches her bed or anything she sits on during the week is unclean until evening and must wash his clothes and bathe with water (vss. 20-23). . .

Josephus states that women during the menstrual period were not permitted in any of the courts of the Temple (Against Apion 2:103-104; War 5:227). The social separation of women during their menses is further emphasized in the Talmud.

WomenintheBible.Net provides more detail:

Strictly speaking, she should not have been among other people. According to the laws of ritual purity, she should have been at home during her menstrual period, living quietly (see Leviticus 15:19-31). These laws worked very well for healthy women who had a menstrual period of five – seven days. It was a time out for them, when they were relieved of their normal duties and could rest.

But the woman in this story was not healthy. Her menstrual flow had lasted twelve years, so the purity laws had become an impossible burden for her. She could not go out, she could not touch members of her family, she could not enjoy a normal life, and she was constantly debilitated.

Jairus' daughter has been alive for roughly the same amount of time as the woman has been suffering: twelve years.  Twelve is a number representing completeness in the Bible; it is when a child comes of age, and here it brings a crisis and a turning point for both the young girl and the older woman. Though the two do not meet, their lives are intertwined by these events and by the way their narratives are told as an intercalcation.

This Biblewise article explains "intercalcation" as "a literary technique used by the gospel writers to enhance both stories, providing larger insights and lessons. The 'story within a story' is called an intercalation or a 'sandwiched' story."  The article's detailed comparisons are worth noting:

It becomes clear when they are told together that they belong together. There are too many verbal links to suggest otherwise. The daughter was twelve years old and on the brink of her womanhood. The woman had been hemorrhaging for twelve years and had become unclean and cast off because of her womanhood. The disparity in status and stature of the main characters cannot be overlooked. They are exact opposites. One was important and influential, a ruler in the synagogue; the other was an outcast with no standing in the community. Jairus was named; the woman was not. He had a family, a place in society; the woman had “lost all that she had.” (She’s probably homeless.) But there are some similarities, too. They both humbled themselves by falling at Jesus’ feet. They both had a great need. Jairus asked that Jesus come and lay his hands on his daughter; the woman wanted but to touch his clothes. They both believed that Jesus was the one to help them, but they came from opposite ends of the social spectrum. . . . 

Mark's version is significant not least because it gives us a very unusual glimpse into the inner life of this woman.  She thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed" -- and then she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.  In every way the reader is encouraged to see this woman, this silent social outcast, as a feeling, thinking human being.  Desperate for healing but mindful of the social mores, she intends to slip in and out of Jesus' life unnoticed by anyone.  In the process she becomes the only person who obtains healing outside of Christ's voluntary will.  The agency in her story is not His, but hers.

But when He feels power go out of Him, Jesus is determined to see and hear the invisible, voiceless recipient.  At this point the woman seems to become afraid that she has been too bold, but she is also brave.  She doesn't slip away in the crowd, but comes to Him and confesses.  "Daughter," He tells her (did she find it odd to be called so by a man who was at least her own age, if not younger than she?) "your faith has healed you."  The respect He gives her is as plain as His compassion.

During this exchange, the powerful and influential synagogue leader has had to stand and wait.  And while he waits, time runs out for his little girl.  He must have felt a kind of despairing impatience, waiting for Jesus to be finished with this interruption, but the texts do not record him as protesting.  If he thought his problem was more important than that of this lowly woman (who, though suffering, was not at the brink of death as his child was!) he doesn't say so.  I sincerely think I could not have been so patient in his place.

And it seems he's going to lose out because of it.  A messenger approaches to say it's too late.  His daughter has already died.

Jesus now allows Jairus' problem to interrupt his final interchange with the healed woman.  He is still speaking to her when the messenger comes, but He stops to hear what the messenger will say.  Then, with the same compassion He showed the woman, He tells the bereaved father not to be afraid, but only to believe.  And then He raises his daughter from the dead.

The Biblewise article interprets it like this:

In putting the stories together, Mark shows that there is no limit to the good that God can do. One is not healed at the expense of another. Those choices do not have to be made -- either/or, one wins/the other loses. Jesus demonstrated that God is present and caring for everyone – rich or poor. One is not more important than the other.

Most of us tend to err on one side or the other-- we give more weight to the concerns of the privileged and powerful, or we tend to despise them for their privilege while we focus on the marginalized.  But a sick child is a sick child, a bereaved father is a bereaved father, and a suffering woman is a suffering woman-- alike in their humanity no matter who they are. Jesus saw and cared about all three.

Now that she has died, Jairus' daughter is also unclean, and anyone who touched her would become unclean (Numbers 19:11), just as anyone who touched the hemorrhaging woman would become unclean.  Paula Fredricksen's article on Boston University's religion page shows that in general, Jesus as a practicing Jew would have followed the purity laws, and that the purity laws were about ritual cleanness for the worship of God; they were different from the moral laws about sin.  Being or becoming ritually unclean was not about sin, and of course people naturally incurred ritual uncleanness (through marital sex, childbirth, funerals and the like) in the course of their lives.  But uncleanness was something you'd generally incur through contact with family members and close friends; you didn't want to have to go to the time and trouble of undergoing a cleansing ritual for a stranger.

Jesus, however, touched unclean strangers frequently, in order to heal them.  And as David deSilva points out in his book Honor, Patronage, Kinship and Purity (pp. 284-285), something astonishing happened when Jesus touched an unclean person: rather than their uncleanness being transferred to Him, the person was healed by Him, thus becoming free of the source of the uncleanness:

The leper is perpetually unclean, but Jesus nevertheless touches him and makes him clean. . . The Gospels thus present Jesus encountering a stream of ritually impure and potentially polluting people, but in the encounter their contagion does not defile Jesus; rather his holiness purges their pollution, renders them clean and integrates them again into the mainstream of Jewish society where they can reclaim their birthright, as it were, among the people of God. 

The hemorrhaging woman and the dead daughter of Jairus thus both encounter Christ from the same place, regardless of the disparity in their social positions.  Both are unclean and thus outside of society.  Jesus' touching the girl and being touched by the woman restores both to the community. The purity laws, Jesus seems to be implying, should not be used as a justification for creating outcasts.

David deSilva elaborates:

Jesus' healings of the diseased and encounters with 'sinners' are immersed in issues of purity rules and pollution taboos in which we see Jesus consistently showing a willingness to cross the lines in order to bring the unclean ones back to a state of cleanness and integration into the community. . . [W]hen Pharisees, who seek to preserve purity through defensive strategies (abstaining from contact with the unclean or potentially unclean), challenge his eating with sinners and thus inviting pollution, he quotes Hosea 6:6, "I desire mercy and not sacrifice". . . The holiness God seeks, according to Jesus' understanding, entails reaching out in love and compassion. . . .

