All theology is contextual. No theology is done in a vacuum.
Complementarity : a relationship or situation where two or three different things improve or emphasis one another's different qualities. Represents Christian orthodoxy even if we disagree how we can work that in the local church. Complementarity = beautiful difference.
Complementarianism : is different has taken on a narrowerer application of complementarity.
Complementarity is a word that Christians on all sides can use to describe our position on male and female.
Creation. There is a complementarity in everything. Jewish
Abolishing the difference between heaven and earth has led to a society that looks to abolish the difference between male and female. We are not wholly the same and not wholly different.
Camille Paglia on difference and harmony:
Female / male
Earth / sky
Land / Rain
Internal / External
Invisible / Visible
Curves / Lines
Cyclical / Linear
Eastern / Western
Dinoysianan / Apollonian
Chaos / Order
Chtnonian / Structured
Cycilcal / Linear
Body / Head
Nature / Society
Pagan / Judeo-Christian
Camille's understanding is that the Christian vision of difference won and that that was good for women. In the Christian vision of reality, polarities like these are ultimately reconciled within the Godhead.
The Christian vision is of harmony and not conflict.
Jen Wilkins:
Genesis. God declares not good and then, before he creates eve, parades the animals in front of man for naming. For Adam, this is
Before Eve is prepared for Adam, Adam needs to be prepared for Eve. Adam's 'at last, she is bone from my bone', is a statement of declaration that honours the sameness of men and women. The first word in scripture is that we are same. Empathy for one another comes from the starting point of 'this person is just like me.' Focusing so much on our difference leads to an objectification 'mars and venus.'
Let's talk about what's not in this story. God doesn't create a buddy for Adam.
There is no such thing as a church where the men or women thrive and the other doesn't. They may give the appearance of thriving but it doesn't happen.
Root the difference in biology, what's a 'trans-culutral' difference. If we start with biology it stops us saying things that are stupid:
- Men have physical dominance. On the whole they are physically stronger. That's the context of 1 Peter, not emotional or intellectual difference. Men outgrow vulnerability as they age, women do not.
Women / Men difference:
- support - report
- relationship - individuality
- asking questions - avoid question
- cooperation - assert
- holistic - focused
- consensus - orders
- relate - resolve
Think of the difference between men and women as the difference between a lion and an ant. Ants are team and together players, lions may go with others but know they can go alone. At that's why women go to the toilet together! It's how vulnerability affects a woman's psyche.
Moral.
Men and women are both moral but how they process morality is different.
Women tend to base morality on relationship but men focus on outcome.
Emotions.
Use them differently. One is more like the women are twice as likely to suffer from anxiety than men. Most women internalise stress, men find something to hit with a stick, they externalise pressure. Use our emotions in different ways.
Think about the way women understand the gospel in ways that embody the gospel. Men only bleed when something is wrong, but women every 28 days bleed, that has a profound affect on how men and women understand things.
What does the church need from women?
- Their unique perspective. Women got the vote in 1920 but weren't allowed to serve on jury boards until 1960. Since getting the vote we have fairer divorce laws, domestic laws have come to fore, women's health... During WWI more American women died in child birth than American men died on the battlefield. We pass through life as embodied males and embodied females. If all input I'm getting in my church is from men think what gaps I may have! Women are going to have eyes for the powerless. They'll see things that we think are secondarily important but are crucial.
- We need women's relational capital.
- We need their visible leadership. How visible? As visible as your churches complimentarity allows. We need to make participation as easy as possible for women in leadership. It's very important for the next generation of women coming along but also men.
What women need from the church?
- To be shepherded. We disciple them as though they're exactly the same. Women can gather as women. What trends in the marketplace are attracting women? Do you know anything about essential oils? Can you name 10 dominant female voices? Women are looking for mothers in the church and if they don't find them in your church they will look outside your church. Need mothers.
- Need to be leveraged. Our practice on complimentarity is broken and a lot of women assume our theology is broken.
- Actively help them to find their voices. That means, we should hire them. Understand that the barriers for women in the church are many. Women will volunteer and volunteer and volunteer until Jesus comes again. Will you dignify her by commending her publicly?
Physical dominance is a form of privilege. Because men have physical dominanece they have used it to conquer. There's a reason why you see men in power and a reason why 1 in 4 women have been victims of sexual harassment. Just by virtue of being an embody male you have privilege. How will you use it?
