Before I intro­duce you to our HERetic of the Week, I want to announce the win­ners for our book give­away from Monday’s post. In case you missed it, I blogged a review and inter­view about Rachel Held Evans’ new book, A Year of Bib­li­cal Wom­an­hood: How a Lib­er­ated Woman Found Her­self On the Roof, Cov­er­ing Her Head and Call­ing Her Hus­band Mas­ter. Rachel’s pub­lisher offered to gift three copies to three lucky read­ers.  My blog read­er­ship came out in droves with an enthu­si­as­tic response to Rachel’s book and message!

I enlisted my son Jeremy to draw names out of a hat for us. And the win­ners are :

Al Doyle

J. Stahl

Estelle

Yay!!  Please email me your mail­ing address.  I’ll for­ward it to the pub­lisher who will be the one to mail you your copy of A Year of Bib­li­cal Wom­an­hood. (includ­ing inter­na­tional addresses, J. Stahl!)

I enjoyed hav­ing my first-​​ever give­away on this blog that I intend to do this again. Stay tuned for future oppor­tu­ni­ties, and thanks again every­one who participated!

Ok, now for our HERetic of the Week

Blog­ger and author, Jo Hilder first got on my radar when I noticed her con­tribut­ing posts for Burn­side Writ­ers Col­lec­tive, an online mag­a­zine that I have also con­tributed to. Before long, we were fol­low­ing each other on Twit­ter and Face­book as well as Insta­gram. (Do you Insta­gram? Find us!)

Jo is ded­i­cated to the equal­ity of women and leaves no room for diplo­matic maneu­ver­ing with the oppres­sive sys­tems towards women in church and cul­ture. I am inspired by her pas­sion for jus­tice for women. I am excited to intro­duce her to my read­er­ship.  Here’s our email interview:

Jo Hilder is an author, blog­ger, can­cer sur­vivor and pro­gram facil­i­ta­tor liv­ing in New­cas­tle, Aus­tralia. She is mar­ried with four chil­dren, three grown and one about to enter high school.

Tell us about your faith back­ground. Were you raised in a Chris­t­ian home?

Nobody in my imme­di­ate fam­ily is a Chris­t­ian — in fact, my par­ents and broth­ers are athe­ists! My ear­li­est mem­ory is talk­ing to God from my bed­room win­dow at night, and in my heart believ­ing He talked right back — I would have been maybe four. My the­ory is some­one close to our fam­ily was pray­ing for me.

At around this time, I started going to church on Sun­days with my best friend and her fam­ily, but not being Catholic, I was never included in any­thing. It didn’t ring true to me God was that much of a snob. When I was invited to a bible study in high school, I heard about Jesus for the first time. At last, every­thing fit. I went along to the youth group at the Pentecostal/​charismatic church the older girl who invited me to Bible study belonged to, and bam — I found my tribe. I even­tu­ally mar­ried a young guy from church and became a wor­ship leader, min­is­ter­ing and lead­ing wor­ship teams in sev­eral churches. How­ever, after sev­eral major life events includ­ing a men­tal ill­ness diag­no­sis, can­cer, and alco­holism, we observed an obvi­ous dis­par­ity in the way the church han­dled those events, and some unan­swered ques­tions about what the church says and thinks about those out­side the church struc­ture, the mar­gin­alised, the sick and infirm, the men­tally ill and even sim­ply those born women. Our fam­ily decided to take a break from struc­tured church meet­ings. We still meet with other Chris­tians, but not in a church for­mat, and we are seek­ing ways to work out and express our Chris­t­ian faith in less cor­po­rate, more per­sonal and more prac­ti­cal ways.

How has the church affected and shaped your iden­tity as a woman?

I came to the church as a teenage girl wounded and dam­aged, and they offered me heal­ing and accep­tance. How­ever, I learned early the church only uses and val­ues “good girls”, and as much as I wanted to be for­given, I des­per­ately wanted to be used and val­ued by my Father. I mar­ried young, want­ing to prove my worth and erase my shame­ful sex­ual his­tory. I fully under­stood it was both my “call­ing” and my respon­si­bil­ity as a Chris­t­ian wife and woman to adhere to the cul­tural norms mapped out for me by my church, norms I was told were Bib­li­cal, and which would lead to peace and pros­per­ity for my fam­ily. I under­stood if I tried to lead, either my fam­ily, or any­one else, chaos and destruc­tion would result. I truly held in my heart the premise that my phys­i­cal, spir­i­tual, intel­lec­tual and behav­ioural sub­mis­sion and def­er­ence both to my hus­bands “lead­er­ship”, and to church lead­er­ship and what they taught about what the Bible “really” said, were essen­tial for God’s will to be worked out in my home. I tried with all my heart to sub­mit to every­thing and every­one, at one stage resort­ing to wear­ing mod­est, almost Amish style cloth­ing and head cov­er­ings, and drop­ping out of all activ­i­ties which were not church or fam­ily cen­tred. I wanted in my heart to be a “good” Chris­t­ian woman. My hus­band how­ever never had the slight­est moti­va­tion to be the kind of “leader” the church wanted him to be, and he thought my sub­mis­sive head cov­er­ings were silly. It was hope­less — me try­ing to can­cel out all my cre­ativ­ity, intel­li­gence, energy and pas­sion through “sub­mis­sive behav­iours”, try­ing to make it look like my quiet, peace­ful and non-​​ambitous hus­band was the “true” leader of our fam­ily. In the end, I had to give it up, because it was absurd to try and and change our­selves into some­thing we sim­ply were not.

