Archive | faith

In which words like “real” and “true” mean things

May 22, 2013

Brian Zahnd recently tweeted something I found so profound and now I’m thinking…

Babel was about everyone speaking one official imperial language. Pentecost is about the borderless God who speaks in every language.

— Brian Zahnd (@BrianZahnd) May 22, 2013

I was prepared to dominate English 101 at university; I had read almost every single book in the catalogue, I had high honours from high school, I was confident (okay, fine, an irritating slip of a teenage know-it-all). English 101? In the words of Kristen Howerton, come at me, bro.

The very first book we studied was new to me; a collection of essays by well-known writers and linguists about how we use and mis-use words, co-opting our language for political, marketing, and ideological purposes. Culturally, we use our words, and yet their meaning is muddy. It was my first foray into the outer limits of postmodern thought, and I remember reading these essays like I was drinking from a firehose: it was too much new information all at once. I remember one essay in particular; the author argued that we cannot use subjective words such as “feminine” as a descriptor of women because, by very nature of womanhood, if you are a woman, then it is, in fact, regardless of stereotypes, feminine.

If I am a woman, and I am doing it, it is, by statement of fact, womanly.

My eighteen-year-old mind was blown.

I had a very clear – and narrow – idea of what femininity or womanly meant in those years. Those beliefs were more informed by culture wars than Scripture. I came to realize that my understanding of these words was based more on pop culture, bad theology, and advertising than on the actual words themselves. And years later, when I began to study the kaleidoscope of womanhood in Scripture, and experience the freedom of Christ with the broad gorgeousness of the church, culture, and terrible beauty in the world, I began understand that words, so easily tossed around, matter. Words matter, particularly when we apply them to people, and words have power.

I have had an uneasy and respectful relationship with words, particularly words of religion, sex and gender, politics and ideology ever since.

Language is a responsibility. Scripture affirms this truth: our words have power.

A few weeks ago, we were at a Christian bookstore. There is only one in our city and it’s an independent shop. Brian gets most of his commentaries from retiring pastors in the area who have off-loaded their life’s work to the used book section, and I do like to prowl through the stacks while he’s weighing the entire new arrivals section. In the women’s section of the store, I again noticed the trend of divisive language cloaked in soft colours.

Critical thinking is one of the better habits I picked up in higher education, along with an awareness of my own ignorance, an appreciation for the humanities, and the ability to cook an entire meal using only a hot pot and the expired contents of a communal fridge. My critical thinking went into overdrive in that bookshop because there is actually no such thing as true womanhood or real femininity. We only have our culturally and contextually conditioned versions of those words, they are not clear.

We use words like “true” and “real” in reference to womanhood or motherhood or marriage, and I think it’s wrong to do this.

We use these words like they are freeing or universal or helpful, but they are forging new chains for a new law. There is no such thing as “real” woman or a “real” man. If you are a man, you are a real man. If you are a woman, you are a real woman.

The funny bit of perhaps-irony is that from the outside, my life even likely affirms those narrow descriptors of “true” womanhood. After all, I married young, I am a stay-at-home mother of three tinies, I care for our home and family, I cook, I clean, I fold laundry, and I honour my husband. And yet, the doing of these things do not make me a “real” woman. If I worked outside the home or if I never got married or if I did not or could not have children or if I burnt supper, it does not make me less of a real woman, particularly when one is in Christ. One need only open their eyes (or more radically, read their Bible) to see women all around us who do not meet these narrow and misleading definitions of “real” or true” and yet live and move and have their being in their full womanhood, affirmed as daughters of the King. Womanhood in Christ must mean more than these words propose.

And that wholeness, that realness, that trueness, is not represented by marital status or income level, adherence to a sitcom society that never existed or a division of modern labour. You are a true woman. You are a true man. Already.

