Do Women Have An Elevated Standing Within The Christian Community?

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By James Choung

A few weekends ago, I spoke at a conference titled “Renewing Gender Relations.” It was an honor to be speaking alongside other plenary speakers such as Dr. Mimi Haddad, the president of Christians for Biblical Equality, and Rev. Dr. Grace May, president of Women of Wonder.

I spoke on the synergy of men and women in partnership, and was led to offer a history lesson.

My main question came from the subtitle of Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity: how does the obscure, marginal Jesus movement become the dominant religious force in the Western world?

 

In his book, he takes a sociologist’s lens on Christian history, and says that without mass conversions or events, Christianity could achieve 5 to 7.5 million adherents by 300 AD just by having 40% growth each decade through relational evangelism.

Then, with each chapter, he unpacks a counter-intuitive reason why the Christian faith was growing. Christianity reached the middle and upper classes, and not just the poor. Their mission to Jewish people was rather successful, instead of unsuccessful. Christians offered basic care to the sick during plagues when their own pagan relatives left them for dead, increasing the chance of survival nine-fold instead of just relying on miracles. Christians were concentrated in urban areas where they could welcome the steady inflow from surrounding areas, and they could minister to the urban chaos and grind, due to the strength of their community. And during persecution, the way martyrs would face their death greatly impressed the Greco-Roman world.

But there was one more factor: women had an elevated standing within the Christian community.

“Christianity was unusually appealing,” writes Rodney Stark, “because within Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large.”

His reasons from a sociological perspective are interesting. In a Greco-Roman world where men vastly outnumbered the women, the women outnumbered the men in Christian circles. They were usually the primary converts, who would later lead their husbands to faith. And the Christian faith gave them incredible advantages: in a world where men were expected to be promiscuous, Christianity demanded fidelity for both men and women. In that way, women enjoyed higher security and equality in their marriages. In a time when women were often given over in marriage by age 12, Christian women married later and had more choice. And where the Greco-Roman world didn’t want many children, Christians were encouraged to be fruitful and multiply, and with their prohibitions against infanticide (which often targeted girls) and abortion, more female babies were allowed to live.

But in all of this, women were also leaders of the church. Many women were martyred, and those who were killed for their faith often held positions of authority in the church. At the Council of Chalcedon in 451, they specified that deaconesses needed to be single and over 40. The very fact that they had qualifications for deaconesses must mean that, obviously, they existed.

“Nevertheless,” writes Stark, “there is a virtual consensus among historians of the early church as well as biblical scholars that women held positions of honor and authority within early Christianity.”

It seemed that Christian women enjoyed far more privileges and status than other women in the Greco-Roman world, which leads to a question:

Do Christian women today enjoy more privilege and status than women outside of our communities?

For if the answer isn’t in the positive, I wonder what that means for the health of the church. Because when women did, it helped a marginal sect become the dominant religious force in the Western world.

My question is: what happens when they don’t?

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13 comments

  1. No, they don’t at this time in the Western church. And the church suffers greatly. Just like a homosexual marriage with two dads-many church bodies are a dysfunctional family due to lack of female leadership.

    As Danny Silk said- the farther a woman gets from the church, the more likely she is to be leader of a country. That has to change.

  2. Do Christian women today enjoy more privilege and status than women outside of our communities?
    To me the answer is a resounding no. Outside the church a woman can be president, secretary of state, run a corporation, teach as a professor. Nobody is going to tell a college professor she isn’t allowed to teach male students. Outside the church a woman can basically be whatever she wants. But that same woman will walk into the majority of churches and be told she can’t teach the Bible to men, that she should work in children’s ministry, and that men are leaders and she is meant to be a quiet follower. In addition, the church often holds to antiquated and outdated discussions about gender roles.

    I think it’s a tragedy for men and women.

    • Erma, there’s a reason why men should lead men and women lead women….every woman has the potential to lead and influence the congregation she serves, there are just Biblical standards that I think should be different then what the world says….the world has a worldly view and in a healthy church they embrace a Biblical view….

  3. Great article James. We need more thinking like this. It is a shame that women are not being empowered better. Great to look back at history since most people draw on how “progressive” today is. History shows how the church was much more progressive with women than most are willing to state.

  4. Interesting article and an interesting approach to the question. The question, “Do Christian women today enjoy more privilege and status than women outside of our communities?” is really the wrong question in my view. Fidelity to the apostolic witness about Christ in the early centuries of the church situated the church counter-culturally in certain dimensions, some of which are articulated here, vis issues of marriage, abortion, care for the sick and so forth. Yet in other arenas, the church was not explicitly counter-culturally, but reformatory of culture. In either case what was at issue is fidelity to the apostolic witness about Christ — not the prevailing culture outside the church. It should be expected then that at times the church will appear radically counter-cultural and even retrograde to the surrounding culture. This is not an indication that the church is necessarily in error, but may be a prophetic witness against a culture that has derailed.

