Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

Tim Bayly weighs in on “Why Women Make Better Women Ministers Than Men Do,” and asks if there’s a feminine basis for piety now existing in the Church. He, of course, thinks there is, and says that that being the case, “men who want to be ministers in the Church will be at a distinct disadvantage,” although his title suggests that girly men will still be found in the pulpit.

Oh, Tim. So careful you are to make sure that no one ever sees you and your colleagues as “feminine” in piety, practice, or pronouncement.

You’re clearly not a girly-man minister, but then, we knew that from your time at the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, a ministry founded to counteract the view of Christians for Biblical Equality, which stands for a literal reading of Galatians 3:28 that says gender, as well as race and class, cannot be a distinctive that divides Christians from one another. Your contempt for egalitarians like myself, who believe that gender is neither a basis for nor a disqualification against all areas of service in the Church, is clear from the disgusting title of your final workshop session — Abortion: The Blood Sacrifice of Egalitarianism. Believe me, you have offended every brother and sister who believe that the Gospel frees all to serve freely in Christ with that bit of macho posturing, but I’ll cover that one later. Promise. In the meantime, let’s get to macho posturing and “women ministers who are actually male.” We don’t even have to explain away the contempt that oozes from you for pulpit men not like yourself.

You despise the “feminine piety” of the evangelical Church and decry those men who aren’t sufficiently endowed with masculine piety — dare we call it that? — and who let the feminie ethos you so fear permeate their churches. And if a “feminine piety” calls for or produces timid, wishy-washy, whimpering, easily defeated and entirely emotional men, that would, indeed, be a problem. Nothing would get done, and we’d run out of Kleenex.

But that doesn’t describe the feminine — it describes the cowardly, whose ranks are filled equally with men and women, although the New Testament indicates, on the first and clearest reading, that the men around Jesus were much more inclined to be that way than the women. Jesus knew that of his male followers, and he exhorted them to act in love, strength, courage, and unity — the kind of characteristics evidenced in the NT equally by men and women, if not often displayed by the disciples until after Pentecost, leaving the brave women during Christ’s Passion to gather at the foot of the cross and wait by themselves at the tomb. Nonetheless, nothing in Jesus’ exhortation to his disciples condemned the feminine nor recommended the masculine; all Jesus called for was a realization of the strength they had in him, which would produce as much in the way of love and affection as it would courage and action.

This same Jesus wept over Jerusalem, comparing himself to a mother hen desiring to gather in her chicks; his Father sprinkles the Old Testament with references to a God who describes himself in feminine imagery — not any of which is simpering, sentimental, and ineffectual. Paul’s counsel to the timid young pastor, Timothy, didn’t give him a list of kick-ass macho directives, but reminded Tim to not be discouraged by his youth, to remember the teachings of his mother and grandmother, to boldly proclaim the Gospel, and to carefully tend to the flock God had given him. This same Paul, in his first letter to the Thessalonians, compared himself and the other apostles to a nursing mother, nurturing her children in tenderness — perhaps offering the “milk” of the Scriptures to a young Church not yet ready for the “meat” of the Word (1 Thess. 2:7). His later exhortation, in ch. 3, says he and they also treated the uping Church like a father with his children, but not to negate the nursing mother image, simply to compare the apostles’ love with that of a loving, gentle, encouraging father. You undoubtedly appreciate that Paul told Timothy to “fight the good fight,” which seems masculine, I suppose — except that we’re all, male and female, called to do so. Frankly, I don’t know how well you and Paul would’ve gotten along.

The rest of the apostle’s exhortations to Timothy, applicable to all who seek to serve the Church, like the men at the Sexual Orthodoxy conference, is to be gentle, not quarrelsome, able to teach, not greedy, and of general good character and maturity. Not one of those qualities is fed by testosterone OR enhanced by estrogen; they simply are the command of God for his people, first church leaders and then those in their flock. The character of the Christian is outlined equally for women and for men in Galatians 5, the list of traits called the fruit of the Holy Spirit: Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, mercy and self-control, all expected of the maturing Christian, all made possible by the genderless Holy Spirit, all true in the non-gendered God we worship, and all evidenced by Christ Jesus, by whose human-ness, not male-ness, we can be saved.

I wonder what you would make of such a list now, though, with your fear and revulsion for the “feminine piety” you seem to see among even male pastors in today’s Church. Surely you decry, as I do, the silliness of John Eldredge’s “Wild At Heart” series; I know you think Promise Keepers was an erroneous step in the evangelical movement, as did I. But in the early ninetheenth century, the “feminine ethos” your colleague Ben Merkle will discuss in a later session was not terribly evidenced by hundred, perhaps thousands, of single women missionaries who worked tirelessly and courageously for the Gospel and for social righteousness in ways that you must admire — or don’t you, given that these brave, strong women, without losing a shred of their God-given femininity, nonetheless traveled far and wide for Christ’s Gospel rather than stay home, amassing tableware and perfecting domestic skills while waiting for marriage. (This is the counsel, by the way, of Nancy Wilson for young women).

Actually, consistently requires that you do, in fact, condemn them. As Dale Courtney would say, that’s PRICELESS in its myopic view of Kingdom priorities.

These women’s piety was not in their female-ness, but in their courage. The commitment to the Gospel and the passion that lead then, and leads now, male pastors is not a by-product of their male-ness, but of their Christ-likeness. The evangelical world has stumbled, certainly, in its embrace of the emotional, the marketable, and the faddish at the expense of the true call of the Church, and my stomach turns when I see Christian bookstores full of praying teddy bears, cute but pointless tchochtkes designed to pacify the sheep, and merchandise that promises bold Christian witness via T-shirts — but those things are hardly the fault of women or the men who love them. That the material stuff offered is often pink and crystal and fluffy in its sentimentality doesn’t make them feminine. It makes them silly, weak, and indicative of a Church strongly lacking in perspective and direction.

The heroes of the faith that I know, living and dead, weren’t so lacking. They didn’t fear being women, and they weren’t men who feared being “womanly.” Rather, they wove a cloth of strong and beautiful threads, and they used it not just to cushion and comfort, but also to fly as a banner proclaiming the true Gospel of the One who is neither male nor female, both feminine and masculine, and who desperately desires the use of a strong backbone given to his children.

Christian men who are truly strong share that body part with their Christian sisters. The problem in the Church is when other body parts are what enlivens the walk of men and stumbles that of women.