Women in the Church

Guess what! This is a topic for the Conversation, and we haven't even talked about it yet! I'm being early! The reason I know about it ahead of time being that I'm kind of doing tomorrows. So. I'm throwing my thoughts up here to try and make sense of them ahead of time, which might just be a good idea.

There are no women bishops in the Church of England, and as far as I know, there aren't any women priests in the Catholic church. In an era of equality, this seems a little strange, and the church has been criticised for it. On the other hand, people in the Church of England have threatened to leave if women are appointed as bishops.

The justification for this is taken from Paul's teachings that women should be silent in the church and ask their husbands at home, and that women should obey their husbands. Sure, Jesus taught equality, the arguement goes, but Paul, well, he wrote something like a quarter of the new testament, was a real man of God. So we ought to follow his teachings.

I really struggled with this at first. I couldn't reconcile the idea of Jesus who went to the oppressed, the despised, and lifted them up, with the idea that women should be oppressed in the church. My original idea was that Paul was writing with regard to his times, that there was a culture thing in there, that, well, he wasn't Jesus, was he?

Doing RE at GCSE, I discovered the second part of the women obey your husbands. I think it was first at Devoted. Anyway, wherever it was, it doesn't really matter. The second part goes along the lines of husbands honour your wives. The idea was that the husband would not ask the wife to do anything unreasonable, and that the husband would be prepared to lay down his life for the wife.

I also learnt that the reason it's thought Paul told the women to shut up in the church was because they were sat at the back of the synagogue (bearing in mind that the early church often borrowed the Jewish synagogues for their services), and they were shouting down questions to their husbands who were sat at the front, while the teacher was speaking. Obviously this was a bit of a nuisance. It didn't show a good image to those outside of the church either. A lot of Paul's teachings were concerned with Christians being kind to everyone, with Christians acting like the ideal. They were accused of cannibalism, so you can see why he wanted them to be nice to people.

An interesting thing I learnt very recently was that at the end of Romans, when Paul sends his personal greetings, a woman was chosen as his first in line to greet. He also said she had been a great help to him, elevating her to almost the status of an apostle. Also, he proceeded to mention various other women in his greetings, and put the woman first in a husband and wife pairing. Women traditionally weren't mentioned in Jewish writing (just look at the geneologies earlier in the Bible if you don't believe me).

Also in Romans is a section where Paul says you've not to use his teachings to create disharmony or oppression.

Like I said earlier, one of the reasons this issue has been something I've struggled with is that I don't see how the idea of oppression and preventing certain groups of people from partaking fits into the universal nature of Jesus' love. God's love is for everyone, not just select groups. I think this has been ignored by the church in a lot of situations, not just with regard to gender. Anyway, that's my take on it. If you're coming to the Conversation tomorrow, well, that's a sneak preview. Although it's more a writeup of just about everything I plan to say.

Remember: God made you special and he loves you very much.