A Women in the Ministry Series
My parents were talking softly, almost in a whisper as we traveled past her home nestled along the street in our little village, Heyburn, Idaho. My mom, who saw everything in the clarity of her Naz faith responded. “Yea, I, huh, agree. She knows and loves Jesus.” Dad, at the wheel of our 1962 Dodge Lancer cut to the heart of the contradiction. “Mormons are good people, but my administrative assistant, I think, is born again.” My father served as the village manager, his selection as a Protestant in a community almost 100% LDS was kept under wraps lest it provoke a political backlash.
Even at 10 years age I knew, or at least thought I knew, that while being a Nazarene or Baptist set you up for being a “real Christian,” only that inside awakening brought it all home and made what was true by way of Church, real. Sitting in the back of our Lancer, I wrestled with a new idea. God could use a heretical faith to implant Jesus.
Since that early revelation God has chosen to evidence and underline in authentic human relationships that young boy’s awareness by bringing across my path Native Americans, Roman Catholics, Jahovah Witness, Gay, Straight, Bi-sexual, Buddhist and Muslims in whom I have no doubt God is active in forming the likeness of Jesus whether or not they followed or had good Trinitarian theology.
Everytime I drew a clear line as to who is in and who is out God introduces a person who clearly pursues love, integrity and hungers to enter more deeply into the mystery of Divine Presence. Finally, I gave up drawing lines concluding three things:
1. in Jesus of Nazareth the reconciling work of the Trinity of God is complete and covers every son and daughter of Eve and Adam.
2. This universal saving graciousness can either be lived into or away from within our individual (and in very direct ways communal) choices as we respond in love to love. Hellish and heavenly possibilities fill the earth. 3. Those privileged and closest to the “revealed story” are far more at risk than those on the edge or outside of the God Story in Jesus snd through Israel.
One of the hardest prejudices to fall, for me, was the idea of women serving as Pastors. While my mind pretty much disavowed it by my college years, the emotional depth of the feeling remained for a couple more decades even as I championed individual women who by relation, I was convinced should pastor.
Only in the last 30 years has my awareness of Biblical examples of women acting with real spiritual authority in the Bible caught up within me as a free and celebratory reality.
So, as I sat with an elderly woman recently who has seen women in ministry up close for years express her feeling that women serving as Sr Pastor just doesn’t feel right, I fully understood. Cultural prejudice runs very deep, especially when it, on the surface, seems Biblically enjoined.
The prejudice runs deep in the pew so that even in our largest churches a woman coming into the pulpit as lead can cause an exodus of far too many Jesus followers.
It is in that spirit I recommend this video of a “Dialogue Sermon,” a style popular in our church. it’s a discussion on John 4, “the Woman at the Well”
See one example:https://youtu.be/8kZgOVf5Bgw
As we enter a new year let us consider the urgency of women who work tirelessly to communicate and live the gospel of our Lord.
Blessings, Terry
(this prejudiced follower of The Way)
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