We’re doing a women-only Christian Feminist Meetup on 30th November 2019 and would love you to join us!  You may or may not know that the world’s FIRST Vagina Musuem has opened in Camden Town, and we are GOING TO VISIT!  On 30th November, they’ll be a double-bill of two solo shows, “Hole” and “Fat Sex”, and we’re organising a CFN women-only meetup to go see them.  The show starts 7.30pm, and we’re going to meet at 6pm for drinks and to chat.  We’ll meet outside the Vagina Museum, and find somewhere for a drink, before heading to the shows.  Afterwards, those of us able to stick around for a bit longer will find somewhere for post-show drinks to discuss the shows.

For a bit more on the shows:

Hole is an autobiographical comedy about Vaginismus, holes, feeling whole and womanhood. Hole is like any other young woman, except she can’t have penetrative sex. This show follows Hole as she explores what sex really is, through quirky original music and multi role characters. [The focus of this show on vaginismus may be of particular interest, given that (at least) anecdotal evidence suggests that religious purity culture can contribute to women developing vaginismus, through alienating women from their own bodies.]

Fat Sex is an autobiographical solo performance, using comedy and references to popular culture to discuss fat female sexuality in society. Fat Sex is performed by a plus sized female who embraces the fat body as a sexual body. The performance explores the struggle to reclaim the fat body as a sexual body, and how the fat body either denied a sexuality, or fetishized.

DETAILS…

DATE: Saturday 30th November 2019

TIME: 6pm onwards

LOCATION: The Vagina Museum, Unit 17 & 18 Stables Market, Chalk Farm Road, London, NW1 8AH (nearest tube: Camden Town or Chalk Farm)

TO JOIN US: Please book for the shows via the Vagina Museum HERE and email christianfeministnetwork@gmail.com to let us know you’ll be joining us for the meet-up.

To keep up-to-date on CFN news, sign up for our monthly newsletter HERE.

Philosopher Robin Bunce reflects on the ideas of complementarity after CFN co-founder Natalie Collins participated in an Unbelievable debate with New Frontiers pastor, Phil Moore.  You can watch it HERE.  Robin is Director of Studies for Politics and Graduate Tutor at Homerton College, University of Cambridge.  He is a historian of ideas and has written on politics and contemporary culture for the Huffington Post, the Guardian, the Independent, and the New Statesman.  The other posts we’ve published on complementarity  can be found HERE. 

Complementarity, New Frontiers’ new gender theology, is still in its infancy. I have t-shirts older than New Frontiers’ doctrine of gender, if truth be known. But for all its novelty, some patterns are starting to emerge. One thing I’ve noticed is that advocates of complementarityare very keen on 1 Peter 3:7, which describes wives as something like ‘theweaker vessel’, or ‘weaker partner’, depending on the translation.This is something new. The Danvers Statement, the founding text of Complementarianism, only mentions 1 Peter 3:7 once, compared to verses in Timothy or Genesis which crop up much more often. Equally, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which fleshed out Complementarianism in the early 90s, only refers to women being the ‘weaker vessel’ four times in more than 300,000 words.

1 Peter 3:7 was central to Phil Moore’s concerns in his recent discussion with Natalie Collins on Premier Christian Radio. For Moore, physical strength is central to the message he thinks men crave. ‘Actually,’ he claims, ‘men are hungry for someone to say to them: society is ruled by men, largely because men are stronger, and are able to make it so, that’s how it’s been through history. And what we’re to be is men who lead the way that Jesus led, he was not insecure, he didn’t say to the twelve disciples, “hey, the thirteen of us, we’re a focus group.” He ledthem. But he led them by washing their feet, by laying his life down for them.’ It’s an interesting argument.

The first thing to say is that Moore’s view cannot be found in the Bible. Nowhere do any Biblical writers say, ‘This is the word of God: men are stronger, therefore they rule, and they should rule with confidence, and like a servant.’ This idea is alien to the Bible.

The second thing to say, is that Moore’s claim doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Moore’s logic breaks down between his first statement that men are stronger, and his second therefore they tend to rule. In essence, while Moore is broadly correct about male strength, he is wholly wrong about its significance.

While Moore is essentially correct that ‘men are stronger’ this statement needs to be qualified. Put simply, male strength differs over time, and across each body. So, while the upper body strength of the average adult man is between 80 and 95 per cent greater than the upper body strength of the average adult woman (depending on which study you read), lower body strength is much less divergent. Nonetheless, Moore’s paraphrase of 1 Peter 3:7, ‘Guys, understand, she’s weaker than you, you can beat her in an arm wrestle!’ is essentially true.

