I’m a Woman – Part 2

from here

So I read. I read and I read and I read.

Through reading I found that the Bible’s teaching about men and women was far less clear-cut than I’d previously been taught. While yes, there were some who highlighted the verses that suggested women and men had specific, God-ordained roles which should not be flouted, there were other, equally-sincere Christians who focussed instead on the verses which commanded mutual submission and equality in all relationships. 

I learned how helpful it was to understand the cultural context in which particular Biblical books were written in order to better comprehend what the author was addressing and how his fundamental aims might apply (or not) to our very different cultural context. I also learned that mentioning “cultural context” when speaking to some people made them flip out (“That’s reading into the Bible what’s not in the text! We’re not allowed to do that!”), and that these were often the very same people who had no problem deciding for themselves, for example, at what age the Biblical authors probably thought a boy became a man, because – despite God’s significant problem with women teaching men – the texts lacked such an instruction. It became obvious to me that a) people were quite happy to change the rules about how to approach the Bible depending on whatever best suited their argument in the moment, and b) with the authors and scribes and translators all coming to the text with their own backgrounds and biases, there was no such thing as a “plain reading” of any of it (I’ll dive deeper into this in the next post).

From then on, I had zero patience for the idea that women were put on earth purely to support the efforts and dreams of children and menfolk. I started challenging my ministers, all of whom had trained at the same conservative college where they’d been taught that the rigid-gender-role theory – officially known as ‘complementarian’ theology – was the only one worth considering. (And yes, I was frustratingly aware that my being a woman overshadowed whatever logic or research I wanted to share with these men; there was no point whatsoever in me trying to convince them of anything given the fact that – in their minds – God had granted them permission to ignore my views on the Bible completely. I tried, though. I really tried.)

While many of these men were dismissive, my favourite of the bunch, who I’ll call Harold, was always open to engaging with me in these discussions, offering his perspective and seeming to listen to mine. After disagreeing with him during Bible study one night, he sent me an 11-page argument he’d written to help him figure out his thoughts on women’s roles in the church and at home, which included gems like this:

...for the sake of upholding the divine order, the married woman, who may be a gifted teacher, will put aside her gift in certain contexts, so that she does not challenge the leadership of her husband and defy God’s divine order.

Harold

Taking utterly seriously his comment about being keen to hear my thoughts on it, I responded with a 12-page rebuttal to his paper, which drew to a close with thoughts like this:

If the Bible’s so clear on this issue, why is it that no one can agree on exactly what a woman should or shouldn’t be doing in church? It’s looked different in each of the four Anglican churches I’ve been part of in Sydney, ranging from women excluded from leading even the service in one church to women occasionally preaching in another. So where does one go to answer these questions, and why, when it involves half of God’s children, does the Bible not spell this out? The complementarian argument must build its case on the foundation of just two passages, both of which even Biblical scholars agree are difficult to fully understand; this means that questions that arise from this position usually have to be answered by the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood rather than God’s word. Though complementarians may start with the Bible, they have to end with man-made rules.

Annelise

Harold had never heard of “egalitarianism” before, he told me after reading. He was surprised by the fact that what I’d said had made some sense. We had another conversation, later, Harold and I, during which I said that God was genderless, and he said, “Wow, I’d never considered ‘father’ a gendered term,” and I said, “That’s because you’re a father! God looks just the same as you!” and then burst into frustrated tears. Harold was sympathetic, and I thought that through such conversations he was starting to get it. Alas, I was wrong: not long after that teary encounter, a third male pastor was appointed to our church, and when I asked Harold why the women’s pastor wasn’t paid but the three male ones were, he simply stated, “Men aren’t willing to work for free.” Then, not long after that, Harold decided to restructure the church’s leadership by implementing a team of elders, who, he patiently explained to me, had to be both married and men because the Bible was very clear about both prerequisites.

