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It Is Okay to Be Ordinary
Is it okay to not make a splash by doing something recognizably great that leads to acclaim and social media notoriety? Why is there so much pressure on girls and women today to be powerful, to start and lead a cause, or to stand out above everyone around them by their success? Are you letting yourself down if you are just an ordinary woman letting God be the one who is extraordinary? Is it okay to be ordinary? That is what we will explore in this post. Not Accomplishing Anything? Several years ago, I read an Engage blog by Tiffany Stein called “Next Steps.” Tiffany wrote about the pressure she…
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3 Book Recommendations for Ministry Leaders
I am here to commend to you three new ministry resources that belong on your reading (or listening) list. All three are available on Audible and read by the authors themselves: Releasing today: Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church (IVP Academic), by Nijay Gupta Matthew. Mark. Luke. John. Jesus. Paul. When most of us learn about the early church, we hear stories of prominent men. But ample evidence exists in the New Testament that women were actively involved on the front lines of the gospel mission, too. And not just baking cookies. They were respected leaders. Mary Magdalene supported Jesus and the male disciples…
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Who Gets Lost in Bible Translation?
Today I’m happy to host guest blogger Cynthia Hester, DMin. Dr. Hester writes and teaches about women and church leadership. She writes at cynthiahester.com and is a contributing author to the book 40 Questions About Women in Ministry. In 2021, she founded Theology of Women Academy® to teach Christ-followers, including ministry leaders, the spectrum of orthodox views on women and church leadership to equip them to develop their beliefs—their theology of women. Today’s Bible readers mostly read English translations, rather than Greek and Hebrew texts. Though we don’t have the original writings, we do have thousands of ancient biblical manuscripts from which translations have been written. The Bible, in its original form, is the inspired…
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Traditionalist Views of Women: A Little History Lesson
Theological issues relating to women—the texts, the interpretations, the history, the challenges—lie in an area of teaching and thus of academic interest for me. Because seminary degrees cannot shoehorn every single topic into a set number of credit hours, often people looking at deep-dives into history or the history of ideas must go outside of seminary walls to learn chronologies, read the primary documents, and learn social contexts. Such was the case when I took a doctoral course on women’s history. Acknowledging that I taught at a seminary, my professor let me consult with a historian at my own school to create a supplementary reading list. She ran it by…
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Revisiting the Topic of Women in Public Ministry: My Recommended Resources (2022)
For more than two decades, I’ve taught a course on gender and its ramifications in the church and for women in public ministry. Since #MeToo and #ChurchToo combined with Christian leaders saying women have to endure abuse to be biblical and also that women shouldn’t teach in seminaries, I’ve seen a shift in attitudes. Add to that the one-two punches of Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez with Beth Allison Barr’s book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: People are revisiting what and why they believe on the topic. Some have sat up and said, basically, “Evangelicals have barred the front door against radical feminism while leaving the back door wide open to misogyny.”…
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Do Women Have to Be Quiet?
What does Paul mean when he twice enjoins women’s quietnesss in 1 Timothy 2:11–12? First, let’s look at the context: 2:1I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people— 2for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. 3 This is good, and pleases God our Savior, 4 who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. 5 For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, 6 who gave himself as a ransom for all people. This has now been witnessed to at the proper…
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Celebrity-Driven Christianity?
Aspire to lead a quiet life (1 Thess 4.11). “It’s the seemingly unimportant people who determine the course of history. The greatest forces in the universe are never spectacular. Summer showers do more good than hurricanes, but they don’t get a lot of publicity. The world would soon die but for the loyalty, creativity, and commitment of those whose names are unhonoured and unsung.” —author James Sizoo For seventeen years I served as editor-in-chief of a magazine for Christ-followers. In that position I constantly faced pressure from myself and others to gain followers by running a big-name profile on the cover. But I had to resist the temptation, because I…
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Did Jesus Have Women Disciples…and other questions
Were any of Jesus’s disciples women? Yes. Dorcas (Greek), also called Tabitha (Aramaic), lived in Joppa, on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. We find Dorcas’s story beginning in Acts 9:36. And the author introduces her as “a disciple.” This reference to Tabitha is the only time in the NT that we find the feminine form of the Greek word, μαθήτρια. The plural masculine form of the word, “disciples,” appears many times in the NT, including in contexts where women are included in a group. So Tabitha is certainly not the only woman disciple in the NT. But in this case she is singled out. She lived with widows, ministered to widows, and clothed them with lovely…
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Re-Introducing Five Women
Florence. Ever since the third century, an area in the north of Florence was dedicated to Christianity; up to the Middle Ages it represented the city’s most important religious center. From the 500s on, a building complex there included three churches, one of which was Santa Reparata. Around 800, Sta (Santa) Reparata became the new seat of the bishop. “Raparata” is a name known to few Americans, but her story is well known in Italy. A Christian martyr from third-century Palestine, she was the patron of the city of Florence (Firenze) up until the late Middle Ages. Today people can visit the remains of the church named for her—underneath the Duomo…
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Lost in Translation: Are Women Really Missing?
Jesus Wants Male and Female Disciples Years ago, during Vacation Bible School, I learned a little song based on Jesus’s words to his fisherman-followers. It went like this: I will make you fishers of men, Fishers of men, Fishers of men. I will make you fishers of men If you follow me… Men, men, men, men. Four times. I must have unconsciously internalized that, because I heard this: the male Jesus told his male followers to go find other males and invite them to follow the Lord. These words of Jesus to which I’m referring are recorded by Matthew (4:19). The English Standard Version (ESV),…
