Scot,
You do not know me, and I can only imagine the amount of email that you receive each day. I want to say this is a complimentary email - as the subject line may cause you wonder.This is in reference to your wonderful new book The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible
.
A little about me and the church I pastor. I am pastoring in an urban
church in the West. We are very much focused outward -
concerned with issued of poverty, hunger, homelessness, human
trafficking, and immigration - all of which are right outside our door
in the form of people (or cracked eikons) everyday. I just came to this
church from a church in the Midwest. As progressive as this church is,
I was surprised to find that they had never empowered women to serve in
any and all capacities.
I just read The Blue Parakeet and noted your comment on page 150 where you said, "I (and my colleagues) failed our female students at TEDS, that we should have engaged this debate 'tooth and claw,' and that had we done so the Evangelical Free Church as well as that seminary may have been a much more liberating institution than it is today."
I simply wanted to tell you that we as a church have just made the decision to practice what we feel is "biblical equality" and open the all ministry roles (paid and volunteer) to both men and women. We have been suggesting collegial and well informed resources to those who are struggling with our decision - and your new book is on that list.
I write you simply to say "Thank you." Thank you for your scholarship, dedication to Scripture, obvious love of Jesus, and candidness with which you write. Thanks for all your hard work - it has served to shape my thinking, challenge my own private "status-quos", and further my understanding of Jesus. Have a wonderful day.
I just read The Blue Parakeet and noted your comment on page 150 where you said, "I (and my colleagues) failed our female students at TEDS, that we should have engaged this debate 'tooth and claw,' and that had we done so the Evangelical Free Church as well as that seminary may have been a much more liberating institution than it is today."
I simply wanted to tell you that we as a church have just made the decision to practice what we feel is "biblical equality" and open the all ministry roles (paid and volunteer) to both men and women. We have been suggesting collegial and well informed resources to those who are struggling with our decision - and your new book is on that list.
I write you simply to say "Thank you." Thank you for your scholarship, dedication to Scripture, obvious love of Jesus, and candidness with which you write. Thanks for all your hard work - it has served to shape my thinking, challenge my own private "status-quos", and further my understanding of Jesus. Have a wonderful day.
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Having just recently accepted a pastoral call at a new church, I experienced a senior pastor (who has served his entire ministry career in that congregation) repeatedly lead the congregation through studies and teaching and papers and the like on questions surrounding women, the bible and the church, to the point that I was enthusiastically hired this fall.
There was one family who I guess is still in process of deciding how they will handle my hire: their one issue? That I will regularly preach. This is new for me, this questioning of my place in the pulpit. I can say that when I learned this my heart sunk and I felt that dead pit inside that I have heard so many of my women peers describe in their life as ministers in the church.
A new part of my journey, for sure...
Erika (31), I have one piece of advice on the preaching. I grew up in the 60s and 70s in the Methodist church when women were just starting to lead churches there.
My most vivid recollections of the women preaching in those days were that they focused the majority of their sermons on women in the Bible and women's issues, believing these had been ignored in the past by male preachers. You could set your clock by it.
As a child and teen I was personally put off by this emphasis; it was as if they were doing a 180 in their zeal to "put things right" and ignoring the rest of Scripture in the process. To be fair to them, though, this was the era of emerging feminism, and they were pioneers who saw things through that lens.
When I was called to ministry, one of the first things I decided was that I would preach the whole gospel and do my best not to do it primarily from a woman's viewpoint.
My advice is to be yourself in the pulpit and don't think you have to bow to any particular agenda or be put into someone's box of what a woman preaching should look like.
My experience has been that non-churched people who don't listen to conservative Christian radio are way more welcoming. In fact, we attract more of them because being a woman is an immediate statement to the non-churched that our church is different than the usual fare.
Yes (33), that is our experience as well. Despite having rather conservative beliefs ourselves, we do terribly with people who take their cues from conservative Christian radio.
Like you, our church tends to do best with people who have been burned by church somewhere in their pasts (and this can run the gamut from liberal to conservative churches) and with people who do not have a church background at all.
I am also a woman in ministry. Can anyone tell me if there's a special website or blog for us? Or shall we start one ourselves? Who's with me on this?
When we can talk I'll tell you how Jesus tries to ruin my marriage - a story I take myself out to dinner on.
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