The basic problem for Moore is that leadership is not determined by arm wrestling. To understand why upper body strength is less significant than Moore claims, I’m going to turn to Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher who pointed out the flaws in the strength-leads-to-power argument almost 370 years ago. Hobbes was interested in the basis of power, and therefore he considered the idea that physical strength might be the foundation of political authority. Hobbes’ argument goes like this: physical strength has no impact on the power to lead because we live in a world where even the weakest person has the power to kill the strongest. This means that the strongest person can never rely on their own strength, and the weakest person can never be discounted because of their weakness. Hang on, is it true that the weakest person can always kill the strongest? Pretty much, and here’s why: what Hobbes remembered is that the strongest person had to eat and sleep. That means that the weakest person could poison them, or kill them when they were utterly defenceless. In terms of Moore’s argument, no one, however strong, has the power ‘to make it so.’

While Hobbes’ argument is counter intuitive it is basically correct. Indeed, it may have been reasoning like this which led so many writers of the Bible to place so little faith in the physical strength of mortal men.

That said, Moore may be right that men want to be told their physical strength makes them significant. But if men want to hear this all it shows is that men want to be lied to. Moore seems to work on the assumption that if men want to hear it, it must be true. That’s neither a reasonable assumption nor an assumption that is supported by the Bible. The voice of the people (or men in this case), is not the voice of God.

Hobbes set out his argument about the insignificance of physical strength in Leviathan. His book’s title was a reference to the book of Job, specifically the passage where God says,

Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook
or tie down its tongue with a rope?
Can you put a cord through its nose
or pierce its jaw with a hook? . . .
The sword that reaches it has no effect,
nor does the spear or the dart or the javelin. . . .
Its chest is hard as rock,
hard as a lower millstone.

God’s word to Job is the exact opposite of Moore’s gospel of male strength. God reminds Job of his physical weakness. God mocks the strength of Job’s arm, even with a sword a man is no match for Leviathan.

Hobbes’ conclusion is that leadership is built, to a very large degree on trust, noton physical strength. Ironically, Moore argues that trust is a distinctively female virtue.

Moore’s message to men is that they are strong, that their strength – like the strength of men throughout history – makes them leaders. He appears to think that physical strength is a superpower that men have and women lack. Moore’s complementarity is the Gospel of Goliath, the Gospel of Esau. In his determination to justify excluding women from Eldership, Moore appears to have lost sight of the Bible’s message that we should put our faith in Jesus rather than the strength of men.

This is part of a series philospher Robin Bunce is writing about THINK Theology’s Future of Complementarity conference.  Read the Introduction HERE.

Previously on christianfeministnetwork.com I argued that ‘men and women are not interchangeable’ is one of the slogans to emerge from THINK 2018. Here I want to trace the phrase’s origins in the work of CS Lewis, and explore some of the ways that Lewis’s argument poses problems for contemporary evangelicals.

Lewis was the first writer to argue that men and women are not interchangeable. He made the claim in his 1948 essay ‘Priestesses in the Church?’ Here, he argues,

. . . unless ‘equal’ means ‘interchangeable’, equality makes nothing of the priesthood for women. And the kind of equality which implies that the equals are interchangeable (like counters or identical machines) is, among humans, a legal fiction. It may be a useful legal fiction. But in church we turn our back on fictions . . .

At a basic level, Lewis argues that sexual equality does not imply that women should be priests unless we understand equality as interchangeability. For Lewis interchangeability means that men and women are basically the same, sexless and identical – a notion he rejects.

Lewis’s essential argument is clear enough, but his reasoning is complex, and to understand it, it is necessary to enter his intellectual world. Lewis’s rationale for this argument is bound up with the representative nature of the priesthood. ‘[A] priest’, he argues, ‘is primarily a representative, a double representative, who represents us to God and God to us.’From this, Lewis argues that only men can truly ‘represent the Lord to the Church.’Notably, although the priest is male, Lewis argues that the priest has a double gender identity. When standing before his congregation, or when standing before God as an individual, he is male. However, when standing before God as a Priest he is female, for he represents the Bride of Christ.

Significantly, Lewis does little to root his concept of non-interchangeability in the Bible. Indeed, he explicitly says that he has no intention of justifying his argument in this way. Rather, his ideas come from a range of Anglophone sources, which contain concepts which were unknown to the authors of the Bible.

