a double take on early christianity: an interview with rodney stark
One of the world’s most respected sociologists of religion, Rodney Stark has, since the early 1960s, studied the phenomenon of conversion, focusing especially on newer religious movements such as Mormons, Moonies, and Hare Krishnas. He has written or co-authored many books, including The Rise of Christianity (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), The Churching of America, 1776–1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (Rutgers University Press, 1992), and A Theory of Religion (Peter Lang, 1987). An agnostic, Stark teaches at the University of Washington in Seattle and lives nearby with his wife. Stark was interviewed by Michael Aquilina originally for Our Sunday Visitor.
Aquilina: You call The Rise of Christianity a “hobby.” What attracted you to church history rather than building ships in bottles?
Rodney Stark: My hobbies—with the exception of being a sports fan—always involve books. I read some recent histories and said, “This is nice stuff.” I read more and said, “I’ve got something I can contribute here, because their history is good, but their social science isn’t.”
Most Christians would find your work iconoclastic. You’ve undermined a number of received truths of church histories.
RS: I don’t think anyone should take offense. My findings make the Christian accomplishment seem all the more wonderful.
One tradition you question is that Christianity was primarily a movement of the poor. Why?
RS: In the upper-class and senatorial families, and even the imperial family, there were many women who were Christians, even early on. In the 1920s we found a paving block dedicated to Erastus, whom Paul mentioned in his Letter to the Corinthians, and the block shows that Erastus was city treasurer. And there’s reason to believe that we have in the early Church a quite literate group. When you read the New Testament, for example, ask: Who are these people talking to? The language there is the language used by educated people.
You describe the everyday misery of the ancient world. Did Christianity change that?
RS: It made it a lot more bearable. The Church didn’t clean up the streets. Christians didn’t put in sewers. So you still had to live with a trench running down the middle of the road, in which you could find dead bodies decomposing. But what Christians did was take care of each other. Their apartments were as smoky as the pagan apartments, since neither had chimneys, and they were cold and wet and they stank. But Christians loved one another, and when they got sick they took care of each other. Someone brought you soup. You can do an enormous amount to relieve those miseries if you look after each other.
You also argue for steady growth by individual conversions rather than by mass conversions. Why?
RS: We don’t have a single documented case of mass conversion. Yes, there’s the passage in the Book of Acts, and I’m not one of these people who say, “Don’t trust the Bible.” But you’ve got to understand what people meant by numbers in those times. Numbers were rhetorical exercises. You’d say a million when you really meant a hundred. What you’re really saying is “lots.” In Acts, I think the numbers are meant to say, “Look, wonderful things are happening.” If the historical demographers are right, Jerusalem had about 25,000 people in it at the time. So if you start talking about eight or ten thousand converts, that’s a little bit out of scale.
What about forced conversions?
RS: There weren’t any in the time I’m talking about. Constantine didn’t cause the triumph of Christianity. He rode off it. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say he had many harmful effects. I don’t believe establishment is good for churches. It gets them involved in the worldly realm in ways that are unsuitable and corrupting. By the end of Constantine’s reign, we see people competing madly to become bishops because of the money. After that, Christianity was no longer a person-to-person movement.
People value religion on the basis of cost, and they don’t value the cheapest ones the most. Religions that ask nothing get nothing.
You look at the spread of Christianity beyond the empire, and you see that it was almost entirely by treaty and by baptizing kings. I think one reason medieval church attendance was so bad in Scandinavia and Germany was that these people weren’t really Christians. If it hadn’t been for the establishment of the Church, they might have been. Their lands would have become Christian because many people would have gone door-to-door to make Christians out of them—and then baptized the king. It was bad for the Church. I think the current pope would agree with me; I think most medieval popes would have me burned for saying this.
American Catholics can understand it, though. They know how good it was for the Church to have to fight for its life in the United States. The old Protestant story was that the priest met the boat, and you had another boatload of Catholics. But that’s not true; those people weren’t used to going to church or contributing money. They had to be turned into Catholics. It was a remarkable feat. Posed with a challenge, the Church rose to it very well, and the American Church became a very strong Church, compared to the Latin American Church.
