:: in.a.mirror.dimly ::

Though most readers know her as Tamara Out Loud, Tamara Lunardo has made her noise by writing powerful, hilarious, and deeply honest blog posts that often leave her readers laughing out loud. We’re fortunate to have her guest post today:

I’ve heard it from both sides, each passionate, each convinced, each sure of God’s design.  I’ve heard them trace threads of their own theologies throughout the scriptures, winding them tightly around what they hold true. I’ve heard them tear up Paul’s letters over whether to permit a woman to speak, preach, teach, minister, or lead. I have heard them and heard them and heard them, and I am tired of hearing it.

I am tired of the arguments, the anger, the divisions, the hurt; I am tired of it all. And so I think the most subversive thing I can do amid the fight is to do what I am passionate about, what I am convinced of, what I am sure is God’s design: I can write. I can write because God gifted me to, and when He gives you a gift, you do not debate the merits of using it. You say a humbled thank-you, and then you use it.

And when I write, a funny thing happens: Neither complementarian nor egalitarian need argue. God permits a woman to speak.

When I write stories of Jesus’ meeting me at the well or of His barging in on my Damascus road, God permits a woman to preach. When I write stories of seeing grace light dark places or of learning love in unexpected form, God permits a woman to teach. When I write stories of painful struggle or of raucous laughter, God permits a woman to minister. When I write stories of baring raw honesty or of poking at man-made taboo, God permits a woman to lead.

When I write, God permits a woman to speak, and I am only a whisper in a beautiful, growing chorus.

When God permits a woman to lead, people can share stories long pressing their hearts because they first saw me share mine. When God permits a woman to minister, hurting hearts who would not venture inside a church building can find community in my written spaces. When God permits a woman to teach, a worship leader can pray new hope with thoughts I have put to paper. When God permits a woman to preach, a pastor can reach his congregation with a sermon infused with my imagery.

And for now this is enough; I don’t need to hear the arguments. God permits a woman to speak, and I do.

About Today’s Blogger

Tamara works out her thoughts on life and faith at TamaraOutLoud.com, occasionally with adult language, frequently with attempted humor, and hopefully with God’s blessing. Editor of What a Woman is Worth through Civitas Press, she holds a BA in English and her five children, when they let her; she almost never holds her tongue.

About the Women in Ministry Series

The Women in Ministry Series is a collection of guest posts that aims to:

• Provide an alternative to the women in ministry debates by telling the stories of women in ministry.
• Encourage women to explore their God-given callings.

You can stay updated on the latest post each week by signing up for the weekly e-mail list. (You also get a free E-book!)

Comment Policy: Everyone is welcome to leave a comment. However, this series takes for granted that women are called by God into every facet of ministry. This is not the place to debate that point and such comments will be removed. Women have been told “no” in far too many places. This is one place that is committed to saying “yes.” For more about the comment policy, read here.

Next Week’s Blogger: Cortney Dale

Some people are talented at making money. I, on the other hand, have the unique talent of choosing highly specialized professions that don’t make any money.

When I started attending seminary, the typical conversation with my family was something like, “How will you avoid becoming a beggar on the street?” OK, it wasn’t quite like that, but way too many conversations had those overtones.

Thankfully, I had plenty of pastors to look up to over the years. They seemed like reasonably well-adjusted individuals with normal lives. It wasn’t until I started working in a church and saw pastoral ministry up close that I realized it wasn’t for me.

I kept my misgivings to myself and my wife, not wanting the “beggar on the street” conversation to further evolve. As I searched for a new path forward, I realized that the obvious answer was writing full time. This did very little to assuage the concerns of my family.

When I started to pursue writing as a serious profession, I didn’t know any writers personally. How does one go about making a living as a writer? I could handle the part where I pounded out 5,000 words in a day, but the part where a paycheck ended up in my bank account eluded me. I had never seen the life of a writer up close and personal, and I had no idea how to go about pursuing my calling.

Enter writing blogs, books, and magazines. For years I inhaled Writer’s Digest, The Writer, and a bunch of writing blogs and books. These stories of professional writers became my lifeline. When people wondered how I could ever make it as a writer, I received support and encouragement from the stories of writers who kept up the struggle and dreamed up creative ways to make a living.

