Ministry

We had a very interesting and unique day in Worldview Capstone class today. Capstone is taught by four teachers, but our whole graduating class is part of it. When we walked in, we each got a note card that we were supposed to write a question on - any question at all having to do in any kind of broad way with faith. Questions ranged from "What about Christianity makes you uncomfortable and why do you still believe it anyways?" to "Is porn okay?" to "What should we look for in a church?" to "What biblical support is there for the moral exclusivity of monogamy?" (That last one was mine, by the way.) It was enlightening and deep and interesting - it's a joy to hear the diversity in the respective teachers' answers.

That having been said, it strikes me what little diversity there is in the type of people that always seem to have these types of discussions. (I only noticed this about 40 minutes into class, and only because they were sitting all next to each other in a perfect line - I swear I'm not trying to be a Feminazi.) Don't get me wrong, I loved the conversation and it's obviously better to have that pannel than have inept speakers, but why is it that they - and, come to think of it, anyone else from the faculty that might've been chosen to be on that pannel - are all men? Why is it that now, as I'm tracking down people to interview for my senior project, all the people I've come up with are men? Where are all the women? What are they doing? I have six people lined up to speak so far and two pending; one is a woman. All the pastors are men. All the leaders are men. All the teachers with that air of authority around them are men. The number of women in my life that seem to have a role with power and leadership equal to the men in my life with the same power could easily fit on one hand. Come to think of it, that really doesn't make much sense. I grew up with this assumption that we live in a post-feministic society, where gender and race and class no longer have any significance outside of themselves. Well, evidently, they do, because almost all of the teachers and pastors and writers and theologians and musicians and people in general that I look up to and am given as examples are men.

I know a lot of this is still because a lot of churches teach that women shouldn't be pastors at all. Strangely enough, that doctrine barely makes me feel uneasy, because it's been hammered into my mind for as long as I can remember and I have never had a female pastor. But as you can probably infer from my whole little schpeel up above, I have a bit of cognitive dissonance built up in my psyche over the whole deal. I have a lot of internalized discrimination. I don't listen to women as easily. I don't believe women as easily. On a distant social level, I don't trust women as easily. I'm completely sure that that's only because I have so rarely been given the opportunity to regard women as equal authorities to men. But it's very uncomfortable to stretch my mind in such a way.

For example, read this article. (Which, I might note, is by a man. Who is a pastor. With a wife.) Listening to Driscoll's interview, there is no way I would ever have come on his side. Intellectually, I find it utterly repulsive the way he argues about it and the way he disrespects people that differ from him. But practically speaking, his arguments are the same arguments that were pounded into my subconscious as a child. I always considered myself a free-thinker; I was raised very cynical by my father, and began voicing outright disagreements with my Sunday School teachers by age 11. I never thought I was at risk of absorbing attitudes like this, but here they are. And even if I'm aware of my ridiculous irrational bias that even discriminates against myself, I still fight to overpower it. I get the feeling that it will take a great deal more women in leadership before I'm able to get over it completely. I'm certainly not there yet.