One thing that never made sense to me in these churches was this: the ministers there believed and taught that gender was binary, that men and women were designed very differently, and that together we made up the image of God. You’d think, then, that it’d be quite important to these men to make sure their congregations learned from women, too, to hear what God or the Bible were like when seen through the uterus-y lenses of us females. If two people have very different experiences of something, you’d want to hear both sides to get the full picture, right? And if the full picture is supposed to teach you about what God’s really like, gathering all of the necessary information should be a big deal to such Christians, right?!

This was never the case, though; we’d only ever hear from men in church, and no one could explain why it was that women’s experiences weren’t worth listening to. Men sat in church week after week after week, listening to men preaching sermons sprinkled with anecdotes about watching sport, and supporting their friends who struggled with porn use, and disappointing their long-suffering wives (“I didn’t know you couldn’t boil potatoes in a kettle! Poor Elaine had such a mess to clean up! Good thing we have our amazing wives, amirite, gents!”). And women, too, sat in church week after week after week, listening to men sharing their anecdotes about watching sport, supporting their friends who struggled with porn use, and disappointing their long-suffering wives (“Poor Elaine indeed”).

I learned a lot from and about these men during such sermons, in both what was said and what was not. I also knew that none of those men were willing to learn from me, to hear my hot take on that week’s particular passage, to listen to me share my hobbies and my struggles. These men could always use the excuse that they weren’t allowed to (“God said so!”), but none of them seemed particularly bummed about this. It broke my heart. I spent more and more of my time in church-related environments feeling like my insides were wilting.

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I’d snagged myself a husband by this point (go me!), meaning I now regularly sat in the congregation listening to him preaching, noticing that he’d rejected the helpful notes I’d offered about the ancient Near Eastern culture in which the text was authored (which made so much sense of its probable aims and message), and had instead decided to toe the Sydney Anglican line. I bawled after one of his sermons, which I’d found vapid and poorly thought-through. It felt deeply unfair that Alan was allowed to stand up and give average talks when friends of ours – gifted speakers and teachers – were banned from that same stage purely because of their gender. I had no urge to be up there myself (attention makes me want to vomit); I wasn’t after the spotlight, just a sign – ANY SIGN! – that my voice and my views, and those of my sisters, mattered. 

I especially wanted to matter to God. According to the church, I didn’t.

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To be fair to those churches, we women did get a chance to hear other women preaching: there were women-only conferences scheduled each year, where we’d have the opportunity to choose electives covering topics like ‘singleness’ or ‘forgiveness’ or ‘gossip,’ or these options (copied and pasted from the 2009 event): 

God's princesses • (50 min) • God is our Father, and God is a King, so we are all princesses just like Esther! It's often said, but is it actually true? What is our relationship to God, from the Bible's perspective? 

Radical hospitality • (55 min) • From naked chefs to Donna Hay, we get plenty of advice on entertaining. But what is Christian hospitality? How can we make our homes and lives more welcoming? 

The lost art of submission • (47 min) • The 'S' word gets a lot of bad press and is too easily misunderstood. According to 1 Peter, who should we submit to and why?  

Just regular subjects all Christian women would totally be interested in! Topics men covered in men-only groups (I’ve been informed) included porn, courage, dealing with work, treating a woman like she’s your sister until you’re married to her, being good, leadery husbands, and porn. (Apparently someone had decided women weren’t that interested in sex, judging by the fact that no one ever spoke to us about it.)

While looking up websites to remind myself of the electives available at conferences I’d attended (SO FUN), I discovered that there’s a new women’s conference called OneLove. The men’s equivalent is called Basecamp. Interestingly, if you watch the videos on both websites, you’ll see the Basecamp promo is a sausage fest: men as far as the eye can see! In the OneLove video, however, playing at the top of its page, it seems the band is male, as are TWO OF THE SPEAKERS. The ONE CHANCE women get to preach to other women, and look!!! They book men instead!!!!!! I’m adding exclamation marks here in an attempt to distract myself from my overwhelming desire to shriek!!!!!!!!!!!!