Without those stories, I would have given up on my calling a long time ago. If I didn’t know that there were other crazy people like me who loved to write and didn’t mind the spare pay checks, I would have been forced to settle for a soul-crushing job that didn’t tie into my passions.

Without stories, it’s hard to know if we’re on the right path. We need to know that other people have faced similar circumstances and have kept up the fight. We need to know that it’s worth the struggle.

As I’ve thought about the importance of the Women in Ministry Series that will be launched this Friday, the value of stories have been at the forefront of my mind. Women who feel called to ministry need to read stories about those who have blazed the path ahead of them. Women who have been told “no” all of their lives need to read stories that tell them “yes.”

Perhaps the most difficult part of this process has been contacting some very talented storytellers about contributing, only for them to reply that they don’t have any stories to share about women ministering in their lives. It never occurred to me that there are women who simply haven’t seen a God-empowered female ministering as either a pastor or a lay minister in the church.

That left me wondering how many women are struggling with a nudge from God that they simply can’t process. Are there women who sense a call into ministry, but they can’t sort it out because they’ve never seen it modeled for them?

As I think and pray over all that this series of stories about women in ministry can be, I hope that it will become a lifeline to women who need models. I hope that readers can share links with those who need encouragement and a few examples of what it’s like for God to work through women in the church.

And then, when a well-meaning relative asks a young woman, who is planning to go into ministry, how she will eat or find a place to live, she can smile and know that she has a treasure trove of stories assuring her that God will show her a path forward.

Every now and then I run into a statement like this: “The problem with the church is that it’s too feminine.” Other times I hear: “We need men to stand up and… and… be… MEN!”

I think these folks don’t know what they’re really saying.

These folks may have an idea in their minds of what this looks like, but if you asked them to really explain such things in detail, the training wheels of these undeveloped thoughts fall off.

I’ve been thinking about all of this for years now, and yesterday I finally put some thoughts together…

Read the rest of this entry »

When certain people read that I’m putting together a series of guest posts about women in ministry, they may be tempted to think and say that I’m out to destroy the Bible, nay Christianity itself. They may assert that I’m misconstruing clear passages from the Bible based on loose speculation and undermining the very faith I claim to support.

If women are allowed to teach and serve as equals in ministry, what will become of Christianity and the church? I’ve conducted a very thorough risk assessment of my series that kicks off next week, and such detractors are certainly right. There are tons of risks. Here are just a few that I’ve thought of:

Under the cold-hearted leadership of female leaders and ministers, men will be rounded up and locked in the nursery. Children will puke on their shiny shoes. Pastors will lose their expense accounts. Secretaries will stop answering the phone.

THE COFFEE WILL NOT BE MADE!!!

Yes, it is a terrible thing when sinners fall into the hands of an “angry woman.”

Sermons will start to include illustrations based on raising kids and cooking dinner instead of sports and war movies. Women will start to speak their minds to the male authority figures in their lives, thereby causing strain on men who are forced to utilize neglected parts of their brains. Men will have to start vacuuming better, moving the chairs out instead of just going around them. Dinners will not be cooked. Children will stop eating their vegetables.

Dangerous heresies will sweep through the church by “easily deceived” women—just like Eve. In fact, women will start forcing their husbands to eat apples all of the time. The line for the men’s restroom will become oppressive. The parking lot with become a scrap heap of twisted vehicles piled upon one another. The back rows will buckle and break under the weight of disinterested, dispirited men who feel like the church is way too feminized.

Without a man to wear a suit up front, men will no longer know how to dress on Sunday morning. First they’ll forget their ties, and then they’ll soon denigrate to stained t-shirts, slippers, and dirty Carhartts. They’ll stop reading their Bibles because they’ll become convinced that only a woman can interpret it for them. They’ll stop signing up to lead anything in the church. Even the hunting group will be organized through the cabal of the lady’s knitting group. Camouflage will be replaced by knit teddy bear sweaters. Venison dinners will be replaced by crusty, inedible scones and fruity teas.

