Women are the unsung work­ers of the Sun­day pro­duc­tion, both at home and in the church. It is women who get the kids ready and get every­body out the door on time. It is women who ready the Sun­day school class­rooms and get the hos­pi­tal­ity cen­ter hum­ming with cof­fee and creamer. It is women who serve doing the obscure Sun­day chores that keep the church pro­duc­tion run­ning smoothly.  (of course I am speak­ing in gen­er­al­i­ties)

Here’s what likely would NOT be miss­ing : a preacher to preach a ser­mon.  A choir direc­tor to direct, though granted a choir absent of women is going to be a pretty small if not non-​​existent choir.  There also would likely be no issue of a miss­ing  Announcer. You know. That’s the guy who gets two min­utes of mic time to basi­cally deliver the com­mer­cials before the ser­vice begins. Most churches have some kind of announcer and in nearly every church ser­vice of my entire life this announcer  (the announcer!!) is male and not female. And that is the point of this post, of this week’s What If ques­tion.   What if women stopped show­ing up. Would the patri­ar­chal sys­tem of most churches come to a grind­ing halt?  Would it make men who dom­i­nate posi­tions of lead­er­ship real­ize that women are doing much of the work yet their is a wide gap in the inclu­sion of women in church leadership? 

I am not anti-​​male.  I love men. I mar­ried and I am rais­ing a man.  Men are won­der­ful lead­ers. So are women. My issue with the world of church is that despite more than 2000 years of spir­i­tual and social devel­op­ment, the church con­tin­ues to indoc­tri­nate it’s peo­ple that men lead, women sub­mit.  Many faith com­mu­ni­ties deter­mine that this is prof­itable for God’s peo­ple because it has been deter­mined to be a bib­li­cal virtue.  Many Chris­tians go so far as to say that it is God’s cre­ated divine order, that men were cre­ated to lead and women cre­ated to sub­mit.  Some soften this misog­y­nis­tic pos­ture by describ­ing the com­ple­men­tar­ian view of gen­der as “sep­a­rate but equal.”  The idea being that men have pre­or­dained roles and so do women. I under­stand roles and I cer­tainly hold a few roles in life that change from time to time (like I used to have the role of stay-​​at-​​home mom. Now I play the role of work­ing mom.)  But does the Cre­ator rel­e­gate gen­der roles that are meant for every cul­ture and every time period in every arena of life? I think not.

Women and men together are meant to occupy the roles we are gifted for. The church would be all the more rich if women were not barred from all areas of lead­er­ship and influ­ence. Men would be the bet­ter for it, and so would women.

The church is crip­pled and hob­bling in a bro­ken world. Instead of work­ing together and Being Together in all roles within the body of Christ, half our mem­bers are shut out and mar­gin­al­ized to ser­vice posi­tions. I know all about ser­vice posi­tions as this has been the story of my entire adult life, in both voca­tion as well as vol­un­teerism. Serv­ing is noble and God knows we all need to have a servant’s heart for each other. Yet women are thrust again and again into ser­vice posi­tions to such an extent, that if they did not show up on Sun­day morn­ing, we’d have houses of wor­ship neglected and impaired.

I like the fic­tional story in Jim’s book. I like to fan­ta­size about Sis­ters Sol­i­dar­ity Sun­day actu­ally tak­ing place. What would that look like? What if women didn’t show up for church? That would be a most unla­dy­like trick to pull on the biggest day of the week for the tribe known as Church.