A Year of Biblical Womanhood

by Rachel Held Evans

  TO DO THIS MONTH:

  □ Remain totally silent in church (1 Corinthians 14:34–35)

  □ Avoid teaching or speaking (1 Timothy 2:11–14)

  □ Take an Internet vacation

  □ Spend three days at St. Bernard Abbey in Cullman, Alabama, practicing prayer, silence, and contemplation (1 Thessalonians 5:17)

  □ Visit a Quaker congregation

  Dan’s Journal

  August 7, 2011

  Today Rachel gets back from Bolivia . . . well actually, tonight. This will conclude the month of charity and she will enter her month of silence.

  I don’t think this means she is going to be silent all month. I suppose I could take this opportunity to make some crack about her talking too much. But she doesn’t. And besides, I miss her talking. I miss her around here; it gets kinda lonely. Her plane, flight 4215 from Charlotte to Chattanooga, is scheduled to arrive at 11:36 p.m. She was away with World Vision this past week, and based on our limited correspondence, seems to have had an excellent time learning about the organization and child sponsorships.

  But today is a long day for me. Not just because I’m looking forward to her return, but because tonight after I pick her up, I have to give Rachel some bad news. We just found out this past Thursday that Rachel’s mom has breast cancer. I haven’t told Rachel yet. I didn’t want her to grapple with that at the same time she was writing about her trip, spending time with the Bolivian children, saying good-bye to her fellow travelers, and trying to catch planes in airports as she makes her way home. The good news is the cancer is in an extremely early stage, very small, and was found during a routine mammogram. Robin will need to go in for some treatment and more tests, but according to the doctors this cancer can be dealt with. The news is bad, but it could be much worse. Maybe I’ll wait until tomorrow, after Rachel’s gotten a chance to sleep. She’s going to be exhausted, and I want her to get some rest.

  A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.

  —1 TIMOTHY 2:11–12 UDPATED NIV

  Fortunately, my mom gets mammograms more regularly than she goes to the movies. And fortunately, it was a really small lump, so she only needed radiation, not chemotherapy. The whole ordeal would be over in a matter of months.

  “There’s a woman receiving surgery on the same day as Robin who will more than likely die from breast cancer,” the surgeon told my father at their first appointment. “So that’s one end of the spectrum. Your wife, on the other hand, is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Odds are that we will get this nodule out, do some radiation, and it will never be an issue again.”

  This was supposed to make us feel better, and indeed we welcomed it as good news, but the mention of the other woman haunted me, and throughout my mother’s treatment and recovery, I never forgot that there was another family living through a very different story.

  Of course, friends and family rallied. Church ladies brought casseroles. Fellow teachers graded papers. When Ahava heard the news, she sent me a short message:

  I went down to the Western Wall today and said all of the Psalms for your mother’s complete healing. I wrote her name on a piece of paper and placed in the wall with my request. Refuah shlema. Complete healing!

  The gesture meant more than I could express in my letter of thanks.

  And yet the Almighty Project rolled on. My hair, now an inch or two past my shoulders, had grown heavy and limp in the summer humidity. Dan found a giant, desk-sized calendar in the trash at Bryan and brought it home, so I could cross off the days—just fifty-four . . . fifty-three . . . fifty-two . . . fifty-one more to go! I dreamed of tossing out my head coverings, leaving the dishes in the sink, and reading something other than Bible commentaries for a while, maybe The Hunger Games.

  But first I had to tackle the virtue I’d been dreading for months: silence.

  The Bible has been used to silence women for centuries, largely on account of two passages from the New Testament.

  In 1 Timothy 2:11–14, the apostle Paul wrote, “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner” (UPDATED NIV).

  And in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, he says, “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.”

  For the first seven months of the project, I got around the 1 Corinthians 14 prohibition by using what I like to call the “prophesy loophole.” Since the Bible includes multiple stories of female prophets who spoke in public, and since the book of Acts says the Holy Spirit would enable “both men and women” to prophesy (2:17–18), and since Paul himself, just a few verses earlier, in 1 Corinthians 11:4, instructed women who prophesy in church to cover their heads, I allowed myself to speak up in church now and then, with the understanding that I was “prophesying,” not “teaching” . . . which of course didn’t make anyone uncomfortable whatsoever.

  However, back in March I’d broken my eighth commandment—“Thou shalt not teach in church”—rather overtly when I “prophesied” on a Sunday morning at a church in Virginia. The good people at RISE Church in Harrisonburg had invited me to speak to their yearold congregation and offered to pay for my travel. The dates lined up perfectly with my trip to Amish country, and I really liked the church, so I was eager to make it work. I told the assistant pastor, Brent, that I could speak to the members of the church, so long as it wasn’t on a Sunday morning in their sanctuary, as that would definitely qualify as “teaching in church.” Seeing as how RISE’s senior pastor is a smart and spunky young woman named Amanda, Brent seemed a little perplexed by the whole scheme, but agreed to try and set up a Sunday night meeting at another venue in town.

