Look who’s doing the exploitation

The Baptist Standard ran a story about sex trafficking of young girls.  While young boys are also abused, it is mostly the girls.  Recently there has been much talk about this and various groups have discussed it.  They focus on the exploitation of young girls and boys.  But what they are not saying is who is doing the exploitation.  

For instance, if you have 10 girls under the age of 16 on the street selling their bodies, that doesn’t equate to 10 males.  One male cannot support one female or young boy on the street.  I don’t know how many it takes, but you can be sure that for every youngster on the street selling his or her body, there are multiple males who are buying.

Males make up 95 percent of the prisoners in Texas.  Males start the wars, males are responsible for most of the killing of women and children. Males use the services of prostitutes.

I listened to the Mark Driscoll interview found on the website of Pastor Jonathan Martin.  Mark Driscoll speaks “boldly” about sexual issues and this interview was prompted by his book on sex and marriage.  He and Ed Young, Jr., a Southern Baptist pastor of several off campus churches of his megachurch in the Dallas area, are on the forefront of bringing the bedroom into the church house. A year or so ago, Ed Young, Jr literally brought a bed onto the stage and he and his wife were on the bed in front of the whole congregation.

Dr Young, Jr. is promoting a series on sex for married couples.  He calls it sexperiment.

This is voyeurism, folks.  These pastors have forsaken the gospel and are parading themselves and their wives onto a national stage of sexuality.  A man who loves his wife will not parade her out onto a bed for the men in the audience to visualize. She is being exploited, much like the young women sold on the streets.  Like many of those young women, she cannot say ‘no.’

Remember that these wives, much like the pimped prostitutes, do not have any say in the matter.  They are submissive wives and when their husbands tell them to do that because he is her spiritual head and leader, she must do it.  He may also throw in the fact that the private planes, luxury vacations, fine clothes and jewelry, and the good life may also go down the drain if he can’t keep titillating his congregation with something new and outrageous.

In his interview, Mark Driscoll makes fun of women preachers.  I doubt seriously that any woman preacher would engage in such sexual exploitation of her husband.  Mark Driscoll didn’t put his wife out on the bed as Ed Young, Jr, did, but he put her down as being equal-but, and built up these men in his church as being the head of the women.  While not specifically saying that there were men in his church who engaged in various pornography, he says he councils men on this subject, which he is graphic about.

Both these pastors tell men that they are lord over their wives (the husband is the head of the wife) but that they must not lord it over them.  What do you think these men who are into pornography, bought sex, and without a history of knowing Christ, hear?  They hear exactly what the pastor wants them to hear – their wives were created to serve them, because women are not favored by God enough to even be a deacon. Then they are apt to take it to another level, one of abuse and sexual exploitation.  After all, one of these pastors is sexually exploiting his wife on stage in front of the entire congregation.

Exploitation of women is society and church approved.  It is approved by pastors who bring the bedroom into the church house.  It is approved in the churches where women are told that ANY KIND of husband is to be her leader and she is to submit to him.  It is approved in churches where certain offices are withheld from women on the basis that they are women and God doesn’t allow women to serve in those hallowed offices.   Don’t blame Eve.  The Adams of the world need to keep their fig leaves stitched.

The preachers themselves are exploiting women, in particular their own wives, through the antics of the husbands who bring sex into the conversation with the public. 

How can they expect to keep women from being demeaned when they hold the bible over women’s heads and tell women that they were created to have men control them?

Will you pray for a great awakening and getting off the bed and out of the bedroom for these pastors who continue to demean all women by denying them full fellowship within the church, and who demean their wives in front of their congregations?

Your story

This is a personal invitation to all of you to submit your stories about how you were affected by gender restrictions.  Men can write the story that they know first-hand about their wives, girlfriends, and mothers who were denied full service in their church simply because they were born female.

The CBE Conference on April 27-28, 2012 will have these stories printed out and posted on the wall for others to read.  Make them 500 words or less, easy and interesting to read.  Use your first name and last initial only.  Read carefully the wording on the submit form, as your will be giving us the right to use your story in future publications also.