The received tradition is that many Christians were martyred. Yet you say that blood witnesses were few.
RS: There’s a consensus among historians that the numbers weren’t large at all, and that we may know the name of just about every single martyr. The Romans decided to attack the movement from the top. This would have worked with other religions because there was no bottom to paganism. Paganism was really temples on a shopping mall, and people were very casual about which ones they patronized. If the Romans knocked off the chief priest and took away government subsidy, a pagan temple would fold up.
So the empire went after Christianity the same way, thinking, “If we butcher the bishops, things will take care of themselves.” Of course, it didn’t work because there were 92 guys waiting in line to be bishop. That’s what you get with a mass movement.
Does this minimize the traditional notion that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church”?
RS: Not at all. One thing about religious truths is that we have to take them on faith, and faith needs reassurance. What’s more reassuring than noticing that some other people, whom you admire, are so certain that it’s all true that they’re willing to go the ultimate mile?
You seem to argue that Christianity was an overwhelmingly good social force for women.
RS: It was! Christian women had tremendous advantages compared to the woman next door, who was like them in every way except that she was a pagan. First, when did you get married? Most pagan girls were married off around age 11, before puberty, and they had nothing to say about it, and they got married to some 35-year-old guy. Christian women had plenty of say in the matter and tended to marry around age 18.
Abortion was a huge killer of women in this period, but Christian women were spared that. And infanticide—pagans killed little girls left and right. We’ve unearthed sewers clogged with the bones of newborn girls. But Christians prohibited this. Consequently, the sex ratio changed and Christians didn’t have the enormous shortage of women that plagued the rest of the empire.
What about in the Church itself? How did women find their place?
RS: Women were leaders in the early Church. Paul makes that clear. And we have Pliny’s letter in which he says that among the people he’s tortured were two “deaconesses.” We’re not helped by Bible translations that render “deaconess” as “deacon’s wife.” I’m not saying the Church was ordaining women in those days. Of course it wasn’t. But women were leaders, and probably a disproportionate number of the early Christians were women.
Some of their husbands may or may not have been, but the women were there. There’s another thing we don’t understand: In every single society of which we have any evidence at all, women are more religious than men. We’re not sure why. But what that has meant is that religious movements are disproportionately female. That’s certainly turned up in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when we have good numbers. People in the early Church remarked on it back then. The early church fathers noticed that the movement had more women.
Even Christian historians tend to discount stories of the miraculous and minimize the veracity of early Church documents. Yet you accept the record to a remarkable degree.
RS: People in the patristics field recently were hammering me for naively accepting early accounts. One woman in particular mentioned the early Church’s rules against abortion and female infanticide. She said that I didn’t seem to understand that these prohibitions served all kinds of polemical purposes. Well, of course I know that, but I guess I’m so naive as to believe that groups that constantly hammer against something are more opposed to it than groups that, in their official writings, say that the same thing is laudable and wonderful and that we ought to do it.
From Plato and Aristotle on, the classical philosophers were advocating abortion. And infanticide was fine with them, too. Of course there were Christians who didn’t obey, just like there are Mormons who chew tobacco. But the fact of the matter is: most of them don’t. The same thing applies here.
And as for miracles: listen, people do get healed—spontaneously and, it would seem, miraculously. There’s not a physician on earth who would deny that. What is the agency? I don’t know. But to deny that people in tabernacles around the United States are getting healed is simply wrong. There’s no reason to deny that these things happen just because we don’t share the definitions put on them by the people of another time or place.
Somebody at Harvard Divinity School might say, “That wasn’t a miracle. It was a spontaneous remission.” “Spontaneous remission” is the way the experts say, “We don’t have the slightest idea what happened.” The most hard-nosed scientist has no reason to doubt that miracles took place in the early Church. The opinions of the village atheist are as fundamentalist as anything any Baptist ever believed.
You conclude your book by saying that “what Christianity gave to its converts was nothing less than their humanity.” What do you mean?
RS: If you look at the Roman world, you have to question whether half the people had any humanity. Going to the arena to enjoy watching people tortured and killed doesn’t strike me as healthy. I’m a big football fan, and I see that, when some player gets hurt, they bring out an ambulance and the doctors take twenty minutes to get him off the field. They don’t want people hurt out there. But these people did. They’d shout, “Shake him! Jump up and down on him!”
