Stamping Out Sexism in the Church

I have never written a letter to a magazine letters page in my life.  I’ve written to the Methodist Recorder a couple of times, but never to a magazine, until last week.

It was the November issue of Christianity Magazine that prompted me to write; specifically a letter that they published complaining about the magazine publishing a news item about New Wine’s support for Women Bishops in the Church of England.  The correspondent repeated the trite and ill-informed position that the Bible forbids a woman to have authority over a man and suggests that it is the place of women to be meek and submissive.  Reading this letter made my blood boil and after several days of reflection I decided that such sexist and misogynistic attitudes cannot be left unchallenged.

This is actually just the latest instance of encountering sexist attitudes in the church.  I was recently speaking to a woman minister who told me about a man who had left her church when she became minister.  Apparently he’d said that he had nothing against her personally; he just didn’t agree with woman ministers (and this in the Methodist Church which has had woman ministers since the early seventies).  He thought, I’m sure, that he was being kind with his words, but you can’t really say you have nothing against somebody personally when you are rejecting them because of their sex.

I suppose that it is still possible, if you ignore Biblical scholarship, reason and experience to hold a position that the Bible forbids women in leadership, but it is a tenuous position.  The same Paul who supposedly forbade a woman to have authority over a man also wrote, “there are neither male nor female, Jew or Gentile, Slave or free but all are one in Christ Jesus.”  It is also clear from Paul’s letters that women had positions of authority in the early church and Paul calls some women “co-workers.”   Even if you believe that all scripture is basically the result of Divine dictation with the author merely acting as a scribe for God, you cannot ignore the passages that treat women as equals with authority as leaders, both in the New Testament and, yes, even in the Old Testament.

Very, very few Christians, if any, today would accept discrimination in the church on grounds of race.  A letter written to a Christian magazine promoting a racist point of view simply wouldn’t be published, even if the write tried misquoting scripture to back up their argument.  To my mind sexism is just as unacceptable and evil as racism and should be treated by the church in just the same way.  Both denigrate human beings because of who they physically are, both fail to recognise that the image of God is in every human being and both fail to love our neighbour as we love ourselves.

It really is time that sexism in the church became a thing of the past!