The implication of words like “true” and “real” is that if you do not meet their arbitrary standard, then somehow you must be a fake woman or an unreal woman or less-of a woman. Maybe these words are used more to affirm our own beliefs and life choices, maybe it’s out of fear, or a loss of power, or a lack of real thoughtfulness. Rachel Held Evans wrote an entire book about how the word “biblical” is a pretty terrible adjective in front of “womanhood” for this same reason.

This is why words matter, and why I don’t like the use of subjective language to burden and divide in the name of God.

I believe that part of God’s Kingdom includes the wholeness of restored image-bearers of God, working and living and loving in beautiful communion together. Carolyn Custis James calls it “the blessed alliance” and it’s not exclusive to married couples by a long shot. The blessed alliance is what happens when men and women are both walking in the fullness of their unique gifts and callings, in wholeness and in right relationship with God and each other, it’s what happens when we are restored in God’s Kingdom.

I celebrate the differences between men and women, I do, although I’m wary of universalizing traits, temperament, and personalities for entire genders. In our culture, we do use words like “womanly” and “feminine” to describe certain types of women, and there is a tacit agreement about what those words mean. But in the Kingdom of God, we are not reliant on the world’s culture to affirm and celebrate each other.

And words like “true” and “real” in reference to womanhood or manhood are not celebrating the differences. They are narrow, misleading descriptors, a one-size-fits-all paper-thin straw man argument.

They are words that divide and agitate and burden, there is no freedom in this language. This is cookie-cutter language, this is not the language of the Cross, and it is not the language of the Kingdom of God. There is no Gospel in a new law with extra requirements and add-ons to life in Christ.

I believe that in the Kingdom of God, true womanhood and true manhood is not so different from true personhood. Christ came to unveil what it means to be fully human, and to reconcile us with our Father, and to save us, set us free, heal us, to walk us out into our created purposes and wholeness. He calls us by name, not by a number. Words have creative power, words can build up or tear down, set free or forge chains. Words matter, and words mean things.

image source: Judy Drew, Love of a Child

(These musings were also helped along this morning by a Twitter convo with @JesusRockStar, @CarisAdel, and @SarahBostAskins.)

Continue Reading · faith, Jesus Feminist, women · 22

In which it’s an ordinary Pentecost

May 19, 2013

Earlier today, at the tinies’ request, I made a dozen paper crocodiles at the kitchen table. Just a pair of scissors and a folded piece of paper turned into hours of playtime, sometimes I make it – toys, playtime, faith, marriage, friendship, all of it – more complicated than it really is. Sometimes a paper crocodile is enough for everyone, and sometimes your kitchen floor should have bits of paper and buttons and string on it. One of the tinies was upset because their crocodile had “horrible” teeth but we all decided that crocodiles should have horrible mismatched teeth, higgledy-piggledy to be truly fearsome so it was okay in the end.

We went for a walk before supper. The pizza dough for Sunday night was still rising on the oven, and so we put on our old runners and the jeans with worn-out seams. I had a group of dear friends in town this weekend which was lovely and full, so I’m feeling a bit tired and talked out. We headed for an old playground tucked behind a few dodgy houses, the neglected kind with a wooden play structure that is too tall for insurance purposes, and bits of wood, too-full trash cans, loitering teenagers who slink away when adults show up, and those old swings on long, long chains that make sure a kid touches the sky. Everything is becoming so safe, but still kids love that thrill of danger and delicious fear at an old playground, and so we hunt them up, hope the city continues to neglect them, and we swing too high for a while. I miss the old merry-go-rounds, the ones you could lay out on, full stretch, while someone swung you round and round, faster and faster, and the clouds blurred and you felt immortal and wild and still in the whirl.

I answer a lot of questions: Joseph is four years old now, and he can question like a CIA interrogator, relentless, for hours at a time, until I’m reduced to saying, “No more! No more questions! Not one!” and then he says, after a beat or two, “Mama, why don’t fish breathe air?” They were playing pirates on the gigantic slide tower. Anne stood guard, her butterfly net in hand, staring off into the distance on watch for invaders. The storm clouds were gathering above her head, and I pulled out my camera phone, snapped a quick shot because I couldn’t believe how strong she looked, standing high up in the sky, staring off into the gathering darkness, resolute.