Was Christianity’s contribution just the elimination of the circus?
RS: No, it was a new idea. Among the pagans, you get the sense that no one took care of anyone else except in the tribal way. It’s what we’re seeing today in the Balkans—you take care of your brothers, and you kill everybody else. Christianity told the Greco-Roman world that the definition of “brother” has got to be a lot broader. There are some things you owe to any living human being.
Does it concern you today that blood sports and violent movies are on the upswing, and that abortion and infanticide are back in force?
RS: It doesn’t surprise me. It offends me. For more than a century we managed to have a period of considerable public decency. Now, maybe we’re sliding back to what’s more typical. I blame the courts, which say we can’t censor anything but religion. The fact of the matter is, when I was a kid, there were rules about what you could and couldn’t put in the mail or show in the movies.
Some of the rules may have been a bit much, but where do you stop? Where do you put your limits? If you don’t set them pretty tight, pretty soon they’re blowing people’s heads off. It’s not, for example, that people didn’t get killed in movies in the forties, but there wasn’t this enormous immorality. Evil was to be punished before the movie was over. And they didn’t show all this gratuitous gore. There are people who get turned on by this stuff, and we are helping to build monsters.
You say that Christianity succeeded in part because of its high moral standards. Today, however, many churches are lowering the bar to make religion more popular. How would you analyze their efforts?
RS: They’re death wishes. People value religion on the basis of cost, and they don’t value the cheapest ones the most. Religions that ask nothing get nothing. You’ve got a choice: you can be a church or a country club. If you’re going to be a church, you’d better offer religion on Sunday. If you’re not, you’d better build a golf course, because you’re not going to get away with being a country club with no golf course. That’s what happened to the Episcopalians, Methodists, Congregationalists, Unitarians and, indeed, to some sectors of Catholicism.
Are Christians waking up to that?
RS: Most denominations are tightening up, and the reason is they’re running out of members. The young clergy have religious motives that their elders didn’t necessarily share. It was a much better job forty years ago. If you look at Catholic religious orders, you’ll find that some are recovering and some new ones are growing. The only ones growing are those that have joint living arrangements instead of everybody living out on their own; that have organized worship; and that have some distinctive dress, so you can recognize them on the street as not just your average social worker or schoolteacher. That’s a QED. If religion gets too cheap, nobody pays the price.
Here’s an example: Do you really need to have hamburgers on Friday? Getting rid of meatless Fridays was a dreadful error the Church made. When I was a kid—in a town that was 40 percent Catholic and 60 percent Protestant—meatless Friday was an enormously important cultural marker. Every Friday reminded you who was like you and who wasn’t like you—and it did this in a way that wasn’t harmful to either side.
Our high-school football games were always played on Friday nights. After the game, you took your girlfriend to the drive-in restaurant. And, around midnight, you could hear the Catholic kids count down to twelve and then shout, “Hamburger!” And everybody would laugh. It was a little social ritual that left Catholics with an enormous sense of solidarity. We thought hamburgers were the big denominational difference.
What do you make of the current pope?
RS: Here’s someone who knows what it was like for the first Christians—who knows what it is to fight for his Church’s life. If an Italian bishop wants to know how many Catholics are in his diocese, he looks in the census books for the number of people who live nearby. A bishop in Communist Poland knew that the census and the number of Catholics were not the same number, and that it’s important to get yourself some Catholics if you want to have a Church. Whether you agree with him or you don’t, it’s very clear this pope is a holy man, that he’s on a mission.
You once wrote that you’re “not religious as that term is conventionally understood.”
RS: That’s true, though I’ve never been an atheist. Atheism is an active faith; it says, “I believe there is no God.” But I don’t know what I believe. I was brought up a Lutheran in Jamestown, North Dakota. I have trouble with faith. I’m not proud of this. I don’t think it makes me an intellectual. I would believe if I could, and I may be able to before it’s over. I would welcome that. This article was taken from http://www.jknirp.com/stark.htm
Hat-Tip to my ole friend Reinhold Scharnowski.
