facebook Lecture | Our Daily Bread University
Back to Course

Women and Church Leadership

0% Complete
0/0 Steps
  1. Introduction
    Introduction to the Course
    2 Activities
  2. Lesson One
    The Hermeneutical Challenge
    3 Activities
  3. Lesson Two
    Women and Religious Leadership in the Old Testament
    2 Activities
  4. Lesson Three
    Women in the Gospels
    3 Activities
  5. Lesson Four
    Positive Images of Women in Leadership in New Testament Churches
    2 Activities
  6. Lesson five
    Restricted Roles for Women in Leadership in New Testament Churches
    3 Activities
  7. Lesson Six
    1 Timothy 2:13-14 in Light of Genesis 1-3
    2 Activities
  8. Lesson Seven
    Exploring the Nature of Ministry
    3 Activities
  9. Lesson Eight
    Dealing With "Kephale" in Paul's Letters
    2 Activities
  10. Lesson Nine
    A Further Look at Diversity in the Pauline Churches
    3 Activities
  11. Lesson Ten
    The Early Church Fathers in Their Cultural Setting
    2 Activities
  12. Lesson Eleven
    Medieval and Reformation Ideas About Women in Leadership
    3 Activities
  13. Lesson Twelve
    Changing Patterns for Women from the 17th to the 21st Centuries
    2 Activities
  14. Lesson Thirteen
    A Retrospective on the Course
    3 Activities
  15. Course Wrap-Up
    Course Completion
    1 Activity
    |
    1 Assessment
Lesson 1, Activity 2
In Progress

Lecture

17 Min
Lesson Progress
0% Complete
00:00 /

Getting to know each other

Here in the summer of 2012 as I build this course for you, I am turning 82. I mention that simply to alert you to the fact that I have lived with this subject matter for more than six decades. Many of the authors cited throughout this course are personal acquaintances, people on all sides of the questions this course raises. Over the years, I’ve benefited from long conversations with any number of them as I have wrestled with the issues of women and church leadership.

On a personal level, I met my husband (Randall Mathews) in college, and we married shortly after we graduated from college. Over the years, God gave us four splendid children who moved with us around the USA in pastoral ministries in Michigan, Colorado, and Wyoming before we spent 17 years serving churches in France and Austria. When we returned to the USA in 1980, my life changed significantly as our adult children married and I moved into one or another aspect of theological education. Along the way I had earlier picked up a master’s degree in clinical psychology at Michigan State University; and in the late 1980s I returned to school for a PhD in Religion and Social Change at the University of Denver/the Iliff School of Theology. By then, my focus, while strongly academic, was on the place of women in the Christian Church, and my doctoral program was shaped to enable me to go much more deeply into the biblical, theological, and sociological issues many Christian women wrestle with. Along the way I’ve been involved with several seminaries (schools of theology), most recently as the Lois W. Bennett Distinguished Professor (now Emerita) of women’s ministries and educational ministries at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary near Boston, Massachusetts. I am now retired but continue to teach on the doctoral level at Gordon-Conwell, and I serve as academic dean for CUGN’s online program.

Now it’s your turn to introduce yourself. If you are enrolled in this course as part of CUGN’s Core 3 M.A.R. degree program, you are familiar with the Online Blog/Journal. To get there, go to “My Profile” on the right side of the screen where you’ll find a drop-down menu with blog options. If you’ve been through Cores 1 and 2, you’ve already had the tutorial giving you this navigation and you’re familiar with this site. Now tell us about yourself. Your introduction doesn’t need to be long, but please include what you think would be relevant facts about yourself, and do post one or more pictures of yourself.

Pause this introduction to the course now, and write your brief introduction of yourself in your Online Blog/Journal.

Basic information for this course

I want to make a comment on my approach to teaching and learning. Adult learning is not the same as children’s learning, so andragogy is different from pedagogy. Adults learn best when they interact with the material. You may prefer a more passive posture, taking notes on a lecture. But the reality is that you will not make the material truly your own in that passive posture. I want to see you wrestle with the content of the course.

In building this course for you, I have made two assumptions about you. First, I assume that you are an adult with adult learning patterns and needs. Second, I assume that you’re taking this course because you’re interested in the subject matter. On the basis of those two assumptions, I have structured this course without any exams and with limited short reading assignments. I am not into “busywork” just to make a course look hefty. However, you will be expected to interact frequently in your Online Blog/Journal with the content of each segment. This is your opportunity to explore the subject matter for yourself, and this course is your guide through the thicket of books and opinions that abound around the issues of women and church leadership.

