There is a gathering for women in my diocese this weekend. A retreat with Gospel preaching and teaching by women to women. I will not be attending because I may have accidentally scheduled a conflicting tattoo appointment in another city for this weekend and have a deep terror of accidentally offending a tattoo artist or rescheduling on them and leaving them with a gap in their schedule/income. But I am excited about everything I have seen about this two-day retreat/gathering. I love that my church and diocese have female clergy and lay leaders that live into their ministry callings. I love their hearts and wisdom. I love the many generations represented at every gathering. It’s a beautiful picture of the women of God existing and thriving for His glory. It’s something I have not always had the privilege of seeing valued in a church.
When I was in college attending Austin Stone Community Church in Austin, Texas, there was a sermon that included the line “as go the women, so goes the church.” I actually heard this a couple of times in sermons during my tenure at that church. It was meant as a warning - when the women (the last bastion of purity in any church, apparently) loosen their morals, the church and society are doomed. It left me with the impression that we had to fortify a wall around the women and police their morality or else the Church was doomed. That was the goal of the sermon - meant to energize men and women to keep their women and their women’s purity protected from the world.
This is not a Scriptural view of women. This is a cultural view of women. This is a sociological view of a patriarchal society. This is not a picture of the women we see in the Bible.
The women we see in the Bible run the gamut. It is impossible to lump them all into any one group. Some were sinners, some were saints, many were both at different moments of their stories. There are abused women and women who abused others. There are widows and wives and unmarried women. There are virgins and sex workers. There are poor women and there are women who financially supported Jesus’ ministry. There are a thousand pictures of womanhood in the Bible. But nowhere does the Bible hold up women and say “see this? This is your canary in the coal mine. This is how you men will know if your church is healthy.”
Women are not objects. Women are not a barometer to measure the atmosphere of the Church. Christian women are co-heirs with Christ. They are full members of the body of Christ. They make up more than half of the Church worldwide and they have always been the, frequently (but by no means always) quiet, pillars of the Church. Peter may have been the Rock, but Mary Magdalene was the first evangelist.
Jesus treated women as equals. He elevated them. He brought them into the circle. He recognized their humanity and loved them as children of God. He did not say to wall them in and protect their purity from the big bad world, he showed us how to teach and equip women. To empower them for ministry. The evangelical church in America has done an extremely poor job of this, because we have come to believe in sociology over scripture.
The evangelical church has bought into the Victorian ideas of purity and the virtue of women and has fully wrapped up the value of women in these concepts. Women are not valued as evangelists and teachers and leaders. They are reduced to objects to be funneled into a singular ideal form - 1950s style homemaker and mother. This is not a hit at either homemakers or mothers - if that is your calling, live into it. The Bible, however, does not support the idea that this is God’s plan for all women. This vision of Christian female purity is also racialized. White middle and upper class women were the only ones who really got to live that 1950s life in the 1950s, usually with the hired assistance of one or more non-white women who were working outside of their own homes to make ends meet. It’s not a vision that fits with reality, but it’s deeply engrained. When I was a child feeling a call to ministry, the only ministry I could envision was as a missionary’s wife. Women could do ministry “out there” in the mission field. Women couldn’t do ministry here. (This is further racism, btw.). The church has pulled in these cultural ideas and expectations and made a whole new gospel out of them. It is deeply harmful and skews the entire message being preached.
For all that, I do think that the health of the women in your church says a whole lot about the direction and health of your church.
Let’s run with this idea for a minute.
If the women are sheltered and cloistered away from the world, is your church actually reaching into the “world”?
If the women are crushed and silenced, is the Church then crushed and silenced?
If the women lead in Godly ways, does the Church then lead in Godly ways?
It’s not an exact thing, but I think there’s a correlation worth recognizing here. When the church is not focused on micromanaging the women in the congregation but rather focuses on building up the gifts and life of all of the members of the congregation - men, women, old, young, children, and elders - the church thrives. When people are crushed and controlled, the church withers.
So the Austin Stone was right in one way. If you want to know the health of a church, you can look to the women. Are they crushed or thriving? Leading or shrinking? Somewhere in between? Where women are empowered by the Gospel, it shows itself in life and light in a church. Seek that out.
This last part especially. Thanks for writing this, Katie.
It's kind of mind-blowing how much, by some rubrics, the well-being of men individually and corporately has been tied to the virtue of women...who must be kept silent and more or less invisible in many of the communities that hold these rubrics. But I agree--there is something important to be noticed about the health of a community when one sees whether and how its women are flourishing.
Christian women are co-heirs with Christ. That's so good. I love how Jesus elevated and respected women the way he did. I think of Abigail, a prudent woman with good judgement and a terrible husband who kept King David from bloodshed. Tamar, who although made herself out to be a prostitute was in the genealogy of Jesus. Or even Deborah, a military leader in the book of Judges. The Bible has so many examples of how women were restored even in unideal and sometimes dire circumstances. It makes me sad that white-washed Victorian views of womanhood have infiltrated the church. Thank you for speaking to this!