Arguments for male-only ministry, good and bad
A conversation with a good friend yesterday reminded me of an old (9 months; palaeolithic in internet debating terms) blog post by another good friend, Mike Higton. Mike addresses a class of arguments for restricting certain things – church teaching ministry, perhaps, but the argument works equally well for frontline combat roles or for preschool childcare – to people of one gender. He addressed arguments of the form: ‘This role requires characteristic X; But characteristic X is generally more developed in people of one gender; so this role should be reserved to people of that gender.’ Thus expressed, this is formal, but the concrete examples are not hard to list: men are generally physically stronger, so only men should be miners; women are generally more nurturing, so only women should be full-time parents; men are generally more logical, so only men should be teachers in the church; … Mike’s point, wonderfully argued – do read the post – was that arguments of this form inevitably fail. Given their prevalence – I have seen similar arguments widely celebrated online in the past couple of weeks – it is worth spelling out this failure very carefully. Let me get formal again, and lay out the logic as carefully as I can: C1: Role A requires people with a high degree of characteristic X, a requirement so important that it over-rides every other potential qualification. C2: Characteristic X is unevenly distributed between genders, such that people of one gender on average exhibit it to a much higher degree than people of the other gender. C3: Therefore, role A ought to be available to people of one gender only. Thus stated, this argument is not quite demonstrably false, but it is very nearly so. The crucial point lies in the definition of ‘much higher’ in C2. The argument sketched can only have logical validity if ‘much higher’ is so extreme as to exclude the highest example from the other gender. Let me illustrate by imagined example: let us take ‘height’ as characteristic X; unquestionably it is a gendered characteristic; the Scottish Health Survey in 2008 recorded the average height of men (aged 16+) as 175cm, and the average height of women (aged 16+) as 161.3cm. Role A might be ‘Goal Defence in a Netball team’; this is no doubt profoundly unfair to very gifted athletes, but suppose that actually height was what mattered here, far beyond talent, fitness, or any other characteristic; in a mixed netball team, should we reserve the GD role for men only? The answer is – obviously I trust – no, or at least only yes in extraordinarily restrictive circumstances. Average heights are merely average; individual people are below or above them. I am, it happens, some way above the average male height according to this survey; but I have several female Scottish friends who are taller than me. When we went to the women’s Netball tournament at the Commonwealth Games, I am fairly sure that every single player on the four teams we watched was taller than me. Now, I suppose that the tallest person in the world is a man (although this was not always true). So, I assume, is the second. Are the top hundred all male? The top ten thousand? It seems clear that, if a random village were to put together a netball team, it would not be at all impossible that the tallest person in the village would be female. It is unlikely, but that would lead us not to male-only Goal Defence play, but to a situation where most, but not all, GDs were male. Perhaps the proportion would be 80-20, perhaps 90-10; at some elite national level, it might even be 99.5-0.5. The point is it can never be 1-0; this form of argument cannot lead to a restriction of a role to one gender only; in the logic sketched above, C3 can never follow logically from C1 and C2. Now, like Mike, I do not suppose that the characteristics necessary for Christian leadership of whatever form are gendered in any interesting way. But even if they were, a blanket ban on men (or women) serving in a particular leadership role would be wrong; we should instead be expecting and accepting a gender imbalance, not a gender monopoly. Someone committed to such an account of gendered characteristics might plausibly argue that preachers/church leaders ought to be 80% male, but s/he can never argue that these roles are restricted to men only. Any argument of the form C1-C3 above necessarily fails. An argument for the restriction of church roles by gender on the basis of uneven gender distribution of a characteristic is always a bad argument; on...
