Silence does not serve unity; it pre­serves the injus­tice of inequality. 

This is one of my favorite lines from Unla­dy­like, a book I wrote as a response to the stub­born exis­tence of Chris­tian­ized dis­crim­i­na­tion that is per­va­sive in many faith tribes.

Women know how to be silent. Con­trary to pop­u­lar myth, women do know how to keep our mouths shut and our dis­sent to our­selves. We are expert at cul­ti­vat­ing unity and pro­mot­ing har­mony in the spheres we find our­selves in. Ask any woman who’s raised toddlers!

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There is a wis­dom in silence. No doubt about that. Like the time I chose to not say a word when our small group was told to imple­ment a pop­u­lar cur­ricu­lum for a church wide pro­gram meant to make us con­ta­gious Chris­tians. I held my tongue and opin­ion on that one as it seemed best to just go along with the pro­gram and endure what would surely fiz­zle out.

There was wis­dom in that (wasn’t there?) to keep agree­able since so many other peo­ple found the cur­ricu­lum help­ful. I just wasn’t one of them.

That’s a good kind of silence in my opin­ion. A silence that won’t be bro­ken for pettiness.

Silence can be golden.

Then there’s the other kind of silence, the kind that would keep a woman in her place, trapped in a role no mat­ter how oppres­sive it is to her per­son. I call this an unholy silence. It is not for piety sake that this kind of silence is prac­ticed;  it is for the sake of pro­tect­ing the safe and the famil­iar. I know much about this kind of silence for I prac­ticed it for close to two decades. I rejected the com­ple­men­tar­ian view a long time ago.  But I stayed in the closet about it. I kept silent out of a sense of pre­serv­ing unity amongst my broth­ers and sis­ters. I did want to cre­ate divi­sion, which I knew that the issue of women and equal­ity in the church is con­tro­ver­sial and divi­sive. I did not want to be a cor­rupt­ing force to the beauty of unity in the churches I ran with. So I hid it, like a flash­light under the cov­ers, I kept my beliefs about women and equal­ity below the radar.  I knew how to be silent. The church had taught me well.

It took a well-​​timed con­ver­sa­tion with a group of women who unknow­ingly spoke into my life by their Speak­ing Up and Speak­ing Out. Their out­spo­ken dis­agree­ment with the unfair treat­ment of women in the church was a spark to the dry tim­ber of my con­science. Sto­ry­telling is such a pow­er­ful force of change. (This is one of the biggest rea­sons I host Women’s Lis­ten­ing Par­ties.… so we lis­ten to each other’s sto­ries in order to dis­cover our own story).

My story was that I mis­took silence as a virtue in order to pre­serve unity. True in many cases, far from true in the case of injus­tice and oppres­sion. In try­ing to avoid being divi­sive, I ended up a woman with a divided heart and soul.

Now I’m no longer silent. One of my mis­sions while I’m on this planet is to Tell it True, Tell it Strong for women and for myself. I never again want to live in the closet with my unholy silence. It would be a dis­ser­vice to the sis­ter­hood if I did, for it was out­spo­ken women who helped lib­er­ate me from a dis­torted view of stay­ing quiet.

What unholy silences have you broken?