Tag Archives: Women in leadership

Why are Women More Eager Missionaries? John Piper’s opinions miss the mark.

Posted on December 28, 2016 by | 17 comments

On today’s “Ask Pastor John” episode, posted here, John Piper* is asked why so many single missionaries are women (80-85% of all single missionaries), and Piper responds that he doesn’t really know, but has a couple opinions, that are in short:

Single missionaries by and large would prefer to be married.  Proposing marriage falls on men, so the type of man that is single because he lacks the courage to propose marriage also lacks the courage to become a missionary, which takes grit, courage and strength.

One thing I agree with, is that missions work takes grit, courage and strength.  However, I have different opinions than Piper on this phenomenon of single women going into missions.  Mine are,

  1.  Conservative evangelical women who are gifted in leadership and teaching may only be permitted to use those gifts on the mission field.
  2.  Conservative evangelical men who are gifted in leadership and teaching may use those gifts anywhere, and are often funneled into local ministry as young men and so do not need to look so hard for opportunities to lead.

My opinions come from personal experience as a young woman who aspired to be a missionary, and as an approaching-middle-aged woman who has been thinking and reading about gender issues in the Church for several years now.

I grew up in a pastor’s family, and my father loved missionary work so he was always planning missions trips and inviting missionaries to come to our church, where we would personally host them in our home.  I remember as an 8 year old hearing about Amy Carmichael‘s missionary work in India in a Sunday School lesson.  I am not someone who remembers every detail of my life, so a snapshot like this is usually significant, an a-ha! moment in my identity formation.  Amy Carmichael is my earliest hero.

My family also spent three years living in Bolivia and Paraguay, South America, working in a boarding school for missionaries and filling in for missionaries on furlough in jungle and city locations.  We met many single missionaries, all female except for four males (two of which were dismissed for molesting children).

With my brother Jonathan in La Paz, Bolivia
Visiting Lake Titicaca with my brothers
My parents taught my fourth grade class our first year in Bolivia
Matthew graduated from high school and Danny graduated from 8th grade while we were in Bolivia

Having been raised in the Conservative Baptist denomination, I never saw women in pastoral leadership.  No one ever told me that with my leadership in the youth group and award winning speech contest record, that I could be a pastor one day.  If a young man had demonstrated these qualities, he would have been invited to preach and been encouraged to pursue pastoral ministry in his schooling.  When it was time for me to go to college, I only thought about two options – music ministry or missionary work.  These were the only leadership roles that I had ever seen women in, and it was the entire scope of my imagination for my own life.

I had great love for God’s Kingdom and wanted to participate in bringing God’s redeeming work to the world.  I studied music in college because I felt that was my spiritual gifting.  And then I went to seminary and started out with a missions degree, but let my aunt and uncle talk me into a more ‘practical’ degree that could be used anywhere, Educational Ministries.  I fell in love with my husband, a former missionary to Romania, and imagined us working overseas together.  I was devastated when this didn’t come to pass, as it was my entire identity.  I was going to be a missionary.  I couldn’t imagine how I could use my gifts for God here in the USA.

One day, God had to out-right spell it out to me in an audible voice: “Ruth, I want you to co-pastor with your husband.”  Logan had been talking about church planting, and I was saying, “OK, whatever,” but feeling zero passion personally about being involved in a church plant.  I knew I would be relegated to babysitting and cooking and would be left out of the dreaming, teaching, leading part of ministry.  Now I understand that dreaming, teaching and leading are aspects of my God-given design for co-dominion with my husband (Genesis 1:28).

I began reading voraciously about women in ministry.  God began introducing us to couples who co-pastor.  It was an exciting and enlightening time.  It was also hurtful to realize that I had catching up to do in preparation for pastoral ministry, because I had never been guided as a young person towards leadership.