The first key to understanding the roots of Lewis’s position is his reference to ‘legal fiction’. This concept, which cannot be found in the Bible, is the notion which helps him distinguish between the government, where men and women can ‘be treated as neuters’, and the church, where he argues they cannot.  The phrase ‘legal fiction’ was popularised by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham in his A Fragment on Government(1776), as part of his attack on Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, published between 1765–1769. Blackstone’s view was that the legal system had to be based on certain fictions. For example, it made sense, Blackstone argued, to assume that government was based on an initial social contract, in which the people consented to being governed. Everyone knew, Blackstone argued, that this social contract was not real, but nonetheless, the law made more sense if we accept the fiction of an initial contract.

The second notion that Lewis’s argument rests on is that of representation, and dual identity. Again, this can’t be found in the Bible, because these concepts were not available to the authors of the Old or New Testament. Rather Lewis’s argument has its roots in mediaeval corporation theory, and early modern debates over the ‘Divine Right’ of Stuart Monarchs. It was in the mediaeval period that the idea that a person could have a dual identity entered anglophone discussion. Thomas Hobbes, for example, drew on these traditions when he argued that the King was both a natural person (for example Charles Stuart), and an artificial person (the person who can speak on behalf of the state).

But the story doesn’t end there. Behind Lewis’s essay is a specific legal fiction which tied notions of representation together with ideas of gender. I’m referring to the doctrine of coverture. Coverture was the legal fiction which described the legal relationship between husband and wife until the later Victorian period. It emerged in the eighteenth century in Britain and America, and at the same time analogous notions entered French law. The nineteenth century legal understanding of coverture, which found its way in to the legal systems of Britain’s colonies, comes from Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which systematised the doctrine. Blackstone described coverture thus,

[b]y marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover[emphasis added], she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-French a feme-covert; is said to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture. Upon this principle, of a union of person in husband and wife, depend almost all the legal rights, duties, and disabilities, that either of them acquire by the marriage.

Put simply, coverture was a legal fiction which embodied the principle that a husband was his wife’s sole legal representative. Consequently, coverture was the most controversial of the legal fictions essential to English law, as it was the basis on which married women were denied the right to vote, the right to own property, to seek divorce, or to make a will. It was the basis on which the first generation of campaigners for women’s suffrage claimed that women were legally enslaved. Therefore, when Lewis was developing a doctrine of gendered representation, thinking about gender equality, it was only natural that this Oxbridge Scholar should think in terms recognisable from the legal doctrine of coverture.

Before leaving Lewis, I want to draw out three points: first that his understanding of interchangeability is based on a notion of representation that comes not from the Bible but from medieval legal theory via Blackstone’s legal fictions. Second, it’s based on the notion of a representative priesthood which Evangelicals reject. Third, that the discussion of coverture is more relevant to the theology of Newfrontiers than it might initially seem. Kristin Aune’s excellent ethnography ‘Postfeminist Evangelicals: the construction of gender in the New Frontiers International churches’notes ‘The gendered concept of “covering” is important to NFI. When women are described as “covered” this means that they are under the (male) authority of their husband (if they are married) and/or their church leader.’ Aune argues that Newfrontiers’ theology of ‘covering’ read the English legal doctrine back into 1 Corinthians 11:4-15’s complex arguments about head covering, and that the article ‘Adjusting our Vocabulary: Covering’, which appeared in the 1983/4 Restoration magazine was crucial to the development of this aspect of Newfrontiers’ gender theology.

Wilson’s use of Lewis’s phrase is curious, because he disagrees so profoundly with the foundations of Lewis’s argument. Wilson does not believe in an Anglican view of priesthood; he does not believe that church leaders have a dual gender identity – far from it; and while Lewis councils us to turn our backs on legal fictions, Wilson is part of a church movement which has sought to revive the doctrine of coverture as a structuring principle of church life. What is more, it is peculiar in the extreme that Wilson, a writer who claims to set such store in the Bible, would borrow a concept from an essay which explicitly seeks to make an argument from the Anglican tradition rather than the Bible. Yet Wilson and Lewis are united in a common determination to exclude women from aspects of church leadership. And when it comes to complementarity perhaps that’s all that matters.

Part II will trace the idea of non-interchangeability through the 1960s and 1970s, where the phrase took on a series of new meanings, alien to both the Bible and Lewis’s original formulation.

