A few weeks back we had a round table at our home. The purpose of it was to follow up on The Black Swan Effect: A response to gender hierarchy in the church. What is God doing? Should we be doing anything more to follow up from the book?
To my amazement, even though the team responsible for the round table sent out the invitation to a very limited group of people, both men and women traveled in from all over the country to take part. They were all high-caliber people, many with ministries of their own.
After initial introductions, we each spent time on our own listening to what God was saying about the area of women in the church and specifically about men and women working together as equals in the Kingdom. When we came back to report on what we had heard, there were striking similarities in what people shared.
Any movement that results in women and men working together as co-equals is to be characterized by love, humility, forgiveness, laying down our lives. Nothing is to be done to get even or to get revenge, or even to demand our own way. As we willingly have an opposite spirit to the natural or world’s way of doing things, we’ll find that God is at work on our behalf.
2 replies on “An opposite spirit”
Thanks, Felicity! I have been in ministry since 1980. For the most part I have been a witness to brothers and sisters working as they ought to, side by side and filled by the Spirit.
This has involved ministry in various countries and cultures; in pastoral ministry and theological education.
I keep hearing these graphic, apocalyptic warnings from men and women both, that any woman who seeks to serve God in equality is a man-hater, family-destroyer, idolatrous, full of arrogance and false teaching. I’m trying to remember anyone who fits that description, without much luck. Or better, the women seem no better or worse than male leaders.
The Lord’s prayer for us was to be one even as He and the Father are one. John 17 reads:
20 “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, 21 that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me…”
I long for the fulfillment of this prayer. May it begin in my heart today.