For the first time, I began to see how women in the Bible were leading all along.  I began to learn about women pastors in the USA.  At one time, there were more female Baptist pastors than male.  However, they were serving in rural, impoverished churches while men had more desirable positions in cities and east coast towns.  As rural towns became more prosperous, denominations began tightening their belts on women in ministry so that men could take their churches.  Our own church in Maine had a history of female pastors generations ago.  There has been a steady move away from allowing women in ministry in recent decades.  It was not that long ago, 1987, that the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood was founded, and it was in 2000 that the Southern Baptist denomination stopped endorsing women’s ordination.

Of course, another avenue for women in ministry was mission work.  On the field, women could teach and lead even the [non-white] men.  There are aspects of classism, sexism and racism intersecting with the issue of women’s ordination.  While women may not teach men in  wealthy, white, Western churches, their work in Africa, Latin America or Asia is admired.  Women may not preach in many of our churches, but a visiting missionary woman may “share” her experiences on the field with her sending church, sometimes even from behind the pulpit.

I would be remiss to not point out that Jesus never married before beginning his ministry, and Paul taught us to remain single for the sake of the Gospel (1 Corinthians 7:7-38).  Too often, marriage is placed on a pedestal and given too much importance in the Evangelical tradition.  Certainly, married couples can work together as a “Blessed Alliance” for the sake of the Gospel.  But young people do not need to be married to serve the Lord.  And I would guess that 80-85% of single people serving the Lord right here in the USA are male.

Let me share some more resources for further reading on women in ministry on the mission field and in local congregations.

Missiologist Jenny Rae Armstrong wrote a powerful piece about our privileged Western cultural perspective on womanhood and gender roles in this piece, “On Being a Woman After God’s Own Heart.”

Founder of Youth With a Mission, Loren Cunningham, believes women should serve in ministry alongside men.  Here is a short video from the YWAM website:

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You can purchase “Why Not Women?” here.

Here are a couple articles on the History of Women in Missions, Women in Mission: A Protestant Tradition.

I saw this astute comment on the Desiring God FB post: image

God has gifted all of us for Kingdom work, and churches should be empowering the Priesthood of all Believers rather than setting a few up in a hierarchy of power in the Church.  We should be guiding all of our church family to uncover their giftings and callings and make room for them in our congregations.  It is a waste not to use each person to their full potential.

*John Piper is a pastor, theologian and co-founder of the complementarian organizations, The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, The Gospel Coalition, and Desiring God.  He is an influential force in conservative, reformed, fundamentalist evangelicalism, with a large following.  On Facebook, he has 438,000 followers, 879,000 on Twitter, and his writings and sermons reach millions around the world.

Here are some rebuttals from Egalitarians to Tweets and sermons Piper has produced recently:

In 2012, John Piper said that Christianity had a “masculine feel” and Ben Witherington responded to his address with this excellent article: “John Piper on Men in Ministry and the Masculinity of Christianity.”

Spiritual Sounding Board tried to decipher some of Piper’s strange tweets and shared a particularly disturbing tweet.  Zack Hunt has written on The Monstrous God of John Piper.

Sojourners Magazine includes John Piper in their great article on Kissing Sexist, Racist Christianity Goodbye.

John Piper is not at the fore-front of this post by Tim Fall, but he is in the background and Fall’s piece is great, so you should check it out.  Silencing Women – the guaranteed way for men to stay in control.

Jory Micah responded to another Ask John episode about egalitarians and complementarians dating in this post.

Thanks for visiting The Beautiful Kingdom Warriors!  We have a Facebook page where we share posts from around the web everyday dealing with women in ministry, gender violence, Beautiful Kingdom Warriors who inspire, etc.

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Francis Chan, the NEO House Church Network, and Women in Leadership

Posted on November 19, 2016 by | 3 comments
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Getting Images: Yoido Full Gospel Church members praying

I recently listened to Francis Chan on the Phil Vischer Podcast, episode 227, sharing about his current ministry, the NEO House Church Network:

Popular author and preacher Francis Chan walked away from his megachurch to try something completely different – a series of tiny house churches in inner city San Francisco.  Why the change?  And what can we learn from his big experiment in going “small?”  This week on the podcast with Francis Chan – is the future of the church tiny??