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I just have to say that I am from that part of North Dakota..or should say I lived there as a littl’n for a few years…small world. Ok, now I’ll actually go back and read the whole thing
Well, Alan, that was a terribly refreshing post and an encouragement to me, personally, as I work to bring into being a Christian community that is “costly” and counter-cultural in the broad ways he is talking about.
Be blessed in Orlando with that bunch of church planting folks…I will not be there! But I have recommended a woman planter from Minneapolis, named Pam, look you up…we’ll see what happens!
Hey Pegsta, I think at this conference, any woman will stand out. I expect it will be 99% men. I hope I’m wrong. I will let you know.
Yo, Alan…I don’t expect you to be wrong…Brad mentioned a woman from Willow Creek who will be there…so that makes two. (There may be wives around…but not in the sessions, eh?)
At the Church of God (Anderson) church planting conference, there were three of us–but they were openly recruiting women planters, how’s that for a change?
God is so merciful to me; I felt no inclination AT ALL to attend–not only would I be “out of place” because I’m a woman, I am not planting the kind of church they’re geared up for. So, God let me stay home!
Be blessed while you are there and thank you for doing what you can to make headway into the chaos!
fantastic interview. Al, when are you two headed to the states for longer? Or are you already here?
Chris, I am here for a conference at the moment. But we hope to move over in ealry June. PEace
Alan, thanks for connecting at dinner last night. I have been tracking with you via your books and this blog for a while. I’m looking forward to growing friendship and continuing to learn from you. Dave
Couple of thoughts:
1/ What religion are women rushing to today? Wiccan Goddess spirituality.
2/ Which is the fastest growing religion in Australia and America? the same.
That certainly supports Stark’s thesis of religion. But, another question emerges:
3/ How does the Emerging Missional Church look by comparison? Dismal - very few women leaders, bloggers, everything.
Methinks we are not there yet. Not by a long shot. And it bodes not well at all.
So, how to engage more women? Over to you gals. How many of you have familiarized yourself with goddess spirituality? What do you think we could learn from it? What could we learn from you?
Oh, and on martyrs, you may want to see the latest post of mine on http://mattstone.blogs.com
Matt
I’m pretty familiar with goddess spirituality. I also consider myself a bit of an armchair theologian and part of the emerging church/emergent conversation. And I’m a lady
Not sure what I have to offer specifically as a woman though since no one’s ever really asked me that question. Good to think about.
Interesting Matt that at the same time you’re asking those questions, much of “traditional evangelicalism” is trying to “reach manly men” with male rituals and conferences with war metaphors and cursing and grunting and shouting.
Matt, the church planting group with which I have been in dialogue has as an actual goal to have 50% of their church planters be women…at the conference last fall, there were three of us…but it is a significant start to have the goal in writing.
Alan and I have talked about this on and off…sometimes I think we are in a bit of a catch 22: if the women don’t believe they have a place, they won’t step up to the challenge. In the church, unfortunately, it has been (and still is, in many areas) a terrible stumbling block that many (men and women) believe God does not allow dynamic leadership participation by women.
But I do believe that it is in the emerging, organic manifestations of God’s Spirit that we see the women stepping up. But I will say that it is a difficult thing to do. It is a very counter-cultural thing to do–from both ways! From the church, they (clergy/laity) fear women leaders. From the women themselves, they fear (don’t know how?) embracing a different form of influence. How do we lovingly, gracefully, mercifully embrace the power of submission, and service and leading by example? Too often women have been ensnared by trying to lead as men historically have.
It is, I believe, another realm where a form of culture shock exists. Women in church leadership are often shocked by how the Christian men actually behave–the things they say, the way they go about doing business–and they just don’t even know how to bridge that gap of “these men just don’t get it.” These women are frequently leaders in their secular job and have earned the respect of their male counterparts. To then come to church meetings and be ignored or talked down to or bullied or whatever, is very shocking!
Pray for the sisters…and the brothers!!!
I believe this balance will only come when a group of men and women follow Christ together in such a way as everyone follows and everyone leads–according to the needs of the group and the Spirit’s gifting. There can be no lording it over each other. There can be no “we have to fix this quick” mentality without looking at all the ramifications. This is the vision of leadership which God has asked me to model.
