Faith's Testimony on Gender

Written by Faith, and all I can say is praise God, He is sooo good! Also, may He bless the IV men on staff who have brought a lot of healing to a lot of women I know :)

I grew up in a conservative Protestant environment where I embraced, without question, the truth that men were pastors and women were Sunday school teachers. The men taught and led the adults, and the women taught and led the children. My father was a leader in that church for as long as I can remember (not the one who preached on Sunday mornings, but the one who was trusted to handle all the money, and thus important in all matters of church business). My mom was a Sunday school teacher, usually mine. It wasn’t until we left that church and entered a different religious community that I had any context for questioning my upbringing. Naturally, the first thing I did at this new church was evaluate which things were the same as my old church,which were different, and whether I was okay with the differences. This was
the first time I had a real understanding of the reality that not all communities do church the same. Moreover, not all Christians do Christianity the same. Two big things really captured my attention at this new church. First, the head of the children’s ministry was, as expected, a woman, but she was given the title of Pastor in front of her name. Second, during certain sermon series, the pastor preaching would periodically invite his wife up to speak with him. Both of these things were very different from my first church. Women were never called pastors. And they never stood on the stage on a Sunday morning unless they were a part of the worship team.
Around these experiences I was also learning that few churches have women in preaching, teaching, leadership positions over the entire church. And I was being told church should function in this way because the Bible says this is the right way to do it. (I won’t cite the epic amounts of 1Timothy, other letters of Paul, and Genesis which were used as evidence.) I never wanted to be a pastor, so I let the question rest. It never bothered me that my father’s role in the church was different than my mother’s, or even that it was not acceptable for them to switch places, because in their marriage and our home life I watched them treat each other as equals. There was never anything about these differences which felt unequal to me. But as I got older, and more critically examined WHY women didn’t/couldn’t/weren’t allowed to preach to a congregation, I kept hearing this implicit
explanation that it was because they were unable to. And as a hard-working, intelligent woman, beginning life at a women’s college, that finally became impossible to stomach. I knew my mother was able to interpret scripture and regurgitate what God revealed to her in an eloquent, captivating way. She did to me almost every day; she could do it on a Sunday morning. And I knew also that, even though I still had no desire to pastor a church, I do had the ability to interpret scripture and teach what I had learned to others. So, I began to disregard the parts of the Bible which (as interpreted to me by male pastor figures) made women and their role in the Kingdom of God inferior. (My mom once cited Galatians 3 something to me about now there is no male nor female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus, and, while I liked the ideas in that verse, it was never strong enough to combat the plethora of evidence in the Bible seemingly preaching the inferiority of women). In
my eyes, women didn’t have to cover their heads or remain silent in church or refrain from braiding their hair or any of that nonsense because Paul was just a stupid outdated man, writing in a way that esteems him and his gender by demeaning women. The problem was that my throwing away of scripture I didn’t like kind of became a habit. But the more I did this, the harder it became to relate to God and to trust in the goodness and power of the rest of the Bible. WinCon 2011 was a transformational experience for me, but not in the area of sex, dating, or relationships. WinCon was transformational because, for the first time, I received teaching, from a wise MAN I already respected, on the Genesis story in a way which finally esteemed woman as man’s equal, and biblically explained gender clashes and oppression and struggles as part of the inevitable consequences of sin, rather than part of God’s original, perfect plan. It was literally life changing for me to hear
him point to Genesis (3:16?) on the board, recognize that it’s a place of confusion and misuse in the church, and differentiate between God’s punishment that child bearing and growing food will be painful from his declaration that the inevitable result of sinful people in a sinful world, is that women’s desire WILL (meaning in the future, only after sin, not in the beginning) be for her husband, but he WILL rule over her. And if anything, this verse reflects on some level the wisdom of the writer of Genesis to understand how sin perverts God’s original plan for relations
between men and women. Now, what Paul writes doesn’t bother me so much. I don’t understand it all, and I am cautious of it’s misuse, but I don’t throw it away because I have confidence that nothing Paul says can conflict with my image of a loving God who created man and women equal in his sight.