Yes, letting women teach, speak in church, hold authority, or call themselves “ministers” in any sense of the word could destroy Christianity as we know it. And even if my little series of stories about women in ministry won’t do any of the things I mentioned above, I do hope it destroys part of Christianity as we know it—the part where women think they are somehow designed by God to be inferior to men.

This will be a destructive series. However, we’re not destroying something for the fun of it. This is a matter of obligation, a dirty job that someone has to do: undoing the wrongs of the past and restoring women to their proper place in the church through empowering stories.

I’m not interested in forcing anyone to join me in this. I know there are some men and women who are comfortable with male-dominated systems. That’s fine for them. I’m not forcing them to change anything. I’m far more interested in speaking to the women and men who think there is something wrong with that—who sense in their times of prayer and readings of scripture that God created men and women to be equal partners in salvation, ministry, and the home.

And really, what’s the worst thing that could happen? A woman may discover her calling into ministry?

Years of being blessed with a low checking account balance forced me to rethink my approach to Christmas. Those were not easy years as I tried to tell myself that Christmas isn’t all about the presents, while fearing that my family would consider me cheap or inconsiderate.

A budget gift is a budget gift.

In a happy case of irony, my focus on gift-giving lead me back to a better conception of Christmas.

If art thrives on limitation, gift-giving followed suit. If I only had ten dollars to spend on each person, I had to ask very different questions for gift-giving, the most important being: “What would this person never buy for himself/herself?”

This lead to a series of time-consuming projects such as homemade applesauce, unique jams, hot sauce, and framed photographs. Everything was tailored to the specific needs of each person and in most cases kept us within our budget.

The first time I gave my grandmother a jar of homemade applesauce, she opened it right away and burst into tears at the first taste. She hadn’t eaten homemade applesauce since the last time her mother had made it. My mom guards her jar of blueberry jam, while my in-laws don’t miss a meal without their hot sauce.

As we’ve reached greater financial security, we’ve been able to spend more money on gifts, but our question remains the same. Oddly enough, the homemade gifts are still a big hit. In addition, we’ve begun to keep our Christmas spending under control by joining together with family members to buy one large gift that someone would never purchase on his/her.

I organized some pretty epic purchases that both met a relative’s need and ensured a minimum investment—the biggest ticket item being a computer for my wife before she entered graduate school. I’d share some examples from this year, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise for anyone.

Ironically, the more I’ve thought about my gift-giving strategy, the more I’ve been drawn away from focusing on giving gifts and pondering the power of God. Isn’t Christmas all about the power of God to do for us what we could never do for ourselves?

I love the promise that Gabriel made to Mary, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”

God overshadows us. He breaks into our gift-giving madness to remind us that our iPads will one day break, our E-readers will be replaced, our shirts will unravel, and even our jams will go rotten. We can’t beat greed, materialism, and selfishness on our own. We’ll keep thinking that these bits of technology and clothing are what we really need.

God knows that we need to overshadowed. We need him to overcome every competing desire in our life. Only he can overshadow every idol that tries to replace those quiet moments where we sense that the loving touch of God is what we were made to experience, even if we think we’ll be fulfilled by touching what we have made.

There is incredible joy in giving someone a gift that he could never acquire on his own. In fact, meeting a real need is the best kind of gift giving. God knew that when he overshadowed Mary with his power and sent us a Savior as the greatest gift—doing something we could never accomplish on our own.

May we find that joy both in our relationships with God and with one another. May we find what only God can give and meet needs that would otherwise remain.

This post is part of World Vision’s 12 Blogs of Christmas Project about the true spirit of Christmas. In order to learn more real needs that you can meet this Christmas season, check out the World Vision Catalogue.

Do you have your own story about the true spirit of Christmas? Share it today at the World Vision blog.

One of my fondest memories of seminary is lunch time. The first generation Korean students gathered at a table and opened their Tupper wares to share with one another. I was even invited to pick up some chop sticks in join them at times.

