Christians of all stripes make mistakes, but usually they are not quite as public as when a pastor stumbles in a service. I was present at a very painful service earlier this month in Ecuador which started out with good intentions but ended in fiasco. A little girl of 13 in a gorgeous […]
Much has been written recently about a Watertown, New York, elderly woman who was fired after teaching Sunday School for 54 years for simply being a woman. See the Associated Press story, Ben’s blog post and Dan’s as well. It turns out that the story is more complicated than that — that the […]
My denomination, the Reformed Church in America, permitted the ordination of women in 1979, and although over 200 women have been graduated from their seminaries since then, not many get pastorates or other Christian leadership positions. Kristine Veldheer, in “Finding Affirmation,” Church Herald, June 1989, p. 29, said the following: “The greatest frustration […]
Chapter 3 in Julie Ingersoll’s book Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles is called “Conflict in the Lives of Individual Women.” Even women, she says here, who have been groomed and carefully nurtured to be put on the faculty of conservative educational institutions come to believe that’s it’s only an […]
Not as many people know Frank Schaeffer as knew his father, Francis, the early Christian Right apologist, but he’s apparently well enough known in evangelical circles to get hate mail from them. I’ve been quite taken with two of his novels, Portofino, and Zermatt. They, along with Saving Grandma, are the ongoing saga […]
Recently, I attended a regional denomination meeting and noticed that over 90 percent of the pastors were six foot or more. According to Short Persons Support, only 11.7 percent of American men are six foot or taller. Not only do local churches not hire many women, they apparently don’t hire many short men […]
Awhile back, a number of years ago, I chaired the Artist-Lecture Series committee at the University where I work, and I hired a well-known Evangelical feminist to come and speak. She came and did a fine job at presenting and defending her point of view, but I don’t remember a single thing she said […]