I would like to begin this column with an apology to all womankind for being a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male.
For every time you may have heard, “But you’re a girl!”
For every time you have been considered or were made to feel, weaker, less intelligent, incapable or inferior in any way based on your gender. For all atrocities committed against women simply because they were women by any WASP male. For mud flaps with the silhouette of an obviously nude female. I am sorry.
The thing that troubles me most is that I feel that Christianity has perpetuated these truly unfounded prejudices.
Ephesians 5:22-24, Colossians 3:18, I Timothy 2:11 and I Peter 3:1 have all been misinterpreted to keep women subservient. We must remember the context in which these statements were made.
In the case of Paul’s epistle to the church a Ephesus, he was saying that the Christians there should submit to those persons and/or entities who have authority over them: wives to husbands, children to parents and slaves to their masters.
The same goes for the passage in Colossians. The passage in I Timothy is taken completely for granted. Paul states that women should be silent in the church. He even says he did not permit women to teach men or have any authority over men.
But if you take the time to study the historical context, the women that Paul was referring were not educated to the point that they were actually capable of holding a position of authority in the church.
At the time women were not provided the opportunity to receive an education. They were disrupting the meetings with their questions and Paul suggested that they wait and ask their husbands.
Now that women are able to receive the education, over half of the population of ETSU are women, they are just as capable of leading a congregation and sometimes even more so. In the case of my home church some of the women were better able to teach than our former pastor.
When I was in Jamaica I attended services at a church where the pastor, deacons, choir director and all but two members of the congregation were women. As I entered the church I was taken aback by the 10-inch attack lizards, who apparently have an appetite for Caucasian flesh, where as the congregation was not even phased.
When we returned to the night service, we had another shock. A man entered the church and sat on the floor in the corner at the back. He lit a candle and began to burn himself.
Every time the name of Jesus was mentioned, he screamed. Several of the men in our group tried to no avail to get the man to leave. The pastor of the church, a woman, mind you, with one command, drove him out.
There is even a case of a female deacon in the early church. Phoebe, mentioned in Romans 16:1, was referred to as a servant in the King James Version. The original Greek text uses a word that literally means deaconess.
The passage in I Peter has also been taken out of historical context. In ancient Rome the “man of the household” had sovereignty over every member of the household.
If a woman asked for her freedom in Christ, she could have been killed. So Peter made this statement to keep them from being harmed.
We are all freed in Christ and made equals by his blood. God has no favorites.

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