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‘Bible Women’ Founded and Established the Chinese Church
Please join me in welcoming guest blogger Dr. Cynthia Hester. She contributed her expertise on women’s history to the book 40 Questions about Women in Ministry Leadership. Today she’s sharing with readers about the remarkable women in ministry leadership in China and Cambodia. God chose to work largely through women to found and establish the Christian church in China and Cambodia. Nineteenth-century pre-literate Chinese women, evangelized by Protestant women missionaries, were taught how to read Chinese characters, which enabled them to teach from the Mandarin Bible. These ‘Bible women,’ such as Dora Yu (1873–1931), publicly shared the gospel and taught the Bible to mixed-sex groups. Peace Lin and her son…
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What Does It Mean That God Is Imaged as Both Male and Female?
The following article is excerpted from a forthcoming book authored by Dr. Sue Edwards and myself. 40 Questions about Women in Ministry offers answers to common questions related to women—what does the Bible say and how do we apply its teaching in home, church, work, and beyond? We answer those questions by showing readers how scholars on each side of the debate (for it is quite a debate) come to their conclusions. We aren’t after telling you what to think as much as showing you how to think through each question. Here, we explore perspectives on the imago dei in women and men (footnotes have been omitted for ease of…
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“Touch Is a Human Thing”
An excerpt from my conversation with the late Eugene Peterson The late Eugene Peterson—poet, Presbyterian pastor, and parser of Semitic-language verbs, who died in 2018—was best known for The Message, a paraphrasing of the Bible into modern American English, complete with idioms. But he also authored some deeply wise books on ministry, some of which—like Under the Unpredictable Plant—number among my favorites. Dr. Peterson was a founding pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in Bel Air, Maryland, where he served for twenty-nine years before becoming a professor of Spiritual Theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. During his time at Regent, 1992–1998, I had the pleasure of interviewing him as part…
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Five Book Recommendations for Leaders
This week, I decided to give myself a break from writing on controversial topics like racism and same-sex marriage, so I'm offering a different sort of fare: some book recommendations. Only one has been publshed in the past year. But these resources keep coming up in my conversations (FYI: only two are overtly Christian): Book #1: Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, by Sheryl Sandberg I first learned of Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, when she did a riveting TEDTalk on Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders. It has now received more than two million hits. She gave some good career advice for women in business to “sit…