Secret Women's Business

It can be quite useful to be bad at something. Some men excel at the art of "strategic incompetence". They find that if they cook a completely inedible meal, or generate 50 pots of washing up in the process of preparing a meal, they are not asked to do it again. They are unable to see the grease (and bits of melted cheese) still stuck to the plates after their "washing up" efforts, thus find themselves excused from further duties. Their attempts at washing clothes render all the whites pink and all the woollens downsized, and they find themselves exempt from future laundry duties. Whether such incompetence is innocent or deliberate, the result is the same... their time is freed up for other activities. It is actually impossible to be good at everything, and our weaknesses are usually the flip side of our strengths. There has been research that suggests those who are outstanding in a field are not "well balanced" people... in order to excel in one area, ot...

I received an email yesterday enquiring about the position of Churches of Christ in relation to women as senior ministers. I thought this was an interesting question, so I've posted below an edited version of my email response: Churches of Christ do not generally have "positions" on anything outside of the absolute core Christian beliefs, because of an historical commitment to the independence of local churches, and because they value liberty of conscience of individuals. Choices about who may or who may not be invited to take on a ministry position therefore become the decision of the eldership of a local church, elected by the church membership. As a movement overall, however, Churches of Christ ordain women in ministry under the expectation that all who follow Christ are "ministers", and that there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Greek in Christ Jesus. In the traditional view of Churches of Christ, a team of elders are the ...

Genesis 1: 26 Then God said, "Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." 27 So God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground." Genesis 1 is an extraordinarily rich passage, subtly introducing a number of key themes that emerge throughout the bible. In the extraordinary phrase “let us ”, we see the earliest hint of the God revealed in Christ and through the Spirit... as a God whose very nature is relationship. The Christian view of God as Trinity, three persons in eternal relationship, is gently evoked b...

Churches of Christ are fairly laissez-faire around the issue of ordination... many of our paid ministers are not ordained, and the Church of Christ view around ordination is very different from that of many other traditions. The belief that all Christians are "ministers", but that some people may be set aside from secular work in order to equip all the other "ministers" in Christian service, is one of the key ideas in our movement. Gender is pretty much irrelevant in this view of paid (and/or ordained) ministry. For some of our brothers and sisters in other denominations, ordination has very different implications... and gender is one of the important criteria involved in who may (or may not) be ordained. Circulating around cyberspace is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek argument about the importance of gender in ordination to Christian ministry: Top Ten Reasons Why Men Should Not Be Ordained: 10. A man's place is in the army. 9. For men who have children, their duties...

This website says it all... http://www.girleffect.org/#/splash/

You may have noticed on my profile the statement: “I love to encourage women to do whatever makes them ‘fully alive’.”(Or men, for that matter... but my primary focus is women’s ministry!) By “fully alive” I don’t mean thrills for thrills’ sake... I mean the deeper joy of stepping into vocation... of making a difference in the world in one’s own unique, God-given shape. I heard the following reading at church recently, and thought I’d quote it here, because it captures poetically something of the beauty of a person who is living “fully alive”: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are ...

It's no great secret that the education and empowerment of women is absolutely critical in the struggle against world poverty. Women's education rates are key to lowering birthrates in developing countries... an important step in avoiding environmental catastrophe and resultant hunger. The greater the education of women, on average, the higher their income. In comparison to men, women spend a far higher proportion of their income on their children. The health and education of future generations can best be achieved by educating women, and by empowering them through "microeconomic" schemes. So today I would like to applaud the Obama administration for establishing a global women's post. (see http://www.theage.com.au/world/obama-creates-post-to-tackle-global-womens-issues-20090307-8rwk.html) This can only be a step in the right direction for human rights and human wellbeing across the planet. The Obama administration... like governments all across the globe... face ...