It Takes the Whole Body of Christ to Raise Up a Woman
In our Spring 2018 issue of harvestusa magazine, guest writer Karen Hodge shares her perspective, gained from many years of personal and professional experience, that women’s ministry is vitally needed in the church. And that vital need for women’s ministry is even more important today, as gender distinctions are being erased. (You can read the entire magazine issue online: Women, Sexuality, and the Church)
For many years our church hosted regional gatherings for church planters to encourage and equip them as they began their work. It was always my joy at these events to feed them as well. Several years ago, over a slice of Chicago deep-dish pizza, I listened to a young pastor tell me about the church he intended to plant. It would be relational and organic. There would primarily be small groups and absolutely no programs. He said he did not see the relevance of men’s or women’s ministry.
I asked him about his family. He told me all about his wife and three daughters. At this moment it probably would have been nice if I had informed this church planter that I was a church planter’s wife of 27 years as well as the Coordinator of Women’s Ministry for our denomination (PCA) because I am pretty sure he thought I was just the pizza lady. I then asked him, besides his wife, who would train his daughters about what it means to be a woman. He said the pulpit ministry and their teaching at home should be enough. I said maybe so, but I had recently reflected as my daughter got married that it took all kinds of women in the church to help Anna Grace understand who God was and who He was calling her to be as a woman.
One of the books of the Bible that captivated my heart as a young church planter’s wife was the book of Titus. Paul encouraged Titus that in order to plant a healthy church he should instruct the older men to train the younger men and the older women to train the younger women. These older and younger people lived together in Crete. Paul said of the Cretans, “(they) are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons” (Titus 1:12). It was a worldly and evil place. “They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work” (1:16). There was a fundamental disconnect between what they professed to believe and the way they lived their lives.
Crete sounded a lot like South Florida where we were planting a church. God was bringing so many women who did not know Christ to our fellowship. I knew programs were not the answer, but I found myself in a living room full of women. So I went scrambling for answers; I was eager to know the strategy.
The strategy is in the text: we are not called to necessarily start a stellar women’s ministry but rather to “teach what accords with sound doctrine” (Titus 2:1). To “teach what is good and so train the young women” (Titus 2:3-4). Older women (chronologically or spiritually speaking) are to train the younger women what sound doctrine has to do with all of life, including parenting, relationships, their marriages, and their personal character.
The word “train” means to show, unpack or demonstrate. This command implies proximity. You can’t show someone something unless you are near them. It is a call for life-on-life discipleship. The word “sound” means healthy or hygienic. I knew that the air I was breathing in South Florida all around me was polluted with unhygienic worldly thinking. So, Paul was telling me that sound doctrine was just what my heart and the hearts of the women around me needed. Sound doctrine makes sin-sick people healthy. Sound doctrine yields sound living, sound homes, and sound churches.
So why was I trying to persuade the pizza pastor that there needed to be some provision for gender-specific discipleship in his church and for his daughters? I believe gender distinctness was God’s very good plan.
“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness….
So, God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good”
(Genesis 1:26-27; 31).
In God’s design, both maleness and femaleness are necessary to image God. Maleness and femaleness are also essential to fulfill humanity’s purpose, to be fruitful and multiply and spread God’s glory to the ends of the earth. And it takes maleness and femaleness to be one flesh. “Therefore, man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). And yet maleness and femaleness image God regardless of marital status. In all of these dimensions, we see equality of being and yet a necessary diversity of function. Maleness and femaleness, no matter how hard we try to delete it or separate it from each other, remains inseparable. United as one, men and women are used by God to display the gospel story together.
I believe women’s ministry begins when a young woman is born: teaching, training, and showing her through our words and deeds what it means to be a woman who follows Christ in our sexually-chaotic age.
Furthermore, women are products of our theology. What we think about God and His Word profoundly shapes all our actions, attitudes, and thoughts. Because the Fall has distorted maleness and femaleness, I believe it is essential to train women to be keen theologians, showing them the hope of the gospel in light of the fact that all of us are sexually broken and teaching them to think biblically about all of God’s Word, including the implications of their gender.
I believe women’s ministry begins when a young woman is born: teaching, training, and showing her through our words and deeds what it means to be a woman who follows Christ in our sexually-chaotic age. We must be zealous in encouraging and equipping her to have a sound doctrine concerning her sexuality. While avoiding gender stereotypes, we must encourage her to fulfill her God-given calling as a woman. In a culture where gender is aggressively deconstructed, seen as being unnecessary for who we are as persons, we must come alongside her in the highs and lows of life and help her to delight in her femaleness as part of God’s good design. I believe it takes more than a mother to do this; it will need a community, the Body of Christ.
Fast forward to last year. I got a call from the pizza pastor. He planted a great church that had grown rapidly, but so had the issues his congregation was facing, especially those of the women. His women had begun to gather together and were looking for guidance and direction. He wondered if I would be willing to come and help the women begin to think biblically about womanhood, to encourage them both with sound doctrine and to not lose heart in this unhygienic world. I responded that I was delighted to come, and I even offered to bring the pizza.
You can watch David White talk some more about helping women in the accompanying video: How Can Church Leaders Help Women Who Struggle Sexually? These short videos can be used as discussion starters in small group settings, mentoring relationships, men’s and women’s groups, etc.