Livy:
Complimentarity was best understood by her in thinking through the metaphor of an orchestra. Difference exists and even the potential for bands within the various instruments exists: a string quartet or a brass band. But God's design isn't for strings and brass only but for an orchestra where they work together.
Complimentarity is less about conflict but instead is about the harmony of one piece of music.
SESSION 2: Hannah Anderson
Society, History & Culture
What do society, history and culture have to do with the discussion on complementarity?
Is gender a social construct?
Genesis: God creates engendered sexes. From a scriptural standpoint there is a deep connection between our creation and our cultural mandate. there is no society without male and females expressing themselves in community together. If we do not have a vision of the complementarity of male and female, we don't even have a society. Our conversations about these things can't be divorced from society.
BOOK: Nate Collins: Almost Invisible.
Part of building society's that are complementarity are building societies where you know who you shouldn't have sex with. We have cut off part of how men and women should relate to one another because we removed those restrictions in our society. Genesis 2 is about sending the man and woman out into the world to form a society where they act and live alongside each other.
Gender cannot be separated from all of the other things that are happening in a society.
One of the main ways that we recognise the influence of new culturally acceptable ideas is through second wave feminism.
Society and gender work together as a puzzle fitting into one another.
A Rubix cube.
A completed cube is society as God intended it to be, it is all the pieces doing what they are supposed to do. But that is how a rubix cube comes when you buy it, but then your children get hold of it and mess it up and you have to try and resolve it. Therein lies the issue for discussions on gender.
There 43 quintillion ways for a rubix cube to be messed up and then solved. Society has that many variations to it as well. We mustn't compare one society with another and think one is better than another, they are just messed up differently and so require a particular and different way of solving them each one. We compare ourselves to the word of God not to each other, the past or other societies.
- The first thing that a just society will do is honour both of the genders, with the responsibility and the privileges that come with that. Have a vision and mindset for the vision and maturity of women.
- A just society will honour their authority that comes with that. They're both privileged and responsible for their authority as well. There are many different forms of authority based on our different responsibilities and if we don't have a vision for how a woman can have authority then we are not creating a just society.
- Honour their work as image bearers. Both of their works were also cursed. If we don't have a vision of work for women then they 'become a nuisance'
We cannot neglect the value of our differences. If we do then women are not going to be valued for the vulnerability.
1 Peter 3:7 In the context of roles. Honour them not just because they're human beings but because they're women. Understand that even though you are not like them, I want you to learn to value something that you may not initially value. Honour our differences. Honour women not because they resemble men but because they are women. The same thing is true for men. We must honour men for their manhood not because of the ways they're like a woman.
What does all this mean for our witness in the world?
We see a different vision in the scripture than we see from the world all around us.
What we've done in the church in the wake of the cultural advance on demolishing gender is that we have built a retaining wall and said 'we're going to hold back the flood' (by upholding male only roles.
The sexual revolution is over. When we saw the #metoo movement it was as though the game was over and we saw the reaping of the whirlwind that was sown in the SRev. There is a sense of distrust of male sexuality. Our culture has mishandled our sexuality and now people are in a position of fear about how they relate to one another.
Christianity gives us an ethic and vision for union and community that something is going on that is larger than anything else we're part of. Vulnerability is not a liability. You won't find this communal ethic anywhere else! The gospel gives a vision for how strength and weakness can complement each other.
Alastair Roberts
Shelve questions. The Bible isn't primarily a set of proof texts on which we can build our casess. Once the authority of scripture is so 'atomised' we fid ourselves throwing up our hands and saying 'who can tell what we should believe about these things!'
Our approach to scripture shouldn't be to try and win an argument over our neighbour but instead to pay close attention ourselves. Everything must begin by trying to hear what God is saying to us.
In Medieval commentaries the book Song of Solomon is treated as the Holy of Holies.
Step back and ask questions before stepping forward to specifics. Pay attention however not just to scripture but to the place we're coming from as contemporary society. There is a way that we perceive the world that has been trained by all the things we have and live around, mass produced everythings everywhere that isn't connected to a deep world. The Bible talks about blood, sweat, menstruation, hooves, hair, bodily emissions in the night, specific rivers, memorial stones, wheat and barley harvests. Wombs, foreskins, skin diseases... It is a very different book from the sort of book we're looking for.
The Bible pays a lot of attention to the families people are connected to whereas we see people as interchangeable, individuals. The Bible is concerned with particulars, sons of and daughters of...