Mercy trumps sacrifice because (as I mentioned a few posts ago) people are more important than things.  The Christian faith as Jesus taught it was about inclusion not exclusion, not about keeping "pure" through ostracizing others, but about reaching out to others in love.  As Fred Clark at Slacktivist pointed out this week, if the end result was that we as Gentiles could be included in the people of God, who are we Gentiles to turn around and exclude one another? 

Jesus showed us the way through this story of a sick child, a desperate father and an I've-got-nothing-left-to-lose woman.  He didn't treat people as better-than or less-than.  He treated them all as people.  He didn't do us-vs.-them.  He only did "us."  And no one escaped His notice-- not even a woman who tried her best to do so. 

Christianity should be about going and doing likewise. 

Jesus in the Gardens: Undoing What Adam Did

It's Easter week, and I'm thinking about gardens.

My own garden is full of tulips and daffodils that are starting to fade now, but my cherry tree is still in bloom and dropping pink petals on the grass.  The grass is bursting out of itself, growing too fast, faster than a mower can keep up with.  And the birds are singing as they wing over my plantings. Gardens are beautiful in the spring.

Jesus' death and resurrection was in the spring-- right around the time of Passover.  Two gardens feature heavily in that story.  There was a garden at Gethsemane, where He prayed and cried on the night He was arrested.  And there was a garden where His body lay entombed.

When Adam and Eve first sinned, it was in a garden.  And they were driven out of the garden by an angel with a flaming sword.  In the garden stories of Gethsemane and the tomb, angels appear again.

Gardens. Temptation. Angels. Death.

Turning points.

I think that when we see Jesus in gardens, in narratives that repeat so many of the motifs of Eden, it's good to pay special attention.  Jesus, after all, is called "the second Adam" (1 Cor. 15:45).

Matthew and Mark tell the story of the "place called Gethsemane" (Matt. 26:36, Mark 14:32), but it is John who informs us that the place where Jesus withdrew after the Last Supper was in fact a garden (John 18:1).  The original readers, of course, would have recognized the name of this garden at the foot of the Mount of Olives (which is how Luke describes it in Chapter 22) without having to be told. But look what Jesus does in this garden:

Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” (Matt. 26:39)

The passage says He prayed this way three times.  Three is an interesting number, because that is the number of times Jesus asked Peter to reverse his denial of Him (John 21:15-17).  It is the number of times Jesus resisted the temptations of the devil in the wilderness (Luke 4:1-13).  Adam and Eve were tempted just once, and they fell.  Jesus, as the second Adam, resisted three times.  Somehow, three is the number of reversal, of undoing what has been done.

Adam in the garden at Eden, all of his life ahead of him in a place of joy and peace, chose his own will over God's.  Here in the garden at Gethsemane, Jesus in an agony of distress for the death He is facing, gasps out three affirmations of God's will.

And an angel comes (Luke 22:43).  Not with a flaming sword to drive out, but with outstretched arms to strengthen and comfort.

And then there was the other garden.

At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid. Because it was the Jewish day of Preparation and since the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there. (John 19:41-42)

The narratives give several different versions of what happened next-- just as we might expect if a number of people all told individual eyewitness stories.  But several elements appear over and over again.

The stone was rolled away from the entrance of the tomb.

Angels appeared-- again not to drive out, but this time to proclaim: Jesus had risen from the dead.

And the first to see and speak to the risen Christ were women.

I want to focus on the story in John:

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved,and said, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!”
So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen. Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.) Then the disciples went back to where they were staying.
Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.
They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”
“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.
He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”
Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”
Jesus said to her, “Mary.”
She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”).
Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her. [Emphases added.]

One thing stands out immediately.  Mary didn't see Jesus just because she happened to be the first one there.  Jesus could easily have appeared to Peter and John, but He didn't.  He waited until they had gone home. Then He appeared to Mary.  Why?

In the first garden, the garden of Eden, the woman who listened to the serpent was thinking about her own gain.  She saw that "the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom" (Genesis 3:6). And so she took, and she ate.

In this garden, the one with the empty tomb, the woman isn't thinking about herself at all.  She's thinking about something else.  Someone else.  Three times she says it: "They have taken Him away.  Where is He?"

The third time, He answers her Himself.  "Mary."

And she rushes into His arms and won't let go.

Just as Jesus reversed what Adam did, Mary has reversed what Eve did.

But He has something He needs her to do-- something He chose her, and not Peter or John, to do.  So He must ask her to let go of Him and do it.

After the scene in the garden of Eden, God warned Eve that now her husband will rule over her (Gen. 3:16)  And what we see in the biblical story from that time on, is men ruling over women.

Until Jesus came along.

Two years ago I wrote an answer to the question, Why Did Jesus Choose Twelve Men? 

The twelve were the main witnesses to the life, death and resurrection of Christ. In the Ancient Near East and Roman cultures, the testimony of women was considered invalid. It was not accepted in court; it was not legally binding in any way. The world was simply not going to listen to women, and Jesus knew it.
So here’s what He did. His very first act upon Resurrection was to appear to the women. In fact, John tells us that though Peter and John ran ahead of Mary Magdalene on the way to the tomb, they saw nothing. Then after they left, Mary Magdalene was the first to see the Resurrected Christ. John 20:3-14. Other women also saw Him shortly afterwards– but no male saw the Lord, revealed for who He was, until that evening, eight hours or more afterwards. . .
The significance of this would not have been lost on the male disciples in that patriarchal culture. They knew that they themselves had refused to believe the women’s testimony that morning. Then when Jesus appeared to them, they realized the women had been telling the truth.
Jesus was communicating this very clearly (the fact that we miss it today is a product of our culture): “The world will not accept the testimony of your sisters, but I have just forced you to listen to it. My kingdom is to be different from the world. You are to listen to your women and allow them to testify of Me.”

 Before Jesus commissioned the apostles to take His message to the world in Matthew 28:18-20, Jesus commissioned Mary Magdalene and her sisters to take His message to the apostles.  This was a much bigger deal than it looks like.  As Christianity Today's online article Five Errors to Drop from Your Easter Sermon puts it:

As you preach this Easter, do not bypass the testimony of the women as an incidental detail. In the first century, women were not even eligible to testify in a Jewish court of law. Josephus said that even the witness of multiple women was not acceptable "because of the levity and boldness of their sex." Celsus, the second-century critic of Christianity, mocked the idea of Mary Magdalene as an alleged resurrection witness, referring to her as a "hysterical female … deluded by … sorcery."  

This background matters because it points to two crucial truths. First, it is a theological reminder that the kingdom of the Messiah turns the system of the world on its head. In this culture, Jesus radically affirmed the full dignity of women and the vital value of their witness. Second, it is a powerful apologetic reminder of the historical accuracy of the resurrection accounts. If these were "cleverly devised myths" (2 Pet. 1:16, ESV), women would never have been presented as the first eyewitnesses of the risen Christ.