When did you begin to see that you were at odds with the patri­ar­chal tinted mes­sag­ing of the churches you have known?

“A wise woman builds her house,” said the church, and I learned early that wise women do not seek their own way by try­ing to be lead­ers or pas­tors. All my female peers, regard­less of how bril­liant they were, or how pas­sion­ate and ambi­tious they had been to serve the Lord as teenagers, seemed to get some kind of spir­i­tual lobot­omy in their early twen­ties. All their energy seemed to grav­i­tate to sooth­ing their itchy ring fin­gers. Once mar­ried, babies soon fol­lowed, and from then on a Chris­t­ian woman’s  job seemed to entail meet­ing up for morn­ing tea and craft, par­tic­i­pat­ing in the crèche ros­ter, and tak­ing hot meals around when some­one was sick. I always seemed dif­fer­ent — these things never sat­is­fied me. I wanted to read hard books and write essays. I wanted to teach and learn. I had thou­sands of ques­tions about the Bible and why we did things the way we did. I wanted to lead the con­gre­ga­tion in wor­ship, stand in front of five hun­dred peo­ple and take them through to the throne room in praise, and thank God, they let me do that. I thank God for Dar­lene Zchech (Wor­ship pas­tor at Hill­song, in fact, Brian Hous­ton was the first pas­tor I ever had, the church was at that time 30 peo­ple in a com­mu­nity hall) — if Dar­lene hadn’t come along and made it okay for women to lead wor­ship pas­sion­ately in church in this coun­try, I’d never have found my place at all. I loved lead­ing wor­ship, but I also longed to learn how to really pas­tor peo­ple prop­erly in their own lives, car­ing for them, not just singing at them on Sun­days. How­ever, I learned that pur­su­ing or try­ing to cre­ate posi­tion, projects or pro­grams, seek­ing advance­ment of any kind in the church or try­ing to teach or reach out to oth­ers was pride­ful and ambi­tious, unwom­anly, sin­ful and I should instead wait on God to release me into ministry.

So I waited. And waited.

I watched my male coun­ter­parts, all of whom became Chris­tians at the same time as me, all of whom had jour­neyed sim­i­larly to me, grad­u­ate through church into posi­tions of lead­er­ship and influ­ence, while I stayed capped and trapped in the music team. In time, those men left to start their own churches, sup­ported by our lead­er­ship, whilst I stayed put. I didn’t dare say any­thing. Clearly, there was some­thing wrong with me — I was still too pride­ful and ambi­tious. I watched as other women I respected waited their way into min­istry posi­tions, only to be stood down if they dis­played chal­leng­ing, strong behav­iours, or if they showed ini­tia­tive in any way. The ones who sur­vived in min­istry had hus­bands to stand beside them also in min­istry, who could absorb and deflect any crit­i­cism. My own sweet hus­band had no desire for min­istry. For many, many years, I sim­ply accepted that despite my sus­pi­cions I was called to do a work by God, the church would always treat me with sus­pi­cion, dis­trust my motives, and use shame to con­trol my desires and my passions.

Have you ever spo­ken up or addressed gen­der inequity in per­son or on your blog?

It’s only been in the last few years I’ve iden­ti­fied what went on for me for all those years, and I’ve writ­ten and pub­lished many essays and posts address­ing spe­cific issues I see. In fact, it wasn’t until we had stepped out­side of the church struc­ture and no longer had a stake in it emo­tion­ally, socially and finan­cially we were even able to see the sys­temic and cul­tural inequity of the church, because whilst we were in it, while we knew it wasn’t right, we had always believed the prob­lem was us — if only we could get our heart right, if only we could work out our submission/​leadership issues.

On leav­ing the church as such, we were able to see objec­tively how the church prac­tices and defends inequity across the board, inside and out­side of itself, and also per­pet­u­ates a view that the imbal­ances are God’s will and His way. I think many folks who leave the organ­ised church come to recog­nise with regret how eas­ily they once accepted inequal­ity and social injus­tice, and seek to change this. In fact, it was my hav­ing can­cer and my hus­bands alco­holism — all whilst we were born-​​again, Bible believ­ing, pray­ing, wor­ship­ping, tithing Chris­tians — which really showed us the prac­tice of imbal­anced mercy and judge­ment in the church, and gave us a greater com­pas­sion for those who are on the receiv­ing end of it. 