On The Life After podcast, Jamie Lee Finch points out how surreptitiously gender stereotypes are perpetuated in the Christian world, offering book covers like these as but one example:

These stereotypes are less sneaky in the names of the conferences I mentioned above, and in the themes chosen for gendered conferences: Christian women’s conference themes include “Surprised by Weakness” and “In His Hands.” Men’s conference themes include “Renew your strength,” “Give me Strength” and “Life on the Road.” The message is reinforced over and over and over (and over and over) again: women are (or should be) sweet princesses who dream of romance and rescue and need protecting. Men, on the other hand, are wild and strong adventurers who, therefore, can’t necessarily be blamed for trying to have sex with their female staff during one-on-one meetings about the children’s program at church, especially if said employee is baring any skin. Women are passive, men are active. It’s blatant sexism, presented as Biblical truth, and it’s incredibly disturbing and harmful. This is what’s taught – both implicitly and explicitly – in most of the Anglican churches around Sydney (as well as many Baptist, Pentecostal and Presbyterian churches).

Returning briefly to the conferences I spotted, it appears that at one upcoming men-only convention, a talk called “Man and Marriage” will be based on this passage:

Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behaviour of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewellery or fine clothes. Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight. For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to adorn themselves. They submitted themselves to their own husbands, like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her lord. You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear. 

Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers.

          1 Peter 3:1-7

Six of these seven verses are about wives rather than husbands; I wonder, will the sermon content be similarly ratioed? How much of what’s said at the conference, or in this talk specifically about relationships, will be dedicated to domestic violence? In a hall packed with hundreds of men, a concerning proportion are statistically likely to be perpetrators, and yet none of the men I’ve asked about it remember hearing a sermon on the topic before the investigation by Julia Baird and Hayley Gleeson revealed it was a problem in the Anglican church. 

Do I believe this issue would have been raised much earlier if women were allowed to preach in such churches? Yep, I do. 

Do I think there’d be less of an issue for many Christian men with abuse at home if women were treated as equals in the church, rather than paid a stack of lip service while simultaneously having their views suppressed? I really, truly do. 

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Hazel had only just joined our family when Harold unveiled his grand eldership plan at church. I’d taken some time off Sunday services after she was born, using newborn-baby-related exhaustion as my excuse, and then, when I returned, I spent services crying in the cry-room (it was intended for babies’ upsets rather than parents’, but I found it worked just as effectively for the latter). Once I’d noticed the sexism, I couldn’t unnotice it; it was everywhere, and it both exhausted and depressed me. Men delivered their sermons each week, many featuring cringe-y and stereotyped illustrations. Women spent their weeks at church volunteering their time to provide morning tea and help in the crèche. Women were treated as if their brains were better suited to babies than Bibles, while men were treated as if they couldn’t quite figure out how to prepare food, keep children alive, or relate to women as fellow humans rather than sex objects (so... should be appointed to paid leadership roles instead). Women-only events at church often involved drinking tea and crafting, while men-only events at church often involved sport and/or the consumption of some form of meat. 

I was convinced we could all do better, but no one in a position of authority within my church agreed with me. Even Alan – who had some say in how the church was run – wasn’t so sure complementarianism was necessarily wrong: “If husbands are making kind and good decisions for their wives, how’s it a bad thing?” he’d wonder aloud. I didn’t learn the term “benevolent sexism” until later; if I could, I’d travel back in time just to yell it at him and then storm out, slamming a door. It was infuriating to live with someone who had the power to make a difference within the system but who lacked both the personality and zeal to want to start the fire and burn the mother-flipping patriarchy to the ground. (He’s still irritatingly chill. We balance each other well.)
 

Looking at my teeny, smooshy baby and imagining the various pathways her life may one day take as she followed her passions and gifts, I realised with painful certainty that – as far as I could control it – I wanted the church’s teaching on gender and sexuality to play no role whatsoever in shaping either who she’d become or her expectations of the men in her life.

We left the church within weeks of her birth.

No Man’s Woman by Sinéad O’Connor