Indifference

Your pastor steps up to the pulpit on Sunday morning. He looks out at the congregation.  Maybe 50 people, maybe 200, maybe thousands are looking back at him.

The pastor opens his Bible and turns to 1 Corinthians 13.

“If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”

One woman in the congregation is thinking that she cannot be a deacon because the church loves a strict interpretation of scriptures more than it loves her.

“Love will never fail. When all is said and done, words that preachers say will fade away, and if anyone has spoken in tongues, that, too, will someday cease. All the knowledge that we have now will fade away.”

A father looks over at his daughter and remembers that their Youth Pastor told his daughter that she could never be a pastor because women can’t preach.

“The one thing remaining is love.” 

A young man is thinking of the girl he is in love with and who he wants to marry one day, and he is thinking how she will love, adore, and obey him.

“Love,” the pastor goes on. “But now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

A young woman is thinking that she has been called to missions to some foreign nation where the people are of a different race and speak a different language, and how wonderful it was that the pastor offered to help her get into seminary, even though she cannot come back from the mission field and preach a sermon from the pulpit.

“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face, now I know in part, but then I shall know fully just as I also have been fully known.”

In the book “Fighting Chance – the struggle over woman suffrage and black suffrage in reconstruction America” (Faye E Dudden 2011), we learn that women’s rights were a big factor even before the Civil War.

John Piper and Wayne Grudem and Paige Patterson would have you believe that this is some modern feminist action that just sprung up after the birth control pill was invented, and that women want equality with men because of their sinful nature.

The 15^th amendment to the constitution said that citizens could not be denied the right to vote based on race.  But it did not give women the right to vote, even though Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony pushed hard for the right for women to be able to vote.  It would be another 50 years before women could vote.

How long will it be before a woman can be a deacon or an elder in your church? How long will it be before a woman can enter into a marriage and not be told that she has to submit to her husband because by doing so, she is actually submitting to Christ? How long will it be before your pastor sees women and men as equal before God?

If you are tired of seeing through a dim mirror what is staring you in the face – that men and women are both created in the image of God, join us as we speak out for women’s equality. Where men and women can serve the Lord by the gifts of the spirit, not by what gender they are born with.