We walked home together, talking about decisions and dreams and daily work. Anne ran straight down the hill ahead of us, her hair streaming behind her, legs churning like an adolescent colt while Joe stumbled and rolled like a puppy after wards. After everyone washed their hands, I rolled out pizza dough and then we turned on a television show so they could have Pizza and a Movie Night (always a big treat). I read a book over my food, Brian watched hockey on his computer, and it felt lazy and wonderful. Then I gathered my babies on the couch for our bedtime reading. Tonight was another worn-out Berenstein Bears book, the one where Brother and Sister Get In A Fight.

But I stopped reading all of a sudden. Just trailed off, really, because I was distracted by the light coming through the front window blinds. It took me a minute to figure out that the light was catching the cottonwood fluff in mid-drift down from the forests around the city. Somehow the effect of the cottonwood fluff thick in the air and the light and the trick of the blinds made it look like glitter flying in the street, like tiny stars on fire, and I stopped reading until I got a good poke in the ribs, “Mama, you stopped!”

But look at the light, look at the light, look at the light, I stuttered. Look at coming down, it’s just cottonwood fluff and light and blinds and look at the light. How is that happening? The world is full of stars in the daylight.

It’s Pentecost today, I wanted to write something today about Pentecost. I wanted to write about Pentecost because I speak in tongues, and I love the words and freedom of the Spirit, and I believe in fire descending and the birth and rebirth of the Church and scarlet geraniums. I wanted to write about the way that God is For us and the ways that God is With us, and the ways that God is Among us, but instead, I ended up sitting on my couch, covered in children, Evelynn had red socks on her feet.

I ended up with nothing to say but this: There are buttons on the table and craft glue under my nails, and I was struck quiet, arrested, by the way the light catches the every day seeds flying, looking for a place to land among us. A simple holy day, immortal and wild and still: For, With, Among, descending, let the language of our birth stop for just a while, light is descending.

Continue Reading · faith, family, Uncategorized · 13

In which they are overlooked in a sea of hipsters

May 16, 2013

My sister’s husband recently graduated from university. Between working full-time and being a wonderful father to my two little nieces, it was a busy and arduous road to complete his education. We’re very proud of his perseverance. Among all of the young people, I felt rather middle-aged at his convocation. I got married one week after my own university graduation, quite convinced of my maturity, and yet these kids looked like they belonged in junior high to me. Babies! in caps and gowns! setting off on adventures, no doubt.

In a sea of shiny young people, I suddenly found tears in my eyes for the older ones among them. I don’t mean to take anything away from the young ones, not at all. I remember those days with tenderness. But they wore their youth and bright future so carelessly, and I found myself applauding until my palms tingled for the men and women like my brother-in-law who had to battle through school with so many other demands on their attention, for the women older than my mother who have finally finished their degree long after their nests emptied, the middle-aged men with a circle of whiskers on their shining bald heads. I whooped when someone with grey hair under their black cap and tassel climbed the stairs for their diploma, I high-fived several grandmothers on their way up the aisle.

image source

A few months ago, I requested stories or anecdotes about how it feels to be a woman in the church. I was more than a little overwhelmed by the responses, both the sheer number and the content, but I did my best to respond to each one. Women filled my inbox with stories – beautiful and horrible, hurtful and empowering – about their experiences within the institutions of Christianity. After all my research, I thought I knew what to expect. And sure enough, there were the stories about women feeling marginalized because they are not married or do not/ cannot have children; stories about women who had men turn their backs when they stood up to preach their first sermon; stories about women who stayed in abusive marriages because of their church teachings; a lot of affirming women who found their voice and healing within church.

