You Go, Girl!

  Wow!  I could hardly believe my eyes when I read Michelle (Eagle) Artley's article in the latest issue of the Missionary Church's official publication, The Missionary Church Today.  Her feature, "Calling All Women", encourages women to pursue leadership roles within the church as "catalytic" leaders, catalytic referring to an entrepreneurial trait of those who "start something".  She gives a brief history of the role of women within the church, pointing out that a century ago there were many "ministering sisters" in the denomination, in fact, more than 500 licensed between 1880 and 1960, while today there are only six.  Since 1960, there seems to have been a 50-year descent into conservative legalism regarding the role of women in leadership, which flies in the face of the "respect for women" that Jesus and Paul demonstrated.  Artley points out that "we tend to gravitate toward Paul's instructions to women in dysfunctional churches, such as Corinth or Ephesus, but he regularly spoke of women leading in the church. ... Throughout the Bible women filled such leadership roles as prophet, pastor-teacher, apostle, deacon, judge, and co-laborer."
  Artley challenges the mostly male leadership of the Missionary Church, "men of God, when the Lord saw that is was not good for man to be alone, he did not create a few more men and call it a day.  He created woman to complement man and partner with him."
  There are others who are challenging the current policy of the Missionary Church to limit women, which states that they "cannot be lead pastors or denominational or district executives except in situations of need and for the duration of the need."  Three years ago my brother (a minister in the denomination), and I put our heads together to see what could be done to remove all restrictions on women within the Missionary Church.  A recommendation resulted, originating from his board of elders at New Hope Missionary Church in Lapeer, Michigan, and that recommendation has been slowly crawling its way through the various committees, and is due to be addressed at this year's general conference.  Perhaps the male chauvinism of the denomination will be mitigated soon.
  Michelle Artley speaks for me when she says that "Women are vital to the wholeness of church leadership.  May God soon be able to look on the whole of the Missionary Church and see that it is good."
  In an earlier post I mentioned that one of the problems of trying to be literalists is that we automatically make ourselves hypocrites, because there is absolutely nobody on the planet who can treat all of the scriptures literally.  As an example, I mentioned that Jesus had told his disciples to "sell your possessions and give the money to the poor" (Luke 12:33) but that nobody was taking that literally.  This thing of limiting women in the church is a result of building a doctrine on a literal interpretation of Paul's instructions to troubled  New Testament churches, but again, it makes us hypocrites, because even in the same passages that seem to limit women, there are references to slavery, which we dismiss as not applicable today, since slavery is not permitted in our culture today.
  We could treat the passages on women in the same way as we treat the passages on slavery if we wanted to, but the conversation, when it is addressed at all, is largely conducted by pools of male church leaders, so how likely is that to happen easily and quickly?
  May God help the Missionary Church to shed its hypocrisy and finally treat women with the equality and respect that the Lord intended!