Richard.w.hendricks

My friend, Tony Jones, has written a call for schism over the issue of women’s equality in the Church. He’s now decided that schism not the right word but the fact remains that we may need to separate from people who “preach a false gospel.” I’ve thought about it ever since he posted it. (Tony built bridges for this little charismatic kid to cross over into the ancient-future church through his ministry and writings over the years. I self-identified with the emerging church in my twenties and even 15 years later, I’m pretty sure I still find a home there. And one thing I know about Tony is that he often writes or posits with hyperbole to kick off the real conversation that actually needs to happen.)

So I’ve somehow written myself into a four-part series on this “schism” notion because there are parts of it that resonate with me – I would never attend a church that didn’t affirm women in full equality, for instance, and to me this is a major justice issue – and then parts the “schism” language freak me out or irritate me because I do believe with all my heart that there can be unity and redemption.  Instead of having one big long post like I did with my Christian conferences magnum opus of feelings, I decided to break this one up into parts. So this is just part one. Over the next week or so, I’ll write the rest of it  as I go along because I think the conversation is a worthwhile one indicative of larger conversations about unity and a new way forward. 

Oh, Father, I know I’m not perfect, I know we’re not perfect, but at least we are not like those people over there.

Secret telling time: I’m part of the people over there.

It’s funny how nice a schism sounds when you’re the one who is the active participant, the one whose decree makes it so. It sounds noble and high-minded when you say that someone else is a false gospel and you are the one with the truth. I imagine that it must be nicer to be the one leaving with our convictions so strong. The rest of you sinners can think what you want, I’m just trying to follow the Bible, we say. No hard feelings.

It’s not-so-great when you’re the one who is left on the other side of the slammed door.

This is a dispatch from the other side of the schism.

If there is one thing I figured out very quickly when I was introduced to the big old American evangelical church in my twenties it is this: there wasn’t room for me. 

It wasn’t just because I was a woman and an egalitarian. In my context, it was also because I was considered liberal in my politics. I liked universal healthcare, for starters. But mainly, it was because I was part of that happy-clappy branch of Christianity, born out of the fire of the renewal movement, because I was “one of those charismatics” and I spoke in tongues, four generations down from the old Pentecostal Holiness stuff as it splintered and moved through the world. The door was shut to me because my lineage of faith was, as Oral Roberts would say, “forged in the fires of healing evangelism.”

It was also because I was not-American. (We could talk about that, couldn’t we? Where is the room for those of us outside of that dominant empire narrative? My experiences with Church are pretty different because I grew up before globalization and technology homogenized our experiences. Remember our global brothers and sisters? It’s hard sometimes for the ones on the inside to remember that there might be reasons why the Pentecostal tradition is the fastest growing stream of Christianity in the world from the global south to Asia Pacific to post-Christian neighbourhoods in Canada.)

Oh, yes, I grew up charismatic and Word of Faith before I had a clue what those labels were or meant. (We just thought we were Christians now, end of story, we had no idea of our place in the big family of God. We were innocent enough to think we were all on the same team because, well, JESUS.)

And then I went out into the world and all I have heard from every other Christian out there was complete and utter disdain for me and for the people I loved, the ones whose prayer and faith had formed me, the ones who taught my Sunday school, who prayed for my parents, who discipled our little family in the faith, the one who plunged me into the water and told me to rise up as a new creature in Christ.

Part of me rails against the idea of a schism – even a decentralized postmdoern Internet schism – because I’m already hanging onto the last rung of the ladder. Don’t cut the thread to which I’m clinging. I’m already a back-alley dweller, far from  the tables. It isn’t my egalitarianism or my feminism or my femininity that ostracized me from certain aspects of the Church: that ship has already sailed. 

I live on the other side of the schism. I have no idea who these people are online half the time. I didn’t even learn about the existence of an organization called “The SBC” until I was nearly thirty. Lifeway? I don’t really care that they don’t like or or won’t carry my book because well, I never would have expected them to carry my book – I’m not Baptist, I never have been, I never will be (watch out now). I’m a postmodern post-evangelical post-charismatic outside of their postal code for the ones who freak out about lady-preachers in every way possible.