In place of heavy reading assignments, I do expect you to interact personally with the content of the course. Throughout each lecture segment, you will be asked to pause the lecture and take time for reflection, jotting down your responses in your Online Blog/Journal to any questions posed. No one except you and your scholar/mentor will have access to your Online Blog/Journal, but your grade in the course will be influenced by the extent and depth of your responses to these prompts.

An important part of any course is building an adequate flexible bibliography of multiple resources. So the next thing you are to do is to go online and sign up for the free account at LibraryThing.com. It is here that you will track all of the books and articles referenced in the course for your possible future use. Once you have arrived on the LibraryThing.com website, open the excellent tutorial, “Short Introduction to LibraryThing.com.” Complete with screenshots, it will walk you through the process of setting up your collection system (which you can tailor to your own interests and needs).

Once you’ve set up your LibraryThing.com account, you choose how you want to enter books and articles into your growing bibliography. Under STYLE, choose A, then choose the items and order in which you want to assemble your book information. For me personally, I’ve set up my account so that from left to right, I have first a small picture of the book COVER (for quick identification), then to its right the TITLE of the book, then the AUTHOR, then the DATE of publication, followed by TAGS, then SUMMARY, then COMMENTS. You have other choices and can set up your system in whatever way works best for you.

Be sure to include TAGS. These are one-word categories covered in the book that you may want to surface later on. For example, I had entered Amy-Jill Levine’s book The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus. Under TAGS I put “Judaism, New Testament, Anti-Semitism, Christology, Biblical studies, Jesus”—a total of six tags. If, much later, I want to locate books on any of those subjects, I can with only a keystroke or two locate all of the books in my bibliography touching any of those subjects. Tagging is an important process that allows you to manipulate your bibliography to meet future interests or needs. By the use of tags, you are building your own indexing system for your reading.

Your summary of each book can be brief but should give you a good idea of the contents of the book; then your comments about the book will remind you whether or not you felt the book was worth a second read and what stood out as a valuable insight, etc.

Pause this introduction to the course and set up your LibraryThing.com account.

Once you have your account set up in LibraryThing.com, you may want to enter a few books already on your shelf to familiarize yourself with using the system. Early in the first segment of the course I will give you seven or eight titles in the area of hermeneutics. Enter them, and though you can’t add comments about them unless you’ve actually skimmed or read them, you will have them tagged as “hermeneutics”; and if sometime later you want to read a book on hermeneutics, that tag will take you to all of the books on that subject recommended in lecture-segment 1. Following most of the lecture-segments, I include some suggested bibliography relevant to that lecture. You will do well to enter these into your LibraryThing account.

While this course will examine relevant factors in Ancient Near East (ANE) culture and in church history, it is primarily an extended study of the subject in the Bible. In a number of cases, I will ask you to read a particular text in several translations. You may not have several translations you can immediately pull from a shelf, but your computer offers you a wonderful resource to accomplish this. Let me point you to an excellent free website that will allow you to access a dozen or more translations of the Bible. Go to www.biblos.com and bookmark this site for future use. In the space to the right of BIBLE SEARCH, type the biblical reference and hit the search symbol. The text will come up on your screen in the New International Version 1984, but just above the text you’ll see folder tabs. The first one on the left is titled PARALLEL. Click on that file-tab and at least a dozen different translations of the verse(s) will appear. This site also offers you a host of Bible-study helps (concordance, Bible dictionary, etc.).

A word about nomenclature in this course

Over the years, a number of different words were used to describe various positions on the issue of women and church leadership. The most frequent term used by those who restrict church leadership to men to describe that position was “traditionalist.” Others used the term “male leadership.” The most frequent term used by those who do not restrict church leadership to men to describe that position has been “egalitarian” or the “plural ministry view.” In the late 1980s, a new term was introduced by John Piper and Wayne Grudem for those who restrict church leadership to men, that of “complementarian.” While this has become widespread in its use among traditionalists, egalitarians have objected that they are also complementarian, shunning any sense of unisex and embracing God-given gender differences. They describe the egalitarian position as “complementarity without hierarchy.” Because both groups use the same term but with entirely different meanings, this course will not use the term. Instead, the term “traditionalist” will be used to describe those who restrict church leadership to men, and “egalitarian” will be used for those who do not restrict it.

