What if the conversation about gender roles in the church isn't so much about gender itself but about how we form community & what we think that community is supposed to do?
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at this point, but I continue to be amazed by how little we question the shape of modern ministry.
When a church operates like a business or government, it will have little need for spiritual mothers b/c our culture understands family formation as a private (vs. public) endeavor. "Mothering" is exclusively biological, directed toward home. It's not a mode of being elsewhere.
When a church functions like family, however, spiritual mothers will be *essential* b/c there can be no new life without fathers AND mothers.
ISTM that the sidelining of women's gifts tells you a lot about the way a ministry understands its mission. Folks will disagree w/ me but I also don't think the debate should focus fundamentally on ordination.
The questions are much more about the cultures we're building & what those cultures reveal about our sense of mission & vocation. How we relate to the gifts & contributions of the women in our midst tell us whether we think they're necessary to the community's life & well-being.
So the questions I ask are:
"Who are the mothers of your church?"
"How are you honoring & equipping them?"
"Where does your time, money, & attention go?"
"Is your church operating as the household of God or Big Box ministry?
Caveat: "Family" is doing a lot of work in this thread & I don't presume that we naturally understand all that the family is supposed to be. To be clear, family =/= nuclear suburban family model of domestic consumption.
Instead, I'm using family to describe a lifegiving community of distinct individuals bound together by shared begottenness & with a shared vocation.
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I think about this quote from Dorothy L. Sayers a lot. It's from the essay "Why Work?" published in 1942 in the middle of WW2.
This bit from Sayers gets me every time: "The root causes of conflict are usually to be found in some wrong way of life in which all parties have acquiesced,
and for which everybody must, to some extent, bear the blame."
Sayers was writing in context of a literal war, but the principle applies to the ideological wars that often precede physical violence. The principle applies to how we engage in culture wars.
Quick niche thread for credobaptists on baptizing children after a confession of faith.
(Padeobaptist friends, I see that hand... please come find me after the service.)
Context: I'm a Baptist who believes in baptizing children upon a confession of faith regardless of age. I've thought through the question over the years as a pastor's wife, mother, children's SS teacher, & believer baptized at 6yo myself. Here's why:
1. A child's faith should not be evaluated by an adult's faith. A "credible" confession of faith for a 5yo is a confession of faith that shows that he or she as a 5yo is exercising a 5yo-faith in Christ, not 35yo-faith in Christ.
Female influencers, particularly religious ones, walk this line of "effortless perfection." They must appear to be just 1-2 steps ahead of their followers but not so far ahead as to make their lives unattainable.
They are trading in the hope that you, too, could be like them one day. They are selling goddess-hood to mere mortals who hope to one day achieve it. But achieving it must remain achievable.
Just catching up on Rachel Hollis & being "unrelatable."
As a woman who has spent the majority of my life being generally unrelatable, I need to know: Where do I pick up my paycheck & how can I get someone else to clean my house?
B/c so far being unrelatable has not panned out for me the way it has for Rachel.
I mean, it has taken me all of 5 years to figure out how to do beachy wave curls & I still can't do them predictably.
Cultures and communities that can't recognize a self-serving person will struggle to recognize a sacrificial one.
Insofar as a space gives opportunity after opportunity to those who lack virtue, it cannot give those same opportunities to people who are pursuing virtue.
Bad work will come at the cost of good. When the wrong people are given the spotlight, people doing good, faithful work will be overlooked, undervalued, & unheard.