Although Nazarenes have been ordaining women to preaching ministries for their whole existence, over a hundred years now, Olivet is no hotbed of feminism. My sense for why the name change from Home Economics to Family and Consumer Sciences worked not only for the field as a whole but also for Olivet is that the new name has effectively bridged the gap in the field between the generalists and the specialists. Those in the Christian community who appreciate the integrative elements of the many practical, personable, and scientific skills appropriate for use within the family will find plenty in the Olivet FACS programs to make them happy. Dr. Richardson admits that there are a few young women in the department who are more interested in an MRS degree than a BS, but that seems now to be more of an exception these days where most students want to specialize in a profession that gives them professional and salable skills in the marketplace. It appears that the students identify more with their specific major than the fact that it is included in a department that has the word “family” in it. One Olivet student put it this way: “I do not identify with it [the word “family”]. I am a housing and environmental design major and I plan on concentrating on using my skills for the commercial and environmental aspects.”

There’s no doubt that the family has been undergoing stressful changes and the institution itself has been getting re-thought and re-experienced. Studies have been done (e.g., P. Sanday, PhD, University of Pennsylvania) examining cultures world-wide to determine the factors that make families male dominant. Those factors include food scarcity, hard and dangerous living conditions, large game animals being a prized food, infants being raised solely by women, and limited female representations in sacred symbols. It’s hardly fair to blame a social/political action group like “feminists” for causing changes within the family when these same factors are waning in western and/or first-world societies anyway. When sheer muscle power is no longer needed to bring down large game animals to feed the family and life is not harsh and dangerous, what’s to keep men who now have the time from wanting to know the joys of getting to know their children better? Of course it is important for such social/political action groups to exist so they can point out the obvious to the blind, let alone the fairness of it all.

I’m aware that in some quarters of the Christian community there are rear-guard actions going on that involve defending and/or resuscitating the old “home economics” and “homemaker” terms. In a certain way, I agree with the intent behind these efforts – that of trying to help the family in a modern world where so many confusing changes bombard us all, and who’s to know what is harmful and what is not, particularly when there is so much bad advice going out on the media about marriage, home, children and family relationships. I appreciate that concern. But my main feeling on that approach is that it lacks on a number of fronts. First, most Christians would agree that the message of Christianity is universal in that it has something important to say to every culture on earth during every time and era. It may point a finger of correction at the culture or it may not make an issue out of some beliefs and behaviors and simply adapt its message within the cultural framework. History shows us that Christianity can survive and do well within male dominated cultures; certainly it can do the same within egalitarian cultures that look on patriarchy as evil or barbaric. The question then becomes which culture needs more of the corrective finger. And before we jump too awfully fast that we know the mind of God on that issue, perhaps a dollop of humility would be in order, as A. W. Tozer reminds us, “cast of mind” can all too easily determine what our “scriptural” views are when we must deal with biblical interpretation issues near border lines where good people disagree. (Tozer, 38)

Secondly, turning to the past for answers is not the only option available. While we need to learn from history, we also need to do research and learn new ways of seeing and understanding. I believe that the more we understand the modern family the better: growing that knowledge will take not only learning the individual component areas of Family and Consumer Sciences more deeply and more fully, it will also take learning an integrated knowledge of all those areas (marriage, child development, hospitality, dietetics, housing and environmental design, etc.), particularly as they relate to the family.

It’s also important to continue studying marriage and family relationships. Dr. John Gottman, the premier researcher in this field, for example, has uncovered scientific reasons why it is extremely important to save your marriage as well as dispelling many myths like “men are not biologically ‘built’ for marriage” and “men and women are from different planets.” “Gender differences,” he says, “may contribute to marital problems, but they don’t cause them.” (Gottman, 13-17) To have a happy marriage, he says, whether the couple is egalitarian or not, the husband and wife have to figure out how to show each other honor and respect. If a husband does not allow his wife to influence him, then there is an 81 percent chance that the marriage will end in divorce. (Gottman, 100). I highly recommend his book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.

And thirdly, it’s not practical. Why insist that a dated and hated title like “home economics” be used when a more widely accepted title has already been agreed on by both the Family and Consumer Sciences professionals and by the culture at large? Unless you want to do nothing except preach to the choir, why put off potential students from being attracted to your school program before they get close enough to experience it? It’s entirely possible to stick to your message while using the language and knowledge of your culture just as Paul did on Mars Hill in Acts 17. It’s simply unnecessary as well as being counterproductive.