The Course Syllabus

Course description

In this course, you will work with biblical, theological, historical, and contemporary issues and models for the ministries of women. In particular, you will examine these issues in the light of some of the best recent scholarship and in the light of current debates on the question of women’s ordination to pastoral ministry or to other types of leadership in the church.

Course objectives

If you faithfully interact with the segments of this course and produce the assigned papers, by the end of the course you should be able to

• Articulate the relevant issues on all sides of the question of women and church leadership.

• State your own biblical and theological understanding and the position you have come to as a result of taking this course.

Course structure

In addition to this introduction to the course, you will move through 13 segments during the 8-week semester. As noted above, the course is designed for your ongoing interaction with the materials being presented, and your postings in your Online Blog/Journal will constitute the ongoing “testing” of your involvement with the course subject matter. Your Core 3 scholar/mentor will have access to your Online Blog/Journal to monitor your progress in the course.

Textbooks

While no text is assigned for outside reading, your use of LibraryThing.com will mirror the reading you are doing or plan to do in the future. In most (not all) of the segments, suggested readings will appear that you should enter into your LibraryThing.com account, whether or not you are currently reading any of them. There will be shorter required readings interspersed in the various segments of the course.

Grading

In this course you are expected to do the following:

• Keep up with the weekly assigned lecture segments and interactions.

• Actively build your bibliography on the subject of women and church leadership.

• Write a paper (2,000 words or more) laying out your conclusions on the subject.

• Gather information on your own denomination’s/church’s stance on women in ministry, which you will post on your Online Blog/Journal.

Your grade for this course will be based on the level of interaction you bring to all of your Online Blog/Journal postings and on the quality of the final paper and denominational report. Your Blog postings will constitute 50 percent of your grade; the final paper will constitute 40 percent; and your denominational/church report will constitute 10 percent. You will get feedback from your scholar/mentor along the way so that you know whether or not your interactions are adequate.

Assigned papers

While the blog/journal postings will constitute half of your grade, you will also submit two papers:

• The major paper at the end of the course gives you an opportunity to gather up all of your thinking throughout the course and lay out where you come out on the issues of women and church leadership. This paper should be at least 2,000 words in length and should include your reasons for the stance you take on the subject at hand. This paper should be a serious effort to come to grips with biblical, theological, and historical materials covered in the course and to chart your own convictions with substantiating “evidence” to buttress your position.

• The second paper is shorter and constitutes a report on what you’ve learned about the stated or unstated stance of your church or your denomination on the question of women and church leadership. If you have documentation (actions taken at denominational or church meetings, etc.) for whatever stance your church/denomination has adopted, include those documents in your report. In many cases, denominations or churches have avoided taking a position; in such cases, you can write your paper to lay out what seems to be the unstated but practiced position of your religious group. This paper should be at least 500 words in length, longer if necessary, depending on what you have learned about your church or denomination’s stance on this issue.

Course schedule

Week 1:

Work through this introduction to the course and then through Segment 1: The Hermeneutical Challenge, making all required postings. Note: All of us have been influenced over the years by various speakers or writers. I have benefited immensely from wide reading, and in these segments I try to tell you where I picked up various ideas. I’ll give you the author and book title where I can so that you can track further with that writer if you’re interested in reading more on that subject.

Week 2:

Work through Segment 2: Old Testament Women in Religious Leadership.

Then work through Segment 3: Women in the Gospels.

Week 3:

Work through Segment 4: Positive Images of Women in Leadership in New Testament Churches (Romans 16:1-12).

Then work through Segment 5: Restricted Roles for Women in Leadership in New Testament Churches: Exploring 1 Timothy 2:1-15 and 1 Corinthians 14:34-35.

Week 4:

Work through Segment 6: 1 Timothy 2:13-14 in Light of Genesis 1–3.

Then work through Segment 7: Exploring the Nature of Ministry.

Week 5:

Work through Segment 8: Dealing with KEPHALE in Paul’s letters.

Then work through Segment 9: A Further Look at Women in the Pauline Churches.

Week 6:

Work through Segment 10: The Early Church Fathers in Their Cultural Setting.

Then work through Segment 11: Patristic, Medieval, and Reformation Ideas about Women in Leadership.

Week 7:

Work through Segment 12: Changing Patterns for Women from the 17th to the 21st Centuries.

Then work through Segment 13: A Retrospective on the Course.

Week 8:

Write your major paper and your church/denominational report and submit them to your scholar/mentor as posts to your Online Blog/Journal.

Lesson Materials

TranscriptOutline