We live in a world of abstractions, shallow, airless and relatively weightless world. Detached from the soil of reality.
The contemporary fixation with whether or not men and women are different would have struck the original readers of the Bible as odd. Like asking which is better the cello or the violin, is a strange question. But in a society that values economic value and productivity we approach the Bible with those questions. It might be a valid concern but it isn't the same concern as people had in the past.
Genesis 1: It is a literary account. It is a story that has a rhythm and pattern to it that we need to pay attention to as it's pattern is part of the meaning. It's a dance, it's an orchestra it's an assembling of all the different parts into a whole.
Two sets of three days;
Forming, naming, taming, ruling
Filling, collecting, communion
The whole story begins with time. The light in the first day isn't primarily a division of light and dark, it's a separation of night and day, it's a time based one. Then on to more times, seasons etc. Time isn't just day and night but yearly, seasonal and finally, the rest sabbath day. There are patterns and dynamisms to creation. It isn't just a bare structure of systems but of life. As God fills there are different things he does. Creation partakes then in God's own creation ability it teems it recreates. Forming basic structures and filling.
They are all good in their particular parts and then very good.
We read it from the persepctive of human beings, we're the centre of the universe and everything rotates around us. But, human beings are late on the scene. Almost all the other creatures are well settled in to their places before we turn up. We don't make or pay much attention to the animals but the animals are good, good in themselves, not just because they can be food or pets.
Animals are helpers for us. They are not comparable to us or suited for us but they are helpers for us. Creation is a source of joy and delight to God and we're supposed to share in that. They are given to us that we would share it and care for it.
What does this have to do with us? Humans are created for the good of creation, not to be despots but to be household servants within this realm, those who represent God's presence within this realm. It isn't a picture of the man in the centre and everything else around him, he is there to care for and fulfil the world and creation mandate.
Adam is created from adamah, from mother earth.
Man and woman are intervolved with one another not just involved but intertwined. We are distinguished in a way that means you can never understand one without reference to another. One note on it's own is lacking and means very little but placed alongside and within a symphony it becomes charged.
We tend to think of the standard unit of humanity as being the individual. But the SI unit of humanity in scripture is man and woman made in the image of God. Male and female are akin to to magnetic poles structuring time always in reference to one another.
Humanity is irreducibly two, it cannot be broken down.
We live in a society that tries to have universal principles. Money. We want universally understood terms of meaning.
Two hands of humanity, we feel lacking without both hands
Two eyes of humanity, we lose perspective with only one eye
The Bible doesn't say that the man should be the head... it says he is the head. The question is is the man going to be the head in a way that's good or in a way that beats people down.
Guardian: only 3% of articles and books on subjects of gender mention motherhood.
When we detach ourselves from the physical and gritty reality of life we lose so much of God's good creation.
God is the father, the earth is the mother that Adam has come from.
What do father's do with their sons? They teach them their trade. God teaches Adam the trade of creating, of filling and forming. God makes adam a participant in his creating.
Not good to be alone is not a statement of loneliness, it is that man needs a partner. Adam can form but he can't fill without eve, he can't give life, he can't give the future, he can't bring the perfection that God has planned. In creating the woman he creates her and creates the realm of fellowship and communion, presence.
Man is meant to serve the earth, to be it's servant to care for his mother.
Headship. We see it as being 'when things go wrong, that's when we see headship.' Adam's headship in Genesis however isn't meant o be over the woman but for the woman so that she can go out and fill the world. He is there to empower her. For Christ to be the head of the church, does that mean that he is the 'boss' of the church? Eph. 1 says: 'he put all things under christ;'s feet and gave him to be all things... to the church.' He does that for the benefit and building up of his bride. It isn't about two people loving each other but it's the way that God wants us to participate in his pattern of creation.
The forming and filling pattern is the relationship between christ and spirit. There is a deep parallel in scripture between the Holy Spirit and women. The woman coming out of his side, like a bride being presented to his groom.
Imagine Adam naming the animals and then suddenly breaking out into song.
The Sabbath book of the Bible is the song of songs. Not as two people opposed to one another but as two people joined together in rest.
God's answer to our questions may seem strange but we may need to revisit our question again.
Q&A
Wealth comes from the word 'weal' - it has to do with our well being. Our society has become very good and generating money but not much wealth for our families and households.
500 years ago the home would have been the centre of production, of education. When we talk about returning to the home we're talking about developing the vision of the home as seen in the Scriptures.
