Author: RStarke

Harmful Counsel Harming Women Is A Church Problem (Not Just An SBC Problem)

Harmful Counsel Harming Women Is A Church Problem (Not Just An SBC Problem)

Last month, Rachael Denhollander’s prophetic question about the worth of a little girl’s life brought the topic of institutionally ignored abuse of girls into sharp relief. Now Christians are asking a different version of that question all over again, about girls who grow up to be women who are being severely abused by their husbands,  and go to their pastors for help.

Last week, RNS journalist Jonathan Merritt brought an 18- year old audio file of Paige Patterson comments at a CBMW conference about a woman in an abusive marriage asking him for help, out from the shadowy depths of the Christian watch-blogosphere into the bright light of Twitter. There are transcripts of Patterson’s remarks floating around, but to feel the full impact of Patterson’s recounting of his initial counsel to her, and its aftermath, it’s best to listen – it takes about 5 minutes.

Patterson’s counsel is that the woman should pray by her bedside after her husband goes to sleep, and then to prepare for the possibility that her treatment might get worse. Sure enough, it does, and the woman returns to Dr. Patterson with two black eyes.  The woman asks if the consequences of his counsel make him happy. Patterson replies that it does, because he’s noticed that the man had shown up at church, professing to be repentant.

When I first heard the audio, the only hope I felt was that its relative age meant that since then, Patterson’s happiness had turned deep sorrow over how his counsel enabled the dehumanizing assault of a woman. But later that same day, Merritt tweeted a much more recent piece of video from a conference in which Patterson, from a teaching pulpit, turns Genesis 2:22 into an anecdote involving an attractive teenage girl two boys’ objectifying comments about her, and his blessing their comments by referencing the same Bible verse. (Once again, it’s helpful to watch the segment, although if you have teenage daughters like I do, best to watch/listen where only Jesus hears anything you might say out loud.)

Far from repentance and change, Patterson’s attitudes about women seem to have deteriorated and atrophied in, I believe, a ministerially disqualifying way.

In the week since all this has come to light, a growing chorus of leaders in the SBC has called for Patterson to remove himself from leadership or be removed. So far, Patterson has refused. We don’t know yet whether he will relent, or whether the SBC will do the right thing in removing him themselves. But if either of those scenarios play out, many Christians might be tempted to believe that when Patterson goes, his views will go with him. They will be mistaken.

The tragic fact is, Patterson’s approach to applying Scripture to the subject of divorce is one that leaders in other, equally broad streams of conservative evangelicalism not only use themselves, but proffer as a model for the church as a whole.

Take Heath Lambert, the recent president of the Association of Christian Biblical Counselors.

In a live-streamed Q and A session at the most recent annual ACBC conference for the ACBC, Heath Lambert fielded the kind of hypothetical question Paige Patterson had experienced in real life. What could be done for a woman in an abusive or deeply broken marriage – involving things such as emotional abuse or sexual addiction – where there was not currently physical violence?  Was there any Scriptural justification for a woman in such a marriage to pursue separation, or divorce?

Lambert’s strategy for answering the question is notably similar to Patterson’s.  In Lambert’s case, he employs two separate texts – Mark 10, followed by 1 Peter 3 – to argue that the Bible says “no”.  Once again, it’s best to watch the video to get the full context of Lambert’s remarks. The question begins at 44:58, and the segment lasts about 5 minutes.

In referencing Mark 10, Lambert’s statement that he’ll let Jesus’ words “sink in and go uninterpreted” is unfortunate, because it’s that lack of consideration of context that leads people to believe that Jesus is making some kind of a blanket statement about divorce, rather than a right framing of it for Jesus’ particular audience at that moment.

In Mark 10, the group posing the question to Jesus about the legality of divorce hardly has the welfare of abused women as their leading concern. They are the Pharisees, infamous for making the Old Testament Law a means to their various ends, chief among them playing legal gotcha games to try and challenge Jesus’ expertise in the law. Men in Jesus’ day were, ironically, doing the very thing of which women in abusive situations are often accused – making exaggerated claims about their spouse’s sinful or displeasing behavior as an excuse to abandon her. Moses recognized that divorce was a way of protecting women who would be at risk of worse than mistreatment if hardhearted men were not given the option. And yet those same hardhearted men were using the option to do the very thing Moses was trying to prevent. Jesus knew all of this, like he knew the Pharisees’ hearts, and both schooled them and indicted them in the process.

With 1 Peter 3, Lambert takes even more hermeneutical liberties, asserting that the phrase “even if some do not obey the word” represents a kind of MadLibs “fill in the blank” representation for any kind of sin being committed by any kind of husband (rather than the likely subcategory of an unbelieving husband vs. a professing believer). But in the very same breath, Lambert raises the category of physical violence as an exception, without giving any justification for why the exception he chooses is legitimate, but others, including ones Jesus himself names, are not.

Lambert’s counsel terminates at the same place as Patterson’s initial counsel – that a woman is to stay in a marriage where she’s not currently being physically beaten. Unlike the Patterson case, the question posed to Lambert is theoretical. But when we note the fruits of the application of that hypothetical borne with the real woman Paige Patterson counseled and then dismissed with such callous disregard,

I can’t help wondering about women who have come to the pastors and ACBC counselors who sat in that audience, or who were listening to that counsel directly online.

