Opinion: Perspectives from readers

I grew up in a church with rigid gender hierarchies, so it wasn’t until college that I attended a church where women regularly preached or held other leadership positions.

My decision to pursue theological studies at Duke Divinity School was a step away from the Christianity of my youth, and as a member of Chapel Hill (N.C.) Mennonite Fellowship (CHMF) it is a tremendous blessing to be part of a community where women’s preaching gifts are affirmed. While I was in seminary, however, as I interacted with colleagues who support “women in ministry,” I realized that many could be just as sexist as those who barred women from the pulpit.

It seems there is something missing from our understanding of the words “there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). The question is no longer whether women can preach—of course they can. But we must also question our often unconscious sense of a hierarchy of ministries and the ways members’ gifts are often reinterpreted in light of socially prescribed gender roles that have no biblical basis. It’s true that women preaching challenges traditional hierarchies and the idea that only those who fit the normative construction of leadership should be heard. In order to more fully reflect the body of Christ we must not only allow but actively encourage women and others to speak the word of God to us.

However, we also need to ask where women have been serving throughout the history of the church when they weren’t allowed to speak. Women’s inclusion in ministry often happens without pausing to reevaluate our overarching understanding of what that work is. Women have always been active in churches—preparing meals, teaching Sunday school, nursing babies. In our conversations around “women in ministry,” then, we risk ignoring that women have always been doing ministry throughout the history of the church. Second, we don’t take seriously the work that has been historically marked as “women’s work.” Finally, we cultivate an understanding of ministry in which women are expected to conform to “male” ways of embodying leadership without ever considering the flip side.

If we want to take seriously the call to be one in Christ as beings created in the imago dei (image of God)—for each member to explore her or his unique gifts, regardless of sex or gender—then we must be the kind of community where not only are women preaching but men are working in the nursery. One of the most radical moves the church can and must make is to reimagine who cares for our children.

To do so acknowledges that having women in the pulpit (while vital) risks only being a symbolic challenge to gendered hierarchies rather than reshaping existing power structures. In Body Politics, John Howard Yoder writes, “To let a few women into an office that men have for generations wrongly restricted … may be a good kind of ‘affirmative action,’ but it is hardly the most profound vision of renewal.” We need to see women’s bodies re-presenting Christ for us. However, this in and of itself does not demolish the hierarchies that structure the rest of our lives together.

Preaching need not be understood as more important than teaching Sunday school, cooking or caring for the children in our communities. As Yoder reminds us: “There is not (i.e. there should not be) one ‘ministerial’ role, of which then we could argue about whether it is gender specific. There are as many ministerial roles as there are members of the body of Christ, and that means that more than half of them belong to women.”

The point of affirming women as preachers ought never be to belittle the vital work women have been doing in the church all along. Instead, while we need to see women encouraged to raise their voices, to interpret and proclaim the word of God for us, we simultaneously need to encourage and challenge men to care for children as part of our worship. We ought to value and affirm all those women and men who feel called to this kind of ministry rather than (or in addition to) preaching.

As Yoder writes, “The transformation that Paul’s vision calls for would not be to let a few more especially gifted women share with a few men the roles of domination; it would be to reorient the notion of ministry so that there would be no one ungifted, no one not called, no one not empowered and no one dominated.”

Meghan Florian attends Chapel Hill (N.C.) Mennonite Fellowship.