Once my church plant team gets identified and moving, it will be an easier thing for me to engage in the blog world…and I am slowly coming to see that I will have to engage in this manner. I, however, am unwilling to enter while still in the “theoretical” stage. Any blog will need to serve the mission…
Whenever it happens, I’ll be needing lots of help!!!
Peg, 50% is a worthy goal. I hope to one day see it. I personally believe that the emergence of missional women leaders is of crucial and strategic importance to the future success (or failure) of Christianity in the West. I also sense that it will not happen till women cease asking permission, for some men will never give it. So I encourage you to be bold, to lead where God gifts you and take your lead from that, not the ground rules of the gatekeepers.
(BTW - the leadership style you describe is one Goddess worshippers would affirm as a very feminine one.)
PS. Mak’s observations about resurgent manly men’s spirituality within Christianity have not been lost on me. I have noted the same myself with wry amusement. The very stereotypical nature of it, to me, suggests insecurity.
Thanks, Matt. It is interesting that about a month ago I came to the conclusion that God actually does not want me to plant under the auspices of an organization (why am I not surprised…
), but to move by the power of the Spirit alone. I saw very clearly that I was using these groups as “permission”, as you said, but I wasn’t playing by their game plan. There is no safer place than in the center of God’s will, so we’re off!
And, yes, I am very aware that the leadership style God has asked me to model is considered a very feminine one…and why it’s going to be a major challenge for those men who are called to join me!
The great thing I am looking forward to is having people see that this kind of leadership is so very effective in accomplishing God’s mission. It seems terribly inefficient according to human impatience, however.
It’s gonna be interesting….
warning: semi-rant ahead on women leaders and the Church, as i take a break from the month-long editing project of a book on the effects caused by systemic church change on women married to men in ministry (i.e., amplified pressure when leaders refocus the church on fulfilling the Great Commission).
so. we have Rodney Stark’s interview and his comments on women. and we have the fact that the ironically named “Exponential” conference has EXACTLY one featured woman speaker (Nancy Beach). and that at least 95% of all published “emerging conversation” materials are by men.
where are the women in the emerging cultural edges of discipleship?
ummm … perhaps they are doing stuff, not talking about doing stuff, not critiquing the talking about doing stuff.
i suspect if we would but look, we would find the women of the so-called emerging edges are by far much farther along than men in justice work, intercession, catalyzing missional/Kingdom enterprises, non-profit work, etc.
i also suspect that the more highly networky/decentralized/*starfishy* [as in The Starfish and The Spider] emerging edges have much more parity in opportunities for women and men. guess that leaves out most of the more well known entities, such as “Emergent Village.” maybe in another 5 to 10 years, such farther-emerging edges will get some press. and that’ll be nice, actually.
i don’t know about anyone else, but i do often wrestle with the irony of finding these events and blogs and such stimulating, and yet at the same time i find it becoming such a bore to have the “conversation” dominated by old white men such as myself. (not that i am by any means a typical OWM!) i think we have something important to learn from certain Native American cultures, where neither the elder men nor elder women of the tribe would begin discussions of decisions until both groups were present, understanding that if only one group were there, it would have only half the perspective needed to consider strategic scenarios for tribal futures.
also, i wrestle with consistency in living out my understanding of gender realities in appreciating the polarities (differences) yet focusing on the complementarities (how differences can work together for greater strength). so, i’ve long had a commitment to mentor whoever is interested, whenever i can. interestingly, over the past 10 years, i suspect this has been a fairly even mix of single people and married couples, of men and of women, from multiple generations. also, i don’t go looking for book projects to edit, and yet, it seems to be, again, that an even split between men and women authors find me and i end up working with them. hmmm…
what is God trying to tell us in the draw of wicca etcetera to women? and the parallel repulsion from Christianity? i just wonder: if we got through these genderalities in ways that allowed us to disciple everyone, and equip each disciple to serve as a leader through their gifts, wouldn’t that give Christianity a far more magnetic quality than it has now … even in the “emerging” wing of things?
end rant. back to editing.
