christian women
The Girl Who Baptized Herself, by Meggan Watterson
BEING A YOUNG girl can be confusing. Perhaps you’ll be adored but not respected. Admired, but only if you suppress your inner longings and become the perfect vessel for your parents’ expectations. Silenced girls can grow to be silent women, stripped of agency, never taught that true power comes from deep within.
“The first time I read the New Testament as a little girl, I broke out in hives,” writes feminist theologian Meggan Watterson in her latest book, The Girl Who Baptized Herself. “With little girl clarity, I was finely attuned to detect inequity.” Into adulthood Watterson couldn’t shake the feeling that her received understanding of God was incomplete. Her understanding of God as a “love that liberates” simply didn’t align with the patriarchal and oppressive power structures she witnessed in the church. Then she discovered the story of Saint Thecla, a young woman who, after hearing the Apostle Paul preach, converted to Christianity and joined him in ministry.
The Girl Who Baptized Herself is a blend of memoir, historical analysis of early Christianity, and fictionalized inner narratives for Thecla. The story begins in Thecla’s bedroom, when she hears Paul’s preaching through her window. Thecla, born into wealth and status in Iconium (in modern-day Turkey), has lived a privileged life. When we meet her, she is soon to marry a powerful nobleman. But as she listens to Paul share the gospel, she sits motionless for three days and three nights. There is an inner shift; Thecla realizes that no matter how beautiful her life may be, a gilded cage is still a cage.
Becoming the Pastor's Wife: How Marriage Replaced Ordination as a Woman's Path to Ministry, by Beth Alison Barr
AS AN ORDAINED female minister, I was somewhat hesitant picking up Beth Allison Barr’s Becoming the Pastor’s Wife; it sounded like a story I have gone to great lengths to leave behind. Her work indeed transported me back to my days within the complementarian Southern Baptist Church, a time when I continually received messaging that, as a woman, my status was secondary to men.
Sometimes though, revisiting the pain can help to heal and integrate the wound. Barr, a professor of history, proves to be a worthy healer. I already knew that the story we’re often told about women in church leadership (i.e., they never serve as pastors) simply isn’t true, even in Southern Baptist history. What I didn’t know was just how very untrue.
Barr begins by identifying biblical church leaders such as Prisca, Junia, and Phoebe, then explores women in medieval Christianity, highlighting, for example, the impressive leadership of Milburga, a Benedictine abbess, who Barr argues functioned “like a bishop, which is why depictions of her include a crozier.”
Barr also winds her way through Southern Baptist history, making it irrevocably clear just how many leadership roles women have played in the church, including preaching, teaching, and pastoring.
Image via RNS/Adelle M. Banks
Twenty years ago, men gathered as “Promise Keepers” and filled the National Mall for a prayer rally seeking repentance and spiritual revival. On Oct. 9, it was the women’s turn.
Image via RNS/Emily McFarlan Miller
“I think there’s a moment of great creativity for women leaders in the religious sphere,” said the Rev. Katharine Rhodes Henderson, president of Auburn Theological Seminary, and author of God’s Troublemakers: How Women of Faith Are Changing the World.
“I think that we are seeing, in lots of areas of American life, that some of the traditional structures that served well for a long period of time are no longer doing so. … A time of change means there’s a possibility of new types of leadership and new people doing it.”
As you may know, the question of whether women can serve as deacons has been recently debated among many evangelicals. Since scripture makes clear that Phoebe served as a deacon in the church in Cenchrea, there is an abundance of historical and archeological evidence that women deacons were upheld by the apostles. Both Clement of Alexandria and John Chrysostom recognize Phoebe was a deacon.