Philosopher Robin Bunce is back on the blog with some more insights about the Future of Complementarity conference run by Think Theology earlier this year.  Robin is Director of Studies for Politics and Graduate Tutor at Homerton College, University of
Cambridge.  He is a historian of ideas and has written on politics and contemporary culture for the Huffington Post, the Guardian, the Independent, and the New Statesman.  The other posts we’ve published about the conference can be found HERE. 

Complementarity is not merely a theology of gender, it’s an aesthetic: an understanding of beauty. According to several speakers at THINK 2018 women and men are not just different, that difference is beautiful. Surprisingly, for a theology which claims to be rooted an ancient text, this is a very modern aesthetic, perhaps even a post-modern one. For this ‘beautiful difference’ is a beautiful absence. The aesthetic of complementarity arises from what men and women are not: ‘men and women are not interchangeable.’ This is the aesthetic of artists like Kazimir Malevich, Dan Flavin and Carl Andre, or more recent practitioners of rigorous hard-core absence like Turner Prize winner Martin Creed.

‘Beautiful difference’ and ‘men and women are not interchangeable’ are the two slogans to emerge from THINK 2018, and it’s the second that concerns me here. As I’ve prowled moodily around Cambridge this autumn, I realised I’ve come across the phrase before. Not in the Bible of course – that goes without saying, but somewhere. It turns out that since the end of the Second World War a series of writers have used the phrase ‘men and women are not interchangeable.’ Yet, even though the phrase occurs again and again in theological discussion it never means the same thing twice.  CS Lewis, then Karl Barth and latterly Tim and Kathy Keller have all argued that ‘men and women are not interchangeable.’ But for radically different, and often contradictory reasons. Advocates of complementarity are continuing this trajectory, repeating the same words, but meaning something new.

The story of how we get from CS Lewis’ view that ‘men and women are not interchangeable’ to Wilson and Alistair Robert’s radically different view that ‘men and women are not interchangeable’ is a long one. Fearing history-of-ideas-fatigue or ‘annalist’s fever’ as its sometimes know, I’ve split it into three parts, which I’ll be publishing between now and Easter.

You can find Part I HERE.

Sue Eldridge is one of the Directors of Presence Ministries, Director of Alive and Kicking, and the School of Empowerment for woman. Together with her husband Tim she is co-directors of the annual European Leaders Advance conference, which from 2019 will become European Leaders Alliance. Whilst she would not describe herself as a feminist she is a champion of women in leadership and female empowerment. In this essay, she describes her journey.

I’m not a feminist, but I love being a woman.

I’m not a feminist, but I believe woman are capable of greatness.

I’m not a feminist but I don’t see a ceiling, glass or otherwise, that should prevent a woman from being who she is called to be. To me, character, gifting, integrity and ability are the factors that should determine who and what someone becomes or achieves, not their gender.

I love women. I love all their different facets and strengths. I love that women love so well, and that we are beginning to realise that vulnerability is not weakness but the kind of courage that will enable us, not just to survive, but to thrive and conquer.

Growing up as the youngest daughter of a Squadron Leader in the Air Force I was encouraged to be adventurous, determined and strong. I was what was affectionately known as a ‘Tom Boy’, up to the age of 11 … when I discovered the joy of ‘boys’ and Kiss Chase!! I know . . . Shoot me now! Rock climbing, hiking, fishing, swimming, snorkelling and diving were all part of my life growing up, but so were baby dolls and teddies. I would spend the day in the woods, making dens, climbing trees, stealing sweets (I’m sorry) and then come home to bath my dolls, wrap them in a blanket and feed them with a plastic bottle that never ran out of milk. I wore jeans, scruffy T- shirts, and shorts most days, but also loved dressing up in pretty things when the occasion arose. Life was good, and I believed I could be anything or anyone I wanted to be.

At the age of 13 we joined a church that had an interesting view of women. A view that said that woman could be a part of the Church Family, but not a ‘significant’ part. Woman could participate to an extent, but only if they honoured the angels by wearing a head covering. You could serve, and in some circumstances, lead small groups, but you could never hold any area of government. As a teenager, ‘the rules’ also looked like this: you had to be thin, feminine, quiet, have long straight hair and obviously an amazing singing voice. Ooops, I had no chance… I was NOT thin, not feminine, I was loud, I had wild curly hair and my voice was three octaves louder than anyone else, but not sweeter! I was doomed!