But one theme emerged that I hadn’t looked for, over and over: Women, in the middle of their lives, who felt invisible and ignored by the church, the same way they feel invisible or ignored in our culture.

These are women of my mother’s generation perhaps, maybe ten or even twenty years on either side. And I heard their hurt and sorrow and stoicism.

I used to scan conference platforms and church staff listings, music festivals and seminary rosters for women and visible minorities, now I find I’m scanning for older women, as well. And you know what? They were right. They aren’t there.

One woman told me about how she had led worship at her church for years. But when a new young pastor was hired, he wanted a cooler band to get more young people, and the first thing to go were the older women. “No one wanted to see old women on stage,” she wrote candidly without bitterness, and so she was replaced with young women in their late teens and early twenties. She misses leading worship. Another woman told me about the sting of being passed over continually. She had very high levels of education, a seminary degree, a long history of teaching with many beloved students, but every teacher at her church’s education program was a young, charismatic man with half her education, let alone experience, despite their position of welcoming women in ministry. In practice, it wasn’t actually happening. She believed now that it was because she did not fit the expected look or personality or gender of their education program. Another woman shared about how she has welcomed and celebrated the shift in the churches of her context towards women in leadership and ministry. Yet, she has noticed that they are all young and beautiful women with identical outgoing and big-smiling personalities. The glass ceiling remains for her because she doesn’t fit the standard or “target audience” so she cheers on these young women, the age of her grand-children, with a selflessness that amazed me.

Women told me about how hard it is to be middle-aged or to be considered unbeautiful in a church culture which values youth and energy and talent. In a sea of hipsters and motivated young people with self-promotion apparently engrained into their DNA, they feel invisible and over-looked, slow and ignored.

Ever since I read their emails, I’ve been haunted by their stories. I asked older women in my life and found the same was true. Once a woman reaches a certain age or if a woman is not considered beautiful or outgoing or charming, she often disappears in the eyes of her community. She still has a rich and meaningful life, don’t get me wrong, but they all said, sadly, that yes, they are well-educated or experienced or wise, and yet, they are never asked, they are never invited, they are rarely noticed. Many of them told me that they were “back-stage” while the beautiful and young were celebrated from the front, so they worked and they served in beautiful obscurity and they found that God was faithful there, too.

It’s bothered me because, of course, I believe that God looks at the heart, not at the outward appearance. I long for our communities to be a tangible representation, a sign along the road, of what it looks like when men and women of all ages, nations, experiences, intellectual abilities, socio-economic backgrounds all gather together to glorify God.

It’s an idealist view, a dreamer’s dream, but if there is one place where women of a certain age or women who do not fit the cultural expectations of “beauty” should feel valued and affirmed, celebrated and acknowledged, honoured and even just seen, oh, my goodness, let it be within the Body of Christ!

So I’m thinking of you a lot now, ladies. I’m thinking of the women twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years older than me.

I’m thinking of you and I’m wanting, somehow, to repent for how we’ve shunted you to the side, bought into our culture’s insane standards of beauty and aging, to ask for your forgiveness. I’m thinking of you when I sit in church and I’m looking for you when I’m preaching from the stage now, and I’m thinking of you watching the rest of us run around striving, and I’m not sure how to fix it. But I’m sorry. And I’m watching for you now, I won’t make this mistake again, and I want to be a better listener, and I want to be a notice-er. You aren’t invisible to me, not at all. I want to give honour where honour is due. When I talk about not waiting for permission anymore, about being loved and free, about not waiting for a seat at The Table, I’m thinking about you.

I am thinking in particular of the tremendous beauty and strength of this generation of women. I’m thinking of how much I have to learn, of how much passion and laughter, anger and goodness, stories and sermons, resources and energy they carry within them. Can you imagine, friends? Can you imagine what would happen if we made a little room for their voices and experiences in our communities?