regarding comments by Mak (9) and Matt (12) on stereotypical men’s movement stuff, there is a fascinating quote from *Dune: The Butlerian Jihad* that seems relevant here “Fanaticism is always a sign of repressed doubt” (by Brian Herbert, and Kevin J. Anderson, page 442).
there simply are boundaries somewhere in the midst of the morass which get crossed, and cause us to lose the important aspect of “complementarity” between the genders, where the God-ordained differences are meant to work together for something stronger than is possible for persons or groups of either gender to accomplish alone.
i’ve come to believe that gender has more to do with what’s stored in the attic than with how the plumbing works. sifting through cultural and/versus biblical characteristics of masculinity and femininity is an important task, perhaps more now than it has been in a long time, if we are going to embrace a comprehensive, holistic, and activist view of “gender realities” in culture, church, and Kingdom.
i was part of all three waves of the men’s movement in the 20th century, so i have some intriguing experiences from which to speak:
the first wave started around the 1970s, and consisted of “pro-feminist men” who supported women and the feminist movement to greater or lesser degrees. (i was on the university’s commission on the status of women in the early ’70s, monitoring Title IX/affirmative action.)
the second wave emerged in the mid-1980s, with a wide range of attempts (and backlashes) to recapture a non-feminized version of masculinity, or to counterbalance with strong-masculinity men who could work side-by-side with strong-femininity women, or to return to some more stereotypical machismo version of manhood. (i co-facilitated a men’s group in the late ’80s and early ’90s.)
the third wave emerged in the early 1990s with Promise Keepers, which initially focused on some biblical version of masculinity AND interracial reconciliation. interesting to think about the parallel connections between abolitionists and women’s rights movements in the 1800s. (i attended the first major national conference in something like 1992 or 1993, when it was in Boulder, Colorado, and had only 5,000 for the leadership pre-conference and 23,000 for the regular event).
in the *starfishy* world that is emerging, if we cannot sort through this issue in ways that make sense - both to affirm aspects of cultures that resonate with Scripture, and challenge aspects which cross the line - then our paradigms may not survive …
anyone out there interested in a missional-oriented event that explores such issues?
anyone out there interestd in sponsoring it?
p.s., just in case: it would be wisest NOT to assume that i fully embrace now all things i did then, but hopefully we could correctly assume i’ve learned much from this unusual set of experiences …
Good clarification, Brad. Just because I attended Bill Gothard’s Basic Youth Conflicts in 1975, doesn’t mean I embrace his ideas!
Guys, sorry I’ve been away in US.Very busy boy. On the women in mission (as opposed to ministry) issue, this is a real problem. I had a great conversation with a really significant church leader in the US last night on this very issue. He admitted to being conservative on this issue until he had to confront it in his very capable and passionate daughter who wants to go into some form of missional ministry. I challenged him to gather a group of silent men who feel that the women thing is unjust but who up till now do not want to talk about it. Make a declaration. Gee, the US church is very conservative on this issue. Much more than the Aussies anyhow. Pray for us guys to get the courage to say something.
Alan, I’m really glad you’ve been able to have the conversation you did! and I truly do hope some voicing of new missional realities comes forth, based on your challenge. Glad you were in a position to share a perspective that reinforces relevant justice issues here.
ummm … and i’m not exactly silent on the matter, and as far as i know, i have little influence within the traditional/transitional church, but–seriously–i would be happy to serve the group as secretary-editor-contributor, if they choose to move on this missional issue.
this is a difficult and “theo-political” problem in the Church in the U.S., but it is critical. i doubt we’ll be able to come to resolve on women as ordained ministers or whether the one and only pattern for marriage is complementarian or egalitarian or some other -arian.