 Jesus does not send Mary back to the male disciples to be ruled over by them.  He sends her back to them to teach and proclaim His truth.  Far from telling her to know her place, He deliberately raises her out of a woman's place and into a place of equality.

Mary, in desiring Christ above all else, has undone what Eve did. And Christ responds by undoing "he shall rule over you."

Last year Preston Yancy wrote the most beautiful blog post I have ever read anywhere.  He called it When It Matters Because of Two Gardens, and I probably would never have written this post if I had not first read that one, and thought about it ever since.  Here is a little of what he said, though I encourage everyone to read the whole thing:

I think of how one little verse, one little verse of a redemption in the twentieth chapter of the most beautiful Gospel, the story of us, could mean all this. 

Could mean systemic patriarchy has been overthrown. Could mean that equality is now. Could mean that the Law of Moses would be overcome by the law of grace. Could mean that a woman is a person not a thing, joy of father or husband, and that her word is worth, her voice use. . .

And I think of them, sometimes, of that second Man and that other woman, in that garden west of Golgotha, and I think of her as she was sent forth, running east, and I think of the tangled mess of grace tripping and dancing round her in her wake, her feet bringing the news of healed cosmos, healed creation, and He has done this, first, and we shall follow, and so comes the Light.

Jesus in the garden is an undoing and reversal of what drove humanity out of the garden. He has begun the righting of all that has been wrong-- and not least what has been wrong between men and women.

We should not read the rest of the New Testament in ways that negate this truth.

For He is risen indeed.

The "Feminization" of the Church

In recent years a lot of people have been talking about why in most Christian churches there is an approximately 60-40 ratio of women to men.  This 2006 Biola Magazine article puts it like this:

There are generally more women than men in every type of church, in every part of the world. . .A traditional explanation is that women are more spiritual than men. But the leaders of [a new masculinity] movement suggest that the church’s music, messages and ministries cater to women. . . The result of this feminization is that many men, even Christian men, view churches as “ladies clubs” and don’t go — or they often go to please their wives. 

The phrase almost always used to describe this phenomenon is "feminization."  In other words, the presence of a higher percentage of women in churches is not simply a higher percentage of women-- it represents that the church is, or has somehow become, feminine.

The Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood has this to say about "feminine Christianity":

Walk into the average evangelical church in America, and you will likely sing lyrics such as “I want my life to be a love song for you, Jesus” and “I want to fall in love with you.”

Then you might hear a sermon encouraging Christians to be “intimate” with Jesus and attend a “care group” where everyone is expected to share their feelings.

Such tactics might appeal to women, but they are at least partially unbiblical and push men away from Christianity, according to Randy Stinson, executive director of The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) and assistant professor of gender and family studies at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS).

“Where are the men in our churches today?” Stinson said in a lecture sponsored by the SBTS theology school council March 29. “We have a crisis going on in the local church. Number one, men aren’t coming. And number two, when they are coming, they’ve [sic] marginalized, they’re being passive, they’re being pushed to the side.”

Christianity Today summarizes it like this:

Today a growing body of literature is leveling its sights on the church, suggesting that men are uninvolved in church life because the church doesn't encourage authentic masculine participation.

The same article quotes controversial pastor Mark Driscoll:

In Driscoll's opinion, the church has produced "a bunch of nice, soft, tender, chickified church boys. … Sixty percent of Christians are chicks," he explains, "and the forty percent that are dudes are still sort of chicks."

The article also quotes David Murrow, author of Why Men Hate Going to Church (Thomas Nelson, 2004):

"[W]omen believe the purpose of Christianity is to find "a happy relationship with a wonderful man"—Jesus—whereas men recognize God's call to "save the world against impossible odds." . . . While the church was masculine, it fulfilled its purpose. But in the 19th century, women "began remaking the church in their image" (and they continue to do so), which moved the church off course.

Needless to say, this line of thinking isn't exactly complimentary to women!  It implies that whatever is "feminine" encapsulates everything that's gone wrong with the church. A popular book on the subject even goes so far as to take the title The Church Impotent - because apparently a majority of women in the church means the church is emasculated, and therefore powerless and ineffectual. Even though men still hold the vast majority of the leadership positions.

There are several things that need to be addressed here.  First, what might be some objective reasons why there are more women than men in most churches?  Second, what does it mean to say the church is "feminine," and is that a helpful or accurate assessment?  Third, what is the best way to address this situation?

Why are there more women than men in most churches? 

One reason that is often given (and one that is less denigrating to women) is that women are just naturally more religious than men. However, if that were true, then a similar female-to-male ratio ought to hold true in other major world religions.  But it doesn't.  Christianity is the only major world religion where female attendance is higher than male attendance. As this United Kingdom study states:

Christian women reported slightly higher levels of religious activity than did the men, while among the other three religious groups, levels of reported religious activity were markedly lower among women than among men. How can we explain these gender differences in reported religious observance? Among the Jews and Muslims, there were marked differences between women and men, in keeping with observations about the roles of women and men in these traditions. These differences are also consistent with the view that men’s prescribed religious activities in traditional religion are more prestigious, and thus more likely to be engaged in. Hindu men also reported greater levels of religious activity than did Hindu women.

The fact is that most of the time in the other world religions (with the exception, perhaps, of some reformed branches), women are actively barred from full participation in many of the everyday practices of religion.  They are often kept separate from the men, hidden behind screens or walls, or required to keep silent.  Perhaps, then, another question we ought to be asking, instead of why there are relatively fewer men participating in Christianity, is what is it about Christianity that encourages so many women to participate?  As this article on religion in the United Kingdom in The Telegraph says:

One possible reason why the Church has always attracted so many women is that the theological education on offer on a Sunday is the same for both sexes. Men and women (generally speaking) have always sat together in Church and are expected to participate equally in the liturgy and in prayer. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that the only other religious denomination anecdotally reported as having rising numbers of women is Reform Judaism. Its congregations are mixed whereas in Orthodox synagogues the men and women sit separately and only boys receive the rigorous schooling in the Hebrew scriptures. . . .

An often-ignored fact in all of the hand-wringing about fewer men in church is that the early church in Roman times apparently also attracted more women than men.  As this Huffington Post article on The Power and Presence of Women in the Earliest Churches states:

Some readers may find it surprising to learn that a woman shortage blighted the ancient world, with about 130-140 men for every 100 women. This is so because many female infants were left to die of exposure and because of the mortal risks associated with pregnancy and childbirth. Yet both Christians and their critics observed a marked overrepresentation of women in the early churches, a fact the critics used to their advantage: "What respectable group caters to women?" Why, one wonders, did so many women find the churches appealing if women's contributions were not valued?
The answer is, simply, that the early churches did value women's contributions. 

