Same Sex Marriage Is Here. Christians, Start Being Christians, Please.

In the United States, the issue of same sex marriage has been a cause célèbre for some time, and, increasingly, a social reality across an increasing number of states.  For conservative Christians across the ecumenical spectrum, this trend is perceived as part of a wider national slide into perversion, providing perhaps the most conclusive evidence that our country has lost its moral and Christian bearings.  Many of these same Christians see such a slide as setting us up as a nation for God’s judgment.  And if one throws issues such as abortion into the pot, it makes for a potent mix fueling some of the most heated rhetoric I’ve heard during my not so brief life in Christian ministry.  The Westboro Baptist Church crowd may be perceived by their fellow Christians as being way out on the fringe, using deplorable tactics to get their message out there, but they have been a rich gift to the majority of Americans who do not share their theology or their perspective on morality and who find them, their message, and by extension, their Christianity to be appalling.  

We Christians who are on the inside of all the theological debates that characterize our small worlds too often don’t realize that the rest of the world could care less about our fine theological distinctions.  The rest of the ‘world’ is likely to put us in the same camp as the Westboro gang under the label of ‘Christian’.  Unfair as that may seem, I think the rest of us Christians need to realize that we have been backfooted by the rapidity of the social transformation that is occurring around us.  The rest of the culture has moved on with respect to this issue.  They don’t see anything fundamentally ‘wrong’ with same-sex sex or with same-sex relationships or with same-sex marriage for that matter.  In the meantime our (Christian) insistence on policing the culture, on giving or withholding approval on all manner of moral perspectives or practices – all of these reflexive stances on the part of Christian communities reflect assumptions that come, not from the Bible, but from being a part of cultures that understood themselves as being ‘Christian.’  For centuries in the West and the East, it was understood that the magistrate’s job was to enforce Christian morality and to enforce Christian belief in the community.  The rhetoric that ours is a ‘Christian’ country is a survival of this notion of ‘Christendom’ which imposed a Christian culture on society and enforced it with the full weight of the law.

The great problem for conservative Christians is that ours is not a Christian country.  To make that argument is to be on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of the constitution, and the wrong side of theology and the Bible, for that matter.  The Holy Roman empire in the West and the Byzantine empire in the East notwithstanding, only Old Testament Israel can lay claim to being God’s people, as they are the only nation that God ever made a covenant with.  The New Testament construes God’s dealings differently, not with A nation, but with individuals from all nations.  God has not made a covenant with the United States, or Kenya, or even Canada!  Jesus is not concerned with establishing earthly kingdoms, but with communities that will reflect the priorities of his mission.  Jesus is not concerned with a legal agenda, but with a relational agenda.  At some point the train left the track, and we still haven’t figured out how to put it back on.

Western Christian strategy with respect to gay marriage has essentially been to revert to Christendom mode.  We condemn the malefactors and attempt to use the legal system to impose our perspective on the rest of the culture in this matter.  We have the best of motives – we are trying to protect ‘us’ and our children from ‘them’.  Publicly we are all ‘Love the sinner but hate the sin’, but privately our own loathing and fear make this rather difficult.  Moreover, our fine distinction between love and hate is once again lost outside our tightly construed theological systems.  ‘Hating the sin’ means ‘hating the sinner’ to those people who are ‘sinners’ according to our definitions.   To be frank, our protest against gay marriage has had entirely the opposite effect to what was intended.  We have been exposed as bullies, as obscurantists, as philistines and as ungenerous and unkind.  And who wants to be associated with a crowd of people like that?

 

The majority of Americans are not conservative Christians.  Stop and let this sink in.  They do not start with our assumptions about God or the Bible or sin or salvation.  These are the people that have been offended and ‘lost’ to a ‘Christian’ perspective on sex, marriage and homosexuality.  This has already happened.  The battle for hearts and minds on this issue was lost some time ago.  Christianity, in its conservative avatar, has been effectively sidelined as having any kind of relevant voice in the matter.  Yes there are still states that have not legalized gay marriage, and there are still places in our country where conservatives are in the majority and where conservative views can still be imposed a la the Western Christendom model.  But it is only a matter of time before Americans will not put up with having a religious minority impose their ideas and morality on everybody else.  This way of doing Christianity has always been bad news, and it is surprising that it has survived so long in a country that enshrines the separation of church and state.

Jesus, the apostles and the earlier Christians never envisioned Christianity as a means of social control.  They were never in the position even to contemplate such a use of the gospel, much less be in a position of power to make it a reality.  Christianity began as a minority religion, and experienced persecution off and on at the hands of hostile host cultures.  It’s in this context that Jesus’ call to follow him (including picking up one’s cross and denying oneself) resonated, it’s in this context that Jesus call to love God and love one’s neighbor was given, it’s in this context that we were called to be a city on the hill, a light to the nations.  Christians were noted because they loved one another.  Their communities were just that – communities; not the sort of corporate worship palaces that are held out as ‘successful churches’ today.  Christians in the early centuries were not in any position to pass judgment on the sexual habits or drinking habits or child-rearing habits or abortion habits or idolatry habits of the wider culture for the simple reason that this was a fast ticket to martyrdom.  But Christians made a difference in their host culture by reaching out as Christians to rescue exposed babies, to take care of the widows and the orphans, to set examples in their own families of what Christ-touched relationships could be.  These things, more than anything else Christians did, got the attention of the people in the wider culture and proved immensely attractive, so much so that the percentages of Christians in the cultures where they lived kept increasing decade after decade, even with the threat and reality of vicious persecution.

