I wrote this article many years ago. Sorry if it is long for a blog but it may be of use to someone particularly since it has discussion questions at the end so it can be used in a discussion group. I must point out that I no longer feel invisible in my faith community - perhaps because it is an ageing community with a number of single females and our priest is a woman!
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There have been many sad moments in my life as a woman: times when I am sad on my own behalf and times when I am sad on behalf of others. Such a moment happened in Beijing in September, 1995, when the UN Women’s Conference and Women’s Forum were held there.
For the first time, the Vatican delegation to the official Conference had female representation. Surrounding me on my floor of the Hua Du Hotel, were women – including quite a variety of nuns – who were members of Women and the Australian Church.
Some were attending a briefing held by the Vatican delegation. I tagged along. Women were packed into the large room in which the briefing was held until there was standing room only. A monsignor chaired the session. Questions came from the floor. A woman of middle years asked a question about single women. The monsignor’s response dealt with women in religious life, nuns. Clearly, for him, ‘single women’ equals ‘nuns’.
I am single. Widowed. How often I remember the woman who organised a highly successful Junior Church in our Baptist congregation in the Australian outback. I can remember how she used to discuss with a few of us how she felt she was treated (read ignored) in the church. I was sympathetic but I was in a family situation – husband, three children. How could I know what life and relationships in our congregation were like for a single school teacher of middle years? What was theoretical to me then is my own experience now.
Is your church a family church, a family friendly church? This is wonderful. To have ministry directed specifically to families is a wonderful goal and strategy. But be careful. Almost certainly there are single people among you. It is so easy to overlook them, or look past them. They may have children. They may never have married and never had children. They may be young and lonely or ageing and lonely and chances are the word forgotten could be fitted in there somewhere. Particularly if the single is female. Definitely, if the female is single, female, and ageing.
The single ageing female is more likely than not to have experienced gendered ageism – even in the family friendly church. She is, too frequently, invisible. The image of God, but invisible.
Why is this? Do we accord no status to women without a man? Are some women too afraid to allow a single woman into situations where they will become friendly with their husbands too? I have been fortunate in this respect to the extent where I get cuddles from my Christian male friends (but not from non-Christian males). They understand my need for touch and their wives understand too.
You may be thinking I know women in this category but they don’t make these complaints. This may be so – there were/are docile slaves but this does not endorse slavery. In fact, the most effective form of repression is the one where victims limit their own behaviour and the dominant forces achieve their desired result with no effort.
Consider the role of women in your church. How likely is it in your church for a woman to head a planning and strategy committee? How likely is it that a woman is the treasurer in your church? How likely is it that she will be influential in the Sunday School committee, the crèche, and seeing that church dinners go smoothly? This even before we mention controversial questions like ordination and eldership and authority over men.
I emphasise these roles because the male, even though single, has all these things open to him. In most cases, women whether married or single, would not have the first two roles open to them.
You might say that things are not like that in your church, that your senior pastors are a husband and wife team. Have you considered the role of the wife were her husband to predecease her? Would the female spouse continue to run the church or would the elders be putting out feelers for another husband and wife team? Would the situation be different if the male spouse survived and the female spouse died (bear in mind that statistically men remarry quickly – women don’t)? Importantly, how would the women in the church feel about all of this?
In Genesis 1:27 we read
So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Feminists talk about equality. Christians who don’t like the feminist view point talk about complementarity. Men have talked about the weaker sex. Women have talked about male dominance. I suggest we look at this most significant passage.
Do you see any suggestions of equality there? Do you see reference to two equal halves of a whole? Do you see any fraction whatsoever – like the male part of the image is larger than the female image? Do you see any reference to complementarity? Any reference to this piece of the jigsaw fitting in that part of the jigsaw? Some thing lacking in one part of humanity that is made up for in the other?
We are God’s image. Is God fragmented or androgynous?
The answer is none of the above.
We are only beginning to learn what being imaged in God is about – but we have lots of insights into what it is not.
It is no more about entrenching maleness in church authority, leadership, ministry and ordination than it is about ensuring that such roles and classification display Greek or Jewish qualities.
It is about wholeness – wholeness of the individual and wholeness of the corporate, the Body of Christ.
As we understand more about our biology and our psychology we learn that this is so. Females have a component of male hormones. Males have a component of female hormones. Males manifest anima, females manifest animus. These components are part of our wholeness, our humanity, our God within us.
So it is with time. God is not time conscious. He lives beyond our concept of time. Why then do we not have a transcendent attitude to time as it manifests itself in the images of God, men and women? Why do we give preference on the basis of age? In some societies, the young are sublimated to respect for elders. In western societies, we increasingly see the old set aside to focus on the young. We are diminished in our humanity when we fail to touch or see the Spirit in the other.
Galatians 3:28 says
There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.
How often have I heard this passage of scripture talked down. It does not depict the present situation, some say. This is when Jesus comes back or when we go to Heaven. It is as if Paul said, Not now but at some future time there will be no longer Jew or Greek, there will be no longer slave or free, there will no longer be male and female, for all of you will be one in Christ Jesus. Do you see all that written in this passage? I don’t.
It has only one time specific and that is no longer and that no longer was written almost two millennia ago. Denial of this passage invites denial of the entirety of Paul’s teaching about the Body of Christ. What do you think was part of the attraction of early Christianity? The patriarchy? Is this what so many pagan and Jewish women were attracted to when they heard Paul preach the gospel?
Finally, when we do make distinctions, when we do speak of complementarity, or of some being more equal than others, when we speak of anything other than individual or corporate wholeness how can we ever be one in Christ Jesus? How can we ever know that unity that Jesus described in John 17:20-23, the unity which preceded Creation, redeemed us through Incarnation, Death and Resurrection, and transforms us and fits us to return to Him whose image we are?
Every differentiation we make sets back God’s plan in and for us. Every piece of partisanship unravels that Body which is knit together and lives and moves and has its being in Him.
As ever it has been, the choice is for wholeness and relationship against duality and fragmentation. I know where I stand – and I can do no other.
Set out below are ten topics for discussion.
May they be part of your way to image God in His world.
Rosemary Radford Ruether says: God did not just speak once upon a time to a privileged group of males in one part of the world, making us ever after dependent on the codification of their experience.
If Jesus had chosen six women and six men as apostles, what difference do you think this would have made to the gospel message? What impact would this have had on the church and the scriptures?
Discuss Jeremiah’s description of the Lord creating a new thing on the earth: a woman encompassing a man. (Jeremiah 31:22)
Are women in the Church in the 21st Century, whatever their age or marital status, able to go beyond the roles of women in the New Testament? Are there limitations on women to-day? If so, what are they?
How can women go beyond cultural and religious contexts towards wholeness?
How does the Church acknowledge sexuality in the single and the ageing?
How does the Church acknowledge articulate, skilled and competent women in its midst?
How can women in the Church co-operate in reflection on their experience of being imaged in God and empowered and encouraged in Christ Jesus and have this acknowledged within their local faith communities?
How can women become exemplars to ensure that within family, church, community and nation there are no longer racial, economic, gender or social boundaries?
How can women image the Divine within family, church, community, and nation?
Discuss Robert Palmer’s phrase First the God, then the song, and then the story.