This article on women in the early church from the Christian History Institute corrorobates this:

Celsus, a 2nd-century detractor of the faith, once taunted that the church attracted only “the silly and the mean and the stupid, with women and children.” His contemporary, Bishop Cyprian of Carthage, acknowledged in his Testimonia that “Christian maidens were very numerous” and that it was difficult to find Christian husbands for all of them. These comments give us a picture of a church disproportionately populated by women. . . It is no surprise that women were active in the early church. From the very start—the birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus—women were significantly involved. . .The involvement of women continued in the first few decades of the church, attested by both biblical and extra-biblical sources.

The fact is that a major appeal of Christianity at its inception was that it valued and uplifted those who were marginalized in their own societies.  The same Celsus quoted above also said that Christianity was “a religion of women, children and slaves.” As Paul indicated in his first letter to the Corinthians:

Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. 1 Cor. 1:26-29

 A similar phenomenon appears to be occurring in the rise of Christianity in places where it has not had a long-standing, traditional hold, such as in China.  Christianity continues to grow rapidly in China, with up to 70% of the new converts being women. In this Christian Post article, the reason given is similar to what was going on in the early church in Roman times:

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said on its website that Christianity mainly attracts people with low social status, including the poor, the women and older people.
It said that while half of Christians had completed their primary education, only 2.6 percent of them attained a college degree or higher.

Christianity's attraction of the marginalized is one of its strengths, not one of its weaknesses. On the other hand, this factor probably doesn't fully explain why there is a greater percentage of women in modern Western churches today-- especially since many branches of Christianity are now seen by society as limiting women, not empowering them.  An important question to ask, though, is how long this female-male ratio has been occurring.  The idea that this is a recent phenomenon, rising with the advent of feminism, is certainly false.  The Biola Magazine article I quoted earlier states:

The gender gap began as early as the 13th century, according to some church historians. Others say it began during the Industrial Revolution. . . Industrialization forced men to seek work away from home, in factories and offices, which created a split between the public and private spheres of life. The public sphere became secularized through the new values of competition and self-interest, and the private sphere came to represent the old values of nurturing and religion. . . Thus, religion came to be seen as for women and children and not as relevant to the “real” world of business, politics and academia, she said. Soon, in churches, women began to outnumber men. . .  So, male pastors began to adapt churches to their female demographic.

The rise in the "two spheres" concept popularized in Victorian times may be a factor, but the disproportionality of women in the church, at least in some kinds of congregations, has certainly been documented earlier than that.  American colonial preacher Cotton Mather wrote about it in the 1600s, for instance, though not all colonial churches had this issue. The book Under the Cope of Heaven by Professor Patricia U. Bonomi offers an interesting theory: that male attendance decreased in American colonial churches in inverse proportion to the increase in the role of clergy at the expense of laity:

As the ministers' rising professionalism led them to reduce the laity's power in church government, laymen proved less amenable to a a more passive role than did laywomen. . . [Therefore] Feminization appears to be linked less to the secularization of the masculine sphere than to the loss of power by lay males to a professionalizing clergy.

If this is true, then the Encyclopedia Brittanica's entry on clergy and laity in Eastern Orthodoxy could help explain why there is a more equal sex ratio in these churches:

The emphasis on communion and fellowship as the basic principle of church life inhibited the development of clericalism, the tradition of enhancing the power of the church hierarchy. The early Christian practice of lay participation in episcopal elections never disappeared completely in the East. In modern times it has been restored in several churches, including those in the United States. Besides being admitted, at least in some areas, to participation in episcopal elections, Orthodox laymen often occupy positions in church administration and in theological education. In Greece almost all professional theologians are laymen. Laymen also frequently serve as preachers.

This would also explain why, in my own church (an Independent Church of Christ), where laywomen and laymen alike participate in teaching (both in children's ministry and adult bible studies), baptizing, serving communion, collecting and counting the offering, greeting, ushering, and giving short teachings prior to the main sermon, I see roughly half men and half women when I look around the pews on any given Sunday morning.  My own church (though I have not done an actual count) doesn't seem particularly "feminized."

But this doesn't explain why in some churches where lay participation is high, there is still a higher percentage of women.  This study from 1990 states that in American Pentecostal churches the female-male ratio was at that time as high as 2 to 1, while in Baptist churches it was 3 to 2.  (This study, however, concludes that women are simply more religious for various reasons, failing to take into account that this is a Christianity-only issue, so I won't be quoting it further here.)

But there is another cause that I think is, and has been, very prevalent in Western churches for a long time, and is likely more prevalent in Baptist and Pentecostal and similar churches, because of their strict limitations on women's roles. It's a self-perpetuating stigma that, once established, is very hard to defeat: the stigma known as "gender contamination."  This Forbes article defines"gender contamination" as the idea that when something is perceived as being a women's thing, men want nothing to do with it.  It's the reason why men won't drink "diet" soda and have had to have differently-named low-calorie versions marketed specially to them.  It's the reason why men resist using lotions and moisturizers even if they have neutral, non-flowery scents, and why some companies advertise their products by denigrating competitors with such words as "precious" and "princess."  In short, in our "male mystique" focused society, boys who believe girls have cooties still believe deep-down, when they grow into men, that women have cooties too.

There are still some very deep-rooted misogynistic elements in modern Western culture-- and this, I think, has a lot to do with why evangelicals like Mark Driscoll and the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood are so distressed at the idea that churches are "feminized."  If churches have more women in them, then churches themselves have cooties, and it's up to the biblical manhood movement to remove the stigma by masculinizing the church.  Just as soda advertisements now insist that certain brands are not for women, and certain body washes emphasize how very manly their scents are, the answer in the minds of these Christians is to re-market the church as a manly institution.

The Christianity Today article I linked to earlier puts it this way:

These authors . . . suggest that the solution is to inject the church with a heavy dose of testosterone. In other words, allowing women to create Jesus in their image has emasculated him; thus, regaining a biblical image of Christ is as simple as re-masculating him. The masculinity movement's solution assumes that Jesus came to model genuine masculinity. . .  imply[ing] that when the church adopts the supposedly male psyche, it fulfills its purpose, but when it conforms to the supposedly female psyche, it becomes aberrant.

Which leads me to my second question:

Are these categories of "masculine" and "feminine," when applied to churches and church services, helpful or accurate?

