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We are equal, this we know, For the Bible tells us so.
Jew and Greek to God belong; Racial barriers are all wrong.
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They came from all over—
Bahrain, Turkey, Rome:
A little band of women
with hope all their own
To learn and to study,
To become stronger in their faith
To encourage one another
In the footsteps of the saints.
When the star in the sky is gone
When the kings and the princes are home
When the shepherds are back with their flocks
The work of Christmas begins—
Oh what my children of my youth
Will my Jesus do for you?
Will He take you to the mountain tops?
Will He bring you to the sea?
My Lord he'll show you
His Great Love
That He has given me
Rendered invisible
it has happened just too many times
times two squared
and more.
Even worse is being rendered visible
but not really important.
Your voice is not really that important they say.
It doesn’t have the right credentials,
Many books behind you ... a following... or enough degrees,
or how could you really have something to say
when you spend many of your days doing laundry,
wiping noses, changing diapers,
raising living human beings, instead of just words on a page.
Living words are not regarded with the same care.
At my bedroom door an unarmed guard
stands statue-straight—a nightlight
once Christmas-wrapped in Mother's love.
Won’t you walk in the Garden with me,
And see me as Christ would see?
With me loving you and you loving me,
Won’t you walk in the Garden with me?
We Lutherans all want to argue on the basis of God's revealed truth in the authoritative Scripture. Yet all of us come to this debate with our own personal history and agenda. My own history includes aversion to women in the public ministry as a result of experiences, first as a teenager, then as a student in Germany. More recently, I have developed a growing understanding of the just claims of Christian women who have been disempowered and marginalized in the church and a horror for what has been perpetrated in the name of male headship. A re-examination of the texts and another (this time happy) experience of having a woman as my pastor in the United States about a decade ago led me to abandon my previously held view that the ordination of women is not the Lord's will for his church today. I am now convinced to the contrary, although I do not like using the broad term feminist. My own personal pain is not only that close friends and relatives hold an opposing view, but that I fully understand that view as one who once held it (this is not said in any spirit of superiority).
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No one takes all of Paul’s writings completely literally. Egalitarian and nonegalitarian scholars alike agree that some of Paul’s writing is conditioned by the time and place in which he lived. So how do we distinguish between passages that are situation-specific, and those that should be universally applied? Regarding 1 Timothy 2:8-15, egalitarians share the same basic approach to interpretation: We recognize that knowing the first-century background can make a significant difference in understanding the biblical text.
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Tell her, Jesus —
Tell her to get a move on.
She’s sitting so indifferently —
Oblivious to all the
Woman’s work
That needs completing.