I can’t help thinking of the women and children I know personally, who bear deep mental, spiritual, and even physical scars from the verbal and psychological abuse they have endured.

And I can’t imagine what it would feel like for a woman to hear that her desperate desire to be rescued from such an environment, or to have her children delivered, was really a wrong desire to just feel good. (:49.50)

Given all that’s transpired since then, it’s notably providential that the theme for this year’s ACBC conference is Abuse. Hopefully, the events of this month will have a clarifying effect on the conference agenda. Were Heath Lambert continuing on as president, he might take the opportunity to reconsider the remarks he made at last year’s conference, and state them very differently.

But last month, Lambert announced that he was stepping down from the ACBC to focus on his role as senior pastor at First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, and that a new president will be officially installed at this year’s conference.  The new president is Dale Johnson Jr., who earned his Ph.D in Biblical Counseling just three years ago from the seminary where he currently serves as a department professor – Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary – the seminary whose president is still, as of this writing, Paige Patterson.

This appointment might make the ACBC potentially appear to be positioning itself as the counseling wing of the SBC. But the reach of the ACBC extends far beyond the SBC, into numerous other denominations, and innumerable independent evangelical and Reformed congregations across the country.

That’s why I’m praying that Reformed and independent evangelical pastors and leaders don’t observe what’s being exposed within the SBC and think that this issue is confined there. It’s not. T women in those congregations, just like the women speaking up within the SBC, are praying that this harmful teaching, masked as biblical fidelity and compassionate shepherding, is eradicated, once and for all.

The safety and well-being of women, and children, quite literally depend on it.

Learning From My Black Family

Learning From My Black Family

I was raised in a Christian context that, in the name of vigilance against the dangers of revisionist history, actively taught it. I grew up believing that the Puritans were the pinnacle of American Christian orthodoxy and that Martin Luther King Jr. was little more than an adulterous heretic. I was taught that majority black churches were corrupted by the prosperity gospel, irreverent worship, and too many women in leadership.

Which is why, this week, as we’ve been commemorating the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, I’m celebrating the irony of God’s mercy in using two African American hip-hop artists I’ve never met to expose my inherited ignorance, and lead me into what will be a lifelong process of repentance and relearning.

I don’t remember when or how I first heard of Shai Linne, only how it felt the first time I heard his music.  Like a lot of young, restless, and Reformed Bible college grad types, I had long ago set aside the childish things of CCM radio and fed my soul a steady diet of the Gettys and Sovereign Grace music. But what Shai Linne had created seemed to defy categorization.

Before the album “The Atonement,” all I knew of rap and hip-hop was the glorification of violence and misogyny. Shai Linne’s music was different. His lyrics were theologically solid and rich as the Westminster Catechism. But it was the lyrical approach – the discipline of the syntax, the creativity, the turns of phrases so tight that the only other artists I could compare it to were dead white men like Shakespeare and Donne – that gripped my soul. It was poetic, prophetic gospel preaching, creatively wrapped in the rhythms of rap. I remember the day I listened to “Mission Accomplished” as I folded laundry, and felt all the questions I’d ever had about limited / particular atonement finally fall into place. One three-and-a-half minute song settled what four years of Bible college had not. I was hooked.

Not long after, I learned about another artist named Propaganda. I read that he wrote in the spirit of Shai Linne, so I downloaded his album “Excellent” the day it released. As the kids say, I wasn’t ready.

“Excellent” was broader in scope than “The Atonement,” but every bit as gripping. This time, I was chopping vegetables for dinner as I listened. Suddenly, the lyrics of one track gutted my Reformed Baptist American sensibilities with such surgical precision that I had to set down my vegetable knife and click “rewind,”  just to make sure I understood what I was hearing.

“How come the things the Holy Spirit showed them
In the Valley of Vision
Didn’t compel them to knock on they neighbor’s door
And say “you can’t own people!”
Your precious Puritans were not perfect
You romanticize them as if they were inerrant
As if the skeletons in they closet was pardoned due to they hard work and tobacco growth
As if abolitionists were not racists and just pro-union
As if God only spoke to white boys with epic beards
You know Jesus didn’t really look like them paintings
That was just Michaelangelo’s boyfriend
Your precious Puritans
Oh they got it but they don’t get it
There’s not one generation of believers
That has figured out the marriage between proper doctrine and action
Don’t pedestal these people.
Your precious Puritans’ partners purchased people.

Why would you quote them?”

(Click here to listen to the whole song-it’s well worth your time)


The forcefulness and eloquence with which Propaganda called out the heroes of my faith sent me on a hunt for answers the minute the dinner dishes were dry. I combed the stacks of the church history section of the combined library of my Multnomah Bible College-graduate husband and my Master’s University-graduate self. My search yielded few and incomplete answers.  So I took to the Internet. There I found various Reformed theologians and bloggers, equally gripped by “Precious Puritans,” discussing the historical veracity of Propaganda’s claims, and arguing charitably over the different ways they could be viewed.

None of Propaganda’s detractors denied the substance of his argument – that many of the Puritans and later Reformed theologians I had been taught to revere had been slave owners, and/or slavery and segregation apologists. The allegations were, in truth, facts – facts I had never been taught.