Meanwhile, the occasional middle-aged pastor who had forgotten to bring a lunch would survey the vending machines with dread, knowing that the cheeseburger in a plastic bag would be his best option. He delayed that decision as long as possible.

Once a month we had a guest speaker come for a pizza lunch. Just about the entire seminary turned out for these events, filling the cafeteria and giving us all a chance to see each other and to catch up. These lunches gave us something that is essential when a bunch of people from a variety of backgrounds and relationships gather together to talk about God: relationships.

Do We Speak Truth in Relationships?

I love the way that ideas and conversations can spread on the internet, but the most significant drawback is the relational void that can occur in some online “conversations.” That isn’t to say that relationships can’t happen—they do. I’m just saying that we can now enter into conversations where we know nothing of the people participating in them.

Consequently, we don’t understand where someone is coming from and we’re not all that invested in seeking the best for that person. We just see a pile of text that challenges something important to us. There’s no prospect of seeing that pile of text at the next community lunch.

The Difference That Relationships Make

I’m certainly all for sharing my ideas online and hearing out those who disagree with me. However, I’ve observed some interesting dynamics. For example, though I’m a committed Arminian, many of my closest friends since childhood remain Calvinists. Although my childhood church is complementarian in their views toward women, and I have changed to egalitarian, I would pay close attention to the opinions of my pastors should they even contact me with a concern about my writing.

It actually can be quite easy to be friends with people we know who believe differently from us. Of course we all have experienced exceptions to this.

Who Should We Listen To?

As a general rule, I put the most stock in the opinions of the people who know me the best. Starting with my wife and some family members, I also pay close attention to friends, pastors, and colleagues. It is both unhealthy and impossible to acknowledge every opinion online as a kind of authority for our lives, and yet, it’s often tempting to do just that—even if we think we need to challenge these voices.

Who Should We Ignore

The tricky part about blogging is that I need to remain open to conversations with folks from a variety of perspectives, but I also can’t let a challenge from someone who doesn’t know me rattle my cage. I can’t lose sleep over the stuff coming from denominational leaders, celebrity pastors, and groups that would condemn someone like me.

They’re free to believe as they wish and I recognize their place in the church, but their critiques are also irrelevant to me. They have nothing invested in my own spiritual growth or the growth of my community, and therefore the best thing I can do is to seek accountability among those who desire to see myself and my community grow. While I seek guidance from perspectives outside of those who agree with me, a relational investment is critical.

Recognizing the Benefits of Authority

Having set some boundaries around the opinions I care most about, I want to make it clear that within the confines of relationships and becoming personally invested in one another, I also highly value the place of authority. We all need pastors and friends who care enough about us to challenge us to change. Tomorrow I’ll write about the freedom that comes from loving, relational authority.

Are the young, restless, and Reformed trying to sue your church for copyright infringement?

You can evade legal trouble while keeping it cool and classy with the new “Mars Hill Whatevah”®  logo for your church.

This sleek, black logo will remind your fellow litigants that Christians really shouldn’t sue one another, and that you’re not going to take their threatening letters seriously.

Interested in using this copyrighted logo for your church?

No problem! Just download the image, plant a church, and you’re good to go! Best yet, you won’t have to worry that I’ll send my massive team of lawyers after you!

Notes for Readers

For the full scoop on where this joke is coming from, see JesusNeedsNewPR and the original post.

The final straw arrived last night—the one that breaks the camel’s back. Like an angry camel I flopped onto the ground flailing and spitting. Proverbially spitting that is.

Or are llamas the ones who spit?

Regardless of the spitting involved, I hit my limit last night. Enough things had gone wrong, enough projects had piled up, enough incidental circumstances had mounted to the point that I snapped.

The crazy thing is that under normal circumstances, the final straw was actually a pretty good thing tinged with a few problems. It was something that I would normally thank God for. But oh last night, I didn’t need one more thing to do. One more urgent deadline was too much after pushing to meet more deadlines than I could count. The constant urgency of one thing after another got to me.

I stomped out of the house because I needed to break my little pity party. I needed… Mediterranean food. I could try to tie this back to my camel metaphor (I mean, where else would a camel in Columbus go?), but I’ll just stop things there since I ate a lamb wrap.