In many respects, our world today is more similar to the world of the first three Christian centuries than at any other time in Christian history.  We Christians are a minority.  The wider culture is increasingly hostile to Christian belief and values.  The problem is, we are missing the incredible opportunity that has been presented to us.  We are so busy complaining (with increasing shrillness) against the media and against gays and against gay marriage and against abortion and whatever pet social cancer one can think of, that we have been blind to the fact that our context has changed around us.  What ‘worked’ fifty years ago (in terms of imposing our values on the world around us) no longer works today.  Instead, alien values are increasingly being imposed on us, and we don’t like it.

Same-sex marriage is a fact.  Or it will be throughout the land sooner or later.  If we keep framing the argument in terms of ‘culture wars’ or battles lost and won, we will have missed the opportunity of our times.  Our task is not to keep gay marriage from happening, but to love same-sex couples, and individuals who are themselves same-sex in orientation.  Our job is not to march against abortion, but to roll up our sleeves and help those women who find themselves in situations where abortion is a real option.  And if we are going to make a big deal about marriage, then we had better make sure our own house is in order.  I say this realizing that our own house is in utter disarray when it comes to marriage in particular and relationships in general in our communities.  We Christians have no ground on which to condemn anyone else and their view of marriage when more than 50% of our own end in divorce.  The statistics expose us conservative Christians as the hypocrites we are, on this issue at least.  Is it any wonder that few in the wider culture take us seriously?

 We live in a messy world full of people who are making choices that we don’t agree with, and whose choices often have unintended consequences that affect us and our families.  This is our reality.  It is time, past time for the church to come together, not to launch crusades against the moral depredations of the wider society, but for us to become the church, the community of God’s people, the counter-culture where we live the values we proclaim, where we experience and share the love of Christ.

The wider culture in general and the gay culture in particular is offended by and completely rejects the ministries of condemnation that seem to emanate from Christians and churches and Christian organizations.  It is my opinion that when we Christians demonstrate that we can love each other, and that we can reach beyond ourselves and care for people whose values and perspectives are different than ours, then we may begin to reclaim the attention if not respect of the wider communities around us.  We have to realize that our grasp of the love of Christ and our ability to express that love to each other is our most powerful weapon.  We have something that the people around us are desperately seeking.  How tragic that too often they are not finding it from us.

The Week From Hell

It began well enough.   Excited followers and hangers-on, disciples relieved that, finally, with this journey to Jerusalem, Jesus is getting serious about being the Messiah they know he is, Jerusalem’s jaded inhabitants streaming out of the gates in force to get a glimpse of the ‘prophet from Galilee’, children picking up the excitement and shouting out, ‘Save us, O son of David!’

Crowds energized by eyewitness reports of Jesus’ most stupendous miracle yet, in the nearby village of Bethany, his friend Lazarus, dead four days and decaying, raised to life; crowds, wanting to see more.

Palm branches waving in the air, cloaks cast on the ground for Jesus’ donkey to clip clop over.  We’ve managed to preserve the celebration in our churches today, the palm-frond crosses, the ‘Hosannas’ and the rocks employed to sing if the children are made redundant.  But rarely do we access the profound, disturbing, crushing irony of the day.  It was all froth.  It was meaningless praise.  Because no one got it.  No one understood.  Not the disciples, not the crowds, not the children, not the authorities.  There would be no popular uprising, no freedom from Rome, a la Judas Maccabeus.  There would be no stars falling from heaven, no bloodied moon, no settling of scores with the wicked of the earth, a la John the Baptist.  Jesus would end up alienating everyone, including his own disciples, one of whom would betray him, another deny him, all of them abandon him to face his fate alone.

 

We have prettied the week up as it has been transformed into a liturgical event; an excuse for a petting zoo for the kids with donkeys trotting and children singing pretty songs and the rest of us celebrating the cluelessness of Jesus’ disciples and his followers and the crowds who did not know what they were saying; but ‘holy week’ or ‘passion week’ is really nothing more than the week from hell.

Jesus takes the plunge into the morass of power politics, manipulation and corruption that is Jerusalem.  And many things start to happen.  First of all, from his disciples’ perspective, after a promising start, Jesus does nothing to follow up on his ‘successful’ return to Jerusalem.  This is frustrating.  This becomes maddening.  Visions of thrones, of sitting on the right and left, of lording it over the Gentiles – none of this is happening.  And for the well-connected religious hierarchy, Jesus is their worst nightmare.  Get the riff-raff excited and the Romans will put the screws on them.  Plus they do present a rather large target. And Jesus is not pulling his punches – with him around and holding the crowds’ attention, they are looking as bad as they really are, and they are being shown to be not on anyone’s side but their own.  And the Roman garrison is always twitchy when there are crowds, especially when the crowds are religiously motivated.  It is a toxic soup, and Jesus has decided intentionally to stir it.

