Breaking Glass Slippers and Glass Ceilings - Part 2
Shattering the Glass Ceiling
This post is part 2 in a 2 part series. To read part 1 click here
The term ‘glass ceiling’ is a metaphor for a man-made barrier preventing women from being promoted to positions of authority. It was made popular in the late 1970’s-80’s and referred to the male-dominated hierarchy of the corporate world. Yet the ‘glass-ceiling’ actually existed in both society and the church for many centuries before that term became popularised.
In society, over the past century, women have had an increasing measure of success in their fight to be recognized as equal in worth and value to men and to be seen as being able to be more than simply a wife or mother, but in the church, there has been much less progress. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with being a wife and mother; they are both noble things, but sometimes God calls women to areas of ministry other than those.
In my newly published book “Daughters of Eve” I share this quote from Rena Pederson, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of “The Lost Apostle” who said this: “A girl can grow up to be almost anything today – the commander of a NASA space station like Eileen Collins, or Secretary of State like Condoleeza Rice, or a Fortune 500 CEO like Anne Mulcahy of Xerox – but not a minister, or even a teacher, in some of the larger Christian denominations.”
I go on to say, “Sadly in many parts of the church globally we still face widespread restrictions on what women can and can’t do. Many still don’t believe that God made women equal in worth and in calling, or that God would call women to leadership roles in the church today. Other times they will agree that God made women equal in value, yet will still deny that He made them equal in their right to follow His calling on their lives.”
In the church over the centuries, a misunderstanding of what Scripture actually says has created a very definite glass ceiling that meant women were not even able to be considered for leadership roles in the church. The idea that women are not equal with men and do not have the right to freely follow God’s calling on their life, doing whatever He calls them to, is, upon close examination, blatantly unscriptural, yet still widely believed.
God’s original commission was to both man and woman as equal partners in ministry, and Adam and Eve’s sin did not change that. When Christ came He reaffirmed God’s original equal valuing and co-commissioning of both men and women by having women amongst His disciples and by commissioning women with apostolic assignments.
After Jesus, Paul reinforced the acceptance and equality of women as disciples and leaders of the early church. That’s right, Paul! The man we’ve been told was anti-women in leadership was, in fact, after Jesus, the most vocal pro-women leader recorded in the New Testament. He openly commended and encouraged women in following the call of God on their lives. He encouraged them in learning and asking questions, he encouraged their co-leadership of the home and family alongside their husbands. He recommended them as apostles and leaders. He did much to establish the rights of women to have complete freedom to follow Christ, yet that’s not what we’ve been told about him, and it’s not what we’ve been told that he taught. In my research I discovered that what we read in our English versions of the Bible is not what Paul actually said, in some cases; it’s been translated badly for various reasons, and I explore these in-depth in Daughters of Eve. And as a result of that mistranslation, we’ve been taught and have believed things that are wrong.
Jesus, Paul, and the very early church went against the established beliefs of society to openly call women out of their place of bondage into full freedom. They traveled as evangelists and missionaries, some with Paul as fellow-workers in the gospel, they led churches, and some were recognized by the church as apostles. Others established healing centers and pioneered social initiatives that benefitted their societies.
By the time we were a couple of centuries removed from Jesus and Paul certain men in the church began to twist Paul’s teachings and promote Hellenistic ideas that were the opposite of what Jesus and Paul taught. These men were intellectuals who had been educated in a Hellenistic (Greek) culture, and they were responsible for the reintroduction of Greek thinking and philosophies to the early church. These early church fathers, such as Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Jerome, and Augustine, openly espoused and introduced into the church beliefs they had picked up from Greek philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato, Homer, and others. These men, and later others, distorted and then weaponized Paul’s teachings in order to achieve their goal of denying women any form of power in the newly institutionalized church. By the time of the Council of Laodicea in the 4th century, the ideas these men promoted as being truth had become accepted, and the Council of Laodicea voted to ban women from church leadership. This denied them equality and made them again subservient to men. From that time on the Bible, sadly, became a sacred weapon used to discriminate against women, to keep them in a place of being subservient, and to oppress them – all in the name of God. In Daughters of Eve, you’ll find all the research I discovered that supports this – biblically and historically..
It’s only in recent years, with many historical documents being made available online, that we have been able to have easy access to see what the original manuscripts meant, and also to read what the earliest church leaders confirmed as their original meanings.
So here we are today, approximately twenty centuries later, and women all around the globe are still in bondage – both in church and society.
We preach that Christ offers salvation and freedom to all, but we don’t fully believe or practice it. Our practice over the centuries has in reality been a gospel of freedom for men and one of only partial equality and freedom for women. We say to women, “Come to Christ and you’ll be free to follow Christ and His call on your life”, but then we place restrictions on them and limits as to where they can serve Christ. We are really saying that freedom in Christ for a woman doesn’t really mean full freedom. We tell them that what Jesus and Paul really meant was, - As a woman, you are free with certain limits, and those limits are that you can do some things, but not others, and in everything, you must submit to men; they have authority over you as leaders and husbands.
In many churches and denominations, it is still believed taught that –
Women can’t be a leader because that means they will be in a position of authority over men or hold a higher position than a man.
Women can only be a leader if it is in an area relating to women’s interests – the home, children, or women’s ministry.
Women can’t preach, because the Bible forbids women to speak in church.
If women do teach they should only teach children, teenagers, or women.
If you’re on the mission field you can teach there, but if you’re on the mission field and leading a ministry you must hand it over to the first male you train up who is suitable to be a leader.
In some churches, you can be on the church staff as a secretary, Sunday School superintendent, Women’s ministry leader, Worship ministry leader, or maybe hold a pastoral staff position, but you can’t be a senior pastor, an apostle, or a prophet.
If you’re a woman you should only minister to another woman on a prayer line or in a counseling session. (The belief behind this is that if you minister to a man you may distract him or tempt him to sin.)
You can’t start and lead your own ministry (women who do that are seen as rebels, and many believe them to have a Jezebel spirit).
In some churches, women are still separated from the men and have to sit in their own section.
Some churches still require women to wear head coverings in church.
Obviously what I’ve mentioned above is not every denomination or church’s stance. Many have done the research and found the truth – that God created women equal to men in worth, and in their ability to follow His call on their life.
Sadly though, I have observed many times that while pastors say they believe in equality, it is often not borne out in practice in churches. Women are still overlooked when considering people for leadership roles as is evidenced by the lack of women in leadership in our churches. I am not promoting the idea of having women preachers, elders, pastors etc for the sake of having women on the team; they must be there only because they are called and anointed by God for that role. But sadly, in church after church, there are many women sitting in congregations that are called by God to minister, that are overlooked when it comes to choosing someone for a church leadership role, to preach or minister.
Glass slippers and glass ceilings – here we are now, twenty centuries after Christ, and these attitudes of constraint and definition both still exist in the church today. Both the glass slipper idea and the glass ceiling one, are equally wrong understandings of God’s plan for women. They both need to be broken so that women can be free to be who they were each created to be, using their unique skills and talents to the full in whatever way God calls them to – in the home, in the workplace, or in ministry.
If you want to find out more about how God sees women and His plans for them, grab a copy of my book “Daughters of Eve”. You can purchase it here