Go to www.cbehouston.org and click on “Your Story” and read it carefully and then submit.  If you do not get a reply back within a day or so, please email us at the address on the website.

We want to hear from you!

The sneaky preacher

“Jesus is tenderly calling.” Those of us who have been in church for most of our lives remember the last few minutes on Sunday morning where the invitation to follow Christ and place our membership in that church fellowship begins with a song. 

Many evangelists ended their sermons to the tune of “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior,” and eyes filled with tears, many of us made our way to the altar where we accepted Christ as our gentle Savior.

We sang “All the Way My Savior Leads Me” and made professions of faith, committed to the mission field, and young men answered the call to preach.

Were we influenced by the message of the preacher, or the traveling evangelist?  Or did the words of the song enter our hearts and brought us to accepting that Savior or the call to further service?

Fanny Crosby wrote these songs and you can tell by her name that she was a woman.  She wrote 1,000 or more songs, and used over 200 names because her publishers thought people would not want only songs by Fanny Crosby.

This was brought to my attention last week when one of our steering team members said he once told the congregation that he was in that they wouldn’t let a woman preach, or speak behind the pulpit, but they sang with gusto songs written by Fanny Crosby.  These were gospel songs, telling the gospel, and bringing people to a commitment to follow Christ.  What difference did it make that they were sung?  The words were the message and the words were written by a woman. We have ‘walked the aisles’ to her words.

“Jesus is waiting; O come to him now, waiting today, waiting today; come with thou sins; at his feet lowly bow; Come, and no longer delay.”

Sometimes I wonder if the Bibles sold today have Matthew 23 in invisible ink. Don’t we see our hypocrisy?  Can’t we see that preaching is simply giving the words of Christ to those who will hear? How can we turn them away?  Jesus is calling today! 

Fanny Crosby was a sneaky preacher.

Will you pray with me for the day to come quickly that women will not have to resort to turning the gospel into a tune before her words can be spoken behind a pulpit?

The shoe on the other foot

While working for BGCT, one of the employees in the Dallas office had to leave her position and move with her husband several states away because he was the pastor and had been called to a new church.  That is a familiar story with pastor’s wives.  Many wives were school teachers and it seemed that they could move and find a job in the new city where they would be serving.  A local pastor’s wife is a CPA and involved in a ministry dear to her heart and I imagine she prays every night that they will not be called elsewhere.

But what if the pastor is a woman?

My blog of the other day “Time for a change?” got the attention of someone  and he clicked the ‘like’ button.  So I trotted over to his blog to see who he was and why he might have liked this story.  I still don’t know his name, but he is the spouse of a minister! He is on posting #3 which is called “I am a Paulian?” – married to the minister #3.  Below is an except from his first post about this on January 18.

It’s just one of those things apparently, a sort of ‘Buy One, Get One Free’ deal where the wife or other one is there in a supporting role, like Robin to Batman or Kevin Bond to Harry Redknapp.

But there are problems, especially if you set on the journey and find that the scenery changes dramatically along route.

It is not as simple as someone training for a certain job while the other half leads their life.

For Christians the church and what goes on there is the most important thing about life on this earth.

So what to do if your marriage, faith, struggles, job, vocation, community, life all somehow become tangled up in what your wife does for a living, if your minister is your wife and your wife your minister?

Who is that person giving the sermon on a Sunday morning? Your wife or your minister?

How do you respond to the sermon?

Apparently he lives in Ireland and they are Presbyterians.  I got a kick out of this and I hope you will too, as we look at the situation from the male spouse of a woman pastor.

Across the water, we will join hands as we welcome women to the ministry.  Will you pray with me that someday we don’t just find this an amusing story, and that men and women both answer our Lord’s calling and work together in the best way they can for the Kingdom?

Time for a change?

Today I want to tell you about three books that I haven’t read.  These books intrigue me because of their titles and what I have read and heard about them. 