  The poor guy spent weeks searching for just such a venue, but apparently Harrisonburg is the place to be in late March, so everything was either booked or beyond the church’s budget. Of course I felt terrible because you know how much I hate bothering people, so I caved and said I would speak at their Sunday morning service, as long as it was clear that I was “prophesying,” not “teaching.” I wore my head covering, and God didn’t strike me dead, so I suppose I got away with it. It seemed rather silly to go to all that trouble when I’d be speaking to the same group of people no matter what. The Church was never meant to be confined to a building, after all.

  I’m not the only one to struggle with the interpretation of 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Corinthians 11. Even the spokesmen for the biblical womanhood movement who claim to take the silence passages literally engage in some dizzying mental gymnastics when applying them.

  When asked if it is wrong, in light of 1 Timothy 2, for men to listen to popular female teachers like Beth Moore, founder of the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood (CBMW), John Piper said, “No, unless you begin to become dependent on her as your shepherd-teacher. This is the way I feel about women speaking occasionally in Sunday school . . . The Bible is clear that women shouldn’t teach and have authority over men. In context, I think this means that women shouldn’t be the authoritative teachers of the church.”1

  (In other words, a Christian man can learn from a Christian woman, as long as he doesn’t learn too much.)

  Even more confusing is the fact that Piper cites the first half of 1 Timothy 2:12 (a woman should not “have authority over a man”) as universally applicable by discouraging women from becoming pastors, but disregards the second half (“she must be silent”) by encouraging women like Moore to continue speaking.

  Cofounder of the CBMW, Wayne Grudem offers equally confounding advice for women by extracting from 1 Timothy 2:12 an eighty-three-item list detailing exactly what wom
en can and cannot do in the church.2 A woman can be a choir director, but not preside over a baptism or communion service, he says. She can write a book about theology that is read at Christian colleges and seminaries, but she cannot teach theology at Christian colleges or seminaries herself. She can teach vacation Bible school to children, but she cannot lead a Bible study with adults.

  I’ve watched congregations devote years and years to heated arguments about whether a female missionary should be allowed to share about her ministry on a Sunday morning, whether students older than ten should have female Sunday school teachers, whether girls should be encouraged to attend seminary, whether women should be permitted to collect the offering or write the church newsletter or make an announcement . . . all while thirty thousand children die every day from preventable disease. If that’s not an adventure in missing the point, I don’t know what is.

  So for the project I decided to take two approaches to silence. First, I would focus on the sort of silence that has been enforced by the Church for so many years. I’d been careful not to schedule any speaking gigs for the month of August—no chapel addresses, no classroom lectures, no conference appearances, no Sunday sermons. I also refused interviews and article requests and enforced a week of online silence to completely disengage from my blog and social networking. For the month, I would remain completely silent in church. I could not pray or read Scripture out loud, nor join in the conversation following the Bible study.

  But I also wanted to explore what you might call the upside of silence, the sort of silence that has been practiced by contemplatives for centuries to quiet the spirit and turn the soul toward God. My experience with contemplative prayer back in October had been quietly germinating in my soul, and I wanted to water that impulse and feed it and expose it to more sunlight. So I scheduled a three-day visit to St. Bernard Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in, of all places, Cullman, Alabama. I planned to stay in the monastery itself, eating meals with the monks, joining them in ritualized prayer, and seeing what they might teach me about disciplined silence. Then, to conclude the month, I’d visit a Quaker congregation, where I’d been told services were held in complete silence as congregants await the word of the Inner Light.

  So that was the plan. But first, I wanted to talk to a woman who, in spite of centuries of opposition, has managed to shatter the stained-glass ceiling. I wanted to talk to a female pastor.

  Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, “She doesn’t have what it takes.” They will say, “Women don’t have what it takes.”

  —CLARE BOOTHE LUCE

  When Jackie Roese delivered her first sermon at Irving Bible Church near Dallas, Texas, in 2008, she had to have a bodyguard for protection.

  “It probably wasn’t necessary, but things had gotten so crazy, so controversial, we weren’t taking any chances,” she told me.

  For daring to speak before the church’s thirty-five hundred attendees, the forty-six-year-old mother of three was called a “cancer in the Church,” a “dangerous sign,” and a “threat to Christianity.”

  Tom Nelson of nearby Denton Bible Church reacted to the news of Jackie’s impending sermon by calling a meeting with area pastors to unequivocally condemn Irving Bible Church’s actions. “I believe this issue is the carrier of a virus by which liberalism will enter the evangelical church,” he told the Dallas Morning News. Mark Bailey, president of Dallas Theological Seminary, removed himself from a team of regular guest preachers in protest. Denny Burk, a professor of biblical studies at Boyce College, called Jackie’s presence behind the pulpit “a matter of grave moral concern.”3

  “I think the strangest thing I heard was that a woman preaching on a Sunday morning would inevitably lead to the acceptance of bestiality,” Jackie said with a laugh. “Part of me wanted to end the sermon with, ‘Okay, so how many of you want to have sex with a monkey now’?”

