Whenever Christians speak about women’s equality, the first thing you hear is “I don’t want any women preachers.” Then comes the connection that is fostered upon people, and is not found anywhere in the Bible, linking those women who feel a call to preach, as having homosexual tendencies.
But the main focus on women’s equality is not women preachers, it is not even women deacons. When I began my ministry, all I wanted was for churches to allow women to be deacons. A deacon! That’s all. I have come to realize that equal means equal, and there is no limit to what women can do in service to God and in her church.
How often do you tell your daughter that she is inferior to your son? You tell her that every time you take her to church where she cannot be a deacon. Or to a church where she can’t answer her call to pastor – but you will gladly ship her off overseas to some foreign land where she can be a ‘missionary.’
Is ‘missionary’ less than being a deacon in the church? Who decided that being a deacon is the second highest calling, next to pastor, that a church can have?
We depend upon our missionaries to spread the gospel. Southern Baptists have Women’s Missionary Union (WMU). Baptists allow young women to go to the mission field for two year stints, and even allow them to go for longer periods of time. Unmarried women are allowed to go to the mission field which may be a dangerous place for women to be.
Who decided that the mission field can have women who are not ‘qualified’ to be deacons (the second highest office in Baptist churches) but who can be ‘qualified’ to be a missionary?
We swallow camels and strain gnats. Our bellies are full of camels.
Until every girl and every woman sitting in a church pew can serve as God calls her, or even as churches call deacons, then no woman is equal in your church.
When you walk into the church door, you are telling your girls and your wife, that all men, any man, is superior in God’s and the church’s eyes, to her.
Is that what you want for your family?
As Molly Brown said in “Titanic” movie as the women in the lifeboats refused to go looking or survivors: “These are your men out there! Don’t you want to go back and save them?” Men, these are your wives, your daughters, your sisters out there, trying to survive in the cold waters of their church. Don’t you want to help them?
Its 2016 – If you are ready to see your wife, your daughter, your sister be all that she can be in her church, tell your pastor that it is time.
(reprint from April 2012)
My new book “Dethroning Male Headship: Second Edition” is available on Amazon and Kindle. All my books can be found on www.shirleytaylor.net
bWe Baptist Women for Equality's Blog 
Not only that, but the stance that a woman cannot even be a deacon here at home, but is somehow still good enough to go evangelize the unwashed masses overseas, is inherently racist.
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Yes, it is racist. They can teach those who are darker in skin and who speak a different language, but when they come back home, they cannot stand behind a pulpit to preach, or teach men, or serve communion. We have constructed a strange religion of rules and laws, haven’t we? They don’t even make sense, but we live and die by them.
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Oh, yes. Women preachers and teachers are immediately labeled not only lesbians but abortionists. Reminds me of a conversation I had with one of the elders at a local church I visited for several weeks. He,a Princeton graduate (so you would think he could think critically and do a proper exegesis of Paul’s writings), actually said, “Men are responsible to interpret the Bible for women.” I was gobsmacked.
While I asked a few polite but pointed questions based on the truth in the Scriptures (i.e., the Holy Spirit leads and guides the whole Body of Christ, not just half of it, right? for starters), a young guy on my right was saying, beneath his breath, but barely, stuff about abortionists and lesbians, implying that was who and what I was.
At that time I had been married for 30 years and I would have told him that had I allowed myself to be distracted. I would have also asked him where HE was when the pro-life group I worked with and wrote for, for a number years, was cursed and spat at a huge pro-life rally not many years prior. I would have asked if he helped us put out the signs the pro-abortion activists set on fire as we were speaking to the crowd, there. I would have asked him if he, too, was “cursed” by a “witch” who spewed her venom at us as she walked by and we were praying. I would have asked him if he, too, was arrested, like my sister, on another day she and many others were peacefully protesting in front of an abortion clinic. The only reason I wasn’t arrested for the day was because I was taking pictures for the newsletter; for example, snapshots of the pit bull and its pro-abortion activist owner who said he was going to “sic (the dog) on us”–until he saw me taking pictures…
Oh, yes, they do cling angrily to their stereotypes about women who want to, like Mary, sit at the feet of Jesus, no man in between, learn of Him and then follow their calling to preach or teach or do whatever the Holy Spirit gifts them to do–without having to consult with their husbands’, first.
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What a mean spirit prevails against women. It is pure meanness. My recent blog said that when we look for love in churches, we are looking in the wrong place. I know many church members believe they are loving and would dispute what I just said, but when they are enablers of the attitude you write about, love is missing. The thing about Jesus and the women he spoke to, none had husbands! Now what do they make of that? It is obvious that Jesus was telling women that they do not need a male go-between.
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Yes, only Joanna was married. But interestingly, Jesus never told her she had to go home and be a homemaker and submissive wife!
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Right. Jesus never elevated males because of their special anatomy, nor for their special insight, nor for their spirituality. He just never elevated man like we are told to do today. And in particular note, he never put women into submissive roles. My ignorance is showing – how do we know Joanna was married?
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Shirley, the reference to Joanna is Luke 8:3: “Joanna, the wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod’s household.”
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And she was also the one of the women at tomb? Thanks for this! I had completely overlooked it.
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