If the man is the head, the woman is the heart, the one that everything revolves around.
Christ comes as the second Adam, what is the second Eve, it's the bride.
SESSION 4: Hannah Anderson - Anthropology
What does it mean to be made in the image of God?
Shift identity away from the language of image bearers but instead think of it in terms of our vocation.
Our confusion about our sex/gender is more than that, it reflects a confusion about our humanity. When we look at gender confusion it is a symptom of something larger.
Imago Dei has been used by people to mean different things. By some it's our reasoning capacity, by others it's about our ruling, or by others our social division between male and female. Image also has to do with representations. Pilate was representative of Caesar's rule, or coins and statues.
Jesus re coins: 'who's image is it?'
We bear the image of God.
Acts 17. In his logic Paul is calling them to see God as creator but also as Father. He is calling them to understand that they are his children in ways that the rest of creation is not.
Paul: 'he gives life and breath'
Genesis 2: 'he breathed into the man'
Image bearing is an act of inheritance and begetting.
It is the fact that a woman is a daughter of the creator father and a man the son that forms our bond with one another, that we are each under the authority of our father. In Paul's mind image bearing is linked to having children.
The significance of Jesus' baptism was that the Father stepped up and said 'I'm his dad' like a man does at the birth certification of a child. It is him saying 'he is made in my image.' I'm his dad. That's why after the flood when God reissues the cultural mandate he says 'but you may not shed the blood of man because he is made in my image.' The law of the jungle isn't to apply to humans, because they have a Father who has imaged them.
We need to think of being made in the image of God as a vocation to be his children, a family endeavour. It is a family business. There is unity in our vocation. Humanity and womanhood are not at odds with one another but are bound up holistically with one another.
We do come a certain sexed way. We should validate it and acknowledge it.
SESSION 5: Alastair Roberts
The garden is a kindergarten, it is a preschool. They will need to go out from the garden.
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil; rule and wisdom. The knowledge of good and evil in scripture is associated with kings, Solomon requests it to help him rule this great people. In scripture we see a description of the child who has not yet attained this knowledge of good and evil.
Alastair: I believe that they would have one day been given the tree to eat but not yet, they needed to mature toward it. The problem was that they were like teenagers who wanted to steal their father's car keys before they were ready and as a result everything gets broken.
Why is the woman deceived? In part because she hasn't received the prohibition to eat the tree. Only Adam is given that command.
Adam is addressed singularly as 'you' he disobeyed outright whereas she was honestly deceived. God's rebuke 'you listened to your wife' is that he listened to her over God's command.
The women in the story of scripture outwit the serpent by outwitting them. The very person that the serpent deceives will be the one who deceives him.
Significance is redeemed.
Who are the women who make history? Who are the men? They are small people behaving faithfully and doing what God has called them to do. Done in the secret place, often small. Abraham is tied to his home as well, his identity is tied to his home as well.
God's work has long gestation periods.
God's history is not made where we think it would be made. The biblical account of history subverts so many of the ways we think history and power are made.
There is a strategic foregrounding of women to set history right. If we're going to be a society/church that promotes and honours women it isn't that we mustn't just get them up to do the things that men usually do. We mustn't idealise the societies we see in scripture, they are dysfunctional, but grace is at work! The story of the gospels begin with women.
Joseph (Jesus' dad) is a model for masculinity. We see women at key points, associated with Jesus' body, the gospels are teaching us something here not that we must fit everyone into this model of how we value people. Notice, listen, pay attention, where does God place his attention, where does God act? Not where we think he would. Life as it is seen by the eyes of the flesh or faith?
As people of faith we should be people who protect and strengthen seeds of faith.
Application: Church
How can we reorder the church so that it isn't primarily about what's done at the front but about what's being done in the life of the church.
Joseph played the role of a husband in a way that took the spotlight off him.
Our societies values are so mixed up and messed up that until we get our value systems reordered by the Bible we're not able to answer our questions of application.
SESSION 6: Hannah Anderson : Ecclesiology
Selection of quotes from a variety of authors to show the historic nature of the discussion.
The conversation about women's roles is not a new one. The questions and pressures people are articulating are common.
It requires imagination and creativity but we are not without a host of witnesses. We are not grappling with this on our own.
NB: when we say 'gender' we often just mean 'women'.
True complementarity isn't just focused on the role of women. The future of complementarity advances in a setting where churches believe that we're on mission. It's going to be churches that have this drive of mission are going to pick up this conversation with that in mind. Asking: how do I mobilise the differences between men and women to reach that goal.