A few hours later I had some perspective.

I hadn’t prayed about things. I’d just reacted. It was alright that I recognized a need for a change of scenery, but it took me far too long to realize that some of the things that had pushed me over the edge were essentially answers to my prayers.

I just didn’t expect those answers to my prayers to arrive along with all of this other junk.

So now I just feel like an ungrateful jerk who asks God for stuff and then doesn’t even recognize it when it arrives. In fact, I had the audacity to see his blessings as a problem.

I feel like I need to channel my inner Ann Voskamp and work on this gratitude thing. My spirit runs dry for want of gratitude and worship.

My mother-in-law once said that we overcome sin and the schemes of the enemy with worship. And if I was honest with myself, something that is not a guarantee, I’d have to say my “woe is me” attitude is a pretty good sign that I’ve been a tad self-absorbed lately.

I need to redirect my worship to where it belongs.

I take my metaphors to their natural conclusion, which I feel is my warrant as a writer. So, when someone says, “I go to church to get fed,” I can’t help thinking of a baby sitting in a high chair with his mouth open and someone stuffing food into it. Fussing and spit up is part of it.

That metaphor of being “fed” at church has been a powerful one. When Willow Creek Community Church  conducted their church-wide study called Reveal, they discovered that they needed to help their people become “self-feeders.” In other words, mature Christians had grown too dependent on being spoon-fed truth. Church was not a self-serve buffet, but rather a series of high chairs.

We need teaching and instruction, especially if we’re young in the faith. The Bible is tricky, but we also need to learn how to pray and serve others.

Have we possibly associated church too closely with being fed spiritual truth to the exclusion of some other important things?

And related to that, How responsible should mature Christians be for their own instruction in the faith?

The difference between now and most other times in Christian history is that we have access to incredible resources such as books, blogs, online videos, and podcasts. We have accessible commentaries, study tools, and hundreds of trained teachers publishing books that will crack open the Bible for us.

There are some amazing books being published by seminary professors right now that languish in obscurity between the academy and the church because they’re a little technical at times. Make no mistake, teaching yourself is hard work.

I’m not trying to say that pastors preaching sermons are unnecessary. Rather, I wonder if it’s time to reimagine what being “fed” could look like and whether we focus so much on being fed that we forget about the other things that our churches could do. In the process we can take a lot of pressure off our pastors and allow them to focus on ensuring we are becoming spiritually healthy, living as obedient disciples, and serving others where needed in our communities.

I personally know that it’s much easier to spend ten hours pouring over a commentary because Paul said truth is important. However, I’m not quite as fast to jump to the aid of the poor in my community for a few hours, even though we see examples in Acts of the early church providing for orphans and widows, to say nothing of James.

Focusing on teaching truth is pretty easy for folks like me, especially those of us who enjoyed seminary. However, teaching and instructing is just one part of the larger picture. In addition, it may be possible to still do it well without reinventing the wheel.

I’ll be honest, I’m not a lover of sermons. There have been sermons that changed my life, but I think there could have been many, many more life-changing sermons if the pastor stopped talking after fifteen minutes and we focused on putting it into practice as a community. In other words, it’s good to teach that Jesus delivered people from evil spirits, but I’m just as interested in taking time on Sunday to pray for people who feel tormented by temptation.

Each denomination has its strengths when it comes to teaching and preaching. I come from a background that was heavy on teaching, so I’m writing from that perspective—hoping for a little more practice and a little less head knowledge when I gather with believers in community.

I’m aware that we need diversity and that my experience will differ from others. I’m also aware that these are big, systemic and tradition-based matters I’m raising today. Change, if it ever happens, would be slow.

However, I think we need to step back and imagine some new possibilities:

What could it look like if we took some of the teaching pressures away from our pastors and placed it on ourselves?

How could we ensure that teaching still happens?

Would our pastors be able to minister a little more effectively with less teaching responsibilities?

About a year ago a Christian organization sent me an e-newsletter asking for help. They needed people who understood writing and websites. It was a natural fit for me, and so I volunteered.