But as shocking as these facts were to learn, what gutted me was that the main line of defense was not denial, but compartmentalization. Sure, the argument went, the Puritans had owned slaves and propped up the institution of chattel slavery, but that shouldn’t overshadow all the good things they did.

Propaganda had marched uninvited into the institutional halls of Reformed evangelicalism and ripped the closet door off its hinges, causing the rotting corpse that had been hidden inside it for centuries to come tumbling out onto the floor. And the strongest response his detractors could muster, as they shoved the corpse back into the closet and forced the door closed, was to keep waving their hands at all the pretty art on the walls.

The abruptness with which I learned these inconvenient facts about the Puritans didn’t shake my faith in their, and my, God. But it forever shattered my belief that the Puritans had a lock on what practical faithfulness to Him looks like. Not only that, it moved me to consider whether, and how, the Reformed Baptist tradition which held them in such unqualified high esteem might suffer from the same moral blindness. Most importantly, and most painfully, it made it necessary to consider how much of the same unchecked blindness – that sin,  had found its way into my own soul.

It didn’t take long to see it in my first thoughts about artists like Shai Linne and Propaganda.

One of the tenets of Reformed Baptist identity I had been taught to embrace was the importance of exercising discernment about our spiritual influencers – the pastors or theologians we listened to and learned from, the books we read, etc. (This was doubly emphasized to Reformed Baptist women, what with us being the gender of the more easily deceived and all.)

Of paramount importance was the depth and purity of someone’s theological orthodoxy – their Five Solas bona fides. But of nearly equal importance was how that theology was packaged. With what denomination was someone affiliated, and how theologically orthodox was their church? How closely did they follow the regulative principle of worship? What kind of clothes did they wear? What kind of tone did they employ, in their writing, their speaking, even their singing? With which contemporary cultural issues did their theology rightly intersect (e.g. marriage, abortion, taxes), and from which ones was it kept rightly separate (e.g. poverty, race relations, the environment)?

In other words, while the content of someone’s message was paramount, if the packaging wasn’t wrapped in the right way, or didn’t have the right pattern, the contents were necessarily suspect. And if the right packaging only came in certain colors, well, packaging in any colors other than those was necessarily suspect as well. Conversely, if the packaging was the right pattern and color, that automatically signaled that the contents were right – no need to look inside too closely to check.

Thus, what I saw modeled and was taught to believe, was that my default posture towards any white Reformed Christian teachers (and their Puritan forebears) should be unquestioning trust. But my default posture towards even self-professing Reformed Christians of any other ethnicity should be skepticism, until and unless they conformed to all the prescriptive cultural norms and biases of my tradition.

I could be challenged and convicted by white Reformed Christian leaders because they were inside the permissible circle of trust. But because my default posture toward non-white Reformed Christian leaders was skepticism or uncertainty, it was easy to dismiss anything they said that was challenging or convicting as proof that they weren’t sufficiently worthy of trust or attention.

When I first listened to Shai Linne, I did so from a default position of skepticism and mistrust. How could someone who sounded like him, who looked like him, pass the orthodoxy test? But the words he spoke, and the skill with which he wielded them, schooled my ignorance and exposed my prejudice for the sin that it was.

And the sting of this rebuke prepared me for the next one, courtesy of the pen and the voice of Propaganda, an African American brother in Christ who would have been viewed with suspicion at any church I’d ever attended up to that point, just because of how he looked, let alone because of what he had to say.

And from that day to this, I’ve been repentantly listening and learning from him, and many other godly African American family like him.

This week, the fruit of that repentance has looked like listening to the speakers at the MLK50 Conference. As I’ve listened, one part of me has been thinking about the future – about what God has yet to teach me about how He wants me to think, and especially do, differently in my own church context. Another part of me has been thinking about the past – how the old me would have responded to what I was hearing, and how the people I was taught to view with such mistrust and Pharisaical disdain, are the people who I count as valuable teachers, as family, today.

I saw a lot of stiffnecked disdain and self-righteousness circulating on social media yesterday – an experience that produced a simultaneous mix of sorrow and thankfulness in my heart. The old me would probably have been an enthusiastic contributor to it. But because of God’s work in my heart through the faithful witness of two gifted African American brothers, I wasn’t.  And I’m grieved over those who were.

I can, and do, pray for God to do the same kind of work in my white family He did in me, however He chooses to do it – whether through the words of faithful black brothers like Shai Linne and Propaganda, or the less eloquent words of their grateful white sister, Rachael.

Men Need Women’s Words

Men Need Women’s Words

Several weeks ago, a well-intentioned senior writer at Relevant named Tyler Daswick published an article confessing the sin of not reading women writers by describing the six weeks he spent trying to atone for it. It was a valiant attempt, but far better in its intent than in its execution, and he eventually took it down with another apology.

In her characteristically wise yet unflinching fashion, Jen Michel called out Daswick’s ignorance of his ignorance as symptomatic of a wider problem – that in general, Christian men don’t read books by women as often as they should, to their spiritual detriment. Michel offered up a few possible reasons for this – theological frameworks that view women’s voice on a printed page as too close for comfort to their voice from a pulpit, or content that is either too light and fluffy, or too experientially unfamiliar to seem relevant.