I’m used to being left out by now. I’m used to being the red-headed stepchild in the family of God.

Even now, people find out about my background and say, really? You aren’t what I expected. (The judgement in that kind of stings a bit, I admit.)

I did an interview a while ago and it came up that I went to one of those charismatic universities and the interviewer was plainly dismayed, even sympathetic. Oh, you poor thing, it must have been so hard for you. It’s hard to explain to people: those people you love to make fun of? those are my people. They drive me crazy, too, so trust me, I get it. But I still regard our precious mess with tenderness. 

Sometimes it has felt like the one thing that unites most of the western Church is not our love for Jesus, but our disdain for the charismatic Word of Faith world.

We’ve already had a schism, you see, thousands of them. The rest of the church schismed us over and over again, we’re barely clinging to the bridge that the rest of you have set on fire.

I can’t be okay with a schism. It hurts to much to be on the other side of it.

I’ve already been schismed, thanks to John MacArthur and Hank Hanegraff, thanks to seminarians and bloggers, thanks to Internet commenters and tv preachers. I’ve already been told there isn’t room for me. Me and my people, we’re already on the other side of that door, we’re already in the back alley.

I’ve learned how to fit in among the rest of the Church now, of course. But my foot is still firmly on the other side of that schism, and I won’t turn my back on my little tradition. I won’t turn my back on the men and women who raised me to love God and to love people, even if their theology makes the rest of us uncomfortable sometimes. 

(Sidenote: The people at the table could learn a lot from my tradition, particularly about the mobilizing and releasing of women for ministry.)

When my husband went to seminary outside of our tradition, he was wary. We had been so conditioned to being marginalized, so conditioned to think of ourselves as the black sheep and unwelcome at the table, that we didn’t know how it would go. People warned us continually to be on our guard as he went into higher education outside of our tradition: “careful now! you might lose your fire!”  We got so used to being the outsider that we convinced ourselves we didn’t want to be there anyway.

Imagine our surprise when we were welcomed.

Maybe it’s because we’re all a bit older now. Maybe it’s because we have realised we don’t have the luxury of cutting off our nose to spite our face. Maybe it’s because they realized that they missed us or we realized that we missed them. Who knows, but it felt good to sit among people who are different than us, with different theological convictions, and listen to them say “tell me about it.” It felt good to have a talk about our differences without a zero-sum-game, without the threat of nuclear action. It felt good to move with freedom and curiosity and respect.

That bridge meant the world to me. I crossed that bridge and it brought me into a whole new world of theological learning and understanding. I was given tools to sift through my experiences as a child born into faith in Christ Jesus through the charismatic Word of Faith movements. I began to leave behind aspects of my former ways, absolutely, but I reclaimed others that I had dismissed. It changed my life, refined my theology, helped me learn how to hold the gifts of both the wisdom and traditions of the Church with the renewal fire of my own lineage of faith.

I have a group of girlfriends who mean the world to me. We represent a broad spectrum: reformed, complementarian, egalitarian, charismatic, house church, no church, baptist church, all points between. And we do love to pray for and with each other. And of course, I end up laying hands on them while I pray, even prophecying or “having a word” heaven help us, and they receive it from me even though it must be weird for them. The gift of welcoming me and receiving me – all of me, even my happy-clappy weirdness – is a mark of the depth of our friendship. And it means the world to me that they opened up that door. We break bread together, and find we’re family still, we’re healing a small schism perhaps. I have to believe that if there is room for me – all of me without editing – that there is room for them, too, and we are seeing a small bit of heaven breaking through as we respect each other, learn from one another, and mutually change.

The post In which this is a dispatch from the other side of the schism (I) appeared first on Sarah Bessey. And check out Sarah Bessey's critically acclaimed new book, "Jesus Feminist." “I’ve read countless books addressing the place of women in the kingdom, and I have never, ever read anything so lovely, so generous, profound and humble as Jesus Feminist. If you’re expecting anger or defensiveness or aggression, move on. If you are looking for intelligence and warmth and spirit, read this immediately." - Jen Hatmaker, author of "7: A Mutiny Against Excess" and "Interrupted"

In honor of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, I'm reposting this excerpt from A Year of Biblical Womanhood. 