The first is “Let My People Go: A Call to End the Oppression of Women in the Church.”  This book was written by Bob Edwards in 2011, and I have communicated with Bob about the book.  He told me this story about someone he knew.  She explained to me that ever since she was a little girl she has felt called to be a pastor. When playing make-believe with other children, she would always pretend that she was a pastor, and that she would be giving a sermon. When I asked her why she wasn’t pursuing this call to ministry, she explained that her denomination, friends and mentors all told her that her apparent call to Christian service was from the devil. She couldn’t be a pastor, they said, because she was a woman. My heart broke.  I had already felt called by God to research and write a book on gender roles in Christ, and this just added to my motivation. The result of my research is found in my new book.

The second book that I haven’t read is “Render unto Rome: the secret life of money in the Catholic Church” by Jason Berry.  This book follows the money from embezzlement to paying off crimes committed against children.   It is a book of men and what they have done to denigrate the name of Christ, whom they profess to love.

The third book is “Losing My Religion: How I lost my faith reporting on religion in America – and found unexpected Peace” by William Lobdell.  This man was formerly a religion reporter and started out with a faith in Christ.  Marv Knox of the Baptist Standard wrote a review of this book and I quote from him: “…his job ultimately leads him to tell stories about fraudulent faith and forces him to question his own beliefs.  …what if he had had another job? Could he have balanced clergy failure with Jesus’ faithfulness?  Christians need to read this book.”

In recent days we had a young woman quoting from the Danvers Statement in which they tell us that God cannot call a woman to preach and if she thinks God is calling her, she is being deceived. 

It is time that we allow women the opportunity to see what God will do with them in their lives.  It is time to see what God will do to bring back the love of Christ and the words of Jesus to the world.  Jesus gave the gospel to women.  The least we can do is not put up any barriers to women living out their calling.

From the stories above we can see that women can’t possibly do any worse damage to the Gospel and to the people for whom the Gospel is intended.

Will you join me as we tell the world that we need to set our women free?

MLK and me

When Martin Luther King died, I was like many people in the south and really did not like him because of the disturbance of the civil rights movement.  Things were just fine the way they were.  Now that I have matured and understand the situation better, I have much admiration and respect for this man who stood up and declared “I am a man.”

The sad thing is that he had to do it.  No man and no woman should have to declare their place in humanity.  We were created in the image of God.

Begging the question

A church I know will be looking for a new minster soon and there was some talk about finding a woman pastor.  Two people told me “I hope she is not homosexual.”

I asked them “What if it is a he?  Don’t you hope that he is not homosexual?

In November there was a story in the Associated Baptist Press about Sammy Nuckolls.  This knucklehead was a Southern Baptist evangelist, former camp pastor at Life Way FUGE summer camps and had a great following of people who came to hear him speak.

But he had one little problem.  When he was a house guest while preaching at revivals, he had a little camera hidden in a writing pen.  He would leave this camera in the bathroom and video anybody who came inside.  The woman of the house saw the pen and picked it up and saw that it had a USB port on the back and – you guessed it – pictures of her bathroom. He was arrested and there were other women who didn’t realize the pen accidentally left in the bathroom was a camera.

Then there is the story today of the Youth Minister Mitchell Rousse who was arrested Jan.11 after police reportedly traced the IP address of a computer used to solicit minors for sexual purposes to his workplace at a Baptist church.

Also in today’s Associated Baptist Press stories, Daniel Acker was arrested for sexual abuse.  He had avoided arrest 20 years ago when he was a youth minister at a Baptist church.  But now at 49 years old they finally got him. 

Why is it that we automatically wonder if a woman is homosexual and never give a thought as to whether the male we hire is homosexual, or if he is engaging in some sexual behavior which would harm women and children, or pornography which is one of the big problems facing the clergy today?

I can tell you why.  Both of those people who expressed the feeling that she might be homosexual have been long-time Baptists, and that is what they are taught.

Begging the question – “the premise depends on the truth of the very matter in question.”

Will you help spread the word that women preachers are no more likely to be homosexual than a man is?  Will you pray for women that they will be seen as worthy of holding the position of pastor, and not judged to be sinful before they are given a chance?

When it hits home

The now-retired Baptist pastor that I have known for 20 years may have changed his mind.  When I first began talking with him about women’s equality, he assured me that the Scriptures did not back up women deacons or pastors.  He has several dynamic daughters and said, “We have never discussed it, but I would think they would agree with me.”