Read More‘In Memory of Her’
In Memory of Her is an idea I’ve been working on for a while; it’s not quite where I wanted it to be before going live, but International Women’s Day seems the right day to launch it. It’s a website, telling the stories of women who have had significant preaching or teaching ministries, or otherwise led the church. Nothing more than that. I hope it will grow to include hundreds of stories. I hope that perhaps someday a young woman sensing God’s call in a context that does not encourage her might discover some of these narratives of mothers in the faith and find the courage and faith to follow her vocation as a result. That’s all. Do have a look, and if you’d like to write someone’s story, or draw a picture or something for the site, you’d be most...
Read MorePreaching Dinah’s Silence
A few months ago we were preaching the life of Jacob in my local church, and I was given Gen. 35; as I came to prepare, I noticed that our preaching plan skipped over Gen. 34. On one level, no problem: in dealing with big chunks of Scripture we often do that; on another, though, I was uncomfortable. I’ve commented before in public about my concern over preachers – including me – silently passing over the several narratives of sexual violence that Scripture records; in view of this, I did not feel able to pass from Gen. 33 to Gen. 35 and silently ignore Dinah’s experience of rape, and the bizarre and violent events that followed. I read these texts again in my personal devotions this week, recalled struggling with how to preach them, and reflected on how current they are just now. Dinah is raped by Shechem; Jacob, her father, does not care (the text powerfully locates this in part in the disfunction of Jacob’s family: ‘Dinah, the daughter of Leah, whom she had borne to Jacob…’ (1) – the description distances Dinah from Jacob by recalling Jacob’s preference for Rachel over Leah); her brothers, by contrast are incensed. Shechem, the rapist, wants to make things right by marrying her, and his father tries to arrange that. Dinah’s brothers use this desire to construct a trap, and then we are presented with the comically grotesque image of the men of Shechem trying, and of course failing, to fight whilst just-circumcised. Jacob laments the vengeance in the end, because it has disturbed his plans to settle by the city. As I say, my first decision was that I had to face this text; not for the first time in preaching, I found that my insistence on treating a text left me with a problem. How should we – how should I, as a man – preach this strange story? If all Scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, &c., how is this God-breathed Scripture in any way useful? Rightly or wrongly I found the clue in Gen.. 33:18-20. Jacob camped in sight of the city, and bought the piece of land where he pitched his tent. It sounds innocent enough, but the cities of Canaan have not had a good press so far in Genesis. Abraham walked away from the cities on the plain, and saw them destroyed by fire because there were not ten righteous people amongst them; Isaac would not take a wife from the people of the land – and was disgusted when Esau did (twice). In Gen. 35:1, when it seems Jacob’s story is getting back on track, it is with God’s command to go to Bethel, a place in the wilderness. Camping in sight of the city was not a good move. And so I read Gen. 34 as a narrative of what happens when God’s people compromise on the holy demand to be separate; that demand can be, and often has been, misread, of course, but it is there and serious; there are cultural patterns that are so distorted that it is impossible to live well within them. Jacob’s compromise, camping in sight of the city, implicates him and his family in cultural patterns that are inevitably destructive. Dinah, tragically, is the one who suffers most from this. For me, the most striking thing about Gen. 34 is Dinah’s silence. She is raped; her father chooses to do nothing (5); her brothers are outraged, and plan revenge; the rapist proposes to marry her; his father seeks to smooth things over. She is raped, and a bunch of men talk about how to deal with it. What did Dinah feel? Was she longing for revenge, prepared to marry Shechem, wanting only to come home quietly? Men speak and argue about her and around her, but her voice is conspicuously silent. The Bible is unremittingly honest about what Yeats called ‘the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’ (‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’ – originally in Last Poems (1939), but variously anthologised). Human beings are, and so human culture is, warped, broken, and sinful. By camping in sight of the city, Jacob enters this culture, and he, and his family, become entangled in its warped threads. One of the fundamental breaks in human culture is patriarchy – a part of the first curse (Gen. 3:16), and a seemingly-unremitting distortion of human life ever since. Dinah is raped, and then a bunch of men try to work out how to turn this event to their various advantages; her voice is just ignored. The story has happened ten thousand thousand times through history; as I...