Bride of Christ - 2 John: the elect lady and her children a term for the church.
Household and mission need to be rejoined. Building the estate.
When the household has mission then every member is valuable to it.
If we can begin to understand that the household of God is tasked with mission to make every member of it fruitful, it's going to answer a lot of questions about where men and women fit?
When Paul speaks to what people should do in the household of God whether overseers or leading women they are strikingly similar.
We have different practices based on our 'house rules' of church life. Just like playing cards at a friends house, you play by the house rules there. It will look different depending on the way fathers operate in each house.
If we don't give attention to this conversation we will inevitably just adopt cultural norms. Because, isn't that what happens in our biological family? The outside culture shapes and fills everything unless we stop and critique it. We, in our own contexts, depending on our ecclesiology and systematics need to go through the hard work of capturing a vision of the church as a household that allows for both men and women to be parents of the household.
SESSION 7: Alastair Roberts : How we got here
The principles of the sexual, morality of our culture:
1) Sexual acts do not have intrinsic meanings or purposes. The act has whatever meaning you want to put on it, they need not involve the making of one flesh, meaningless sex is a genuine possibility
2) sexuality is a subjective self and intrinsic in who we are. Christian opposition to non-marital sexual acts push against the prevailing
3) Sexual agents are autonomous, rights bearing individuals. Appropriate sexual relations presuppose equal in their agency and no imbalance of power between them. Polygamy isn't where we'll go but polyamory is. Because polygamy has an inequality of power in it.
4) freely giving consent is the watchword for sexual relationships. When advocates of traditional sexual ethics oppose same-sex relations or others are seen to opposing this deeply held belief. Christians believe in consent but it goes further than just consent. We need to think about whether this is for the best for both parties.
You will never win an argument with your spouse because as you fight you are fighting against your own best interest.
5) Beyond the prevention of harm sex should be beyond the
There are important good principles here. Emphasis on autonomy overrides the possibility of seeing someone as objects.
We are not trying to return the past, rather we should be drawing people toward a vision that is greater than anything we have in the past or present. Companionship in a marriage has never been emphasised as much as it is now. For most marriages in the past that was not a reality. We have something new that we should celebrate.
Marriage creates a space for commitment that isn't just about our autonomous bargaining power, what we can get for ourselves. Every single one of us feels these changes. We have all experienced divorce in our own lives, whether ourselves or friends or as children. Abuse, divorce etc. are very powerful realities. We find ourselevs in this wasteland left by the destruction of sin.
Being sexual individuals is more basic than being male or female, engaged as consumers or self-realisers and radical choosers.
Consider the rise of divorce: the family is no longer something passing on from one generation to another, it is something that might dissolve. The home is gone. That is significant.
We are bound up in time on different axis: inward, outward, backward and forward (where time is concerned), we can be extended on each one of those axis. If you can't keep promises you're not connected ot the future. Ina . society where people are not assisted in keeping their promises we can't build forward and extend who we are to the generation where we won't be.
Abraham is told that for 400 years his people will be in slavery and then they'll be brought back. What does it take for a man to be able to look that far into the future?
Complementarity isn't that women should stay at home and men should go out to work, but rather than both men and women should be rooted in the home.
Pornography. Every woman is now going to be compared to 100 of other women who exist to act out male fantasies and have nothing to do with true womanhood.
Abraham's world is world where people are 'fucked or fucking others' and it's an act of violence, that's all it is. It is an ugly reality. Sex in our society becomes a form of play. Sex is meant to be an act of sacrifice.
Results: loss of any sort of weight where sex and procreation have been detached.
Astronauts: 7 dawns in a single day, muscles weakening.
Modern society is like that. We're having these relationships in zero gravity. It's why we struggle to define masculinity or femininity.
We end up with a pursuit of a superficial manliness or femininity. We construct masks to hide the insecurity. We become actors, constantly representing ourselves. Anything we say on facebook is a form of self-branding that is weightless. Internet: all detached individuals trying to appear in the right way, it changes how we see others and ourselves, how we relate to ourselves. Mirrors in the rainforest for example. On the internet we are constantly preoccupied with the representation of ourselves, it's a deep fragilisation of identity.
Such a society will struggle (and that isn't surprising) to understand many of the things we're talking about.
To be a son: privilege, responsibility, authority, power, family name, honour, duty
In the NT the son: is the adult son, the one who does his father's business, like John from the cross, the son provides for his parents.