Yesterday, Tim Challies, one of the most respected veterans of Christian book review writing, weighed in with his own list of questions behind Michel’s questions, as well as answers. Challies centered the conversation on women writing for women – on the reasons women make that choice and how that might potentially limit a male audience who isn’t comfortable with or interested in parsing books through an exclusively feminine lens.

Hannah Anderson was just one of the women writers who weighed in with a laundry list of influences that shape a woman’s decision to write primarily for other women. What was clear is that some of them are ones a woman author chooses, as a matter of calling; others are not. Often, agents and publisher, driven by firm conviction about “what sells”, push women into Hobbs-ian choices – over topics, over tone, over marketing, and over their target audience.

Publishers know that when it comes to certain kinds of writing, certain kinds of ideas, the general public (meaning men as well as women) is only inclined to buy them when they’re offered by a man.

A casual perusal through the New York Times bestseller list bears this out – at least anecdotally. This week’s nonfiction book list features eight men writing about everything from astrophysics to true crime to Leonardo DaVinci, with only two women – a divinity professor writing about her personal experience fighting late-stage cancer, and a journalist exploring the causes of depression and anxiety. Its monthly list of business best sellers is a clean sweep – ten men writing about everything from mentorship to decision making to success through self-discipline.

Many men express nostalgia about the women who teach them when they’re young – their saintly elementary teachers, their tough but caring high school teachers or even college professors, and of course, their mothers. But if the popular bestseller lists are any indicator, there’s a point when many men ‘s ongoing learning trajectory largely excludes women, other than perhaps those with whom they have personal relationships. Sometimes not even them.

For Christians, this trend reflexively calls to mind Paul’s oft eisegeted words about women being silent in church, and not teaching or holding authority over men. Many will perhaps hear the echoes of the Fall and God’s curse on Adam, who “listened to the voice of His wife”, and root their presumptions and prejudices in the belief that a consequence of the Curse is that the voices of women are necessarily suspect.

I’ve read almost nothing engaging that text in relation to its actual context. When Eve was speaking, she wasn’t speaking to Adam, but to the serpent. She wasn’t speaking God’s words as she’d been given them – she was speaking with her own distorted and dangerous spin. Adam’s sin was in not discerning what was happening and intervening on their behalf. His sin was not in listening to Eve at all, but in listening to her when she didn’t speak the truth.

Her words run counter to the words of the Woman of Wisdom in Proverbs 8.
She takes her stand at the city gates and cries out to women and to men as they pass (8:1-4), beseeching them to listen to her words full of truth, righteousness, and knowledge (6-8).
She speaks the words by which kings rule and princes, nobles and righteous judges lead (15-16).
Made at the beginning of creation, formed before the earth began, she promises blessings for all who keep her ways, and harm if she is missed (32-36).

That kind of speech, idealized by the woman of wisdom, is exemplified by a host of Biblical women like Deborah, Abigail, Ruth, Esther, Hannah, Mary, and the women of the resurrection.

The words the women of the Bible speak aren’t always about comfort or maintaining the status quo – they’re frequently the opposite! But they are wise. And right. And life-giving.

When we step back and look at the Scriptures holistically, suddenly the question of why men don’t read women’s’ words is an actual problem, but an eminently solvable one.

It’s a matter of recognizing that women gifted with words are a positive asset for the entire kingdom of God and the world, not just one half of it.

We need more ways to make that truth a reality.

How Necessary Are Women?

 

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Last week, I caught glimpses of the latest firestorm John Piper ignited over his assertions that women shouldn’t be seminary professors via my iPhone as I sat in the back of a conference room near the Venture Capital district of Palo Alto. I was helping lead a sales training workshop for an up and coming Silicon Valley startup. There were 75 salesmen in the room, and 3 saleswomen.

When I say I was “helping lead” the training, what I mean is that I had written the digital sales playbook that comprised the curriculum, while my partner, a man about ten years my senior, lead the actual training. My partner is brilliant, with decades of experience under his belt. I’m apprenticing with him because I’m a good writer, but I’m a really good teacher, and I know I can make a significant and particular contribution to the companies we serve when I move into that role.

But Piper’s comments, and the dynamics I observed in that room so dominated by male presence, had me wondering whether I’ll ever be at the place where I’ll get the chance to.


I watched the way my partner lead the group through different exercises with great skill, even as occasionally he missed things that I would have handled differently. But then I put myself in his position. I thought about the sum total of all the things I would have to do and say differently from my partner, and *not* do and say differently, to be viewed as someone worthy of learning anything from.

Not because I’m not as experienced as my partner, although that’s true.

But because I’m a woman.

With Dr. Piper’s belief about the invalidity of women as seminary professors in the back of my mind, I found myself meditating, for the gazillionth time, on Genesis 1 and 2. I wasn’t thinking just about the nature of women’s calling – to be necessary allies alongside men in the collective filling and subduing of the world. I was thinking about all the boundaries that get built around that calling, that determine all the ways we’re deemed *un*necessary to a man’s flourishing.

And I found myself asking – just how necessary are women to men, as women?
We’re necessary for shaping men’s bodies, of course.

Every man who has ever walked the earth has spent the first nine months of his earthly existence having his entire physical being, the vehicle in which his mind and soul reside, shaped and nourished by a woman. And usually months and years after that.

And we’re necessary for serving those same bodies after they’re grown. (We hear that way too often, for too many of the wrong reasons, but that’s a post for another day.)

