The CBE study group was stumping along yet another dusty corridor lined with grace openings in the Catacomb of San Gennaro on the outskirts of Naples. I, for one, was growing discouraged. We had heard rumors that there was a fresco here of an early woman priest, but it appeared to be only a rumor.
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Paula (347–404): Devoted Disciple and Founder of Monasteries
Luther (1483–1546): Church Reformer
John Eliot (1604–1690): Puritan Missionary to the Massachusetts Bay Indians
Samuel Crowther (1809–92): From Freed Slave to First African Bishop
Pandita Ramabai Saraswati (1858–1922): Sanskrit Scholar and Social Reformer
Katharine Bushnell (1856–1946): Biblical Scholar and Advocate for Equality
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Acclaimed author Walter Wangerin Jr. discovered the power of story in a childhood Sunday School class.
“I remember that a teacher of mine would tell a biblical story, and I literally just packed up my bags and moved into that story,” said Wangerin. “I was Zaccheus in the tree.”
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Whether it’s a church with about 85 members, one with 850 members, or one with around 8,000 members, three gift-based churches, as described by their pastors, practice a model of church life that is not typical, regardless of size.
These three pastors — Austin Stouffer, Jo Ann Kunz and John Ortberg — have steadily guided their members to use their spiritual gifts in an environment of gender equality. And each states that their giftbased church acquired its egalitarian stance from one fundamental: studying the Scriptures with other Christians.
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Crack the book that
Re-rewrites history
And grow new eyes to
Legal injustice
As a girl I watched
Color decide
The lines between human and not
Hit me
Like the whip he used on your back
Your blood flowed and your screams
Choked my sense
Of humanity
Like a millstone
Around my neck
Growing heavier
With each black face
Pushed to the dirt
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As we celebrate students and young egalitarian leaders in this issue of Mutuality, we also recognize the important work of mentors in their lives. Therefore, please join us in honoring one of CBE’s great mentors, who led CBE’s ministry with wisdom and boldness for many years.
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Growing up in the church, “I didn’t sense that women were oppressed,” author and seminary professor Cleophus J. LaRue admitted. The Baptist church he attended was made up of 75% women, and they served in many leadership positions. Women taught Sunday school and headed up the missionary society and Baptist training union. LaRue even learned the foundations of Christian faith from a woman in his church who was the matron of the usher board on which he served. He realized these women were gifted individuals, and his exposure to earnest women doing the work of the Lord stayed with him. But he understood and accepted that they could not ascend to the pulpit; in the congregation where he came to faith, it was known to be absolutely unacceptable for a woman to claim that she had been called by God to preach.
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During the early 1830s, many women were active in the abolition movement. They organized separate antislavery societies for women alongside men’s organizations, and they focused attention on the female victims of slavery.
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Late February 2008: “Someday you will write,” Mother said, “and your tears will be the ink you use.” A static cell phone connection, and 190 miles could not mask her deep emotions as she spoke to me. After hours of grief, my eyes were swollen. I was silent. She did not understand I was trying to breathe. “Honey, are you there?”
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The recently released book of the same title (Scarecrow Press, 2007) is essentially the first biographical study of the extraordinary yet largely unheralded life of Mabel Lossing Jones, wife of the famed evangelist E. Stanley Jones. Mabel was an American pioneer in mission, education, and evangelism in the early to mid- 1900s, primarily in India. Here, she emerges out of the shadow of her celebrated husband as a multifaceted woman leader of the world Christian movement.
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