Thoughts on women...

If you'd asked me this many years ago I would have confidently told you that it meant 'saving yourself for marriage'. That's what I was brought up with in my church denomination. Saving sex for marriage was idealised (as it should be) but little to nothing was said about the challenges of achieving that. You could buy commitment rings which you could wear on your wedding ring finger as a sign that you were saving sex for marriage but I wonder how many of those trinkets survived the trip home. Looking back, they could have done this so much better and given us far more clarity. Show me a teenager and I'll show you a master at exposing loopholes in an instruction. My lasting impression is that of adults who were scared to talk about sex, presumably because they thought if they mentioned it, we might want to do it. While youth leaders lacked courage to face the challenge head on, they still wanted to get the message out there. And nowhere have I seen this demonstrated ...

I've always appreciated the fact that Jesus' family tree is a bit suspect and had it's fair share of nuts. I've also been pretty guilty of skipping past verses 1-16 because I'm just not that interested in a boring list of names. Truth bomb. However I set out recently to look at every single interaction Jesus had with women and study them. So I started to read Matthew and so here I am, stuck at the first verse because wow, there He goes again. Including women even before He was born. And not just any women. Specifically those who in the first century church, at the time it would have been written, would have been seen as even more 'less than' than your average first century woman. Two apparent prostitutes, a Moabite widow and 'Uriahs wife' (who?). Tamar - This woman had a tumultuous and tragic life life. Married to a man who was 'wicked in the Lords sight', she was widowed young. She was subsequently handed off to her husbands brother, Onan, ...

Outing yourself as a feminist to fellow Christians is a bit of a minefield. Poor understanding of the word and deliberate misunderstanding and demonisation of women who stand up for an equal shot at humanity is rife in the conservative Christian world. So indoctrinated by the ideology of male headship, even some women clutch their pearls at the idea of being labeled a feminist, even those who secretly subscribe to the notion that women are equal to men in every way. It is true that some progress has been made, particularly on the east side of the pond. Women are even fairly frequently to be found in pulpits preaching, and on leadership teams pastoring (in all but title). The less said about the west side of the pond the better really, what a frightening place to be either a woman hoping for bodily autonomy or a child hoping to be safe at school. So the question remains, if these progresses have been made, why are so many women still so angry about it? For me it's the absolute lack ...