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I grew up in a very conservative Congregational church, where women were not involved in anything except playing the piano, minding the nursery, and teaching children’s Sunday School. Even the offering was always collected by men. I’m not sure whether the latter was a conscious decision or just a default because nobody had ever thought of doing it differently. But certainly the fact that there were no women elders or deacons was due to what they believed to be biblical principle. When I was growing up, I never questioned it or even noticed it as odd, since I’d never been exposed to anything different. Many years later, the church had dwindled to the point where there were only two deacons serving a congregation of about 40. One of the deacons died or moved away, and there were no other eligible men in the church available to serve. The leaders reluctantly asked my mother, a pillar of faith and long-time member of the church, whether she would be willing to serve as an interim deaconess, until another eligible man joined the church. She initially said no, because she felt it was forbidden in the Bible. But since there were no other options, they prevailed upon her. She finally agreed, but with strong reservations, and insisted that it only be temporary, until a man came along who could take the position. As soon as the other deacon heard that she’d agreed to serve, he resigned, because he didn’t want to serve on a deacon board with a woman. Thus they had to ask another woman in the church, who agreed to serve. And so, ironically, the church went overnight from not allowing any women deacons to having nothing but women deacons. And lo and behold! It worked out, and they did a good job, and the church’s compunctions about women serving as deacons faded away.
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I have been attending a little lay-run Mennonite church in Vancouver for 14 years. About half the preaching is done by laypeople in the church and the rest is by guest preachers. My first few years at this church, I was studying theology at Regent College. Thus it wasn’t surprising that after a couple of years I was approached by one of the leaders in the church asking whether I would be willing to preach for them sometime. The church is very welcoming of Regent students and likes to give them an opportunity to grow by giving them preaching and leadership responsibilities. And they are very forgiving of people who aren’t all that good at preaching (yet). I was not studying to become a pastor. In fact I actively did not want to ever preach. I’d been brought up to think it was wrong for women to preach. Besides that, I was afraid of the responsibility it would entail, and of the possibility of misleading people to their eternal damnation. I had by that time been exposed enough to biblical equality both in my previous church (where I’d seen women preach) and at Regent, where I was at the time just finishing a course on Gender, Sexuality and Community. I’d read Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen's Gender and Grace, Gretchen Gabelein Hull’s Equal to Serve, and Rebecca Merrill Groothuis’s Women Caught in the Conflict, and had found them all reasonable and convincing, while the readings in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood that we were assigned rang hollow. Still, I was afraid to try preaching myself, so I said no, I wasn’t ready yet. A number of months later, the same leader asked me again. The church was preparing for a sermon series on 1 Peter and he wondered if he might be able to slot me in somewhere. This time, I reasoned that perhaps God was nudging me to do it, since it was certainly not coming from my own desire. I told the leader that I might be able to have my arm twisted if the passage that included 1 Peter 2:24-25 hadn’t been spoken for yet, as I’d just written a paper on those verses for my exegesis class. It turned out that was the only passage that hadn’t yet been assigned to anyone. Again it felt like maybe God was nudging me, so I agreed. However when the time drew closer, I panicked and got cold feet about it, and backed out. Another year went by and I was asked again if I would preach. I said “yes” and went ahead with it this time. But oh, what a torment!
I got to pick the passage I was going to preach on. I was given a huge lead time (a few months). The situation couldn’t have been more ideal for my first time preaching, or so I thought. But both the freedom and the lead time proved to be difficult challenges. I spent all but the last three weeks dithering over what passage I would preach on. I finally settled on Genesis 22, the “Sacrifice of Isaac,” because I’d done some work with it at Regent. I had translated the whole chapter for my Hebrew class, so I knew the text pretty well. I relied on all my great exegetical skills that I’d learned in class, prepared lots of geeky notes about what various words meant in the Hebrew, and the inclusios and other poetic devices used in the story. I was getting nowhere on coming up with a main point to craft into a sermon. I had not taken a homiletics class and felt woefully inadequate to the task. My anxiety grew the closer it got to that Sunday I was to preach. I procrastinated and stressed out. By the Saturday night, I had about one or two paragraphs of un-crafted words towards a sermon, nowhere near enough to fill up the 15-20 minutes that was allotted to me. In a profound state of panic, I called up a Regent friend of mine late at night and asked for prayer and wisdom. I told him how I was dreading this appointment with the pulpit the next morning. He had the brilliant insight that my journey towards that hour kind of paralleled Abraham’s trudging approach to Mount Moriah. His steps must have been heavy during those three days, as he knew what awaited him at the top. Ultimately, it was God who provided the ram for the sacrifice. My friend told me to be myself, be transparent, tell my own story and link it with Abraham’s. So that’s what I ended up doing. I didn’t use much of the material I’d prepared, and mostly spoke off the cuff. It was probably less than 10 minutes in all. But thankfully my church has a time of discussion and response after the sermon in our worship service, and the people took up what I’d said and riffed on that for quite some time, and the whole became better than what I’d humbly offered. Indeed, God did provide the ram.
Since that time I’ve been invited back to preach on a dozen or more occasions, and it has gotten easier with time. But it is still a sobering responsibility, and I hope and pray that it will never be something I feel nonchalant about. That lesson I learned my first time about trusting in God’s provision, and seeking him rather than entirely relying on my own intellect, has never left me. Of course I know that I do have to do my homework; I can’t just “wing it.” And I do still struggle with procrastination most times. But I’m not nearly as panicky about it, and I’ve completely gotten over the fear that I might be doing something terribly sinful by preaching.
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