But while we’re necessary for the shaping and serving of a man’s body, does the necessity of women to men, as women, extend to the shaping of their minds – their intellect, their skills, their gifts?

How about their souls?

At what point does my calling as a necessary ally to a man reach its God-ordained  limit?

Is the limit his age? That mix of biological and cultural transition from boyhood to manhood that has no concrete date, and a myriad of different cultural prescriptions?

Is the limit his vocation? Is it my place only to cheer him on in his work? Do I have nothing to contribute,  as a woman,  to a man’s ability to sell software, or give a speech, or make a decision?

Is the limit full time ministry? Is that the realm of influence and help where women are divinely rendered unnecessary?

Or maybe the boundaries should be around me as a woman, and not around men?

Is it a matter of my motives? What if I’m not setting myself up as a spiritual authority, but simply want to be a godly spiritual influence on him – is that still a step too far?

 

Or is it a merely the boundaries of my covenant?  Am I precluded from any kind of spiritual influence or guidance of a man unless I’m married to him, or unless I’m his mother, (until he reaches that indeterminate age where my identity as his mother is superseded by his identity as a man?)?

For those who fight so relentlessly to uphold the distinctive beauty of manhood and womanhood, why is it that the only time it’s permissible, or required to diminish the beauty of my womanhood, and declare it safely mediated behind words on page or a screen,

is when I’m teaching something to a man? (1)

And if those are legitimate boundaries around the ways women are called to influence and inform the thoughts and actions of men, as women, what should the world look like where those dynamics hold true?


It can’t look like the world of Bible – of Abigail, or Esther, or the woman of wisdom in Proverbs 8, or the Samaritan woman, or the women of the resurrection, or Priscilla.
What it does look like is the world I live and work in. Like Silicon Valley. And it looks like some parts of the church, too.

If I didn’t take God at His Word, I’d, frankly, I’d rather discouraged. And maybe looking for a different line of work.

But I do, so I’m not. So I’ll keep going – asking God to help me be helpful in whatever He calling He gives me, and for more opportunities to do the same.

And maybe my calling, at this stage, is just to keep thinking through these things, and asking these things, out loud. And asking God to give us the answers, and for the grace and strength and humility to live them out, as men and women, together.

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  1. “There is this interposition of the phenomenon called book and writing that puts the woman as author out of the reader’s sight and, in a sense, takes away the dimension of her female personhood.” From  https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/do-you-use-bible-commentaries-written-by-women

A Prescription For Our Roy Moore Problem

A Prescription For Our Roy Moore Problem

For  Christians who’ve read Genesis 3:15 at least once, the problem of men sinfully exploiting their power over women shouldn’t really be news. The fact that the world is beginning to recognize the problem is something that should give us hope.  But before we race to write various prescriptions to heal America’s institutional sickness – the eradication of pornography, a return to marriage and traditional sexual ethics and, of course, the gospel, we should stop to ask what it is that has finally opened the world’s eyes, even as so many in the church remain blind to the ways it manifests the identical symptoms, because it is suffering from the same disease.

One of the hermeneutical rules I strived to follow as I was writing about Ruth and Boaz last month was to focus far more on what the text says than on what it doesn’t. I tried not to argue from silence. When Ruth 2 describes Boaz’ unequivocal instructions to his men that Ruth wasn’t to be harassed in any way, nothing in the text suggests anything other than that they obeyed him. So we should assume that they did and believe what the text implies – that Ruth was left to work in peace, and was never sexually assaulted or harassed.

But the question I’ve been asking myself repeatedly of late is – what if she had been?
What if a man ignored Boaz’s warning, looked for a window of opportunity, and took it? What if Ruth told Boaz what happened? How would he have responded?

Would Ruth have been believed?

Until recently in contemporary America, women’s reports of sexual assault would follow a predictable pattern:

  • Cycles of insider whispers would circulate.
  • Isolated stories would bubble up onto a tabloid or gossipy website.
  • Salacious reporting about the alleged victim would emerge on the same channels, mitigating the charges by challenging the accuser’s credibility, motives, and character.
  • Friends would rally to the accused’s defense, testifying loudly to his character, and appealing to civic precedents about innocence until being proven guilty.
  • The accused would embark on a media campaign of denial and moral outrage over his own victimization.
  • Occasionally, news of a financial settlement with accompanying NDA would emerge, and the accused’s PR team would declare the matter closed.

Then the Internet was invented, with its ability to aggregate and amplify women’s voices.

One story on social media became two, and then four, then forty. Patterns emerged – in the methods of grooming, in the bait and switch tactics, in the grotesque specifics of the behavior.

Like the famous Magic Eye pictures from the 1980s, a myriad of data points once hidden in silos of secrecy melded together to reveal the truth that had been there all along.

And so the truth about Bill Cosby has come to light. And Roger Ailes. And Bill O’Reily, and Harvey Weinstein, and John Besh, and Kevin Spacey, and Louis C.K. and…and..and….

Amplified by the digital megaphone of the Internet, the aggregated, harmonized voices of women have become so numerous, so loud, and so unified, that they are finally being believed.

At least, in most places.