Jeffrey Miller, in the Christian Standard's Nov. 2011 article Common Sense on "The Feminization of the Church", discusses two of the main proposals for masculinizing the church: first, that churches sponsor "manly" and challenging group activities such as hiking or kayaking, and second, that church services discard or at least strictly limit "feminine" songs about love and intimacy with Christ in favor of "masculine" songs about God's power and authority.  Here's what he discovered regarding sponsoring "manly" activities through his own church:

I wanted to test the theory that men are more interested than women in rigorous and even dangerous recreation, so I devised a stealthy experiment and formed a hiking group. Anyone is welcome to join this group, but all who express interest are told we do not take leisurely jaunts. Instead, each outing has some significant challenge, the most common being distance—our longest hike, for example, exceeded 26 miles. Other obstacles have included bitter windchills, steep climbs, sheer descents, black bears, yellow jackets, and two territorial rattlesnakes. 

I sent invitations to an equal number of men and women. The list has grown and now consists of 20 men and 20 women. I tell people we hike to stay in shape, rise to the challenge, enjoy God’s creation, and get away from it all. While all these are true, I haven’t till now shared one other important goal of mine: to track the ratio of female to male participants. After 19 monthly hikes, having invited an equal number of men and women to join in rigorous outdoor adventures, 33 men and 57 women have taken up the challenge. Surprised? Me too! I thought the ratio would drift toward 50-50.

And with regards to "manly" music, here's his response:

Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) lists the 100 most frequently used songs in its database. If contemporary praise music is problematically feminine in both lyrics and tone, as the Driscoll-Murrow crowd avers, we should expect the top 100 list to be dominated—or at least infiltrated—by women. In fact, however, the list includes 145 male and 16 female composers. Thus more than 90 percent of the composers writing today’s most popular praise songs are male!

Moreover, some of the most “masculine” songs are written by women (and some of the most “feminine” songs are written by men). Consider Twila Paris’s “He is Exalted,” Jennie Lee Riddle’s “Revelation Song,” and Brooke Fraser’s “Desert Song,” all of which employ metaphors of power. In contrast, Lenny LeBlanc and Paul Baloche’s “Above All” and Martin Nystrom’s “As the Deer” both feature elegant melodies and calming images from nature. 

Going back to the 19th century, Fanny Crosby’s lyrics are not predominantly what we would call “feminine.” And William Bradbury’s melodies are not especially “masculine.” In search of a nonscientific test for these statements, I asked my mom for her five favorite Fanny Crosby songs and my dad for his five favorite William Bradbury songs. . . My mom’s favorite Fanny Crosby songs are “Blessed Assurance,” “To God Be the Glory,” “Praise Him! Praise Him!” “Redeemed!” and “Draw Me Nearer.” My dad’s favorite William Bradbury hymns are “Savior Like a Shepherd Lead Us,” “Jesus Loves Me,” “The Solid Rock,” “He Leadeth Me,” and “Sweet Hour of Prayer.” Judge for yourselves, but I believe the list of hymns by Crosby is more vigorous and Bradbury’s list is more intimate. 

I conclude, therefore, that a central problem with the manly music argument is that men both write and perform the overwhelming number of songs that Driscoll, Murrow, and others consider too feminine. If anyone is guilty of feminizing the church’s music, it’s not women!

In short, the categories of "masculine" and "feminine" are cultural constructs that often have very little to do with the actual proclivities of real men and women.  Women don't necessarily focus on relationship and men on power in worship, nor do only men enjoy rigorous and challenging physical activity.

Thomas G. Long's article Why Do Men Stay Away? in The Christian Century finds these categories insulting to both men and women:

Why are men and the church often at odds? Sadly, many of the answers are as insulting as they are misguided. . .They argue that men, loaded as they are with testosterone, have a proclivity to impulsive, risk-taking, occasionally violent action—exactly the behavior disallowed in the soft world of worship. Given this theory, what enticements can the wimpy church possibly offer us men when we compare it to the joys of hiding away in a man cave, stuffing our maws with pizza and beer as we watch Da Bears and heading out after sundown to rip off a few wheel covers and rumble in the Wal-Mart parking lot?

Others propose a more political and historical explanation, namely that centuries of male control of the church have yielded to an ineluctable force of feminization. Pastel worship, passive and sentimental images of the Christian life, handholding around the communion table and hymns that coo about lover-boy Jesus who "walks with me and talks with me" have replaced stronger, more masculine themes. . . 

Really? The feminine erosion of the church? As David Foster Wallace said in a different context, this is an idea "so stupid it practically drools." Even sillier are the proposed masculine remedies. One website suggests "Ten Ways to Man Up Your Church," beginning with obtaining "a manly pastor" who projects "a healthy masculinity." This patently ignores strong women clergy, of course, but it also denigrates the capacity of men to recognize and respond to able leadership regardless of gender or stereotypes.

Categories of masculinity and femininity that reduce men to biceps and women to clinging vines are hardly biblical.  None of the heroes and heroines of the faith presented in the pages of Scripture acted this way.  Nor do the Scriptures uphold these stereotypical behaviors as virtuous or godly.  On the contrary, the fruit of the Spirit from Galatians 5:22-23, " love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control" include both typically "masculine" and typically "feminine" virtues that are for men and women alike.

And there's a real problem when traits associated with women are denigrated as a kind of sickness that is weakening the church.  As Jeffrey Miller put it in his Christian Standard article:

If the church manifests feminine characteristics, and if it does so more than it once did, then why would this make the church impotent? Such a claim is not only illogical, but offensive. Surely it is ungentlemanly to say to women that the problem with the church is that it’s becoming more and more like them.

How fair is it to assign categories to women that you then belittle and blame them for?  Surely it's possible to attract more men to our churches without communicating to women that they shouldn't exist?

So what is the best way to address this problem?

The church is not a product like a soda or a moisturizer, that you can market to men by claiming that it's not for women.  Nor is it helpful to bifurcate church experience so that the women get all the comfort and love while men get all the challenging calls to discipleship.  Men and women are real people, not stereotypes. Men often need comfort and love, and women have no less need for challenge.  Jesus wasn't speaking only to men when He said "Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow Me (Luke 9:23)."  Nor was He talking only to women when He said, "Come to Me. . . and you will find rest for your souls; for My yoke is easy and My burden is light. (Matthew 11:30)." 

Brownyn Lea recently wrote a guest post on Preston Yancey's blog entitled  What Women Want: the Jesus of the Gospels.  She said:

Jesus is a comforter, a healer, a Savior. "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild", the suffering Servant, the loving rescuer. That Jesus rightfully and perfectly holds all these titles is proof that those nurturing qualities do not belong exclusively to the female domain. Jesus IS the epitome of love, of care, of welcome.