Changes in the way Americans live their family lives have been coming at us faster than we can comprehend them. So it is a good thing that institutions of higher learning get out of the way of outdated and stigmatized terms and continue to draw talent into the field so quality study of the family can continue.

Anonymous. 1999. “Future Homemakers of American (FHA) Changes Name.” Journal of Family and Consumer Sciences 91:3: 132.

Gottman, John, and Nan Silver. 1999. The Seven Principles for making Marriage Work. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 13-17, 100.

Irvine, Martha. 2000. “Survey Finds Traditional Families on the Decline.” Journal of Family and Consumer Sciences 92:1: 74.

Simerly, Coby B., et. al. 2000. “The Scottsdale Initiative: Positioning the Profession for the 21st Century.” Journal of Family and Consumer Sciences 92:1: 75-80.

Tozer, A. W. 1979. Gems from Tozer: Selections from the Writings of A. W. Tozer. Harrisburg, PA: Christian Publishers, 38.

What follows is part one of an article that I wrote for Christians for Biblical Equality who both asked me to write it and who turned it down. Comments as to why would be appreciated. I don’t believe that “lack of space” is the real reason.

Upon the vote of the faculty on October 7, 1994, Olivet Nazarene University changed the name of its Home Economics major to Family and Consumer Sciences. I was present at that faculty meeting, and I remember thinking that it was a smart move designed to attract a wider audience and perhaps participants to the major. Little did I know all what went into that decision locally, particularly how the move was based on what was going on in the profession at large.

The name “home economics” was adopted in 1899 in Lake Placid among individuals interested in the subject area from among a number of alternatives including “domestic science,” “household arts,” and “domestic economy.” Melville Dewey, among the early supporters of the term “home economics” thought the term would help the field have a greater accessibility because it would come to be seen as a social science. (Simerly 2000, 75) The new term worked well for nearly a half century and gave the field of study a sense of cohesion.

By mid-twentieth century, however, a number of factors led towards the need for a change. With more women entering and staying in the workforce and with the birthrate declining, the family took on new and nontraditional forms that loosened the sense of holistic cohesion that had existed in the field before. The increasing pressure from industry for training in more highly specialized fields led to core home economics college courses being reduced and more specialized majors being developed. By the 1990s over 75 different names were being used for the field and the previous sense of cohesion and identity splintered due to a lack of agreed upon philosophical underpinnings and mission identity. Along with a growing sense within society that the term “home economics” was increasingly archaic, the pressure grew for a new name that would help bring more of a shared sense of identity and better reflect the changing nature of the field, particularly its increasing diversity and complexity.

Demographic changes in families during the last half of the 20th century were rapid and widely felt. According to a 1998 social survey conducted by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center the percentage of American households that contained married couples with children had dropped from 45 percent during the 1970s to just 26 percent in the year of the survey. The same time period saw a drop in the percent of children who lived with both parents from 73 percent in 1972 to 51 percent in 1998, and the percentage of children living with just a single parent rose from 4.7 percent to 18.2 percent over the same years. However, “Americans continue to see marriage as an ideal,” according to Bahira Sherif, a professor of individual and family studies at the University of Delaware, “even if they don’t think it’s always best to get married or stay married.” (Irvine 2000, 74) The bottom line seemed to have remained that building a family meant stability and therefore a goal to strive for. The confusing, rapidly changing, and even alarming picture of the American family certainly needed study and attention.

But alarming trends were also occurring within home economic associations and university home economics departments. Within the twenty years between the 1970s and the 1990s the American Home Economics Association (AHEA) lost more than half its membership. The number of home economics major units within colleges and universities was experiencing a similar decline and some felt that the field was in serious danger of collapse. So in 1992 a task force was created to set up a process for the AHEA and four other home economics organizations to create an identity statement, restate the breadth of the profession’s mission, and either reaffirm or propose a new name for the field. Part of that process included a national conference that was held in October, 1993, in Scottsdale, Arizona, where after much intense but thoughtful debate, 77 percent of the attendees voted to adopt the new name, “family and consumer sciences” as a name for the total profession. (Simerly 2000, 78) Four out of the five professional organizations participating then changed their own names to reflect the new name of their profession.