Whenever sexual assault stories bubble up within a Christian context (involving either a prominent Christian ministry leader, or an influential man whose outspoken Christian faith has been an essential part of his platform), they’ve followed a similar pattern:

  • Cycles of insider whispers begin to circulate.
  • A story bubbles up onto a gossipy discernment blogger website, or through one of the mistrusted channels of the demonized “mainstream media”.
  • Friends of the accused race to accused’s defense, testifying to his deep Christian faith, character, title, and good works, appealing to American civic precedents about innocence until guilt is proven in a court of law, and throwing in biblical proof texts about “two or three witnesses” for good measure.

The accuser’s treatment varies, depending on who she, or he, is. If it’s a child in single digits – the default defense is “innocent until proven guilty”. If she is a woman with any kind of perceived character defect – a sexual history, a divorce, a bankruptcy, a perceived pattern of emotional instability- any and all are deployed to dilute her credibility and dismiss the allegations

Occasionally, the “digital witness” of the accused’s own words in the form of emails or text messages find their way into the light. Then the naysayers and defenders go silent.

But when the witness is a woman, not even when their number is multiple orders of magnitude beyond the Biblical standard are they believed.

And so men like Roy Moore hide in plain sight behind a wall of defense built and guarded by professing Christians. They double down on denials, dial-up conspiracy theories, and drape themselves in American legal precedents and blasphemous Biblical allusions to persecution.

Jesus is not pleased.

While the women of Jesus’ day enjoyed a measure of greater cultural stability than those of his ancestor Boaz, they still suffered numerous societal disadvantages because of their gender. I wrote about one of the most significant ones last year. Jewish tradition held that where civil and legal matters were concerned, a woman’s testimony was unreliable and inferior to that of a man, and thus invalid in court.  But the gospels repeatedly depict Jesus turning that precedent on its head- as  revival breaks out through the testimony of a disenfranchised Samaritan woman (John 4:39), as a powerful politician’s wife publicly warns her husband not to execute a righteous man (Matt 27:19), and as a group of women proclaim the good news of the Resurrection to the apostles, men who rightly, they believe, follow prevailing civic tradition in dismissing their report as idle gossip (Luke 24:1-11).

Jesus dismantled the cultural scaffolding of man-centered prescriptions built around the law that privileged and protected groups with social power against those with less. He recalibrated the scales of justice and power by actively lifting the marginalized, and their voices, up and into the work of His kingdom.

In Jesus’ economy, the voices of those lacking societal power were amplified and elevated, and the call of the powerful was to not so much lean in, as to lean down and listen to them.

In Jesus’ economy, a woman’s testimony had evidentiary value in and of itself.  When a woman in Jesus’ day spoke up, Jesus expected her to be heard, and to be believed.

There are important caveats about this conviction that are worthy of their own discussion. Arguing from the Scriptures that God wants women’s voices to be amplified is not the same as arguing that He wants them treated as absolute. The stories of Potiphar’s wife in the Old Testament (Gen. 39:1-20) and Sapphira in the New Testament (Acts 5:1-11), descriptively and prescriptively warn women of the grievous sin of bearing false witness against a man. In fact, there could be room to argue that those stories are the exceptions that prove the rule – that in an economy where a woman’s word is given special weight, a woman who presumes upon or exploits the power inherent in her words is guilty of the same egregious sin that a man commits when he exploits the power inherent in his position or physical strength.

American cultural institutions are finally waking up to the historical imbalance of power it has enabled by dismissing the testimony of women, and is beginning to recalibrate its scales.

The church should do the same, not because it is responding to the example of the culture, but because the culture is subconsciously responding to the example of Christ. 

 

Birthing Thoughts About Boaz

Birthing Thoughts About Boaz

“Encouraged” and “blessed” aren’t big enough words to describe what it felt like to receive so many notes/texts/tweets of encouragement yesterday about the piece on Boaz I wrote for Fathom Mag last month. (And it’s not only because Fathom is one of the most thoughtful and beautiful new digital magazines for Christians out there today, and you should read it every month and subscribe and support their hard work.

Can I tell you the bigger reason for my gratitude?

That piece was one of a series of interconnected pieces on Boaz and the book of Ruth that I wrote for publication over the past few months. A complementary piece on being Boaz in the business world came out at TGC today. Another piece about a conversation I had with a total stranger on a plane about Boaz comes out soon in Gospel-Centered Discipleship.

I wrote all three pieces in conjunction with, and as a direct consequence of, a twelve-week study in Biblical hermeneutics my pastor took a small group of women at my church through this summer. I nicknamed it “Hermeneutics Without A Net.”

Each week, we studied a portion of Ruth using different principles of hermeneutics (word studies, macro before micro, Fallen Condition Focus, etc.) We also read through Paul Miller’s “A Loving Life” on the same passage, to test our observations and insights against his. We were also accountable to talk through what we were learning with another woman. Then we would meet together and pastor Josh – (the Best Preacher in America You’ve Never Heard Of™), would walk us through our work, and lead a discussion.

It was, without exaggeration, the best Bible study I’ve ever done.

I’m not saying that as a novice. I’m saying that as a 5th generation preacher’s kid with a degree from the Master’s College (English major, Bible minor), and twenty-plus years of women’s and coed Bible studies under my belt.

It wasn’t easy, at all.  As in, I may have broken a sweat as Josh let us sit in our ignorance over a passage or idea for a little while (before eventually pulling us up and out of it graciously).