However . . .what I want from church is this - a robust preaching of the Jesus of the Gospels. I want to hear about the Jesus who demanded loyalty, who commanded authority from storms, sinners and satanic forces, who said vexing and frustrating and wild things. I want to hear preaching which is not just faithful to His words but to His TONE: of comfort but also of rebuke, of welcome but also of warning. I want to hear His dares, His call to come and die, His challenge to make hard choices. I want the Jesus of the gospels who does not just meet our needs, but who calls us to bold and courageous adventure, to self-sacrifice, to taking risks. I want the Jesus who promises huge rewards for huge sacrifices, who embraces fiesty Peter and wayward Mary and touchy-feely John.

I want the Jesus who welcomed the little children, but also the Jesus with eyes like a flame of fire, with feet of burnished bronze and a sharp two-edged sword coming out of his mouth. Whatever that wild imagery means, I want to grapple with it. I want the Jesus who inspires my awe and calls forth my worship: a gospel from The Gospels. That's the Jesus I want. That's the Jesus I need: the one who is worthy of the honor, adoration and allegiance of men and women alike.

It's a woman who is saying these things, articulating the need that Christian men and women alike feel for the whole Jesus-- neither a masculinized prize-fighting caricature nor a feminized weepy-and-wimpy caricature.  And if we don't want our Jesus to be a caricature, we ought not to be caricaturing His male and female followers.

Thomas G. Long's Christian Century article hits the nail on the head, I think:

Perhaps a clue can be found in a Christian group that attracts men and women in roughly equal numbers: Eastern Orthodoxy. . . The finding of religion journalist Frederica Mathewes-Green [is] that Orthodoxy's main appeal is that it's "challenging." One convert said, "Orthodoxy is serious. It is difficult. It is demanding. It is about mercy, but it is also about overcoming myself. . ." 

Yes, some churchgoers are satisfied with feel-good Christianity, but I think many Christians—women and men—yearn for a more costly, demanding, life-changing discipleship. Perhaps women are more patient when they don't find it, or more discerning of the deeper cross-bearing opportunities that lie beneath the candied surface.

Why do more women than men go to church in modern Western Christianity?  Perhaps most women don't really care all that much for sterilized, feel-good niceness in the church either-- but women are usually the ones responsible for getting their kids to church, so they deny themselves, pick up their crosses and get out the door.  Maybe Christian leaders ought to be applauding their commitment rather than blaming them for what's wrong with the service.

Maybe rather than capitulating to worldly gender-contamination and male fear of female cooties, publicly visible male Christian leaders should stop maligning femaleness and trying to market Jesus and the church as masculine.  In fact, maybe they should stop trying to market the church at all.  Paul said in 1 Corinthians 2:1-5:

And when I came to you, brethren, I did not come with superiority of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God. For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling, and my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.

Ultimately, "feminization" isn't the real problem.  Women aren't the problem.  Let's face it, in the vast majority of churches the decisions aren't getting made by women-- but Adam's tendency to blame "this woman You gave me" for his choices is still visible in male church leaders today.

I firmly believe that if churches will just preach the gospel of the kingdom of God, both its comfort and its challenge-- Christ will take care of the rest.  Men will rise to the challenge to pick up their crosses and endure the stigma of gender contamination in order to identify with Christ.  And this will in time erase the notion that church is a "women's thing."

Finally, churches do need to pay attention to who they're reaching and who they're not.  But perhaps we ought to be concentrating less on the ratio of females to males and start focusing more on attracting people of other races and economic situations.  Perhaps the real problem is not so much that there are 60 percent women and 40 percent men, but that all of them are white and middle class.

In the end, the Holy Spirit is the one who can help us most.  Let's humble ourselves and ask.

Black History Month: Women's Voices of the Civil Rights Movement

The theme of this year's Black History Month is "Civil Rights in America."  Today I want to celebrate by showcasing some of the voices of Black women who spoke during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.  Women civil rights leaders did not receive the recognition that men did in the movement, so it's important to me to do what I can to be sure they are remembered.  

I also want to acknowledge that women of color don't need me to speak for them.  That's why today's post is not about what I have to say, but simply about giving room in this small space for their voices to be heard by my mostly white readership.  These voices from decades past should never be forgotten.

Fannie Lou Hamer

Fannie Lou Hamer was a Civil Rights organizer and spokeswoman from 1962 to 1972.  Jailed and beaten in prison for breaking a restaurant's "whites only policy," she went on (though permanently disabled from the beating) to found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and to spearhead a lawsuit against Sunflower County for school segregation.  She also founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative and helped found the National Women's Political Caucus, and authored two books. She is known for leading her fellow activists in Christian hymns such as "This Little Light of Mine."

Here is her story in her own words (from About.Com Women's History):

• One night I went to the church. They had a mass meeting. And I went to the church, and they talked about how it was our right, that we could register and vote. They were talking about we could vote out people that we didn't want in office, we thought that wasn't right, that we could vote them out. That sounded interesting enough to me that I wanted to try it. I had never heard, until 1962, that black people could register and vote. 

• When they asked for those to raise their hands who'd go down to the courthouse the next day, I raised mine. Had it high up as I could get it. I guess if I'd had any sense I'd've been a little scared, but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they'd been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember. 

• The landowner said I would have to go back to withdraw or I would have to leave and so I told him I didn't go down there to register for him, I was down there to register for myself. 

• I am determined to get every Negro in the state of Mississippi registered. 

• They just kept beating me and telling me, "You nigger bitch, we're gonna make you wish you were dead." ... Every day of my life I pay with the misery of that beating.

And here is a portion of her "We're on Our Way" speech given in 1964 at the Negro Baptist School in Indianola, Mississippi:

We want people, we want people over us that’s concerned about the people because we are human beings. Regardless of how they have abused us for all these years, we always cared what was going on. We have prayed and we have hoped for God to bring about a change. And now the time have come for people to stand up. And there’s something real, real peculiar but still it’s great: there used to be a time when you would hit a Negro—a white man would hit a Negro—the others would go and hide. But there’s a new day now, when you hit a Negro, you likely to see a thousand there. Because God care. God care and we care. And we can no longer ignore the fact that we can’t sit down and wait for things to change because as long as they can keep their feet on our neck, they will always do it. But it’s time for us to stand up and be women and men. Because actually, I’m tired of being called “Aunty.” I wondered in life what actually time would they allow for me to be a woman? Because until I was thirty-six I was a girl: “Girl this.” And now I’m forty-six and it’s “Aunty.” But I want you to know tonight: I don’t have one white niece or nephew. And if you don’t want to call me Mrs. Hamer, just call me plain “Fannie” because I’m not your aunt.