Read More‘Hate something? Change something!’ On gender bias in conferences
I have a recurrent experience with car ads, which I think is their fault not mine: I can often, years later, remember every detail of the ad except which particular car it was advertising. I suspect this is a result of the mismatch between the grandiose claims made by marketeers and the tiny differences between actual cars. One ad, years back, ran under the slogan ‘hate something? change something!’ – as best I recall one manufacturer or another had improved their diesel engine slightly in some particular, and the marketing department decided to make this an example of world-transformation up there with the American Civil Rights movement or the ending of apartheid… I love the slogan, though. For myself I translate it as ‘don’t moan; transform!’ There are a few things I care about enough to really not like; it would be easy to talk a lot about them; the challenge instead is to do something that will actually make some difference (which may involve some intentional talking, of course). One of the things I try occasionally to do something about is gender balance in those bits of the church I can get my hands on – mostly UK Baptist and evangelical life. So I became interested when Helen (@helen_a13, aka ‘the tweeter formerly known as @fragmentz’) and @God_Loves_Women started asking questions on Twitter about gender representation on UK Christian conference platforms (based on Rachel Held Evans twitter comments about the gender (im)balance at something called ‘The Nines’ in the USA, and an American journalist offering an analysis of the ‘biggest Christian conferences in the evangelical world’ – he used ‘world’ in that odd US English sense of ‘North America’; cf. ‘World Series Baseball’). I tweeted a few names and lists of conferences to include, and looked forward to seeing the results sometime next month… …I should know GLW better than that. Her analysis went live the next morning, and makes sobering reading for anyone involved, as I have been, in organising and running conferences. It suffers the problems of any statistical analysis (you know the old one about a statistician being someone who can lie with her head in the freezer and her feet in the oven, and claim that on the whole, she is feeling completely normal?). But these stats are too skewed to enable any excuses, and I suspect that we all know that if we did the more granular stuff it would just look worse. There’s something here to moan about – or to transform. How might we do the latter? First, there are already some brilliant blogs on the subject: Hannah Swithinbank asks conference organisers to front up and be honest. If you failed to get a decent (which means representative, as well as skilled) speaking team, tell us – publicly – how hard you tried, and what you are going to do different to do better next time. Martin Saunders talks about the effort the UK Youthwork Summit put in to achieve gender balance, and so gives a model for others to follow Jenny Baker points helpfully to some of the underlying structural issues that need to be named and changed. Jonny Baker is typically direct about how easy it should be. Second – guess what? The church is not the only community that faces this particular problem. People have talked very practically about increasing female representation at science conferences; at game developer conferences; at conferences on writing JavaScript – and probably lots of other places. There are great ideas here we could happily borrow… What else could we do? Here are some ideas, thrown out at random: 1. Picking up on Hannah’s points: if your gender ratio is rubbish, commit – publicly – to do something about it at the conference. Create one bursary for every excess male speaker, to be awarded to a gifted young woman; have your top speakers meet with them day by day through the conference to help and encourage them into using their gifts; next year, give them a slot on the programme; … 2. People say they can’t find female speakers – so is there space for a directory, listing great women, their particular gifts and expertise? 3. On twitter, Jenny Baker said she and others had tried the directory idea, and people had been reluctant to put themselves forward. So build a group through intentional mentoring, training sessions, and safe practice spaces; meet people, and encourage them to get involved; … (I know Jenny and Wendy Beech-Ward are doing this already; I wonder how much support they are getting from conference organisers who complain about their inability to find women to speak?) 4. Or, instead or as...
Read MoreChurch responses to equal marriage legislation
I see no less than seven different positions concerning the introduction of SS/E marriage that were/are on the table from the churches in the UK. My point here is not to defend or to demolish any of the arguments, just to make clear that different positions were/are in play, and that they led/lead to different attitudes to the bills.
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