I think the root of the issue of women and equal­ity in the church is not a the­ol­ogy issue, but an issue of jus­tice. What about you? Has the­ol­ogy helped or hin­dered you towards a lib­er­at­ing view of yourself?

It’s absolutely an issue of jus­tice, and not of the­ol­ogy. I have a Bible Col­lege qual­i­fi­ca­tion, and I’ve been read­ing the Bible since I was 13 (I’m now 44) and every time I’ve been asked to accept the con­cept of prej­u­dice, injus­tice or inequal­ity as expressed sup­pos­edly in the scrip­ture, I’ve had to be helped to see it. I have found many peo­ple believe that because it’s accepted that scrip­ture is God-​​breathed. Peo­ple also believe it was not pos­si­ble for the scribes nor the inter­preters, nor the assem­blers of the canon to impact it with their own human frail­ties, prej­u­dices, cul­tural ideas and con­di­tion­ing. Any book, any cre­ative work, which comes through the hands of humans will be changed and affected by those humans, for good, and for bad. I have found con­tem­po­rary Chris­t­ian the­ol­ogy in prac­tice pretty much tries to con­vince us the worst of the var­i­ous lim­ited human attrib­utes of the scrip­tural scribes are some­how the Holy and unchange­able attrib­utes of God. In this way, some were once able to be con­vinced slav­ery, racism and even the Holo­caust were some­how God’s will. In the same way we have also believed oppres­sion and sus­pi­cion of women, and other mar­gin­alised groups, are also Gods will. I believe the sex­ist and misog­y­nist aspects of scrip­ture are inter­est­ing for demon­strat­ing the lim­ited capac­ity of human beings for mercy and jus­tice through his­tory, rather than accu­rately depict­ing the heart of our eter­nal Creator.

What does church and the role of women look like to you in the future? Empow­ered or displaced?

I have no idea, and this excites rather than frus­trates me. We’ve cho­sen to stand out­side of the church and observe it while these mas­sive changes occur in our soci­ety — atti­tudes towards homo­sex­ual per­sons, women, chil­dren, the men­tally ill etc — rather than stand within and be swept along, or shouted down. We, and when I say we I mean my hus­band Ben and I, have been forced to re-​​examine our own beliefs and ideas, and this has changed the way we respond to and view peo­ple gen­er­ally. As a woman, I’ve decided not to include myself in any struc­ture or organ­i­sa­tion which sup­ports sys­temic and ongo­ing injus­tice towards cer­tain groups based on gen­der or sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion. Unfor­tu­nately, my church is one of them. I love the folks there, but I can’t sup­port the way they treat women, amongst other groups, because I don’t see this as reflec­tive of the heart of God, or the mis­sion and pur­pose of Christ. I look at the work some are doing with excite­ment, such as with the amaz­ing Kathy Esco­bar and The Refuge church. I believe the con­tem­po­rary Chris­t­ian church will con­tinue to resist change, and those who desire it will be forced to walk away and begin again. I stand with these ones, desir­ing change, but won­der­ing what it is we actu­ally want this thing to look like. I’m still in my dream­ing stage — stay posted!

How can read­ers find you?

At my desk, here in a sub­ur­ban New­cas­tle sur­burb in New South Wales, Aus­tralia, usu­ally blog­ging away! When I’m not here, I’m coach­ing can­cer patients, dri­ving my kids around, or work­ing in a cool hippy dress shop.

I blog here www​.johilder​.com

I have two books -

Things Not To Say To Some­one Who Has Can­cer (a guide­book for peo­ple who love some­one diag­nosed with cancer)

God, You Can Take My Men­tal Ill­ness, Just Not The Part Where You Speak To Me (a col­lec­tion of essays and arti­cles talk­ing about fam­ily, mar­riage, cul­ture, men­tal ill­ness, can­cer, alco­holism and faith — just the every­day stuff :))

Thanks Jo so much for tak­ing time with us!

Want to hear more from Jo?  Here are some links to some of her arti­cles about women and inequity :

• Why Chris­tians Are Not The Boss Of Marriage
• Jesus Lives In A Rehab — Who Knew?
• On How The Infi­delity Of The Chris­t­ian Man Is The Fault Of His Wife’s Pon­der­ous Thighs. Or Crap To That Effect
• There’s Some­thing About Esther – Why You’ll Want To Be Very Care­ful Demand­ing The Respect Of A Good, Chris­t­ian Woman
• In Which I Am Accused Of Being Unla­dy­like, And I Heartily Agree

What res­onated with you in Jo’s story? Have you had sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences? What do you think about women leav­ing the church alto­gether over the issue of inequality?