Daisy Bates

Daisy Bates and her husband operated the Arkansas State Press, a weekly African-American newspaper in Little Rock, Arkansas.  In 1957 she became the advocate and champion of the "Little Rock Nine," nine students who became the first to attend the all-white Central High School.   President of the Arkansas Chapter of the NAACP, she was the only woman to speak at the 1963 March on Washington.   Here is the gist of her short speech:

[T]o Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins and all of you fighting for civil liberties—that we will join hands with you as women of this country. Rosa Gregg, Vice President; Dorothy Height, the National Council of Negro Women; and the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority; the Methodist Church Women, all the women pledge that we will join hands with you. We will kneel-in; we will sit-in until we can eat in any corner in the United States. We will walk until we are free, until we can walk to any school and take our children to any school in the United States. And we will sit-on and we will kneel-in and we will lie-in if necessary until every Negro in America can vote. This we pledge to the women of America.

Dorothy Height

Dorothy Height was president of the National Council of Negro Women and one of the organizers of the March on Washington. She directed the integration of the YWCA in 1946 and founded and ran its Center for Racial Justice from 1965 to 1977.  She was a gifted orator and held a bachelor's degree in education and a master's in psychology.  She helped found the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971.  President Obama called her the "godmother of the civil rights movement" before she died in 2010.

Here are some of her words from a speech she gave at the first Scholarly Conference on Black Women in 1979: 

I had to say what it meant to black women that we were a part of the whole civil rights movement, that we were a civil rights organization, really, under the leadership of women. And that we had had a major hand in that whole beginning with the significant male leadership. . . Because as women, we could not see our children and our youth struggling and have them on the outside of our effort. . .

But when you ask me the question about race and sex, I want to add something else that I saw recently in a poster. And that poster was a woman who had two chains; she was chained down with two very heavy pieces of stone, with chains on her legs. And the heading underneath was "Double Trouble." And the idea that it reflected was, take one away – one said "racism" and the other said "sexism" – take one away and she is still tied down. Take the other away and leave that one, she's still tied down. The only way she will make it: they both have to be eliminated.

Ella Baker 

Ella Baker helped Martin Luther King, Jr., organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, and became its executive director. She also ran a voter registration campaign called the Crusade for Citizenship. She was the catalyst behind the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which assisted student activism in civil rights throughout the South.   She was involved in the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964 and was one of the little-noticed women leaders of the March on Washington. 

Ms. Baker's speech to a conference of student protest groups in Raleigh, North Carolina-- the conference that led to the formation of the SNCC-- was entitled "More than a Hamburger"  and focused on how sit-ins at lunch counters were only the beginning of what would become a sustained movement.  Though the speech was not recorded, here is a portion of how she reconstructed the event in her personal notes:

The Student Leadership Conference made it crystal clear that current sit-ins
and other demonstrations are concerned with something much bigger that a hamburger or even a giant-sized COKE. 

Whatever may be the difference in approach to their goal, the Negro and white students, North and South, are seeking to rid America of the scourge of racial segregation and discrimination - not only at lunch counters, but in every aspect of life. In reports, casual conversations, discussion groups, and speeches, the sense and the spirit of the following statement that appeared in the initial newsletter of the students at Barber-Scotia College, Concord, NC were echoed time and again: 

“We want the world to know that we no longer accept the inferior position of second-class citizenship. We are willing to go to jail, be ridiculed, spat upon and even suffer physical violence to obtain First Class Citizenship. By and large, this feeling that they have a destined date with freedom, was not limited to a drive for personal freedom, or even freedom for the Negro in the South. Repeatedly it was emphasized that the moment was concerned with the moral implications of racial discrimination for the "whole world" and the "Human Race." This universality of approach was linked with a perspective and recognition that "it is important to keep the movement democratic and to avoid struggles for personal leadership."

These are by no means all of the women who should be remembered.  Evelyn Lowry (who just died last September at the age of 88), Patricia Stephens Due and her sister Priscilla Stephens Kruize, and Myrlie Evers are among the other heroines who should be commemorated for their dedicated sacrifice and leadership of the Civil Rights Movement at its inception.

And the best thing we can do to honor all of them is to recognize that the issue of civil rights for African Americans is far from resolved.

Please check out this article on the By Their Strange Fruit blog to see how systems of racism are still ingrained in American society. and this article to see how basic civil rights are still being abridged in our culture.   Pastor Jonathan Brooks also has an article this week on Red Letter Christians called Ok, White Folks, here's how you can really help!

Black History month is about seeing the perspectives and hearing the voices of those who have been marginalized in American history because of race.  Let it be a catalyst to also hear the voices of those who are marginalized because of race today.  I firmly believe this is part of what the kingdom of God is all about.

Forgotten Women in Church History: Jerena Lee (1783-1860?)

Jerena Lee was the first female African-American preacher and evangelist in the United States.  Born in New Jersey in 1783 to free but poor black parents, she traveled in her lifetime over 2300 miles and preached nearly 200 sermons to gatherings of men and women, blacks and whites.  Everywhere she went the power of her preaching overcame the considerable prejudices of her era against both her sex and her race.

Most people today have never heard of her.

Though not a slave, Jerena Lee was separated from her parents at the tender age of seven, becoming a live-in maid for a white family.  She didn't see her own family again until she was 21.  In her early 20s she was converted to Christianity through the preaching of Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.  When she was 28 she married a black preacher, Joseph Lee, who died only a few years later, leaving her to raise two small children on her own.

According to the pamphlet form of her autobiography, which is available online, Ms. Lee experienced a "call to preach the gospel" several years after she had become a Christian, but before her marriage.  She described it like this:

[O]n a certain time, an impressive silence fell upon me, and I stood as if some one was about to speak to me, yet I had no such thought in my heart. - But to my utter surprise there seemed to sound a voice which I thought I distinctly heard, and most certainly understand, which said to me, "Go preach the Gospel!" I immediately replied aloud, "No one will believe me." Again I listened, and again the same voice seemed to say - "Preach the Gospel; I will put words in your mouth, and you will turn your enemies to become your freinds." [sic] 

At first I supposed that Satan had spoken to me, for I had read that he could transform himself into an angel of light for the purpose of deception. Immediately I went into a secret place, and called upon the Lord to know if he had called me to preach, and whether I was deceived or not; when there appeared to my view the form and figure of a pulpit, with a Bible lying thereon, the back of which was presented to me as plainly as if it had been a literal fact.

When Ms. Lee told her pastor, Richard Allen, that she felt called to preach, he responded that "our Discipline knew nothing at all about it-- it did not call for women preachers."  Jerena Lee felt a certain relief, but she also "found that a love of souls had in a measure departed from me; that holy energy which burned within me, as a fire, began to be smothered."

Nevertheless, Lee submitted to Rev. Allen and did not try again to preach.  Instead she married, birthed two children, and was widowed.  Eight years after her initial call, she was in church listening to the minister (Rev. Allen, by then a bishop, was also present) when the call came again:

But as [the minister] proceeded to explain [give the sermon], he seemed to have lost the spirit; when in the same instant, I sprang, as by altogether supernatural impulse, to my feet, when I was aided from above to give an exhortation on the very text which my brother Williams had taken. 