You can feel the disciples growing, increasingly profound disillusionment.  Judas has been so vilified over the centuries that it is easy to separate him from the rest as a kind of malignant solo operator.  But he was one of them.  And the fact that the rest of them are arguing about which one of them is the greatest and who is going to sit where in the coming kingdom indicate that their minds are on their reward and not on what Jesus is actually saying.  Judas betrays Jesus, but so does Peter.  And the rest of them make themselves scarce when it becomes clear that no kingdom is about to happen.

The ‘Jews’ as John likes to refer to them, the religious leadership are constantly backfooted by Jesus in their attempts to establish a case against him.  It becomes increasingly clear that just another holiday in Galilee for Jesus is not going to do it.  They really must be rid of him.  And to do so, they really need it to be an inside job.  They are pleased when disillusioned Judas shows up.  It remains for them to sort out a way for this to appear as though it’s all legal – proper channels and all that.  Those Romans are sticklers for legal propriety.  It will take some finessing, but they have lots of experience.

And the Romans, there concern is order.  And they have observed that order is better maintained when it’s made clear to everybody that things will not go well with you if Rome considers you to be a threat.  Crucifixions are actually advertisements of Roman power, literal sign posts intended as flashing yellow lights for everyone else.  Deterrence taken to a new level.

Jesus had made it clear on several occasions that he knew exactly what he was doing.  He was going to Jerusalem, he would be arrested, treated horribly and killed.  And then, he said, on the third day he would rise.  But none of this made sense.  No one else understood.

Entry into Jerusalem by Pietro Lorenzetti

So everybody, this last week, is busy putting Jesus in their own box.  The disciples can fathom nothing but a Messiah.  The Jews nothing but a threat.  The Romans nothing but cruel sport, and, of course, a deterrent.  All this time, Jesus is talking, Jesus is teaching, Jesus is doing things in an attempt to engage everyone’s attention.  To no avail.

 And we have Jesus in our own boxes.  We, too, are like the disciples, not understanding; like the Jesus, feeling under threat; like the Romans, busy with our own agendas.  We use Jesus in so far as he his useful.  But no further.

But Jesus presses on.  By doing so he reveals that either he has become mad, or he is doing something deeper than anyone can comprehend. And even twenty centuries later we are still struggling to comprehend.  He is betrayed, falsely accused, tortured, crucified; he dies.  But in doing so he embraces our death, and all its causes, and breaks its power.  Jesus is engaging our foes, Jesus is effecting a deliverance, but not from Egyptians, or Midianites, or Assyrians, or Babylonians, or Greeks or Romans.  However glorious the deliverances of the past, none is more than a shadow to what Jesus is doing.

His body lies in a tomb while Adam and Eve are freed from their curse.  And he himself gets up from the slab and emerges from the tomb alive, transformed, transfigured, the same Jesus but more so, human but freed to be human, God the Son effecting the exodus of humanity from death to life.

 

And we are still unpacking this all.  Still behaving like Holy Week disciples, Holy Week Jews and Holy Week Romans.  We, too often, find ourselves in our own week from hell, caught up in our schemes, our lies, our willful ignorances, our small-sighted fields of vision.

In the Orthodox Church, we are walking through Holy Week this week, very slowly, very laboriously through services every day, and as the week progresses, multiple services every day.  This is intentional.  We need to slow down, we need to open our eyes, we need to experience anew what was really going on, that last week in Jerusalem.  We need to see ourselves in the disciples, in the Jews, in the Romans even.  Because only then will what Jesus says, what Jesus does, who Jesus is begin to penetrate anew.

I more than anyone need this.  So that when, at midnight, early Sunday morning, the announcement comes, Christ is risen!  I can, with the disciples, with the women, with the Jews and Romans who would hear and believe, start to rebuild my life, too.

The Cost of Ministry

I  gave this talk yesterday at St. Paul's University to about 160 students and colleagues during our 'Discernment Day', a day given over for our department of theology students to examine their call to ministry.

Not so long ago I read this article, 'Jets for Jesus' by Sunday Oguntola in the December web edition of Christianity Today:

Gulfstream G650

Allegations of extravagant living among Nigeria’s Pentecostal preachers have deepened following the gift of a private jet to the president of the Christian Association of Nigeria.  The multi-million dollar jet – a 10 seater with a range of 3,900 nautical miles – was presented to Ayo Oritsejafor by members of his congregation, Word of Life Bible Church in the oil-rich Delta state city of Warri.  The gift celebrated the pastor’s birthday and his 40^th anniversary in ministry.

Oritsejafor, who also serves as president of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria, joins a growing list of preachers with private jets in the West African nation, which is Africa’s largest oil producer.

Gulfstream G650

David Oyedepo, the founder of Living Faith Ministries (popularly known as Winners’ Chapel) in Lagos, Nigeria’s major port and most populous city, owns three Gulfstreams (plus a Learjet) worth almost US $100 million.  By contrast, Oritsejafor’s Bombardier Challenger jet is worth less than US $5 million.  Enoch Adeboye, general overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God, also owns a private jet.  So does the flamboyant founder of Christ Embassy Church, Chris Oyakhilome. 