but surely we should be able to hone in on some kind of agreement that since Christ’s Great Commission requires us to “make disciples of all the nations,” that we need to disciple/equip for ministry people of “both genders, all generations, and in cultures of all races, places, and spaces” as i’ve put it before. can we at least agree that we have a red-letter responsibility from our Great Shepherd to disciple all His sheep? after all, both women and men will each be accountable to Christ for the stewardship of the gifts and opportunities invested in them …
i really do see this as a missions/missional issue. from all my studies and experiences in the farther reaches of emerging cultural paradigms, the “post-feminist” generations who did not have to fight the battles themselves over women’s rights and feminism, generally take it as a given that women are just as capable as men in most arenas of life. if we cannot find a biblical perspective that bridges that reality, we may lose all the “post-Boomer” generations to other spiritualities that don’t raise such barriers to women. So, the holistic “younger evangelical perspective” as detailed by Robert Webber in his book *The Younger Evangelicals* may give us some guidance here for realistic and biblical contextualization. i’m not asking for capitulation, but recapitalization–investing time in rethinking gender issues through the lenses of world missions and missional Kingdom enterprises.
Hey, Alan…we had fun while you were gone…glad you’re back!
I did experience a bit of dejavu with your story of the minister and his daughter! My Dad turned out to be a maverick in the RM by having a woman associate minister. He got that way by being a church-planter with one son and five daughters. When you’re planting, you use the resources the Spirit provides…and all six of us were very involved in ministry (still are), with two of us daughters actually being ordained!
Never underestimate the transforming power of a father’s love for a daughter. Say…maybe they might recognize God as Father here…
I am hoping, in my church-planting model, to make a case for the ordination issue becoming somewhat moot…but I am such a radical!
Peggy makes an important point about questions that become non-questions.
five years ago, i was part of a panel of “emerging and semi-emerging leaders” answering questions for an audience of 20-somethings through 80-somethings on emerging culture, church planting, ministry, etc.
a gentleman in his 60s or 70s asked what our views were on women as Senior Pastors. i let some of the other panelists fumble around with responses, then i said only, “I wasn’t aware that the Bible requires us to have Senior Pastors.”
that brought a combination of looks that included: bemused, irritated, quizzical, etc.
there are indeed paradigms and systems where such questions as that one are moot.
there are, however, also potentially theological conundrum questions that come up where none had been asked before. for instance, some people have difficulty with the idea/theology of women serving in prominent roles of ministry. so, what do they do with the reality that in some (many?) places where the Spirit has instigated a “Church Planting Movement,” more than 50% of the workers are women? assuming the Scriptures are inspired (which I believe), how is it that the same Holy Spirit is contradicting what supposedly is the “right” view of women in ministry by raising up or allow women to serve in such vital roles of missional work? somehow, our *paradigms* need a reconsideration when our theologies and sociologies and missiologies show themselves to be out of alignment.
Oh, Brad…are you going to drag the whole “let’s be consistent” thing up…
So much fun…I’ve just learned, over on a thread at Jesus Creed, that I am what is known as a radical moderate. I think I like it…
Actually, it has been adjusted to a “radical bi-conceptual”, which I like even better
I wouldn’t be too surprised if some of the factors that help release women into “formal” ministry would also help to release women into other missional activities and ministries.
According to Cheryl Catford (who’s doing her doctorate on this) the 3 key factors are:
Mentors and role models. (Godly mentors, women in ministry as role models)
Theological permission. (yes, women read all those funny passages too about wearing veils and keeping silent they need to make sense of)
Seeing actual possibilities for ministry. (Telling the wonderful stories about what women are actually doing can open up the missional imagination of others.)
I agree, Janet, with that list of three.
I certainly have had few female mentors or role models…it took me a long time to figure out that I already had God’s permission by virtue of his unmistakable call…and I finally did get a chance to serve. Now I’m moving on to church-planting, which is where my heart has always been (even when I wasn’t aware of it
)
When was the last time the recuiters were looking for a woman minister to lead their team, much less be part of it?
One of the RM colleges in the Bible Belt actually told one young woman from the Church of God (Anderson) camp that they would educate her in the ministry/preaching track, but they would not ordain her or recommend her for hire. What is that about? GRRR…
Even the COG colleges are openly recruiting and supporting women in ministry…but the COG congregations are not hiring them. Even when they face a terrible shortage of pastors. It seems that they would rather do without than call a woman to serve with them. Really sad….
While I sometimes wish that I had daughters which I could raise and encourage in ministry, God has blessed me with three sons. And perhaps that’s where my influence is needed: in the men of the next generation!