"There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you."
—Maya Angelou

I’m glad I have a biblical name.

It’s a name as old as the storied shepherdess of Paddan Aram—a woman so captivating her husband pledged seven years of service in exchange for her hand, a woman whose determination to bear children sent her digging for mandrakes and bargaining with God, a woman brazen enough to steal her father’s idols and hide them in a camel saddle, a woman who took her last breath on the side of the road, giving birth, a woman whose tomb survived obscurity, conquest, earthquakes, and riots to become one of the most venerated and contested sites of the Holy Land.

Beautiful, impetuous, jealous Rachel. Rachel who fought to legitimize her existence the only way she knew how. Rachel who, though it killed her, won.

With Rachel, I notice the details. I absorb her stories as a child does, wide-eyed and attentive, the distance between long ago and yesterday as close as a memory. And like a child, I long for more, wishing at times that I could sit beneath Anita Diamant’s fictionalized Red Tent, where Dinah learned the history of her family from four mothers—Leah, Rachel, Bilhah, and Zilpah—who Dinah says “held my face between their hands and made me swear to remember.”

We recall with ease the narratives of Scripture that include a triumphant climax—a battle won, a giant slain, chariots swallowed by the sea. But for all of its glory and grandeur, the Bible contains a darkness you will only notice if you pay attention, for it is hidden in the details, whispered in the stories of women.

My quest for biblical womanhood led me to these stories late at night, long after Dan had gone to sleep, and I conducted my nightly research by his side in bed, stacks of Bibles and commentaries and legal pads threatening to swallow him should he roll over. The darkest of these stories mingled with my dreams, and I awoke the next morning startled as if I’d been told a terrible secret.

Perhaps the most troubling of the dark stories comes from the lawless period of Judges.

Jephthah was a mighty warrior of Gilead and the son of a prostitute. Banished from the city by Gilead’s legitimate sons, he took up with a gang of outlaws in the land of Tob. Jephthah must have earned a reputation as a valiant fighter because, years later, when the Gileadites faced war with the Ammonites, the elders summoned Jephthah and asked him to command their forces.

When Jephthah reminded them that they had expelled him from the city, they promised to make him their leader if he agreed. The opportunity to rule over those who once despised him proved too much for Jephthah to resist. As Jephthah charged into battle with his countrymen behind him, filled with “the Spirit of the Lord” (Judges 11:29), he made a promise to God: “If you give the Ammonites into my hands, whatever comes out of the door of my house to meet me when I return in triumph from the Ammonites will be the Lord’s, and I will sacrifice it as a burnt offering” (v. 30).

The text reports that God indeed gave victory to Jephthah. He and his troops devastated twenty Ammonite towns, thus deterring the Ammonite king from further attacks. When Jephthah returned home, glowing with sweat and triumph, “who should come out to meet him but his daughter, dancing to the sound of tambourines” (v. 34). She was his only child. The Bible never reveals her name.

When he saw her, Jephthah tore his clothes and wept. Surely he had expected an animal to come wandering out of the first floor of his home where they would have been stabled, not his daughter. He told his daughter of his vow and said he could not break it. The young girl resolutely accepted her fate. She asked only that she be granted two months to roam the hills and weep with her friends over a life cut short.

Unlike the familiar story of Isaac, this one ends without divine intervention. Jephthah fulfilled his promise and killed his daughter in God’s name. No ram was heard bleating from the thicket. No protest was issued from the clouds. No tomb was erected to mark the place where she lay.

But the women of Israel remembered.

Wrote the narrator, “From this comes the Israelite tradition that each year the young women of Israel go out for four days to commemorate the daughter of Jephthah” (vv. 39–40).

They could not protect her life, but they could protect her dignity by retelling her story—year after year, for four days, in a mysterious and subversive ceremony that perhaps led the women of Israel back to thesame hills in which Jephthah’s daughter wandered before her death. It was a tradition that appears to have continued through the writing of the book of Judges. But it is a tradition lost to the waxing and waning of time, no longer marked by the daughters of the Abrahamic faiths.