Continue Reading · church, faith, women · 52

In which I share my favourite books for Jesus Feminists

May 8, 2013

I often hear from men and women who are struggling with their traditional teachings on women in the Church, callings, vocation, and particularly the complementarian view of marriage. I don’t engage in debates online anymore because, well, they are exhausting and usually unhelpful plus it’s pretty time-consuming. But many people are genuinely searching because their marriage or their experience or their reading of Scripture does not line up with the narrow and tiny box they’ve been offered in their tradition, particularly when it comes to these issues. So they are searching.

Often our heart (or I would even argue, the Holy Spirit) leads us with our questions and our struggles, and then, as the proverb says, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. My teachers are often hidden in the pages of books.

I did a tremendous amount of research for Jesus Feminist – which means I read a rainforest’s worth of books. Some of the books were good, some of them were not. Some of them were supporting my position, some of them thought my position made me a heretic and disqualified me from “true” womanhood and delivered me to the flames of eternal conscious punishment. I read feminist books from people who hate Christians, and I read books from Christians who hate feminists. And I read a lot of blogs and websites and I underlined and dog-eared pages and scribbled notes until my kitchen table resembled something out of that movie A Beautiful Mind.

Every word of Jesus Feminist has purposeful thought and intention behind it but, as is my habit here, I often work through theology with story or prose, as an invitation and conversation, instead of in a traditional scholarly fashion. (There are other works which inform my underlying theology ranging from N.T. Wright to Walter Brueggemann, Jurgen Moltmann to Eugene Peterson to Stanley Haurwas, and probably a bit too much Barth for some of you, but I didn’t include those works as they are more foundational to me, and less focussed specifically on this issue.) I also have not included online websites and resources here but hope to gather those up for you soon, as well.

So here are my top books for becoming a Jesus Feminist. These books are a mix of story-telling, journalism, theology, and academics. (P.S. They are in alphabetical order because a ranking was impossible for me.)

A Woman Called: Piecing Together the Ministry Puzzle by Sara Gaston Barton (Leafwood Publishers: 2012.)

A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband “Master” by Rachel Held Evans (Thomas Nelson: 2012.)

Finally Feminist: A Pragmatic Christian Understanding of Gender: Why Both Sides Are Wrong – and Right by John G. Stackhouse Jr. (Baker Academic: 2005.)

Half the Church: Recapturing God’s Global Vision for Women by Carolyn Custis James (Zondervan: 2010.)

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (Vintage: 2010.)

How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals edited by Alan F. Johnson (featuring essays from Stuart and Jill Briscoe, John Ortberg, Tony Campolo, Bill and Lynne Hybels, and many others) (Zondervan: 2010.)

The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible by Scot McKnight. (Zondervan: 2008.)

Junia Is Not Alone by Scot McKnight (Patheos Press: 2012.)

Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Gospel & Our Culture) by Darrell L. Guder, Editor. (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company: 1998.)

Theology for the Community of God by Stanley J. Grenz (Wm. B. Eerdmans: 2000.)

Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (American Society of Missiology) by David Jacobus Bosch (Orbis Books: 2011.)

Why Not Women : A Biblical Study of Women in Missions, Ministry, and Leadership by Loren Cunningham and David Joel Hamilton with Janice Rogers (YWAM Publishing: 2000.)

Women in the Church: A Biblical Theology of Women in Ministry by Dr. Stanley J. Grenz with Denise Muir Kjesbo (IVP Academic: 1995.)

Slaves, Women & Homosexuals: Exploring the Hermeneutics of Cultural Analysis by William J. Webb (Intervarsity Press: 2001.)

Lastly, my heart and thinking is always rooted in Scripture, and so, of course, the Bible.

And in a bit more book news, I should have the final official cover ready to announce soon! I’m excited to share it with you. (The one online is just a place-holder draft.) November feels really far away because I can’t wait to give this book to you. It feels very precious and sacred to me right now. You can find info about preordering – and my first “official” endorsement! – here.

P.S. My full reading lists are here.

image source, Creative Commons