I heard back within a day: “We’ll be in touch!”

That was the last I heard from them.

A few months later a similar appeal appeared in their next newsletter. I archived it without giving it much thought, and that has been bugging me lately. Perhaps they really did need help. In addition, what was going through my mind when they didn’t reply to my offer to help?

I’ll bet that this has either happened to you or that you may have failed to follow through with someone. I used to work in Vermont’s nonprofit sector, and believe me, there are lots of nonprofits that are long on passion and short on communication and organization.

I want to see churches, Christian ministries, and nonprofits succeed, so I thought it would help to unpack what we say to people when we don’t follow through on a call for help. In order to avoid calling any names, I’d like to use the fictitious Save the Cheese Campaign as my example because we all know that a world without cheese would be a very sad place.

The Message

Let’s say a message arrives in my inbox one day that says something like this:

“Thanks for signing up for the Save the Cheese Campaign e-newsletter. Studies show that cheese has never been more in DANGER. We need your help spreading the word about our important work. We need artists, poets, web designers, writers, rabbit owners, and anyone with an unpronounceable Americanized Polish last name to join our team. Contact us today! It’s urgent! Don’t let them cut our cheese!!!!”

I read such a note and say, hey, I can help! So I write an e-mail and hear nothing back. This is what I start to think:

You Suck

After sending them an e-mail with my credentials and hearing nothing back, I’m left to imagine that they just think I suck. I start to imagine someone at the Save the Cheese Campaign writing something like this:

“Dear Mr. Cyzewski:

It has come to our attention that you desire to help the Save the Cheese Campaign, but upon reviewing your experience and credentials we have found that you are no where near cheesy or competent enough to do us or our threatened cheese any good. Have you considered a career as a traffic cone? We actually hold you in such low esteem that after completing this note, I will crumple it up and toss it into a trash can where you will never find it, adding yet another uncertainty to your disappointing, meaningless drift through a cruel and uncaring world that will soon be without cheese because of driveling fools like you.

Yours Cordially,

Daphne Wensleydale”

That is the worst case scenario for me, but there are some other things organizations could say by failing to communicate…

We’re Not Important

If I don’t hear back from an organization that asked for my help, I could also think that this organization isn’t doing work that is important or urgent. I mean, maybe cheese isn’t endangered after all? The supermarkets are stocked with cheese after all and there seem to be plenty of cows about.

The “we’re not important” message will lead to me delete future e-mails from such an organization. But I’d delete future messages from the Save the Cheese Campaign for another reason…

We’re Disorganized

Having worked in nonprofits, I know that business training is not necessarily a high priority in some organizations. If someone can’t figure out how to follow through on the responses to a request for help, then the organization could be quite disorganized and difficult to work with.

Use spreadsheets people!

The Save the Cheese Campaign should be able to figure out how to send me a generic message saying something like, “Thanks for getting in touch with us. We value your willingness to help, but the response from our friends was so overwhelming that we’re all set for now. The Cheese will be saved for now, but please keep us in mind for the future.”

The inability to send so simple a message tells me that the Save the Cheese Campaign will be a poor partner to work with for my volunteer time. I want to be effective and helpful, but I’d suspect that if they ever do follow through, they’ll be sending me urgent stuff to edit at 6 pm on a Friday and never think to say thanks afterward.

We Communicate Something When We Fail to Communicate

I write all of this to say that failing to follow up in our communication can send the worst message. I know I’ve failed to follow up on some e-mails with folks, and I regret the messages I’ve sent without thinking. Communication fills in gaps and connects us with others.

When something life-changing or justice-related is on the line, consistent communication is all the more critical. Whether you’re recruiting volunteers at your church or getting in touch with a nonprofit to volunteer, the ability to follow through effectively can really make or break your ministry and service.

I put together my Save the Cheese campaign parody to help the “ignored” folks such as myself to also rethink our reactions to organizations that fail to follow up. Organizations are run by imperfect people who are sometimes swamped and over capacity. They may deserve the benefit of a doubt.

As for me, I won’t give the Save the Cheese Campaign another second of my time.