These ‘rules’ stayed with me for many years. I married a man from the church at the tender age of 21, after completing my Nursing training. Then, I took up the role I was born for, ‘keeping house’, and being a ‘Mummy’.  To be fair, I loved this role. However, I made a rod for my own back with regards to my hubby, because a warped sense of pride meant that I had to keep house as well as his mum had, and my mum had, and everyone else we met, ever had kept house. I had to be the best cook, homemaker, money-spinner, breast feeder, craft maker, and leader’s wife! I had to be better than anyone at anything to do with motherhood or housekeeping. It was exhausting. It was not empowering. It was competitive.

Fortunately, I grew up!

Well actually…I found myself at 38, having left Nursing, I was now a high-powered Sales Executive for a top Health-care company, working full time, being a mum and co-leading a church in Harrogate. I ran the children’s work, I led worship, I preached and I held dinner parties. I was super-mum. Until I wasn’t. Until the day I woke up and couldn’t move. Until the day that I sat sobbing in the doctors’ surgery while he told me I had had a breakdown and was clinically depressed.

I gave up my job…. I stayed alive. I ignored the jibes from colleagues, to ‘Pull myself together.’ I ignored the notes from Christians which said that I must have done something wrong for this to happen to me. I even managed to ignore the fear inside me that said I was never going to get better. And “better” I got, slowly, painfully I came back to being me.

Then God took me on the most amazing, sometimes painful, but beautifully liberating journey. A journey into who I am. I was in my 40s before I dared to believe I was worthy of anything. To believe that I was enough, just as I was. To believe that I didn’t have to do anything to ‘prove’ my worthiness to anyone, let alone God.  He then took me on the journey of who HE was. Not the judging tyrant I had tried hard not to believe all my life, but had always held onto. I found he was a loving, Grace-filled Father, who desired an intimate relationship with me, his daughter. I started to dare to believe what this loving God said about me, and everything changed.

You see I had believed I was fundamentally unworthy, that I was not good enough. So I had to spend my whole life proving that I was something I’m not. Brene Brown writes in her book I Thought it was Just Me, ‘You either walk inside your story and own it, or you stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness.’ That’s what I was doing, in all my ‘busyness’ I was trying to earn my worthiness. My ‘worthiness’ for being a woman, for being a wife, a mother, even a Christian. So I have started to own my story. I now celebrate who I am, warts and all. I own my mistakes and I have grown because of them. This makes me the best me I can be. Not hiding. Not shame ridden, but 100% free.

This is what will make woman smash through the man-made ceilings. This is what will make top businesses fall over themselves to have woman on their boards. This is what will make Government sit up and take notice. This is what will make nations listen. Woman and men who are secure in their identity, who acknowledge their strengths and their weaknesses. Women who can celebrate the success of others, due to the confidence of their own self-worth. Woman whose worthiness is not reliant on being recognised by others.

Each of us has our very own part to play in this wonderful journey of life. Our part is to be the BEST us. Dr Caroline Leaf says in her book The Perfect You,‘God DOES understand you. He has placed significance in you-your “perfect you” – Your unique way of thinking. The blueprint of your identity is a brilliant design that unlocks something only you alone can do. As neuroscience shows us, every thought you think matters because it changes your brain. You create your unique reality and shape your brain with your thoughts.’

As women start to change the way we think about ourselves and the way we think about other women we will begin to believe that no one can be US better than WE can.

Today we have a post from Ella Green who is the Charity Officer for an ecumenical charity based in Harrogate. She studied English Literature at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge and is now studying a part-time course at Leeds School of Theology.

European Leaders Advance is a conference with the senior leaders of Bethel Church, Redding, California, that aims to equip churches in Europe. It ran from the 24^th-26^thJuly this year and has taken place in Harrogate or London every year since 2013.

There has been a lot of hype surrounding Bethel church over the years and so I confess I was both a little nervous and excited about attending the conference. Bethel has been hugely influential upon the worldwide Church and has received praise and criticism for its strongly revival-focused ministry. There was no doubt from the title on the event programme, ‘Heaven invading Europe’, that revival was going to be a key theme of the conference.

The sense of expectation on the first night was palpable, and it wasn’t just on the first night I felt this, but indeed at every session. There were five fairly chunky sessions each day, and that’s not to mention the other endless opportunities for spiritual nourishment. There were ‘vision’ lunches, an ‘Encounter’ space for worship and ministry, a ‘Transforming Arts’ exhibition and plenty of chances for deep conversation with fellow delegates over break-times. It was certainly a spiritually intense few days and left me with a lot of meaty truth and wisdom to chew over!

