Really!?
My friend almost stopped in his tracks as we walked around the Mall in the beautiful city of Armagh, Northern Ireland. This was our usual route where we talk all things church and he had just confessed that he struggles with humility (don’t we all). My response is what surprised him.
My wife is my go-to example for humility.
I admit, I didn’t think that I would get such a strong reaction from my usually docile friend. He is happily married with several children around the same age as my own.
Really!?
Well, yeah! There isn’t anything my wife does that’s just about her. Any time she is doing anything she has myself and the girls in her mind the whole time. I wish I had that kind of presence of mind and lack of selfish concern that I could say that I always put the concerns of others above my own like she does.
I’m going to be honest. Most of the time I’m speaking in these kinds of contexts I surprise even myself. I had done a little bit of heart work earlier in the year towards listening to the voice of the Spirit through those we’re unused to hearing Him through but until that moment I hadn’t connected the dots that many of us don’t listen to God when He speaks through the women in our lives. The times that we do listen it’s not because we are listening to them as women but as grandmothers who transcend womanhood in our minds (for some reason) or else we listen to them because they are highly educated and we are not.
Drs and Authors
1 and 2 both point out in their respective works the fact that for women to be taken seriously in all of Church history this kind of transcendence of womanhood to be seen as men was necessary to keep laywomen in their place, since the woman in question couldn’t be silenced without being seen to transgress God and His word. The willing servitude of all other women depended on the occasional exception to the exceptional (and therefore male?) woman.This concession for exceptionalism is a repeated theme in the history of women in places of authority and otherwise being relegated to the kitchen and the nursery. The lowest of men are given more platform than the most exceptional of women in the body of Christ and this is to our shame. God’s voice is given more clout when heard through a weak man than a strong woman in our current flesh centred systems.
who writes here on Substack recently published the conclusion to her running series The Evangelical Bro Code3. It her series, Beaty has detailed the problem of male dominance in the Christian sphere and how the Evangelical Bro Code has kept women out of the loop even when they occupy key positions of authority within their churches and organisations. These are the stories of exceptional women within the body Christ—no indeed—exceptional Christians, people we should all look up to in their work and faith but because we don’t listen to the Spirit of God in women we will not likely listen to these women who are often seen as interlopers in a man’s world. We are not used to the timbre of God’s voice when it carries feminine overtones and this will not excuse us when we live in disobedience because there are no men to repeat their sermons for us to hear God in a comfortable and familiar timbre.4When we look to the women in our lives as examples of love, faith and hope in the gospel of Jesus Christ, we realise (especially in the case of humility) that the most humble man we know is put to shame by the most prideful woman we know. I dare say that this is the case for many virtues we claim to value among the people of God. This International Woman’s Day, open your ears and your heart to the voice of God calling you to repentance through the voice of the women in your life.
3 Helpful Practices
Buy an audio book written by a woman speaking in authority in your field of interest.
Purposefully ask a woman’s opinion on a spiritual question you have and meditate on her answer.
Pay attention to when the women in your life are speaking and ask God to open your ears to the things He is saying through them.
Dr Beth Allison Bar is the author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood (2021) and
here on Substack.Dr Grace Hamman is the author of Jesus Through Medieval Eyes (2023) and
here on Substack.Reader Query: How Do We Break the Evangelical Bro Code?https://substack.com/home/post/p-142396661?r=2v2ne0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I am, of course, referring to the infamous repeat sermon debacle when a popular Christian pastor retaught a bible passage taught the day before by a woman speaker because she was a woman and had no authority to preach. If anyone knows where to find this, I will link it here. I didn’t have any luck.