Please read my latest at Comment, on George Floyd and what happens when we make man an instrument.
And also, here is a spooky story for Halloween.
A friend sent me this post yesterday and I thought I’d open up a conversation about it.
looks at some data about male and female pastors, and there are a few small things that were interesting to me.First, pastors are getting older. A lot older. There will be a clergy shortage crisis at some point, if there isn’t already.
Second, women’s sermons are shorter, and seem to be somewhat more informal than men’s (judging by whether they speak at or away from a lectern). I couldn’t believe that the average sermon from a female pastor was 1800 words- that is just a warm up, for a writer.
Third, it looks like women are slightly more likely to have graduate degrees, on average, than their male colleagues.
This last piece is interesting. I have written that women have outpaced men at graduate schools in recent years. This trend is likely to continue, and we are seeing pretty stunning disparities among women and men in college level education as well. Combine all of this with an aging pastorate, and I wonder- are we going to have a gender switch in paid pastoral ministry in the coming years, where the sheer availability of qualified women forces the hand of small churches who might otherwise have been reluctant to hire women, but who now must due to a lack of other options?
The question of women’s ordination has been a thorn in the side of American Protestants since the middle of the last century. Interestingly enough, before that it seems that the terms of the debate were somewhat settled; women ministered when there wasn’t a qualified man available, or overseas, where they were about equally distributed as overseas missionaries. They were also pretty free as far as mercy ministries went, and spoke in tent meetings and the like as well. So what has changed?
A graf, from Tim Larsen’s excellent piece on “Evangelicalism’s Strong History of Women in Ministry”.
While there have always been evangelicals who have rejected women in public ministry, something has changed in more recent decades that has made many evangelicals believe that this more restrictive position is the only evangelical one. What has happened in the last 60 years that has inclined so many conservative evangelicals toward assuming that those who affirm women in public ministry are departing from assuming commitment to Scripture?
He offers three theses: the mid-century was a period that restricted norms on women in all areas of society, evangelicals were reacting to the excesses of feminism, and evangelicals were reacting to the excesses of Pentecostalism in relation to prophecy and women’s public ministry especially. I think all of these are likely true. Let me repeat this again- much of the modern evangelical reaction to women in ministry was actually a reaction to second-wave feminism and its excesses.
We can see the trajectory of Elisabeth Elliot’s own life tracking these retrenchments.
What is interesting to me especially is that the retrenchment around women in public ministry seems to have largely been a reaction to broader social forces in the American context. And here I’ll offer a thesis: some of the energy around expanding roles for women in public ministry has been a reaction to broader social forces, just those operating in the opposite direction. Meaning, as norms for women’s participation in higher education and the workplace have loosened or disappeared, church spaces have faced increasing pressure to also alter their norms around women’s leadership. So I think that a good bit of the energy towards women’s ordination is about equality for women, and is not rooted in a theology of ordination.
For the record- I do support ordaining women, but this is because of what I think ordination is, not because of what I think women are.
more on this one day, perhaps.