My thought then and it’s the same now, is that they don’t agree with him.  And that might be the reason they have never discussed it. 

In fact, one daughter is married to a low-key pastor who just never seemed to click with any of his congregations.  Someone told me that when the search committee hired him, they really wanted what his wife could bring to the church, and to get her, they had to choose him.  I saw this played out over several years.

This retired preacher’s daughter is now head of a religious entity and is doing a fabulous job.  So my preacher friend asked his pastor if she could come speak to the church about what she is doing, since the ministry is one that their church supports.

The pastor said no.

But then he turned around and asked her to speak to a men’s prayer breakfast which was not located inside the church building.

When it hits home, we begins to see things differently.

Will you pray with me that this woman’s ministry will continue to be successful and that both the older retired pastor and the young now-pastor will completely change their minds about what women can do in the church?

No better because we are female – but no worse because we are not males

Somehow I got signed up for Change.org and they sent me an end of the year progress report. Two petitions were to help women that were successful.   They were:

Saudi women win three!

Saudi women activists won 3 big campaigns on Change.org in June: With the help from 3,500 people, they got charges dropped against Manal al-Sharif, who was arrested for driving a car in a country where it’s illegal for women to do so. After two more petitions targeting Hilary Clinton and Europe’s top ambassador Catherine Ashton, both spoke out forcefully in favor of giving women the right to drive (and Secretary Clinton says she only took a public stand because of the campaign)!

And,

Wyndham steps up to stop sex trafficking in its hotels.

San Diego native Tim Rosner saw a story on CNN about a string of arrests at a local Travelodge, where gang members were pimping women against their will – with the full knowledge of the hotel’s owners. Tim was horrified, so he started a petition asking Travelodge’s parent company, Wyndham, to adopt a much more strict code of conduct and prevent sex trafficking in its hotels. After 14,000 people signed Tim’s petition, Wyndham agreed – and CNN notified Tim with a story headlined  “How one person can make a difference.”

Women are being mistreated all the world simply because they are women.  Yet our churches don’t speak out against it.  “Oh, we honor and respect the women in our church.”

Oh, yeah?

It is much like the secretary who sits at her desk while her boss tells someone “She is really the one who runs the office.”  What garbage!  If she is really the one who runs the office, then why is she sitting at her desk while you are the one going out to lunch?”

Same as in the church.  We don’t want words telling us how honored and respected we are.  We just want our birthright. Not to be put up on some kind of paper pedestal because we are women, and not held down by a concrete block because we weren’t born male.

Will you petition your church to treat women as equals – no better or no worse than others are treated.

In His image

In Half the Church, Carolyn Custis Jones tells us that the church should be the one leading the fight for women. But as we know, the church is part of the problem.  Last week someone sent me a book about equality that she had written.  Skimming over it quickly I could see that there was some very good material in the book.  But when I got to her conclusion, she negated everything that she had written about equality when she told women that God tells them to voluntarily submit to their husbands because they are actually submitting to Jesus.

There we have it!   God stuck the husband in between a wife and Him.  Now why would God do that?  As Carolyn James points out in her book, both are the image of God. 

There is a picture being sent around on facebook of a woman being beaten by a man and the sender hopes that this picture will be shared 1,000 times as a testimony against men who beat women.  I agree and hope that more than that will send it around.  But I doubt they will.  There is still within us the belief that women who are beaten by their husbands ‘ask for it’ or have some other fault which justifies the beating.

One of the reasons women are beaten and mistreated in a marriage or relationship is because the men and the women are taught that the man is her leader and her ruler.  That means that he gets to set the rules she is to go by.

This fallacy is perpetuated in our churches and bleeds out into society, causing women who do not even go to church to suffer because somebody convinced her boyfriend or husband that she is to voluntarily submit to him. 

Many of us have hidden within us a remnant of women’s inferior position, and it comes out in the guise of “the Bible says so.”   But that isn’t so.  The Bible tells us that in the beginning “And God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”

One image cannot rule over the other image.  Will you join me in speaking out against all who promote male headship as being God’s plan.  Equal means Equal.  There are no equal-buts.