With the new name the profession continued to maintain its “commitment to individuals and families, to the ecological perspective, and to the integrative focus while recognizing that family and consumer sciences professionals can contribute to the mission through both generalists’ and specialists’ perspectives.” (Simerly 2000, 79) With a renewed sense of mission and shared identity, as well as a new commitment to the realization that professionals in the field practice in work fields like government, education, industry, business, and public service, the newly renamed profession and area of academic study started to flourish again.

Many if not most universities quickly brought their home economics departments in line with the decisions made as a part of the Scottsdale initiatives. Within a year, even conservative, teaching-oriented universities like Olivet were making the jump to the new name. The 1994-1995 ONU catalog shows the Home Economics Department having a Home Economics major with a dietetics concentration, a foods and nutrition in business concentration, a fashion merchandising concentration, a family services concentration, and a general home economics concentration. Four other majors were also offered: a Home Economics Teaching major; a Child Development major; an Early Childhood Education Teaching major (taught in cooperation with the Education Department); and a Housing and Environmental Design major.

The new name, Family and Consumer Sciences Department, took effect in the Fall of 1995, and is reflected in the ONU 1995-1996 catalog. Five bachelors’ majors are mentioned with no concentrations: a Family and Consumer Sciences major; a Family and Consumer Science Teaching major; a Dietetics major; a Fashion Merchandising major; and a Housing and Environmental Design major. Dr. Diane Richardson, current chair of the Family and Consumer Sciences Department, who was present during the change, insists that even while changing the big noticeable things like department title and the way majors were laid out, nothing of substance throughout course offerings was changed. In fact, a close comparison of the two catalogs confirms her assertion and uncovers only a couple of course renumberings and not a single word change in course titles or descriptions other than the name change itself. The current 2007-2008 catalog adds the Child Development major back in as well.

And the department has flourished. The number of majors in the newly renamed department quickly more than doubled and now includes both young men and women. Not wanting to put the entire weight of the success on the name change, Dr. Richardson suspects that at least some of the success of the department in recent years is due to the growing reputation of her program. “Sometimes we forget the old ‘home ec’ image – just cooking and sewing – ” she says, “no longer has much basis in reality. Many of our majors graduate with a minor in chemistry.” Heavy doses of biology, computer science and business are also required of many of her majors.

The name change from the originally adopted 1899 term “Home Economics” to the new 1993 term “Family and Consumer Sciences” has been well received. Not only have a growing number of colleges and universities been adopting the name, but “today (2000), 48 states have adopted the name for secondary school programs and it is widely reported that the name has been well received by teachers, students, parents, administrators, and the community at large.” (Simerly 2000, 79)

The term “homemaker” has continued to decline in use as is seen in further name changes like the 1999 Future Homemakers of America move to change its name to Family, Career and Community Leaders of America. “Because our name had become outdated, we found it much harder to communicate to teens what our organization is really about – building leadership skills and addressing important personal, family, work and societal issues,” said Brandon Abbott, the 18-year-old FCCLA National President. “We hope that the new name will help teens get past the ‘homemaker’ stigma and into the details of how much work we do with the issues young people really care about, like school violence, family relations and career preparation.” (Anonymous 1999, 132)

The most interesting thing that happened at the Republican Convention as far as I’m concerned was the fact that the Indiana contingent were wearing buttons that said, “Hoosiers for the Hot Chick.” I liked the sassiness of it. Not sure what it did for increasing Sarah Palin’s gravitas — that is, convincing voters she was a serious VP candidate.

In a new book titled Why Christian Women Convert to Islam, Rosemary Sookhdeo says that 30,000 Christians have converted to Islam over the last decade, the majority of them women. In their formative years they get disillusioned with Christianity, discover the simplicity of Islam, and under a blossoming romance, convert. Or perhaps a mid-eastern boyfriend converts to Christianity, and then, after marriage, converts back under severe pressure from family. There may be persuasion that Islam and Christianity aren’t really all that different at their cores. Be careful. The two are very different.

Although there may be a growing moderate Islam women’s movement, the numbers are infinitesimal. The Islamic families these converted Christians marry into are highly likely to be intensely patriarchal, in ways that they’ve never even imagined.

Perhaps another reason why more Muslim men marry Christian women than the other way around is that Islam forbids Muslim women from marrying Christian men. See James Arlandson’s article The Truth about Muslim-Christian Marriages, and if you want to get even more alarmed, read his article, Women Are Inferior to Men in the Quran. Anyone who is familiar with the freedom (especially between the genders) that Christ offers, should not give it up for this type of religiously mandated bondage.

And it still amazes me why any Christian complementarian would want to be anywhere even near this Muslim ballpark.