It felt a little bit like the feeling I’ve had when I’ve started working out with a trainer after years of doing the same old stuff. Twenty minutes into my first workout I want to die, and the next day I wish I had, because every cell in my body is weeping in agony. But the next week I go back, and after 12 weeks, I’m in better shape than I ever thought possible.

God used that hermeneutics study to break open the book of Ruth to me in a remarkable way (not to mention all of my Bible study since then). I saw the good news of the gospel in it, and experienced its power and its practical implications, in ways I’ll never forget. It’s my favorite book of the Bible now (and probably will be until Josh starts his next class on another book of the Bible. I’m hoping for Hebrews – go big or go home, I say.)

But that’s still not the biggest reason I’m so thankful for yesterday’s response to the fruit from that study.

The greatest reason I’m so thankful is because of the reason the study happened in the first place. Because I had praying for something like it to happen since I read the first piece in this series about women’s discipleship by Thabiti Anyabwile, in 2006.

Of the numerous follow-on topics and conversations that ensued after that series, the one that stuck with me, and prompted my prayers and thinking over the next literal decade, was the principle Thabiti drew out from the beginning of Titus 2 – that in order for older women to teach younger women what is good (Titus 2:3), they need to be taught in accordance with sound doctrine themselves (Titus 2:1), first. And who better to do that, within a local church context, than their own pastors?

And so that’s what I started praying for. And when we moved church campuses two years ago and started sitting under Josh’s preaching, I prayed even harder. (Because, seriously, Best Preacher in America You’ve Never Heard Of ™). Last January, the praying turned into talking, and last summer, the talking turned into a study.

Beyond all that God taught me through the book of Ruth itself, he also affirmed what I had been praying and thinking on and talking through with other women, in the aftermath of Thabiti’s series:  

When pastors intentionally invest in the theological training and maturing of the women in their church, the whole church benefits.

Our group of women benefited, as Josh walked us through the hermeneutical mechanics of study of a text, and turning it into teachable, gospel-rich food for others.

Our pastor benefited, as he gained a new level of insight in how the women in his congregation and communities approach the characters, themes, and arguments of the Bible uniquely as women.

Our church benefited, as we took what we’d been taught and began teaching it to others in our church and social circles.

And the church outside our four small walls has benefited, as the insights we gleaned have made their way onto social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and even a new digital magazine like Fathom. 

If you’re a church pastor or teaching elder, can I invite you to pray about doing something similar with the women in your church? And if you’re a woman involved in women’s ministry, can I invite you to pray about asking one of your pastors to do it?

I promise you that it will bless you, and your church, in ways you don’t yet know.

Blessed Are the Merciful

Like most of you, I watched the images this weekend of the mayor of Puerto Rico wading through fetid waters to help the people of her city,  juxtaposed against the tweets the President sent out from his golf course and felt ill.

It wasn’t just that our President revealed himself for the gazillionteenth time to be an unapologetically callous, echo-chamber dwelling narcissist. It’s that there are still too many Christians in my circles of fellowship who think his leadership decisions and demeanor towards the American citizens of Puerto Rico are somehow NBD, or fake news, or even justified – because apparently, Puerto Rico has been lead by Democrats for decades, so they’re all just getting what they’ve had coming anyway.

To which I’ve wanted to say…..well, a lot, but not all of it has been righteous, and I’ve been wrestling with my attitude about that as much as anything.

Then yesterday when I was at the gym, a spoken word piece arranged by Beautiful Eulogy, from a sermon by Art Azurdia (one of my very favorite non-famous preachers in the world) on Matthew 5:7 came across my Pandora feed that captured what was righteous about my anger, and burned away what wasn’t.

Pastor Azurdia asks, on Jesus’ behalf, the question all of us should be asking – lay people, pastors, and presidents alike, 

as we watch our fellow citizens suffer, and as other citizens sacrificially serve them in doing what they can to alleviate it.

 

 

Blessed Are the Merciful

 

“Are you merciful?

Why?

Because Jesus healed the sick; because Jesus fed the multitudes; because Jesus gave legs to the crippled; because Jesus granted sight to the blind; because Jesus opened the ears of the deaf; because Jesus found prostitutes and tax collectors, and threw them into the sphere of His love.

Jesus touched the untouchable, and loved the unlovable, and forgave the unforgivable, and welcomed the undesirable.

Because Jesus even now saves the otherwise unsaveable.

Why?!

Because they deserve it?

When the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, He saved us.  Not because of works done in righteousness, not because we met Him halfway, not because we took the proper steps forward, and in good faith elevated ourselves to the place of the deserving poor,

but according to His mercy.

We are here because Jesus Christ didn’t say with cold indifference,
“Give them what they deserve, they brought it on themselves.”

Jesus Christ IS the mercy of God.

And seeing us in our misery and need, He doesn’t just feel for us; He takes the necessary action to relieve our distress.

He leaves the eternal glory of heaven, and the perfect fellowship of the Trinity. He condescends to us, lives among us, suffers like us, dies for us.

Do you understand this? Have you experienced this?

How then is it possible to experience it, and not display it?

It isn’t possible.

You haven’t experienced it, if you don’t display it.

