Unexpected Destinations IV: A Conversation with Wes Granberg-Michaelson
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We discuss gender in church leadership today and continuing challenges for women in ministry and leadership in the church.
CHR: I’d like to turn to the issue of gender. There were very few women mentioned in leadership roles in the book. Of course, you are married to a strong woman, and she played an important role; but women in leadership were not primary in the book. Particularly in the RCA, the “conscience clause” is going to come before the General Synod again. One of the women mentioned in the book, whom I had the honor of working with at Western, Vicky Menning, spoke at Western Seminary in my last year there at a seminar on women and ordination in the RCA. She spoke very movingly about the need for the conscience clause to be defeated.
Gender can be a contentious issue in church life, and there are plenty of places in many denominations where women have a hard time finding a place to use the gifts God has given them. I have just taken a new call and I am the first woman in the call, which actually makes me laugh because I have always been the first woman in the call throughout my ordained ministry. Can you speak about your own journey on women in church leadership?
WGM: You’re right, Cynthia, when you read the book and see my journey, it’s a journey through first of all evangelicalism, and then into Reformed circles, and into the various expressions of Christian community in the ‘70s. When you look at those they were all male-dominated, no question about it, and suffered for it. It was only in the ‘70s, with the development of the Evangelical Women’s Caucus, which Karin helped form, and when it began to be fresh thinking about how the roles of women and men could be understood in different ways.
Those fundamental questions are still with us in some parts of the RCA, and in the Covenant Church, and others. I will state plainly and be quite blunt that it goes at its heart, back to the popularity of the complementarian view of the relationship of men and women, which has done more damage to efforts to use and celebrate and fully embrace the God-given gifts of women today. I think it is dangerous, and more importantly, I do not think it is Biblically founded – and I think that is where the argument must be joined today. In Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, if you study the text, I don’t think you can found the argument that God made men and women different, and it’s not just plumbing, it’s the way they are put together and they are meant to do fundamentally different things. I think this is a dangerous, unbiblical argument. All you have to do is to read the book of Acts, and keep asking yourself, where are the women in this picture? And to realize that women are astonishingly present throughout the book, in ways that are atypical for the culture, to see that the Bible is saying something very different. It’s not just the conscience clause – I think the conscience clause is unnecessary, it should be eliminated, but it’s bigger than that. When you look at Mark Driscoll, who is very popular with some male, young church leaders, you find a situation where there is something that must be challenged, it must be challenged at the level of its biblical authenticity. I simply think that it’s not fair. The other perspective I bring to it is the way you frame the ministry of the church in the church’s mission, it can get us out and free us up from the stereotypical view of women’s roles in leadership. It is no accident that women in the RCA’s history and in other churches lived in this weird irony where they were leading ministries on the mission field in India and other places, and they would come back and congregations would wonder if they could allow them to preach. When you frame this in the gifts that God is calling forth through God’s Spirit it can shift the issue. In my own journey, I have moved from a strictly and severely patriarchal upbringing to the point that Karin and I would choose to hyphenate our names, and I have gone through a fundamental change, to the point that I see this as an urgent issue going forward.
Dick Hamm (DH): Complementarianism comes out of a male-centered read back into the scriptures. The scriptures tend to say that because we are looking for them to say that. I look more to Galatians, myself.
Adam Phillips (AP): Complementarianism is a massive concern, and it’s finding some traction with young, white male leaders, particularly those newer to the tradition, and it’s a big concern. But even for me, and many of my male colleagues, we have grown up with women in ministry and had women colleagues in seminary, and believe fully in the calling of women to the full range of ministries – and even then, I can do stupid things. I don’t always think through what I say or how I reflect on things. I’m not seeking women mentors, or looking for women authors to inform my preaching, or teaching, or writing. That’s a longer journey that some of us will have to go after and undertake, because it’s a generational thing, we may be the 2nd or 3rd generation of evangelicals to know women as fully engaged in all forms of ministry, but we’re still on the journey and it will take a lot of intentionality as well.