Sudbury faith: Appreciating the role of women in the church

Jesus gave women significant roles to play, even entrusting them with the message of the resurrection

Article content In the New Testament of the Bible, the Gospels and the Book of Acts give us lists of Jesus’ 12 disciples or apostles. Sometimes those words are used interchangeably, but they mean different things. A disciple is a student or an apprentice.

Jesus was their rabbi or teacher, and he chose twelve followers to learn from him. After a time of learning, those 12 were sent out to proclaim Jesus’ message about the kingdom of God. They were sent to continue his mission and ministry, spreading the message and even doing the kinds of things he did.

An apostle is someone who is sent. Recommended Videos The lists of the 12 differ slightly in the different tellings, but the thing that becomes obvious in all of the lists is that they’re all men. Should we be concerned about this?

It’s something that didn’t even occur to me growing up, maybe because I was a boy or because it’s just what we were used to. And that may very well be the issue. We got used to Jesus’ disciples/apostles being men, and that could become an influence on our view of women in leadership in the church, in the home, and in the world.

Last month, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States voted not to allow women to be pastors or preachers in their churches. Some conservative church leaders have pointed to Jesus’ 12 male disciples/apostles as support for their argument against women in ministry. But in many denominations, women have been ordained to pastoral ministry for decades.

And even before they were taking on the roles of pastors in the church, women were preaching and proclaiming the Gospel message in many parts of the church. But what do we make of the fact that all of Jesus’ disciples were men? Well, they weren’t actually all men.

In the Gospel according to Luke, the list of disciples is given in chapter 6. Jesus had spent a night on a mountain in prayer. In the morning, he chose his 12 disciples, whom he also named apostles.

Then we read, “He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples.” A large crowd of disciples gathered to hear Jesus, and we’re fooling ourselves if we believe that the crowd was made up of only males. And Luke regularly mentions women who play significant roles in the ministry of Jesus and the church in both his Gospel and in the book of Acts.

Women were and are central to Jesus’ mission. Also, women regularly serve as models of faithfulness. Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, as soon as she was healed, served those who were gathered, not simply out of some cultural sense that this was a woman’s role, but because service is a mark of discipleship.

Women were the ones who remained faithful to Jesus to the end. When all the men had fled as Jesus hung dying on the cross, it was women who remained to watch so that they could also care for Jesus after his death. And it was women to whom the angels proclaimed the good news of Jesus’ resurrection, and it was women who believed while the men discounted their witness as “an idle tale.”

The women persevered in faith. At various points in the Gospels, Jesus challenges the conventional wisdom of what constitutes “leadership” and “greatness.” When predicting his own death, Jesus overturned worldly notions of exercising power, and by his word and example, he demonstrated that true greatness comes through service and true power is shown in sacrificial love.

Of the various characters in the Gospels, it’s women who regularly come closest to emulating what Jesus commanded and modelled. Considering the first-century culture in which Jesus lived and ministered, it might have been his way of working within that culture to call 12 men to be his disciples and apostles. But at the same time, he sought to overturn cultural expectations and challenge notions of leadership and power by giving women significant roles to play, even entrusting them with the message of the resurrection.

One of the verses cited to keep women out of pastoral leadership is 1 Timothy 2:13, which says, “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man.” Those who cite these words ignore the cultural context of those words. And the scholarly consensus is that St. Paul didn’t actually write those words.

The resurrection of Jesus, as heralded first by women, created a new world and new reality, one feature of which is that, as the Apostle Paul did write, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28). Rev. Thomas P. Arth is with Trinity Evangelical Lutheran Church in Sudbury.