At the end of the podcast, he mentioned that the NEO House Church Network is complementarian, reserving pastoral leadership to men.  It is a part of The Christian & Missionary Alliance (complementarian) and is also affiliated with The Gospel Coalition, which holds complementarianism as a key doctrine.

I love what Chan is doing, building a house church network that gives thousands of people the opportunity to minister in intimate and committed small communities. Mobilizing the priesthood of all believers should be the ultimate goal of a pastor.  And Chan is an amazing minister of the Gospel that I admire.  So I thought he would benefit from this quick story about a pastor that mobilized the women in his church to start house churches and they grew to be the largest church in the world.

“Don’t be afraid to empower women,” says the pastor of the world’s largest church.  Churches are wrong not to let women become spiritual leaders, David Yonggi Cho told church leaders at a “Discipling a Whole Nation” conference in Italy.  “If you ever train the women, and delegate your ministry to them, they will become tremendous messengers for the Lord.”

Most leaders at Cho’s Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, Korea, are women.  The 700,000-member congregation is divided into 50,000 cell groups that meet in homes, and about 47,000 cell leaders are women, he said.  Of the church’s 600 associate pastors, 400 are women.  “In ministry they are equal with men,” he said.  “They are licensed.  They are ordained.  They become deaconesses and elders.”

Cho adopted the cell church principle in 1964 after he collapsed from exhaustion trying to minister to his then 3,000-member congregation.  His male leaders balked when he told them to divide the congregation into cells that meet in their homes.  “They said, ‘Fine, but we are not trained to do that and we are not paid to do that.  Why don’t you have a long vacation?’ This is the Korean way of saying ‘Why don’t you resign from the church?’ ”

When he asked the women leaders to do it, they said, “Teach us, pastor.  We will do anything for you,” he said.  The church grew from 3,000 to 18,000 in the next five years.  The cell churches started new cell churches and more lay leaders got involved in ministry, Cho said.  “It is the will of God to have a growing church.”

Source: https://godswordtowomen.org/empower.htm

Over time, using this cell principle, Cho’s church grew to over 1 million people.  Sadly, Cho has been convicted of embezzling from his church.  It is common for one person holding much power to be corrupted.  This should not diminish the impact of Cho’s female cell church pastors though!

Matthew 7:16 tells us, “You will know them by their fruit.”  The fruit of empowering women in ministry at Yoido Full Gospel Church in South Korea was unprecedented growth.  Church planters like Francis Chan should take note and include women in leadership.

Further reading:
The Junia Project has a great article on Why Women Make Great Church Planters.

The MissioAlliance has several must-read articles on Women in Church Planting.

Thank you for visiting The Beautiful Kingdom Warriors, where we fight for our rightful place beside our brothers in Christ’s reconciling and redeeming work on Earth. “Like” us on Facebook if you’d like to read links from around the web each day on gender issues in the Church and world.

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Too Sweet, Or Too Shrill? The Double Bind for Women.

Posted on October 20, 2016 by | 4 comments

hidden-brain-imageA couple days ago, the Hidden Brain podcast had a fascinating episode on how sexism affects women in leadership.  You can listen to it HERE.

Here is the transcript from the episode, as provided on the NPR page (emphases mine):

Fewer than 1 in 5 members of Congress are women. At Fortune 500 companies, fewer than 1 in 20 CEOs are women. And if you look at all the presidents of the United States through Barack Obama, what are the odds of having 44 presidents who are all men?

If men and women had an equal shot at the White House, the odds of this happening just by chance are about 1 in 18 trillion.

What explains the dearth of women in top leadership positions? Is it bias, a lack of role models, the old boy’s club? Sure. But it goes even deeper. Research suggests American women are trapped in a paradox that is deeply embedded in our culture.