Apart from preachers, only top business tycoons and a few governors and politiciaqns own private jets in a nation where more than 70% live on less than US $1 per day…. [Moreover] most Christians in [Nigeria] remain poor, fueling anger that pastors have been feeding fat on their parishioners. 

Gideon Para-Mallam, regional secretary of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, said such preachers are setting bad examples.  ‘This represents another minus to Christianity in a country riddled with much corruption,’ he said.  ‘We are simply displaying the rottenness of what has become of Nigeria.  It is so sad.’… 

But Oritsejafor defends the gift, maintaining that has private jet is a necessity and not a luxury.  ‘Sometimes my schedule is so complicated,’ he said at a press conference.  ‘Now I can move.  I can even go and come back home.  It is a bit more convenient for me, and I suspect that this is one of the reason a lot of these other preachers have planes.’ 

Oritsejafor has his defenders.  To Wale Oke, national vice president of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria, a jet is just a tool for faster evangelization.  ‘How can an Ayo Orisejafor, who has to minister around the globe, pastor a very large congregation in Warri and attend to critical national matters in Abuja if he has to keep waiting at the airports, in a system where nothing is predictable?’  he asked.  He maintained Pentecostal preachers will buy more jets to cope with expanding ministries.  ‘They ain’t seen anything yet!  More of us will yet buy and maintain our jets because, by the mercy of God, we have been given the wisdom to do so.’

Learjet 85

A call to follow Christ, a call to serve Christ, is a call to suffer.  It’s a call to die.  There are many, not just in Nigeria but in my country and even here in Kenya who will say that Christ calls us to success, that Christ calls us into blessing, that Christ calls us to prosperity and abundant life, and that means enjoying all the riches and privileges and status and power that the world around us dreams about.  These people are lying.

This is what Jesus really says:  ‘If anyone wants to come after me, let him/let her deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For whoever would save their life will lose it, but whoever loses his or her life for my sake and the gospel will save it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life?  Or what will they give in return for their life.’ (Matthew 16:24-26)

Gulfstream G650 interior

It would seem that you and I have a choice to make today.  We can continue to believe these so-called ‘successful’ pastors, we can continue to believe what the world around us is telling us that our ministries are supposed to be about success, about more and more numbers, more and more influence, more and more prominence, higher and higher positions, more and more titles, or we can choose to follow Jesus.  The way of the world is upward mobility.  The way of a lot of people in the church is upward mobility.  Success!  Prosperity!  Blessing here and now!  You may indeed find these things at the top.  But you’ll look in vain to find Jesus there on the top of the mountain, on the top rung of the ladder.  He simply is not up.  He’s down.  The way of Jesus is what Henri Nouwen calls downward mobility. When Jesus calls you and me to follow him, which way are you going?  Are you going up?  Or are you going down?

We love titles, don’t we?  But since my first time in Kenya more than 33 years ago, I’ve witnessed a kind of ‘title inflation’ that makes my head spin.  Back in 1980 when I was living with a pastor in the rural areas, there were ‘pastors’ and there were ‘reverends.’  My friend was a ‘pastor’ and he was serving 5 different congregations.  When I came back a few years later, my friend had become a ‘reverend’.  By the end of the 1980s, I noticed that it was no longer enough to be just a ‘pastor’ or even just a ‘reverend’.  More and more men were appointing themselves ‘bishop’.  Soon there were lots of bishops here in Nairobi, and even more bishops out in the rural areas.  There were even some who claimed to be archbishops.  Then, evidently there were too many bishops, because the next trend was to become an apostle.  Apostles are evidently special, and the great selling point is that an apostle trumps a bishop on the authority scale.  It hardly matters that I’ve never heard anyone give a cogent explanation of what an apostle actually is.  More recently, some leaders have turned to the title of prophet.  Then there are the compound titles that I have started seeing on church signs, usually accompanied by a picture of the exalted leader and his wife, and underneath is Apostle Bishop so and so, or Prophet and Apostle so and so.  Most recently at a church near where I live, the very large sign by the road was a celebration of the ministry of the bishop apostle prophet so and so.  The next week I went by the sign had changed.  Instead of letting us know that a bishop apostle prophet so and so was in residence, the new sign said that the bishop apostle prophet DR so and so was around to bless people and collect their offerings.

Not surprisingly, Jesus has a different perspective. ‘These people tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.  They do all their deeds to be seen by others…  and they love to have the place of honor at banquets (and harambees) and the best seats in the synagogues [and up on politicians platforms], and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi [or bishop, or apostle or prophet or daktari].  But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students.  And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father – the one in heaven.  Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah.  The greatest among you will be your slave.  And all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.’ (Matthew 23:4-12)

I think the biggest cost of the ministry is letting go of the world’s way of doing things, of the world’s way of seeing things, of the world’s way of understanding things.  The church today is the opposite of holy.  We are both in the world, and we are completely of it. Look at the way we do things.  Look at how we treat people.  Jesus says that you will know the tree by its fruit.  If the church is filled with worldly people motivated by worldly goals and producing worldly fruit, then what we have is not something that Jesus is going to recognize as his.  We have a saying in my country:  If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck.

