Much food for thought in “Gender, race and the Pentecost: God has moved on” (updated: now gone) by Pastor Jonathan Martin. It was written in response to the recent fiasco over the Wilson and Wilson post at The Gospel Coalition.
We have such a narrow view of how God is working in the church in the world. Please read the whole thing. It offers much food for thought no matter what your view is of women in the church.
I especially liked this:
I am a Pentecostal by heritage and tradition, but culturally I am one of the bourgeois pastors whose day might seem to be coming, but in many ways has already passed. The whole white male, coffee-drinking, apple product-using, Coldplay-listening type. It is a very small world that we live in that feels deceitfully large. We have blogs, we write books, we talk about the most recent issue of Christianity Today. So it is easy to think we are the center of the universe.
We did not notice that the world has already moved on. We didn’t notice that the wind of the Spirit left us, and that there is a new world coming in Latin America and Africa and Asia that rendered us inconsequential. We enjoyed our time in the mainstream well enough to forget that the move of God always comes from the margins.
and
The average Christian in the world right now is an African or Latin American female in her early 20’s. She doesn’t read our blogs and she doesn’t read Christianity Today. She doesn’t know or care who I am and she never will. The names Piper, Driscoll, Chan, Bell, Stanley, Warren—mean nothing to her. Like most Pentecostal women coming into the kingdom around the world, words like “complementarian” and “egalitarian” are not in her vocabulary, nor Calvinism and Arminianism. Unlike some of my brothers would lead you believe (where their lunch table is the only one that cares about Scripture and THE GOSPEL while anybody who believes differently from them in these tired conversations are flaming liberals), she takes the authority of the Bible very seriously. But more importantly, she believes in the power of the Bible in ways that are incomprehensible even for our most rabid “conservatives.” The western filter and language that frames these issues will not be determinative for her, unlucky as she is not to read our blogs. She may well in end up leading a church one day where she preaches Jesus like a woman on fire and lays hands on the sick and watches God heal them, though this will surprise those Reformed colleagues who are sure all female church leaders have been trained by godless-Unitarian-lesbian-leftist-radical feminist-seminarians (she didn’t have access to seminary at all–unfortunately she has read the Acts of the Apostles). Who knew?
Well said, brother. Well said.
I’m so sick of reading judgmental posts that emphatically state that anyone who is egalitarian or leans that way doesn’t take the authority of the Bible seriously. It is simply not true. Period.
As for me, I’m going to keep praying that God moves in a fresh and huge way among the women in the church in America.
I will continue to pray that they will see the Holy Spirit multiplying His fruit in their personal lives and in their ministries in ways that can only be attributed to God being at work.
When God moves there is nothing anyone can say, including the coffee drinking, Apple-using Reformed pastors who seem to want to tell everyone how they can and cannot function in the body of Christ.
Sorry, guys. This woman already has a Savior, Lord, and Shepherd.
His name is Jesus.
Love this!