“It is really the very, very fine line of being a shrew on one hand and a puppet on the other that any woman in public life has to walk,” says former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, a Democrat from Illinois.

When Moseley Braun was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992, she achieved a powerful first. She was the first female African-American senator. And in her race for office, she assumed that racism would be a more daunting obstacle than gender bias. But she says, that wasn’t the case.

“I think in some regards the gender biases are more profound and more central to our culture than even the racial ones, and that to me was the surprise.”

One moment in particular still stays with her, more than 20 years later.

“There was a cartoon from one of the newspapers in the state that showed me as a puppet, with my campaign manager’s hand up my dress,” she says. “And the idea that I was a puppet of this guy that who was managing my campaign was shocking to me.”

But shortly after Braun won her race, she says she confronted a second trap. One day, she made an impassioned plea on the floor of the Senate. But she says, all her colleagues could hear, was a shrill black woman.

Her experience is one that researchers have described as a “double bind” — a set of assumptions that get at our implicit assumptions about men, women and leadership.

“The female gender role is based on the stereotype that women are nice and kind and compassionate,” says social psychologist Alice Eagly. By contrast, she says, “in a leadership role, one is expected to take charge and sometimes at least to demonstrate toughness, make tough decisions, be very assertive in bringing an organization forward, sometimes fire people for cause, etc.”

So what’s a woman to do? Be nice and kind and friendly, as our gender stereotypes about women require? Or be tough and decisive, as our stereotypes about leadership demand? To be one is to be seen as nice, but weak. To be the other is to be seen as competent, but unlikable.

Connie Morella served for 16 years as a Republican congresswoman from Maryland. Like Democrat Braun, she says at times she struggled to be heard.

“In a committee room, when I wasn’t chair of the committee, I would respond to a question or comment on an issue, [and] they’d say, ‘Thank you, Connie, that was great.’ And a little later Congressman Smith would say the same thing, and it was, ‘Oh, Congressman Smith … that was fabulous, let the record show …’ and I’d think, ‘Gee, I just said that.’ ”

How can we tell, with scientific certainty, whether women like Morella and Carol Braun were the victims of bias? When we look at a female leader who appears incompetent or shrill, how do we know if we are seeing reality, or just seeing the world through the lens of our own unconscious biases?

That’s where researchers like Madeline Heilman come in. She’s a psychology professor at New York University who focuses on gender stereotypes and bias, particularly when it comes to leadership. In one study, Heilman asked volunteers to evaluate a high-powered manager joining a company. Sometimes volunteers are told the manager is a man, other times they’re told it’s a woman.

“When the person was presented as a high powered person, who was very ambitious, we found that the person was seen as much more unlikable when it was a woman than when it was a man,” she says.

In these studies, the high-powered male and female manager are described in identical terms, down to the letter. The only difference is that one is said to be a man, and the other is said to be a woman.

Heilman says that the double bind arises because our minds are trying to align our stereotypes about men and women, with our stereotypes about leadership.

“We have conceptions of these jobs and these positions and what is required to do them well, and there’s a lack of fit between how we see women and what these positions require,” she says.

The biases Heilman describes aren’t just held by men. They’re held by both sexes, which explains why many female leaders encounter derision and suspicion from men and women.

“We have very strong feelings about how men and women are, and that leads to this dislike when they go over the line, when they tread where they are not supposed to be.”

The good news, says psychologist Eagly, is that our culture’s views are always changing. And that includes our views on women, men and the meaning of leadership — whether in elected office or the workplace.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Carol Moseley Braun was the first African-American U.S. senator. She was in fact the first female African-American senator. An initial version of the podcast episode with the same error has been corrected.

The Hidden Brain Podcast is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced Maggie Penman, Jennifer Schmidt, and Renee Klahr. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can also follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain, and listen for Hidden Brain stories each week on your local public radio station.

Follow The Beautiful Kingdom Warriors on Facebook for daily links regarding gender equality in the Church and culture at large.  Thanks for stopping by and come again!

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