The line-up of speakers included Bill Johnson, the senior Pastor of Bethel, Eric and Candace Johnson (Son and Daughter-in-law to Bill), Danny and Sheri Silk, and Paul Manwaring. Sue Manwaring, along with Tim and Sue Eldridge (co-hosts of the conference) also played key roles throughout the week. When I saw the names in the programme, I wasn’t sure what to make of the strongly family-orientated structure of the Bethel leadership team. I have to admit that as a single Christian woman, I sometimes struggle to relate to this very couple-focused perspective of ministry. However, the content of the sessions actually provided a refreshingly broad perspective of church and mission, with a strong emphasis on seeking a revival that lasts through the years and across the generations.

It was this focus on successful ‘fathering and mothering’ in God’s kingdom that particularly struck me. Clearly, the leaders of Bethel realise the importance of both fathers and mothers within the church, and yet there was no sense that these roles needed any kind of differentiation. In fact, there was very little explicit teaching on gender at all. Perhaps the closest they got to a discussion of gender roles was in a session led by Candace and Eric Johnson where they talked about co-leadership. They stood either side of the podium and spoke for equal lengths in turn; it was certainly not a case of the man giving the main talk and the woman tagging on at the beginning and end. Interestingly, Candace actually spoke about how she used to face this issue in their church staff meetings. Eric would naturally leap to the role of leading the meeting, jumping between ideas and giving her little space to speak, until the very end of the meeting when he would ask her if she had anything to add, by which point she felt frustrated and had given up on having anything to say at all! Eric was completely oblivious to the effect his behaviour was having upon her until she spoke to him about it, and so they now plan the meetings beforehand to ensure that each of them gets a chance to speak and share their ideas.

Candace also talked about her frustration at being labelled the ‘pastor’s wife’ when she initially joined the Bethel staff team. Whilst she didn’t feel any great need to be constantly praised and acknowledged, she couldn’t help but notice that Eric was often given credit for the work that she had done. I loved the fact that Eric’s response to this was to start referring to himself as the ‘pastor’s husband’ in his conversations with people.

As well as a few joint slots where couples spoke together, each speaker also had their own slot. I found it interesting that both the main female speakers, Candace and Sheri, placed emphasis upon the importance of ‘shining’ in our culture and context. In our self-deprecating British culture, this kind of message is perhaps less commonly heard, but it was empowering to be reminded that God uses us to ‘call out the greatness’ in each other. Candace explained that “we are called to develop our own voice and story….when we shine, we give others permission to do the same.” These women certainly practice what they preach; in a context where they could have easily become stuck as ‘the pastor’s wife’, they have clearly developed their own voices (indeed they have quite literally practiced preaching!) and it gives me hope that they are influencing a new generation of Christian leaders, both female and male.

Bill and Danny particularly focused on the need to successfully grow and equip future leaders. In an exegesis on what might be called a rather ‘niche’ passage in 2 Kings, Bill identified Hezekiah’s lack of concern for the future of his children and grandchildren as a symptom of his distance from God towards the end of his life and a sign of his fall from greatness. Danny followed with a talk later in the week about the importance of giving over responsibility to younger leaders, however risky this might sometimes feel: “Our role is to protect the momentum, not our ministry.” This seems to me to be a vital message, not just in relation to the kind of multi-generational leadership that Danny was speaking about, but also in the context of seeking gender equality in the church.

If we are to be led by the Spirit, in all His power, creativity, and glorious mess (if I’m allowed to call God messy?!), we cannot afford to be protective of our own roles and ministries; to be competitive or self-seeking. I have been convinced again by many of the words spoken at ELA that selfless investment in others is a sure gateway to seeing more of heaven on earth, and that means mature leaders have to be ready to give leadership roles to the younger generation. And yes, I believe that that also means that men need to be secure enough in their own identities as God’s sons to let His daughters step out fully and freely into the gifts they have been given.

Perhaps one of the reasons that Bethel is known by many Christians as a place where God’s kingdom is breaking through onto earth is that this church is creating a culture where people are empowered and released into their giftings. I would say that my time at the ELA conference has given me a wider window through which to see God’s heart for His church, as expressed so beautifully in Acts 2:

In the last days, God says,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
your young men will see visions,
your old men will dream dreams.
Even on my servants, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
and they will prophesy.

It seems to me that the leaders of Bethel get this. The Holy Spirit doesn’t discriminate. We get to see God’s power fully present and active in our sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, in both men and women. And that is something that truly excites me.

The image on this post is of Candace Johnson speaking at the conference, courtesy of John Mudie.