Girls Just Wanna Have Fun | Women in Leadership – Part 1

 

I am a man, and even though I might not like the stereotypical manly things like sport, action films, fishing, fast cars and sexism, I do like some manly things like eating meat, drinking beer, making things out of wood, and being in charge of a barbecue, proving that I am definitely a man, and there is no escaping that. As a man, I feel I’m in a weird position when it comes to talking about women and the Christian faith, after all, men have traditionally had the loudest voices when it has come to talking about faith, and my voice is just another rich male baritone, speaking about things I basically know nothing about. But maybe we need more men to present positive views of women in the church, because there are plenty of men who don't have positive views of women, they have biblical views of women, which invariably means that they accept that women are loved by God, and that they play an important role in the church, but that they shouldn’t really be trusted, or to put it another way, they value women, and their maternal instincts make them ideal Sunday school teachers, but they shouldn’t be doing any serious leadership involving men, because we all know what happened with Adam and Eve. 

 

To be fair, the church can't be blamed entirely for the way it views women, because throughout human history, and even today, cultures across the world have treated women as being less than men. There has never been a female president of the USA, most business leaders and CEOs are men, women have historically been paid less than men, and there is still disparity in how women are paid. The attitude towards women in society only really changed significantly in the last hundred years or so in the UK. Before 1918 women weren't allowed to vote or to stand for election. It is only because of the suffragette movement and men's wars that this changed. In 1918, women were allowed to vote for the first time in Britain, and in that same year we had our first female Member of Parliament. Before then, women were expected to be home makers, but in the first and second world wars, when men were conscripted to go and fight, off the back of the suffragette movement, women stepped up and kept the country running by doing jobs that traditionally belonged to men. Women began working as mechanics, engineers, drivers, postal workers, and police officers, proving to everyone that they were more than baby making machines and domestic robots. 

 

The church has traditionally trailed behind the progress of society, still clutching onto the view that women shouldn't hold any positions of authority in the church. Some fringe Christian denominations ordained women to be ministers in the early 19th century, but the Church of England didn't ordain a woman until 1994. Many Christian denominations saw this as setting a dangerous precedent, and the beginning of the end, opening the flood gates for gays, lesbians and transsexuals to become church leaders, and they emboldened their stances against women, saying the Bible was clear that women shouldn't teach, they shouldn't have any pastoral responsibilities, and that they certainly shouldn't lead churches. Some church leaders take the biblical view of women to the extreme, and only recently, one particularly obnoxious evangelical pastor, who needn’t be named, infamously instructed women in his church, to demonstrate their subservience to their husbands, by providing them with on demand oral sex. 

 

One of my best friends is particularly outspoken about the role of women in churches. I've never expressed my own views to him, because he's the kind of person who loves a lively debate, and I’m the kind of person who hates confrontation of any kind. I think he knows how I feel and has wanted to have that debate with me, because he has regularly brought up the biblical teachings about women, perhaps hoping I will take the bait and argue with him. He maintains that his view is in line with the what the Bible teaches, and whilst I hear what he is saying, I don't agree. I have never argued with him because I know he would crush me with his superior debating skills, but maybe I should have. Maybe I owe it to women to stand up for them, and I should defend my wife’s honour by fighting for her right to lead a church, but the truth is that my wife and I know where we stand on the issue, and we aren’t part of a church that practices this teaching on women, so it’s not really an issue, and I don’t see a problem with having a church led by someone who isn’t a heterosexual male. I'm aware that this means I'm not following what is considered to be a biblical view, but as you should have noticed by now, “biblical” views, aren’t always biblical, although I will admit that it’s difficult to read the Bible and come away thinking that women are equal to men. 

 

The Bible doesn't seem to hold a high view of women. If we go right back to the beginning, women were basically created so that men wouldn’t be bored and alone. Eve was created for Adam, and to add insult to injury, she wasn’t made in a cool way like Adam was, by God molding some earth and breathing life into it, she was made by using the bits of Adam that weren’t needed. If you think of Adam as an apple pie, lovingly made with organic apples and buttery shortcrust pastry, then Eve is a tart made from the pastry off cuts which have been smooshed together, then filled with some old jam found at the back of the fridge. Eve was never meant to be as important or as good as Adam, so perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that she soon proved herself to be a liability, by being a chatty Kathy and letting a snake convince her that it was a good idea to eat a forbidden apricot.

 

Some scholars and botanists believe that the forbidden fruit in the story of Adam and Eve was an apricot, what the Greeks called a 'golden apple'. Apples aren't able to grow in the Middle East but apricots and figs grow abundantly. It is also likely that the forbidden fruit was an apricot, because apricots are horrible, and it would make sense that God would tell Adam and Eve not to eat them.

 

Eve could have left it at that, and simply caused womankind to fall into sin, but no, she had to drag mankind down with her too, and did so by nagging Adam to eat the fruit, causing the ultimate downfall of all humanity, destroying God’s perfect creation, and bringing about the broken world which we now have to live in. It’s all the fault of a woman, and like Eve, all women are deceitful and unreliable.

 

It’s not just Eve either, here are some other terrible things that women have done in the Bible, which have caused men to get into trouble, and which prove that women can't be trusted. Sarah told Abraham to sleep with her servant so she could have a son, then got all stroppy with him when he dared to care for him. Delilah cut Samson's hair and robbed him of his strength, and betrayed him by handing him over to the authorities. Michal had the cheek to shame her husband king David, by telling him that he was embarrassing himself in how he worshipped God, and king Ahaz's wife constantly moaned at him for leaving the toilet seat up, and not taking the bins out when they were full.

 

Men are as bad though, and for all that those women did, the men in these stories were much worse. Abraham pimped out Sarah to the Pharoah because he was a coward and believed that doing so would save his own balls, and he also agreed to sleep with Sarah’s servant, Hagar, because he didn’t believe God’s promises. Samson was an egomaniac who constantly violated his Nazarite vows which had been given to him by God, who womanized and slept with prostitutes, and was basically a narcissistic body builder who figured he could do what he wanted. King David was a Peeping Tom whose obsession with Bathsheba led him to have her husband killed, just so that he could be with her, despite already having several wives, and King Ahaz used to piss all over the toilet seat and refused to mop up after himself, and he offered his son as a human sacrifice to a false god.

 

The Bible apparently presents a view of women which has informed how we see women in the church today, but there are also many heroines in the Bible. Jael delivered Israel from the army of King Jabin of Canaan, by assassinating the commander of the Canaanite army. Rahab helped Israelite spies escape from the city of Jericho, and in doing so helped them conquer the city. Esther risked her life to save the Jewish people from being massacred. Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna were three women who funded Jesus’s ministry; and Phoebe, Chloe, and Apphia were just some of the women who were prominent figures in the early church, and were colleagues of the Apostle Paul.

 

 

 

 

Text taken from “Unanswerable: Exploring the Complexities of the Christian Faith and Biblical Truth”, which is available from Amazon, and from all good book shops. An audiobook is also available at https://mindmole.bandcamp.com/music