In our world is means almost nothing and especially if you're an adult and unmarried. Singleness can be so disorientating for us therefore.
In the church: What it means to be a son of the church is a powerful thing. They do the work of the household and are engaged in its business.
Things become weak when we don't put any weight on them - and that's why marriage has weakened so much, because we don't use it for anything.
It's the same for churches. Get a mission to go for, otherwise you'll just create a drifting community of believers who become consumers.
Family and sex. The family is where the children are raised in the faith.
The family isn't meant to be a private huddle of exclusivity but rivers that extend out to give life to the world around it.
Michel Houellebecq:
https://aviewofthewest.weebly.com/uploads/1/1/4/7/11477003/the_elementary_particles.pdf
Children existed solely to inherit a man's trade, his moral code and his property. This was taken for granted among the aristocracy, but merchants, craftsmen and peasants also bought into the idea, so it became the norm at every level of society. That's all gone now: I work for someone else, I rent my apartment from someone else, there's nothing for my son to inherit. I have no craft to teach him, I haven't a clue what he might do when he's older. By the time he grows up, the rules I lived by will have no value -he will live in another universe. If a man accepts the fact that everything must change, then he accepts that life is reduced to nothing more than the sum of his own experience; past and future generations mean nothing to him. That's how we live now. For a man to bring a child into the world now is meaningless.Your marriage isn't just something for this age alone, it's bearing a treasure that will last into the future. See our relationships against this horizon. We are 'heirs together' of the grace of life.
Where are the deepest wounds we bear? Born in our bodies and guts, our bodies need God's grace, we feel violated in our bodies. Our bodies are where we feel mortality, death and pain, where we feel the judgement of other people. That is what we feel so deeply.
A long excursion into the significance of our bodies in human relationships and the gospel.
SESSION 8: ANDREW
Complementarity is immensely important in the context of understanding the Christian faith. If you don't hold to complementarity generally then it's going to be very hard to resist anything that the sexual revolution throws at you.
The key is championing complementarity.
The future is beautiful but is also different.
We are going to need different ways of trying to land this.
The acts in a play illustration: we have had Acts 1 & 2 with their various scenes, now we've had Act 3 scene 1. We know how the play will end but how we get from here to there is for us to work out and fill in the gaps between here and there.
The first and best questions aren't always the 'so what does this look like in the church.'
Reflections on how we should land on the practise of how we should apply them:
We ought to see the church more as a household and family rather than a workplace and organisation. God has put us in families (church not just nuclear) and we should work and live mindful of them. This cashes out in seven ways:
- Evangelism means bringing to birth rather than recruitment. That involves mothers and fathers. The natural language in scripture is familial image. We have desexualised the language of 'birth' as though it is a process of recruitment. New life and nurture gets us off on a better starting point. Paul sees himself as a father but also a mother 'I am in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.'
- Discipleship: we need to think of it as parenting and not orientation training. It is a familial image rather than a business one. When you enter an organisation you are oriented for a week or so to 'get you up to speed' and we have tried to map that onto the Christian life too. The process of bringing someone to maturity is part of what it means to be a parent.
- Relationships. We ought to see one another as siblings and not colleagues. We need to be in a setting where we don't lust after one another but where don't avoid one another either. Relate to women with the honour and respect you would with another woman. Men need to ask 'am I erecting needless barriers between me and women?'
- Home lives: our homes are 'households' of production and activity and power and influence. Our homes ought to be treated more like that than as though we are atomised workers, who go out, do a job and consume. It must be a question that we ask: is living in a nuclear setting where it's just our own family always best and right?
- Working: Work for the common good as stewards in the family of God not in the city of men.
- Governing the church. We need to think about this as fathers and mothers and not as managers or just leaders. (David Starling: uncorinthian leadership). Fathers are ones who defend the church and die for the church but don't necessarily need to be the ones who have all the ideas or who communicate all the ideas. 1 Timothy are fathers rather than mothers. Titus 1 he says the same things about eldership to show almost that it isn't just the context of Ephesus that made the difference to what he says. We may have swallowed the assumption that to be a visionary has to be a fathers job, or even that leading has to be a fathers job.
- Church: Being the church ought to be a family on mission and not primarily and organisation. Romans 16 is just as important for understanding what Romans is about. Listen to how he talks about the women. Greet one another with a holy kiss; regard one another as family members.