The evidence of God’s mercy in your life isn’t determined by how much theology you know, or by how many books you read, but by your active goodness to people in misery, and in need.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”

Peanut Butter, Bow Ties, ​and Boaz-es

The new edition of Fathom Magazine just came out, and it’s all in on all things imago dei. There is a great piece on clothing as cultural language,  a beautiful poem about peanut butter and motherhood, and also a piece by me on raising Boaz-es in a hypermasculine world. It’s one of the best new magazines for thinking Christians out there. Give them a read and spread the word!

The Statement the World Needs Most

The Statement the World Needs Most

“What is a human being, and what does it mean to be one?”

If popular media trends are any indication, people have been asking that question for a very long while, but we’re not satisfied with the answers.  For the last fifty years, Hollywood has been doing a brisk trade  in TV franchises like Doctor Who and Star Trek, and comic book movie universes featuring the Avengers, the Justice League, and the X-Men, selling stories that stoke our imaginations, and haunt our dreams, as they explore the boundaries of what it means to be human.

The surge in interest in science fiction and superheroes stories has happened concurrently with the rise of the Digital Age. Both “Doctor Who” and “Star Trek” rose to popularity in the 1960s, during the first wave of mainframe computing. “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, the spinoff that launched so many others, soared to popular and critical acclaim in the early 1990s, during the building of what Al Gore famously named the “Information Superhighway”. The DC and Marvel comic movie empires grew in the midst of the first Silicon Valley dot-com boom, bust, and recovery, as companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook grew from successful start-ups into the technology monoliths they are today.

This trend can be partially explained by the way technology has infiltrated the way movies and television are made. The more technologically advanced the story telling is, the more convincingly real the stories become.

But that’s not the only reason, nor the most important one.

From the invention of the first super computer to the launch of the latest mobile app, the central goal of the technological revolution has been the transcendence of human limits – ones like time, location, and knowledge.  Thanks to the wonder of FaceTime and WiFi, we can talk to someone on the other side of the planet in seconds instead of days. Laptops, tablets, and video conferencing systems let us work anywhere, anytime. The (potential) answer to any question is as close as the click of a mouse. And if bad weather and crazed children have you cursing the limits of time, space and knowledge, collectively, just ask Alexa. She’ll have 45 minutes of peace and quiet delivered to your door in a matter of hours.

But not all of our limitations are so easily surmounted.

The most enduring limits of our human state involve our bodily capabilities and the raw materials with which we exercise them.  Our physical, mental, and emotional capacities are all subjected to the vagaries of our environment, circumstances, genetics, disease, and disaster. No matter how fully we ever realize our potential, it eventually diminishes and dies, gradually, or in a single, terrible instant.

There isn’t an app for fixing that, at least not yet.

It’s the combined intractability and universality of these limits that produces cheers, and tears of wonder, each time technology helps us get one step closer to conquering one of them. Whether it’s an artificial heart or pancreas or womb, a brain implant that restores hearing or stills seizures, or an exoskeleton that helps a paraplegic walk – nothing is more thrilling than seeing the limits of our bodily brokenness overcome.

This is the place where worldviews collide, and divide.

According to secular humanism (the dominant ideology of technology industry leaders and workers), humans are uniquely evolved organic matter, possessing an intricate blend of features and flaws. The boundaries of our bodies are fluid. We are eminently malleable, and infinitely upgradeable. The meaning of our humanity is as variable a construct as its substance.

The Bible says differently.

The Bible says that humans are wondrously made in the image and likeness of God (Psalm 139:13-16),(Genesis 1:26).  Because of this, all of the boundaries of our humanity have meaning, and none of them are neutral.  Many of those boundaries are “as designed”. They display God’s character (Genesis 1:31). They enable us to serve each other as we fulfill God’s creation mandate (1 Corinthians 12:14-27). They demonstrably display the differences between the Maker and the made (Psalm 121:4).

Many others are the consequence of our fallenness (Romans 3:9-19), or the fallenness of the world in which we live. (Proverbs 13:23)  The common grace of our God-reflecting desire to rescue and heal, and our capacity to create, and the particular grace of the work of the Holy Spirit, help us retrace the boundaries of our humanity more closely over God’s design in some ways.  But we are utterly incapable of doing it completely, nor were we ever made to.

That work can only be done by Jesus.

Jesus was with God at the beginning (John 1:2), forming living being from dust, and life-bearer from living being (Genesis 2:7, 21-22). In his incarnation, the limitless one took on human limits (Philippians 2:6-8), living perfectly within them on our behalf. Then he submitted himself to humanity’s greatest limit in death, shattering its hold on us through his resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:55-56).

Sin is what causes us to see the different boundaries of our humanity – our ethnicity, our socioeconomic status, our gender,  – as tools to divide and oppress.

Jesus is the one who covers that sin, not by erasing our boundaries, but by redeeming them, and uniting all of us, as human beings, in him.

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28)

This is the statement the world needs the most. The one it keeps asking for. The one the church still hasn’t written.

For all of its good intentions, the Nashville statement answers questions the world thinks it already has answers for, without sufficiently addressing the ones the world knows that it doesn’t. They are questions the world has been asking for years, ones the church has largely overlooked.

And while the world continues its quest for answers, Silicon Valley has been steadily, effectively reframing the question.

“What is a human being, and what does it mean to be one?”

We’re living in an era of unprecedented human transformation. Does the question really matter that much?