Or to put it another way, we have lost the capacity to exercise discernment.  And as a result, we have adopted uncritically the thinking of the world around us and applied it to our churches and our understanding of Christian ministry.  The best example I can think of is that of ‘leadership’.  Please understand that I’m not trying to attack or condemn anybody by what I’m about to say.  Instead I want to provoke an honest discussion.

So allow me a few thoughts on Church ‘leadership’ as we find it in the New Testament.  First we must understand that ‘leadership’ is not a New Testament word; it’s a modern word.  Leadership implies authority, initiative, direction, management and control.  In many ways, leadership is a power word, and assumes a perspective on the world around us and takes on a certain posture and demands a certain course of action.  Leadership is a man’s word and its context describes a man’s context.  Today churches of all kinds have seminars on ‘leadership’. We give our shepherds three easy steps on being a more effective leader.  So many of our churches are so large that we need our ‘leaders’ to become more effective managers.  All of this is intended to enable our churches to function as effective institutions.  But none of this is found in our New Testament.  In fact, the emphasis throughout, indeed the direct teaching of Jesus himself and the apostles takes us in the exact opposite direction.

Jesus’ followers were to be different, known for putting the needs of others before their own, known for being like slaves in their readiness to do whatever for whoever was needy, known for being like Jesus himself.  ‘If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.  For I have set you an example that you also should do as I have done to you.’ (John 13:14-15)  In this Jesus leads by example.  He takes on the posture of a slave, and for those homes too humble for a slave, the posture of a woman.

Immediately after Jesus offers the disciples the bread of his body and the cup of his blood, a quarrel breaks out as to which one of them should be the one in charge over the rest of them.  ‘Jesus said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors.  But you are not to be like that.  Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves.  For who is greater, the one is at the table or the one who serves?  Is it not the one who is at the table?  But I am among you as one who serves.’ (Luke 22:25-27)  This is only one of several passages that I could point to where the disciples import their cultural understanding of leadership into what Jesus is calling them to do and be, only to have Jesus present them with an alternative vision of what it means to be his people that is so radical and unexpected that his disciples simply cannot fathom it.

I suggest that it isn’t just the disciples who had trouble fathoming Jesus’ vision for discipleship and for the community of disciples that would be known by his name.  Every generation of Christian church has struggled with the profound temptation to import the surrounding culture’s understanding of leadership and authority into the church.  When one looks at the historical record, one finds that the Church has repeatedly taken the easier road and abandoned Jesus’ blueprint in favor of the way it’s always been done.  The evidence for this can be seen everywhere throughout the history of the Church to the present day.  At almost every point, the church and her ministers look nothing like what Jesus was talking about and calling his followers to be and do.  And it’s not just Nigerian pastors with jets that come out looking not so good in light of Jesus’ example.  The discrepancy is simply shocking.

Paul’s vision for the Church is no less shocking and just as ignored.  Paul envisions a community where there is no Jew or Greek, no male or female, no slave or free person. (Galatians 3:28).  And in the Church, everybody is gifted by the Holy Spirit for ministry.  The emphasis is on the Holy Spirit empowering each member of the Church to love the other.  And together the local church, as it loves one another, becomes the ‘body of Christ’, the presence of Jesus to the members and the surrounding community.  The only hierarchy Paul knows is measured by how many people one loves or ‘edifies’.

The reason we find this shocking and difficult and even impossible today is because if we were to behave this way as ministers and as churches, it would involve suffering, it would involve giving up positions and power and perks, and it would involve getting involved in the lives of people, and this is always messy, this is always difficult, this always involves suffering.  The first Christians understood this.  They willingly gave up from their own possessions enough so that it was said there was not a person in need in their midst.  I’m not necessarily advocating communism.  But generosity that doesn’t cost me anything is not generosity.  And love that doesn’t cost me anything is not love.  I don’t think the Lord is very much impressed by the number of Mercedes Benzes in our parking lots, and the big men who dole out lots of money to the applause of everybody at harambees.  I think he still prefers the widow who by putting in two shillings put in everything she had.

I’m meant to be talking of the cost of ministry.  And I’ve spent most all my time talking about what I take to be the hardest thing about genuine ministry, and that is seeing ourselves and our work and the world around us from Christ’s perspective.  His perspective changes everything and it makes it possible for us to let go of our worldly ways and perspectives and to trust him instead and to start doing the things he is calling us to do.  This is the Lord’s way.  But I will not pretend that it is the easy way.  The way of the world, the way of the Nigerian pastors and their jets, the way of becoming a somebody, this is a much easier way by far.  Jesus says, ‘Enter through the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who walk in it.  For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.’ (Matthew 7:13-14)