I told them I was like Jonah; for it had been then nearly eight years since the Lord had called me to preach his gospel to the fallen sons and daughters of Adam's race, but that I had lingered like him, and delayed to go at the bidding of the Lord, and warn those who are as deeply guilty as were the people of Nineveh. 

During the exhortation, God made manifest his power in a manner sufficient to show the world that I was called to labour according to my ability, and the grace given unto me, in the vineyard of the good husbandman. 

I now sat down, scarcely knowing what I had done, being frightened. I imagined, that for this indecorum, as I feared it might be called, I should be expelled from the church. But instead of this, the Bishop rose up in the assembly, and related that I had called upon him eight years before, asking to be permitted to preach, and that he had put me off; but that he now as much believed that I was called to that work, as any of the preachers present. These remarks greatly strengthened me, so that my fears of having given an offence, and made myself liable as an offender, subsided, giving place to a sweet serenity, a holy joy of a peculiar kind, untasted in my bosom until then.

Leaving her children in the care of her mother and other family members, Ms. Lee began to travel and preach, even going into slaveholding states, where many slaves walked miles to hear her and then walked all night afterwards to return to their plantations before being missed.  Consulting no man and guided only through prayer and the invitations she received, she preached her way across the United States and Canada. Prejudice and resistance to her preaching was overcome by the power of the Holy Spirit over and over again throughout Jerena Lee's preaching career.  Here is one representative example:

L. W., a respectable brother from Chillicothe, had never heard a woman preach, and was much opposed to it. An appointment was given me, and when I went into the desk and commenced reading the hymn to commence the worship, he looked at me a while, then got up and went out and stood until I had nearly got through the hymn, and then he came in, when I asked him to pray for us but he refused. I prayed myself, after which I took my text, and felt much liberty in speaking in the spirit indeed. And after meeting he came and shook hands with me in the spirit of a Christian, and next day he came and confessed to me his prejudices had been so great, so much like his father, that he could not unite with me, but now he believed that God, was no respecter of persons, and that a woman as well as a man, when called of God, had a right to preach. He afterwards became a licensed preacher, and we parted in peace.

Lee's autobiography also details her arguments justifying her calling:

O how careful ought we to be, lest through our by-laws of church government and discipline, we bring into disrepute even the word of life. For as unseemly as it may appear now-a-days for a woman to preach, it should be remembered that nothing is impossible with God. And why should it be thought impossible, heterodox, or improper for a woman to preach? seeing the Saviour died for the woman as well as for the man. 

If the man may preach, because the Saviour died for him, why not the woman? seeing he died for her also. Is he not a whole Saviour, instead of a half one? as those who hold it wrong for a woman to preach, would seem to make it appear. 

Did not Mary first preach the risen Saviour, and is not the doctrine of the resurrection the very climax of Christianity - hangs not all our hope on this, as argued by St Paul? Then did not Mary, a woman, preach the gospel? for she preached the resurrection of the crucified son of God. . .

If then, to preach the gospel, by the gift of heaven, comes by inspiration solely, is God straitened: must he take the man exclusively? May he not, did he not, and can he not inspire a female to preach the simple story of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of our Lord, and accompany it too with power to the sinner's heart. As for me, I am fully persuaded that the Lord called me to labor according to what I have received, in his vineyard. If he has not, how could he consistently hear testimony in favor of my poor labors, in awakening and converting sinners?

Jerena Lee disappeared from public life at the age of 66, having ended her preaching career and completed and published her autobiography.  The date and place of her death are unknown.  But I can't help thinking of Acts 10:9-48, where Peter was shown in a vision that his understanding of God's work had been too limited, and that he must not call the Gentiles unclean or refuse to associate with them, for God's Spirit could fall on them as well as on Jews.  Peter had to let the evidence of the power of the Spirit overcome his understanding of the "biblical" way he thought things were supposed to work.  He couldn't deny that despite what looked like the "plain meaning" of the Scriptures that only Jews could be God's people, the Spirit of God had fallen on a bunch of uncircumcised Gentiles.

I remember a former pastor of mine once saying something similar after visiting China in the early 1990s. When he had seen the congregations and heard the preaching of several different young women (all of whom said they were called into ministry, and through whom many people's lives had been changed), my pastor said, "Who was I to argue with God?  I could no more deny the truth of their callings than I could deny the truth of my own."

In a time and place bent more strongly against her than is even conceivable today-- a time and place where black people were considered inferior, and black women even more so-- Jerena Lee walked in power from the Holy Spirit that could not be repudiated.  To Christians and non-Christians, leaders and laypeople, white and non-white, men and women, free people and slaves, she spoke with authority the call to repent, believe, and live a holy life. As she wrote:

[B]y the instrumentality of a poor coloured woman, the Lord poured forth his spirit among the people. Though, as I was told, there were lawyers, doctors, and magistrates present, to hear me speak. . . the Lord scattered fire among them of his own kindling. The Lord gave his hand-maiden power to speak for his great name, for he arrested the hearts of the people, and caused a shaking amongst the multitude, for God was in the midst.

The only way around it is to forget it ever happened.  And we've done a pretty good job of that.

But the time has come to remember Jerena Lee.

I'm not saying Ms. Lee was perfect.  I'm not saying she was right in every doctrine or that she never acted unspiritually.  But I am saying God chose her-- and He never lets imperfections bother Him when He chooses a man, so why should imperfections disqualify a woman?

But if the Bible is really "clear" that God forbids all women everywhere to ever teach or exercise authority over men, then when God chose Jerena Lee and sent her out on her own, without even a "male covering," He acted in contradiction of His own word.

Either that, or a "poor coloured woman" who loved God with all her heart, brought people to Christ by some unholy power.  But didn't Jesus have something serious to say to those who believed the same thing of Him?  Matthew 12:26-28.

What if God actually acted exactly in keeping with His own word?  "God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful." (1 Corinthians 1:27, NLT version)

Maybe what's really clear is that church hierarchies and the gatekeepers of doctrine sometimes think they're wise when they're not, and hold onto power when they shouldn't.  Maybe God can and does do things that just don't fit into restricting, limiting "biblical" boxes, and when we read the Bible that way, we're doing Him and ourselves a disservice.

Let's let the witness of Jerena Lee speak to us once again.  The gifts and callings of God are for all.

----------------------------

Resources:

Pamphlet version of Lee's Religious Experience and Journal, published online

University of Minnesota's Voices from the Gaps

PBS's Africans in America Resource Bank

PBS's God in America

Susan Ditmire's History of Cape May County, New Jersey

Daughters of the Church by Ruth Tucker and Walter Liefeld, pp. 259-60.