I wanted to do something to bring this ceremony back, so I invited my friend Kristine over to help me honor the victims of the Bible’s “texts of terror.”

…We prepared for the ceremony for weeks—Kristine with wood and paint, I with poetry and prose. Finally, just before Christmas, while the tree was lit and paper snowflakes hung from the windows, Kristine came over with a heavy paper bag in her arms. We sat on the living room floor with the coffee table between us and began the ceremony.

We started with the daughter of Jephthah, whose legacy inspired me to honor her the way Israel’s daughters once did. I read her story from Judges 11, followed by a short poem by Phyllis Trible recounting the young girl’s tragic end. Kristine lit a tall, white taper candle on the coffee table, and together we said, “We remember the daughter of Jephthah.”

Then Kristine read the story of the concubine from Judges 19 who was thrown to a mob by her husband, gang-raped, killed, and dismembered. I lit a tiny tea candle, and together we said, “We remember the unnamed concubine.”

Next we honored Hagar, whose banishment from the house of Abraham nearly cost her life. I read her story from Genesis 21 and a poem by Tamam Kahn titled “No Less Than the Prophets, Hagar Speaks.” For Hagar, we set aside a damask votive, which we lit before saying together, “We remember Hagar.”

Finally, we remembered the Tamar of the Davidic narrative, whose rape in the king’s house left her desolate and without a future. A heartbreaking poem from Nicola Slee pulled each of the stories together and connected them to the silent victims of misogyny from around the world. We resolved as Slee had to “listen, however painful the hearing . . . until there is not one last woman remaining who is a victim of violence.” We lit a white pillar candle and said together, “We remember Tamar.”

Then Kristine unveiled her diorama. Constructed of a small pinewood box turned on its side, the diorama featured five faceless wooden figures, huddled together beneath a ring of barbed wire. Nails jutted out from all sides, with bloodred paint splattered across the scene. Glued to the backboard was a perfect reflection of the five feminine silhouettes cut from the pages of a book. Around this Kristine had painted a red crown of thorns to correspond with the circle of barbed wire. Across the top were printed the words of Christ—“As you have done unto the least of these, so you have done to me.”

Kristine and I talked for a while after the ceremony was over—about our doubts, about our fears, and about how sometimes taking the Bible seriously means confronting the parts we don’t like or understand and sitting with them for a while, perhaps even a lifetime. Ours was a simple ceremony, but I think it honored these women well.

Those who seek to glorify biblical womanhood have forgotten the dark stories. They have forgotten that the concubine of Bethlehem, the raped princess of David’s house, the daughter of Jephthah, and the countless unnamed women who lived and died between the lines of Scripture exploited, neglected, ravaged, and crushed at the hand of patriarchy are as much a part of our shared narrative as Deborah, Esther, Rebekah, and Ruth.

We may not have a ceremony through which to grieve them, but it is our responsibility as women of faith to guard the dark stories for our own daughters, and when they are old enough, to hold their faces between our hands and make them promise to remember.

***

From A Year of Biblical Womanhood. 

Xerox and Walmart pointed fingers of blame at each other in the immediate aftermath of a public benefits card failure last month. Some shoppers saw that their cards showed no balance or limit and took the opportunity to strip store shelves. The administration of Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal knows where the blame really belongs, though: with the shoppers.

After all, an item with no price tag isn’t “free,” and a SNAP card outage doesn’t mean that you have unlimited money. While Walmart declined to prosecute shoppers who tried to buy carts filled with merchandise that cost far more than the real balances on their cards, the state of Louisiana will not be so gracious. They’re pursuing sanctions against people who tried to overspend.

The punishment for people who misuse SNAP cards is losing access to the program for as long as two years.

Also, we want to point out that EBT/SNAP cards are called “Louisiana Purchase” in that state, which is either hilarious or terrible.

Jindal moves to strip food stamps from abusers [The Advocate]
Jindal administration will pursue people who misused food stamps