My book, Unla­dy­like: Resist­ing the Injus­tice of Inequal­ity in the Church, has been out for eight months.  Dur­ing this time I have heard from many read­ers who tell me how Unla­dy­like has given them courage to respond to Chris­tian­ized sex­ism.  I keep every email. These points of con­tact encour­age me that what I set out to do with my first book is being real­ized and it is this:

To empower women to own their story and not wait for some­one else to revise it for them

 As a writer, I am fully aware of the neces­sity of revi­sion and rewrites. An oft quoted writer axiom says, Rewrit­ing is writ­ing. First drafts are noto­ri­ously shitty, (refer­ring to the famous writ­ing book, Bird by Bird from Anne Lam­ott) and all writ­ers and blog­ger are famil­iar with the process of redo­ing what we’ve slopped down on paper and screen. Edit­ing makes bad writ­ing good and good writ­ing great. An unedited piece of writ­ing is an unfin­ished piece of writing.

And so it is with our lives. We all make choices and deci­sions on a daily basis that deter­mine the out­comes of how we are liv­ing. Obvi­ously many things hap­pen to us, yet we are each in charge of the story we find our­selves in, so that even when events occur to us that are beyond our con­trol, we are the ones who decide how to respond and how to pro­ceed. Like when a friend of mine real­ized that the church she had been on staff with for over ten years was never going to give her equal sta­tus with the men on staff, she decided to edit her story. She didn’t like the way it was going and so she resigned from her job and walked away from the secu­rity of a steady pay­check and sta­tus quo staff posi­tion. It had been slowly sti­fling her for more than a decade.

When she picked up her edit­ing pen, she real­ized that in order to revise her story, she had to make some impor­tant deci­sions. Edit­ing out the church posi­tion became cru­cial as she cast off a spirit of res­ig­na­tion in favor of a spirit of empow­er­ment. Her faith com­mu­nity did not honor her as fully as it had hon­ored their men. She aban­doned niceties and put on her unla­dy­like dress and  walked out of there with her dig­nity intact. She left a power struc­ture that depow­ered her in order to find her story and in doing so, became empow­ered. She now serves as an exam­ple of courage to other women who find them­selves in sim­i­lar storylines.

We each, by the daily deci­sions we make or don’t make, affect other women who take cues from us. Let us be bold in the deci­sions we make in resist­ing the injus­tice of inequal­ity in the church.

I want to end this blog post with two things:

• An excerpt from Unla­dy­like for my blog readership
• A request that you’d buy a copy of Unla­dy­like for your­self or some­one to gift a copy to. Unla­dy­like is avail­able at Ama­zon in both print and Kin­dle ver­sions.  My pub­lisher just let me know that I’ve sold 672 copies and my goal is to sell 1000  copies by the end of the year. Help me reach my goal and increase my read­er­ship of this timely mes­sage. The time for women in the church is over­due and the time is Now. My book is one among oth­ers to help heighten the ten­sion of the need for equal­ity for women in the world of church.  Help me spread the Unla­dy­like mes­sage! Click here for easy access to the Ama­zon link. 

In her book, Chas­ing the Dragon, leg­endary mis­sion­ary Jackie Pullinger tells the sto­ries of how she ended up in Hong Kong’s infa­mous Walled City, an area rife with drugs, crime and gang vio­lence. Many were afraid to ven­ture any­where near the Walled City, but empow­ered by God’s Spirit of love, Jackie pen­e­trated one of the dark­est strong­holds of South­east Asia at that time. She was, and remains, one of the hero­ines of the faith.

Despite Jackie’s min­istry accom­plish­ments, she still had to over­come the obsta­cles that were put in front of her by those who could not see her gift­ing, but only her gen­der. Of her crit­ics she said:

Isn’t it won­der­ful that God would choose a woman to go? I would say, “No, it’s not won­der­ful.” Excuse me for being rude about God, but he can pick who he likes. I mean, it’s no more won­der­ful for him to send a woman than a man, or an old man or young woman. He picks who he wants. That’s his busi­ness. It was God’s wis­dom that sent me. I was just doing what he made me for. That’s no credit to me; it’s all credit to him. If he’s made you for some­thing, you just do it.

I love her atti­tude. God can pick who he likes. And he does. The Cre­ator is not restrained by social and cul­tural con­di­tion­ing or patri­ar­chal world­views like we are. God is an equal oppor­tu­nity Leader.

Christ fol­low­ers need a trans­for­ma­tion in our think­ing. We need to live and act by the con­vic­tion that all are cre­ated in the full image of God. That gift­ing is a mat­ter of call­ing, not gen­der. The issue of women and equal­ity is not merely an issue of the­ol­ogy, but an urgent issue of jus­tice. We need to live and act like we believe this.

It pains me that my sis­ters of the faith who know these things and yet con­tinue to serve a sys­tem of Chris­tian­ized sex­ism, have become com­plicit in their own oppres­sion. I say this because for many years that was me. I was the one aid­ing the polite oppres­sion of women every time I sub­mit­ted myself to silence. I may have been noble in my atti­tude want­ing to avoid being divi­sive, but I blindly divided my voice and myself. This is not becom­ing of a spirit of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion, but fur­thers the dis­union of women with men.

Res­ig­na­tion par­a­lyzes women from reex­am­in­ing our­selves and our sto­ries from a new nar­ra­tive. When patri­archy is the nar­ra­tor, even the Bible becomes a char­ac­ter in keep­ing us mar­gin­al­ized. We have no spunk or fire to imag­ine any­thing dif­fer­ent.  And so the story goes, unchal­lenged and unchanged.

QUESTION: Has Chris­tian­ized sex­ism been a part of your story?