Neither Male nor Female in Christ

Jesus came to bring salvation, hope, and life. He crossed the gap between the infinite and the finite and gave us to call to equality and respect for all, exemplified by his treatment of the down and out in society. Paul expressed the Christian hope in community when he said that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female (Galatians 3:28). We seem to get the first two, but we miss the last one.

This is underlined by a store on MSNBC titled Belief Watch: God’s Girls, with the following quote:

Women make up 61 percent of all Americans who attend religious congregations, but they still struggle for their place in some denominations. A national study led by researchers at Hartford Seminary found that only 12 percent of the clergy in the 15 largest Protestant denominations are women. And some 112 million Americans belong to denominations that don’t ordain women at all, including Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Southern Baptists, Mormons, Muslims and Orthodox Jews.

Now a number of those groups are not Christian, and I do not want to comment on their practice in this matter. But I think that Christians, by leaving women out of certain leadership roles in the church, are failing in fulfilling the ministry of reconciliation that was entrusted to us as a church. God has broken down many of our barriers to ministry over the years. We have had many excuses for why we should exclude certain people from ministry.

In this case, we call upon the practice of the apostle Paul. But there is an odd thing about this particular attempt at obedience. It is pretty much an isolated case of attempting to keep the church rigidly with the practice of the apostolic age. We would be unaware of any practice of keeping women out of ministry with the exception of certain statements from Paul. Why? Because women are referred to regularly as part of the ministry of Jesus, especially in Luke. Women are shown leading in Acts. Paul even refers to one woman, Junia, as an apostle (Romans 16:7).

People often avoid these references by pretending that the women referenced had some other roles than speaking, but the text says nothing of the sort. And those who read Paul in 1 Corinthians 14:33-36 as condemning public speaking by women entirely apparently miss the section in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 in which women are clearly involved in public speaking. We’re usually too busy trying to figure out the head covering thing to notice that the women wearing or not wearing the head covering are doing so while speaking publicly.

My point here is not to review the entire scriptural record, which others have done more effectively than I have, but rather to point out that we find it easy to adjust Christian practice when society’s standards change, so that we now dress differently, meet differently, interact socially in a different way, and conduct worship services that don’t resemble the worship services of the early church, yet somehow when the topic is women in leadership, the men choke, and are stuck on the social practices of 2,000 years ago.

God gave us the direction–in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. We have gotten over slavery. When will we quit choking off the ministry of women in the church?