  With a head of wild curls, commanding voice, and contagious laugh, Jackie’s not the kind of woman you can safely ignore. You would never guess from her confidence that she grew up in a dysfunctional home with an abusive and sex-obsessed father who called her a “whore” when she was just in elementary school, repeatedly telling her that women were “only good for one thing, and most of the time, they’re not even good at that.”

  Over the phone, Jackie’s voice sounds just like Julia Roberts’s.

  “The congregation itself was, for the most part, incredibly supportive,” she told me. “I think it was because they were so used to me. I had been teaching for so many years, it only seemed natural for them to hear from me on a Sunday morning.”

  As the teaching pastor to women, Jackie oversaw more than a thousand women’s Bible studies, developed curriculum, trained other women to teach, and worked with the church’s pastoral board to cast vision for the congregation.

  After four years on the job, Jackie said, “I decided to launch a series of forums in which prominent female leaders and theologians discussed important issues in the Church. We talked about everything from women’s roles in the Church to human trafficking to complex theological topics, and before long, the series had sucked in the rest of the church. Men were asking if it was okay to attend our women’s events!”

  In the midst of all of this, Jackie earned her doctorate degree in preaching at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, where she twice received the merit award for top scholar in her class.

  In 2008, the elders at Irving Bible Church produced a twenty-four-page position paper on the role of women on the church, which argued that the biblical passages restricting from teaching “were culturally and historically specific, not universal principles for all times and places” and that the Bible presents “an ethic in progress leading to full freedom for women to exercise their giftedness in the local church.”4

  This cleared the way for Jackie to begin teaching from the pulpit from time to time. But when the elders invited her to do so, she was reluctant.

  “It cracks me up when people try to present me as this aggressive, manipulative woman who had her eye on the pulpit from the start,” Jackie said. “When the elders asked me to preach, I tried to pass the job to someone else! But they insisted, so you could say I was just being submissive to authority.”

  Still, Jackie was aware of the significance of her presence behind the pulpit. “Before I went out to give the sermon, I was hanging out backstage with my daughter,” Jackie said. “I told her, ‘Sweetie, I’m doing this for Jesus, but I’m also doing this for you.’”

  The action came with some cost. A few disgruntled families left the church, and to this day, there are members of the congregation that have to be “warned” ahead of time before Jackie preaches a sermon, so they can make other arrangements for church that morning. Even some of Jackie’s closest friends left the church because they could not tolerate a woman preacher.

  But Jackie says that, to this day, people will approach her after a sermon and apologize for ever doubting her. Many say that she slowly won them over by consistently hitting her sermons out of the park.

  “Women don’t have a lot of margin for error when it comes to preaching, do they?” I asked Jackie. “You’ve always got to be as good as the men in order to be accepted.”

  “No, we have to be better,” Jackie said. “We have to be better in order to receive the same level of respect as the men.”

  Fortunately, change is afoot. The number of female senior pastors in Protestant churches has doubled in the past decade, rising from around 5 percent to 10 percent.5 More women are enrolling in seminary now than ever before, and by 2006 women made up 51 percent of divinity school students.6

  While most mainline Protestant denominations (American Baptist, United Methodist, Episcopal, Evangelical Lutheran Church, Presbyterian Church USA) now welcome women in leadership, other denominations continue to forbid it. The Baptist Faith and Message, which is espoused by the largest Christian denomination in America, states that, “whil
e both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”7

  “I see myself as a woman who is traveling through a thick jungle with a machete,” Jackie told me. “I can see where other women have forged a path for me, but there are still a lot of vines in the way. My goal is to cut down some of those vines, so that the next generation will have a clearer path.”

  I had no plans to deliver any sermons to three-thousand-member congregations—at least not at the time—but after talking with Jackie I knew that, in no small way, she had cleared a path for me.

  I think Paul would roll over in his grave if he knew we were turning his letters into torah.

  —F. F. BRUCE8

  We forget sometimes that the Epistles are just that . . . epistles. They are letters, broken pieces of correspondence between early Christians, dating back thousands of years.

  In our rush to extract sound bites for our nature-themed desk calendars, we tend to skip past the initial greetings that designate the recipients of the message—“to the church of God in Corinth,” “to the churches in Galatia,” “to God’s holy people in Ephesus,” “to Timothy,” “to Titus,” “to Philemon our dear friend and fellow worker—also to Apphia our sister and Archippus our fellow soldier—and to the church that meets in your home”—and scan over the details that should remind us that we are essentially listening in on someone else’s conversation—“I have made a fool of myself,” “I don’t remember if I baptized anyone else,” “When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, and my scrolls, especially the parchments” (1 Corinthians 1:2; Galatians 1:2; Ephesians 1:1; 1 Timothy 1:2; Titus 1:4; Philemon 1–2; 2 Corinthians 12:11; 1 Corinthians 1:16; 2 Timothy 4:13 UPDATED NIV).