It is a hard way, and more than once I’ve been pushed down, and I didn’t think I could go on.  I’ve been a university campus minister with InterVarsity Christian fellowship; I was a Presbyterian pastor for twenty two years.  My smallest congregation was 42 souls, my largest 1600.  I’ve been a missionary and a theological educator.  And right now I’m just a church member.  And I help out around here.  But Jesus didn’t call me to a career; ministry is not a profession.  Instead Jesus called me to follow him.  And he doesn’t promise a nice salary package, or a nice car, or school fees for my kids, or a beautiful house.  Because when Jesus calls, it’s a call to die.  I’ve lived long enough to know this by experience.  By following Jesus I turned my back on a nice ladder-climbing career in the Presbyterian Church, by following Jesus I had to leave behind home and family and everything that was familiar and comfortable. Choosing to follow Jesus meant I had to give up any hope of an academic career.  Choosing to follow Jesus meant I buried myself and my family in Ethiopia for 8 difficult years.  And when choosing to follow Jesus meant that I chose to be vulnerable with my board of elders about my struggle with depression, I spent the next two years fending off their attempts to throw me off the ship. And they finally succeeded.  And it hurt terribly.  When I chose to follow Jesus into the Orthodox Church after fourteen years of wrestling with the consequences, I lost my job and I lost my mission and I nearly lost everything.  Following Jesus has been very costly.  And I will not make up some happy ending that in my experience does not yet exist.  It has been really hard, and has only become more so the older I get.  But I keep going because Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life.’ And Jesus I have always found to be faithful.  

I will not mislead you and say that it has been worth it.  It has been hard, there has been pain, there has been suffering, and there has been grief.  But we do not live by sight, do we?  We are called to live by faith.  I have not yet received what I am hoping for – the wholeness, the healing, the reconciliation, the restoration, the new life.  But these are all things that we are promised.  In the meantime, what Jesus calls us to do and to be is simply to be his love.  His love in our families, his love where live, his love in our church, his love where we work, his love right here and right now.  And this, brothers and sisters, is why ministry is so costly.  

Too often we are called to love into lives and circumstances where people have themselves not learned to love as Jesus does.  The church is meant to be the one place on the planet where we can experience the love of Jesus.  But it isn’t.   It is this love that leads to a cross.  It is this love that gives and gives and gives.  That tries to help, that tries to hold, that tries to go the extra mile, to give up the extra coat, that forgives when offended and sinned against, that’s quick to ask forgiveness when I’m the one who has done wrong, is patient, is kind, is not envious or arrogant or rude, does not insist on its own way, not irritable or resentful, doesn’t rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth.  It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things endures all things. (1 Corinthians 13:4-7)  As we do these things, sometimes we are ignored.  Sometimes we are wounded.  Sometimes we are crucified.  And too often these things happen to us at the hands of our fellow believers in Christ.  Our suffering comes at the hands of those who should know better.  Just as the suffering of others too often comes at our own hands.

So we come back to where we started.  We have a choice.  We can live lives that are all about ourselves and our success and our name and reputation and our ministry.  Or we can follow Jesus, and let go of the world’s way of seeing things and doing things and take on Jesus’ yoke of love instead.  The way of the world, or the way of the cross.  It’s that simple.  I leave you with Jesus’ own call.

‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.’ (Matthew 11: 28-30)

Women, Culture and the Tradition: Rethinking the Role of Women in Orthodoxy

‘Women may not serve at the altar.  Women may not be priests.  Women may not serve as bishops.’  The reasons given by Orthodox hierarchs and in Orthodox literature are clear and straightforward.  Women are excluded because Jesus did not appoint any women apostles, and bishops are the successors to the apostles.  As Phyllis Meshel Onest puts it in her article ‘Women’s Role in the Church: The Perspective of a Seminary Graduate, a Mother and an Educator’:

For Orthodox Christians the ordained priest is the “icon of Christ” or “in persona Christi.” We believe that there is something in the very nature of the male ordained priest which allows him “to be the sacramental presence of the Lord, the mystical embodiment of the Church’s husband and Lord.” Metropolitan Maximos, my former professor and mentor, taught that the priest is the “iconic representation of Christ, the Groom of the Bride, [which is] the Church. The priest is the living icon of the bridegroom.” Ordaining women to the priesthood alters that imagery to that of Bride of the Bride, which we cannot have.[1]

Orthodox Christians have insisted on the maleness of its clergy for a very long time.  But it is only relatively recently that these views have been openly challenged.  As women in predominantly Western countries have gained a measure of equality with men in terms of their rights if not their actual experience, increasing pressure has been exerted on churches that have historically disallowed women from positions of hierarchical leadership in churches or in dioceses.  In many cases the argument has been a variation of ‘the church is out of step with the society’.  While this makes perfect sense to many on the outside of these ecclesiastical communions, they often don’t realize that the historic hierarchical churches find the argument that they should conform to the way the ‘world’ does things unconvincing. 

Much more effective but not as well-known are those arguments that examine how the traditional ways of interpreting the Scriptures themselves may be held captive to prevailing cultural assumptions.  This is different from the 19^th and 20^th century Modernist claims that the Christian Scriptures themselves were wrong on this and many other issues and should be laid aside to allow a more sensible way of ‘doing’ Christianity that better fits with what we know of the world.  This posture, adopted by much of the past several centuries of critical Biblical scholarship has been rightly rejected by the more conservative churches as a fundamental threat to the very existence of Christianity.  Given that much of the critique of the Orthodox (and Roman Catholic, and other conservative Protestant churches) perspective on women comes from sources perceived as corrosive to the teaching and mission of the church, the leaders can be forgiven if their first reflex is to dismiss any critique as being a kind of Trojan horse.