    Our contemporary western cultural context is one in which (as commenter Erna notes),’a woman can basically be whatever she wants’ — a statement I would expand to say is true of everyone, even to the extent that a person may choose not to even be the ‘gender’ their biological and genetic sex indicates, or to express what heretofore would have been considered an alternate sexuality. The church will naturally then will appear retrograde when she insists that one’s biological sex has ontological and ecclesiastical significance though there may be disagreement within the church about the nature and degree of significance.

    • TBC, you have a thoughtful response. And you’re right to point out the need for a Christological and Biblical basis to these kinds of thoughts, as well as the historical and sociological. It just wasn’t the point of this article. But I should’ve put it in as a note, knowing that others may be asking the same questions you are.

      For more on this from a more biblical basis, you can see my article, “Can Women Teach?” here as I work through 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Corinthians 14 in particular. http://www.jameschoung.net/resources/articles/

  5. Excellent article! I love the question you present at the end. I do agree wit TBC above, that what matters is not a comparison to culture, but rather how accurately the church is adhering to truth and the will of God. However this becomes difficult to navigate on such a large scale for obvious reasons.

    This is why I find your approach so interesting, ie giving extra support and focus on empowering those who in any given society are given a lower status. And this is profoundly biblical! In the old testament God repeatedly does this by choosing the younger brother when society favored the oldest, or by choosing the week when only the strong had a better chance to succeed. If after those repeated examples we still could question this concept, Jesus makes it clear over and over, both implicitly and explicitly in sermons such as the sermon on the mount where he proclaims “blessed are the week!”.

    Which is why I would conclude that although as a church it is more important base our actions on the truths God has revealed to us in scripture than to position ourselves as “counter-cultural,” in this case I believe it is completely in line with scripture to do so.

    I love this article and I love this call to action.

    • Erik,
      the focus on the lower status in a given society is an interesting one, which I think both simplifies and complicates the issues at stake, particularly as it relates to issues of gender and especially in post-modern Western societies. On many of metrics of ‘well-being’, we increasingly and distressingly find men, not women, over represented — from childhood mortality, to suicide, to victims of violence, to failure in school, to homelessness and mental illness. Men in general, it seems, are not doing particularly well, though this is often obscured by the few men operating at the top of society who are doing very well. This is especially evident in minority communities. None of this is to downplay the struggles of women; I don’t think it is a competition anyway, but merely to raise the issue.

  6. Some foresight would’ve helped me anticipate some of the objections that may come from an article like this, particularly given its focus on history. I know that some would have biblical or theological objections as well, but it just wasn’t within the scope of the article.

    But for those who are interested in a Scriptural basis, you can check out my paper, “Can Women Teach?” which covers a portion of the biblical ground — 1 Timothy 2 and 1 Corinthians 14, in particular — to see why I believe women should be encouraged to teach and lead at all ministry levels. You can find it at the link below:

    http://www.jameschoung.net/resources/articles/

  7. I think it is interesting that you appeal to the history of the early church. The early church had deaconesses but they did not have women elders/bishops. The way to elevate women in ministry is to follow Scripture just as the early church did. It is a sad and mistaken idea that gender equality means that men and women should fulfill identical roles/responsibilities in the church. Secular feminism has done much harm to women and it is not something the church should be trying to emulate.

  8. Hi James,

    Interesting article. I think you make great points about how the influence and status of women in the early church was essential to its growth and mission. I think we need to be careful though about the conclusions we draw from that. While the early church had deaconesses, the office of elder/bishop was reserved for men.

    One thing that’s helpful for me to realize is that equality doesn’t have to imply identical roles. For instance, men and women had different responsibilities in Jesus’s earthly ministry. The apostles were all men but women such as Mary, Martha, Mary Magdalene, and the Samaritan woman were involved in ways that were at least as important.

    Another example is the Trinity. We all agree that each member of the Trinity plays a different role and I think we could also say that the Son submits to the Father and yet we also know that they are equal in power and glory and ultimately are One. “But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.” (1 Cor 11:3)

    I am still struggling with the question of whether women can teach in mixed-gender gatherings and I have read your article on the subject. But one thing I can definitely say is that we must reject the modern idea that for men and women to be equal they must share identical roles.

  9. It seems Dan and DPM are the same person! If not, then you two must be talking. =)

    I don’t think I’m trying to make an argument about equality at all, but yes, we are all of equal worth and value in God’s Kingdom — whether male or female, Jew or Greek, slave or free. So I don’t need to affirm or reject that notion to make the point that the Bible doesn’t prohibit women from taking leadership roles in God’s community.

    But I’m glad that you read the article. May the Lord bless you in your journey!

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