Colleges are rejecting women at much higher rates than men, according to an article in this week’s U.S. News & World Report. In 1980 males and females attended colleges in approximately equal numbers, in 2006 women made up 57 percent and by 2010 are expected to increase to 60 percent of those attending college. Colleges find that when the percentages between the genders attending their schools get into that sort of disparity, applications start to drop, since both young men and young women want plenty of opposite sex individuals attending school with them. So in an effort to create approximate parity between the sexes, and so many more women apply than men, many colleges must be tougher on them to allow lower quality males in.

How is it that this situation has developed? Now that women are no longer barred from higher education, their numbers have been climbing rapidly and men have not kept up. “From the early grades on up,” says U.S. News, “girls tend to be better students. By the time college admissions come into the picture, many watchers of the ‘boy gap’ agree, it’s too late for the lads to catch up on their own. Indeed, beginning in those formative K-12 years, girls watch less television, spend less time playing sports, and are far less likely to find themselves in detention. They are more likely to participate in drama, art, and music classes — extracurriculars that are catnip for admissions officers. Across the board, girls study more, score better, and are less likely to be placed in special education classes.” More of them graduate from high school and more of them go on for advanced degrees.

Most of the colleges who are having to put a thumb on the scale in favor of the men are the second and third tier highly desired private schools just under the first-ranked schools like Harvard, Duke and Rice. Still, there are apparently enough college slots available for qualified applicants, but those who get the most prestigious colleges often get the most prestigious and influential positions. One could think of this educational selection process as one of the many ways that we punish women for their successes.

College graduates on the whole, however, make more money than non-college graduates. They are also more likely to have managerial and other leadership positions then mere high school graduates, so it is clear that the workplace in the modern world will for the forseeable future have an increasing number of work situations where the boss is female and the little worker bees are male. And it will be seen, by most Americans at least, not only as perfectly normal but as a very good thing. And people who try to maintain philosophical or religious social and intellectual frameworks that force people into nonsensical corrals that do not mesh with God-given gifts and formal training will increasingly be seen as anachronistic and evil. And why would any church want to piss off that growing number of female leaders, money makers, and intellectuals in their communities who are quietly doing the work that God gave them the talent to do?

Mostly these days, those women simply stay away from such corrals, and highly trained and/or capable women who don’t are seen as either stupid or duped. Pastors who will happily take their money but keep them out of the board room will also increasingly be shunned. What will happen to all these corralin’ cowboys when they become the minority? I don’t know, but it isn’t going to be pretty.

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 white frilly dress sung a wonderful song about overcoming difficult circumstances and about her faith in Jesus. She sung clearly, strongly and on key, and it was a beautiful, soul-affirming time for her. Afterwards, the pastor called her a brave little girl and launched into telling the girl’s testimony for her, about how she had been raped by her stepfather at age eleven and given birth at age twelve. After she was allowed to leave the stage, she collapsed into a chair and dissolved into tears along with twelve of her family members.

The local church gathered around to comfort as well, just as they had been working with the family for months comforting and encouraging and guiding. Normally when something like this happens, I figure the pastor hadn’t checked with wise people of the opposite sex to seek counsel. In this case, however, he had gotten advice from spiritually mature members of both sexes, but had proceeded anyway. Why, I’m not sure. Youthful recklessness, perhaps, or maybe emotional or spiritual obtuseness. More likely, though, it was a desire to make a highly positive spiritual progress report about church successes before all the many out-of-town guests who were present.

Pastors, seek godly counsel and then pay attention. It’s so easy to crush a young spirit when you so strongly want to see spiritual bravery.

I’ve been reading Hugh Hewitt’s Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World, which compares blogging to the Gutenberg printing press, the evils of cultural elite punditry of left-wing bias to the evils of Catholic indulgences, the undoing of the Main-Stream Media to the undoing of the medieval Catholic Church. Just as Luther was able to challenge the stranglehold the Catholic Church had on interpreting what was Biblical truth, so also blog writers were able to break down the old 20th century information monopoly of the left-leaning news networks and newspapers. The message of a little-known nobody named Martin Luther managed to flood past the highly controlled religious information mechanisms (Latin, monk copying, approval procedures) via the many cheap little pamphlets he published thanks to movable type, and of course translating and publishing the Bible into the vernacular. Likewise, blog swarms (thousands of non-edited blog writers telling the unvarnished truth the cultural elites were trying to hide/avoid/slant/fog up) brought down Senator Trent Lott (majority leader) in 2002, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd (leaders) at the New York Times in 2003, John Kerry (around his Vietnam experience stories) in August, 2004, and Dan Rather (his forged documents) in September, 2004. Of course movable type has had a number of centuries to develop its effects, and networked electronic information technologies have only just got off the ground.