But I am not on the outside.  I am an Orthodox Christian, theologically conservative with a high view of Scripture and the Tradition of which it is part.  I come to the discussion not driven by a blind commitment to the equality of women, which is a secular Western ideal (although its roots are very Christian indeed).  Instead, I am radicalized in my view of women by what I read in the Bible itself.  And my familiarity with the New Testament and with the Tradition of the Church, as well as the history and context of the Church’s life and mission, have made me wonder if our modern posture as a Church towards women in ministry can continue to be sustained.

Scripture is a part of the Tradition of the Church.  But the role of Tradition is not to alter, modify or change what we have in Scripture; instead Tradition serves to augment Scripture, to make clear what Scripture itself does not address.  Scripture is therefore complimented by the rest of the Church’s Tradition.  As the Apostle Paul states in 2 Thessalonians 2:15: ‘So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold to the traditions we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter.’

A few thoughts on Church ‘leadership’ as we find it in the New Testament.  First we must understand that ‘leadership’ is not a New Testament word; it’s a modern word.  Leadership implies authority, initiative, direction, management and control.  In many ways, leadership is a power word, and assumes a perspective on the world around us and takes on a certain posture and demands a certain course of action.  Leadership is a man’s word and its context describes a man’s context.  Today churches of all kinds have seminars on ‘leadership’. We give our shepherds three easy steps on being a more effective leader.  So many of our churches are so large that we need our ‘leaders’ to become more effective managers.  All of this is intended to enable our churches to function as effective institutions.  But none of this is found in our New Testament.  In fact, the emphasis throughout, indeed the direct teaching of Jesus himself and the apostles takes us in the exact opposite direction.

Jesus’ followers were to be different.  They were not to be like certain Gentiles, who lived to lord it over people.  Nor were they to be like certain Jews who were keen to maintain the perks of position and power.  Instead, Jesus’ followers were to be different, known for putting the needs of others before their own, known for being like slaves in their readiness to do whatever for whoever was needy, known for being like Jesus himself.  ‘If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.  For I have set you an example that you also should do as I have done to you.’ (John 13:14-15)  In this Jesus leads by example.  He takes on the posture of a slave, and for those homes too humble for a slave, the posture of a woman.

Immediately after Jesus offers the disciples the bread of his body and the cup of his blood, a quarrel breaks out as to which one of them should be the one in charge over the rest of them.  ‘Jesus said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors.  But you are not to be like that.  Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves.  For who is greater, the one is at the table or the one who serves?  Is it not the one who is at the table?  But I am among you as one who serves.’ (Luke 22:25-27)  This is only one of several examples that I could point to where the disciples import their cultural understanding of leadership into what Jesus is calling them to do and be, only to have Jesus present them with an alternative vision of what it means to be his people that is so radical and unexpected that his disciples simply cannot fathom it.

I think you will agree with me that it isn’t just the disciples who had trouble fathoming Jesus’ vision for discipleship and for the community of disciples that would be known by his name.  Every generation of Christian church has struggled with the profound temptation to import the surrounding culture’s understanding of leadership and authority into the church.  When one looks at the historical record, one finds that the Church has repeatedly taken the easier road and abandoned Jesus’ blueprint in favor of the way it’s always been done.  The evidence for this can be seen everywhere throughout the history of the Church to the present day.  At almost every point, the church and her ministers look nothing like what Jesus was talking about and calling his followers to be and do.  The discrepancy is simply shocking.

Paul’s vision for the Church is no less shocking and just as ignored.  Paul envisions a community where there is no Jew or Greek, no male or female, no slave or free person. (Galatians 3:28).  And in the Church, everybody is gifted by the Holy Spirit for ministry.  The emphasis is on the Holy Spirit empowering each member of the Church to love the other.  And together the local church, as it loves one another, becomes the ‘body of Christ’, the presence of Jesus to the members and the surrounding community.  The only hierarchy Paul knows is measured by how many people one loves or ‘edifies’.

St. Photini (the 'Samaritan woman')

Of course it vexes some that Paul does not address structure or leadership or organization in his letters.  The New Testament is not a systematic theology, but a collection of occasional letters, gospels, histories and of course Revelation.  But rather than be overwrought about what the New Testament does not address, the church would be better served by taking on board what it does address about the church, especially since there is a significant amount of open water between what we see with Jesus and Paul, for example, and our own experience today.

To sum up so far, ‘leadership’ and ‘hierarchy’ are concepts that are not developed in the gospels and the New Testament.  Rather, servitude, love and edification define what the Church is about.

It has been argued that the appearance of bishops in the earliest extant documents of the early Church is proof that a hierarchical structure is part of apostolic tradition handed down to subsequent generations and reflects the will of the Lord for his Church.  Bishops may indeed be a part of genuine apostolic tradition, but Christian bishops begin to look less and less like Jesus and more and more like Roman administrators.  It did not take very long before the position of bishop ceased to be a slave position and became instead a power position.  This becomes clear in the growing controversies over who is the greatest, who gets to rule over what, who controls this or that area, etc. etc.  It’s like the upper room conversation all over again, only this time Jesus isn’t there to gently rebuke his wannabe rulers/hierarch/bishops/popes who are so keen, just like the Gentiles, to lord it over whoever is ‘under’ them.  The point I want to make here is that Christian ‘leadership’ quickly became about power, and in direct contravention to Jesus’ specific command.  And as a result, the church became increasingly obsessed with power.  And power is a male word and describes a male world.

