Conference Ruminations

To this point, the CBE blogging team has been providing summaries and some personal reactions to various seminars and sessions of the 2005 annual conference of the Christians for Biblical Equality. Perhaps it is time to provide some analysis and personal takes on the conference experience.

This was my first CBE conference. It was different than I expected. First, I expected more anger. Oh, there was anger all right, but it was subdued. You had to talk to people and hear their stories. The stories weren’t told angrily, but the stories themselves embodied the anger. There was the Bible School teacher administrator missionary with a doctorate who had to stand to the side whenever a man came visiting, and the visitor would speak to the students, no matter what fool thing was on his mind and no matter who he was. And she was left with the pieces when he left, and she often would have to say, “No, that wasn’t Biblical. Here’s what the Bible really says.” There was also the medical doctor who the church leaders would trust with the physical care of church members but not the spiritual care. She felt she had to do something about that, so now she supports the work of CBE with both her time and her means.

Secondly, I expected a little more feistiness. The conference was downright genteel. Academics, basically, started CBE, but they get feisty sometimes. I didn’t meet a single political agitator. Instead, the leaders presented more of a sense of pastoral care and concern, a desire to help. Biblical normalcy. Support for the family.

Thirdly, the education level of conference goers was extremely high, which seems to be true of CBE membership in general. But leaders come in many different stripes, and not all of them are highly university trained. I noticed that it is a goal of CBE to attract more men to membership and conferences. Perhaps they should also aim to attract women business leaders, creatives, opinion makers, writers, and even Miss or Mrs. average church goer. The leaders said that one of their most difficult tasks had been to decide on who their audience was and then stick to it. So they’ve obviously put a lot of thought into it. Perhaps this desire to expand the audience to men is more recent, but if the audience are conservative church women, then perhaps they haven’t reached all categories of that original audience.

Lastly, much of the early work of CBE has been Biblical research and theology-making, which was necessary, because in the minds of most conservative Christians is the question, “What does the Bible say?” But if it is true that hierarchicalism is bad for both the church and marriages, then that case needs to be made — made insistently and made powerfully. The conference and CBE in general are weighted still to the theological side. But Biblical/historical studies and sociological studies should be seen like two wings of an airplane: slight one and the thing doesn’t fly. The fact that Dr. Van Leeuwen’s seminars were so packed out is, to me, evidence that the membership itself has a great desire for more information and study of the sociological implications of hierarchicalism and egalitarianism.