Democratizing the Bible led eventually to some democratizing of the church, which made it possible for democracy to come to civil politics. Hierarchies (gatherings of power), though, resist efforts to circumvent their strength and constantly regrow or gather power in related areas or in new forms. Democracy is the only effective answer to power grabbers, and gives the common man/woman hope for their own freedom — freedom from the arbitrary and capricious controls of the elites who think they know better than anyone else.

Patriarchy in the church is another limit on individual freedom that must go. All believers are priests who do not need intermediaries (or husbands) to pray, to seek God’s will, or to find their Christian way in the world. I predict that the blogosphere will swarm this topic, too, eventually, and that the evil of it will become as plain to Christians as is the subject of racism.

Early this month a 92-year-old Turkish scholar, Muazzez Ilmiye Cig, an expert on Sumerian civilization, was acquitted by an Istanbul court of criticizing the head scarf as a poor symbol of women’s morality and religious devotion, since 5000 years ago it was used by temple prostitutes to distinguish themselves while having ritual sex with young men in fertility rite celebrations. Had she and her publisher been convicted, according to the November 2 New York Times, they would have faced up to one and a half years in jail. Ms Cig sees her trial as a display of strength of the secular tradition within Turkey against the Fundamentalists.

Head scarves are common in public on Muslim women in Turkey but are banned from government offices and universities to protect the secular nature of the state. Ms Cig has also criticized the Turkish prime minister’s wife for wearing the head scarf, which excludes her from attending state functions.

Having been raised in a small Protestant sect that taught that worshipping Christian women should wear head coverings in church services as a sign of submission to men and their total muteness before God, I’ve come to see the head scarf or Sunday-go-to-meetin’ hat as an out-of-place and out-of-date cultural symbol that causes more harm that it does good. Even if it is a positive thing to take a profane cultural icon and to Christianize it, or Muslimize it, religions need to do a better job of shedding symbols and religious activities when the effects of those iconic behaviors become negative within new cultural contexts.

Or scorn-producing, as the case may be. The trial is likely to be just another in a long list of such trials mentioned by the European Union as they continue to consider Turkey for membership, which Turkey very much wants. Why, the reasoning would go, would the submission and subjection of women even be considered, let alone seen as a good, worth fighting in court about?

The more hierarchicalists get out of their religious spheres’ squabbling and into the public eye, the more such scorn they will run into. There are no upsides to this issue for women, and the upsides for men are dubious at best.

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 woman had been asserting herself and disagreeing with the pastor on church matters.

The pastor, however, apparently believes that women can fulfill any job whatsoever they put their mind and hands to — just not in the church. CNN, however, relates that the mayor and the city council may have been disturbed by this schizophrenic viewpoint since the city manager who runs the day-to-day operations of the city is a woman and also the fact that the pastor sits on the city council. Clearly, this story illustrates once again how patrarchialists drag God needlessly through the mud — a God who gives women teaching gifts and then restricts them from using them in promoting his own kingdom (at least the male half of it). Boy, does God come across as dumb.

I’ve just returned from Kenya where I was a part of a 27-person team which provided health care to Kenyans who could not afford health care in their own country. We spent the first week in western Kenya at Nyengena under the auspices of Global Health Outreach and the second week in Dandora, a slum area of Nairobi. We worked closely with local pastors and saw over 30 profess faith in Christ thanks to the work of Pastor Catherine Osiemo. Doctors Ann Marie, Ann, Fiona and Milford along with medical students provided primary care and my wife Dr. Linda provided ultrasound radiological services; the team also included several nurses, pharmacy students and logistics helpers. Five Kenyan dentists provided dental services and a Kenyan pharmacist helped as well.

We also attended a Kenyan Church, and I was struck by the Christians’ all-out, full-throated singing, like I was in the middle of a choir’s quadraphonic sound. An awful lot of Kenyans don’t have much, but the Christians show forth their faith vibrantly. And thanks to the 22 Christian women from America, Australia and Canada who joined the team; without them the five men, of which I was one, would not have made an adequate force to accomplish what a medical team needs to accomplish.