St. Mary of Egypt

It should be no surprise that women are excluded from this male world of church ‘leadership’ and authority.  Such ‘leadership’ is about hierarchy and power, and this is not where women belong.  At least according to the patriarchal cultures in which Christians found themselves.  This corruption of Jesus’ example and Paul’s vision of a Church led to the structures of Church ‘leadership’ that we see from the 2^nd century onward and that these culture-enslaved expressions of leadership have since become enshrined as Church Tradition, displacing the radical relationships and community we see in the Gospels and in Paul and the rest of the New Testament.

It is argued that a woman cannot be a priest because a priest is meant to be an icon/picture of Christ, and Christ of course is male.  But the problem with that argument is that it substitutes a mere form for the content of that form.  A priest becomes an icon of Christ when that priest loves like Christ.  Being male is not the deciding factor.  A woman is just as capable as a man of being the love of Jesus.  The same with a bishop.  The mind boggles to think of what would happen if the bishops of the church were actually like Jesus.  There is nothing in the New Testament that forbids a woman from loving like Jesus loved, and serving like Jesus served.  And there are a number of examples of women in the epistles who did just that (see especially Romans 16).  Besides, we Orthodox, of all people, already celebrate the fact that not just men, but women as well are created in the image of God, or as the Greek would but it, as the icon of God.  In fact, the creation account in Genesis strongly suggests that it takes both men and women together to become the icon of God - something undoubtedly having to do with the plurality of God as Trinity and the nature of God as relationship and love.  It would seem from the very act of creation itself that there is precedent for seeing not just men but women as well and together with men as being the icon of God; and if the icon of God, is it too far fetched to also say the icon of Christ?

It is also argued that bishops are the successors to the apostles and that the apostles were all men, ergo bishops must all be men.  But this is not an argument that is made by either Jesus or the Apostles.  Moreover, none of the Apostles were Gentiles, but that doesn’t stop bishops from being Gentiles.  I suggest that something outside of Christianity and fundamentally part of the early first and second century Mediterranean culture is at work here.  And one must reach deep into cultural, not biblical prejudices to justify forbidding a woman from leading worship, or from preaching and teaching, or from presiding at the Eucharist, because nowhere in the New Testament can such a command be found. 

St. Phoebe

To claim, as many have tried, that 1 Timothy 2:5-11 forbids women from leadership roles in the Church does violence to the context which Paul is addressing (false teachers some of whom are women), and seeks to derive clear principles (‘I forbid a woman to teach or have authority over a man’) from a passage that may seem straightforward in English but which is, in the original Greek, fraught with difficulties.  Rather than base one’s understanding of women in leadership positions in the Church on a passage that is notoriously problematic, it makes sense to pitch one’s tent where Scripture is clear.  And we know that in the New Testament, women have leadership positions in the Church (Phoebe is a deacon (not a ‘deaconess’ as some say – the word does not exist in Greek!  Romans 16:1-2), with another woman being considered by Paul as ‘outstanding among the apostles’ – Junia in Romans 16:7.  Women taught men (Priscilla and her husband Aquila taught Apollos, Acts 18:26).  Women are given the same gifts of ministry that men are given without restriction, which implies that they are able to exercise the same gifts in the Church as men are (1 Corinthians 12).  Women are allowed to pray and prophesy in church (1 Corinthians 11:4-5; Acts 21:8-9).  As Stephanie Black has written, ‘It would be unwise to build a doctrine prohibiting women from speaking in church, teaching men, or holding authoritative roles in the church on the shaky foundation of this [1 Timothy 2:5-11] difficult passage, when such speaking, teaching, and leadership by women are affirmed by Paul elsewhere.’[2]

St. Junia the Apostle

My argument here is that the prohibition of women from positions of ministry in the Orthodox Church is based on what is understood as Church Tradition.  But this aspect of Church Tradition, rather than augment the revelation of the Word of God which is our Bible, actually subverts the foundation of the Church’s Tradition, the written traditions of the Apostles in our New Testament. As such, this aspect of ‘Church Tradition’ should be rejected by the Church as having been compromised by imported anti-Christian assumptions of institutional power and patriarchy.  The kind of ‘leadership’ found in Christian Churches today is not what Jesus inaugurated.  New Testament Church ministry has been supplanted by a cultural model of leadership that made the Church increasingly an institution concerned with the preservation and expansion of power.  The resulting churches became increasingly hierarchy-centered rather than ministry-centered, as Jesus understood ministry.  As a result, there is no room for women in a hierarchy-centered church.  We have been an institution of power for most of our history, not only in the world but very much of it.  However, return to the original vision of the founder and of the Apostles and one gets a glimpse of a movement that was capable of turning the world upside down (Acts 17:6).  I believe this still remains our mission.

St. Prisciilla

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[1] http://oca.org/resource-handbook/theology/womens-role-in-the-church-the-perspective-of-a-seminary-graduate-a-mother-a .

[2] Stephanie L. Black, ‘Biblical Perspectives on Women in Church Leadership’ (unpublished paper, 2009), 5.