Women in the Mission of the Church

M. Dzubinski Leanne

Description

Women have been central to the work of Christian ministry from the time of Jesus to the twenty-first century. Yet the story of Christianity is too often told as a story of men. This accessibly written book tells the story of women throughout church history, demonstrating their integral participation in the church's mission. It highlights the legacies of a wide variety of women, showing how they have overcome obstacles to their ministries and have transformed cultural constraints to spread the gospel and build the church.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• History of religions

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 20 avril 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781493429189
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Cover
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2021 by Leanne M. Dzubinski and Anneke H. Stasson
Published by Baker Academic
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakeracademic.com
Ebook edition created 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-2918-9
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Scripture quotations labeled ASV are from the American Standard Version of the Bible.
Scripture quotations labeled KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture quotations labeled NASB are from the New American Standard Bible® (NASB), copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. www.Lockman.org
Scripture quotations labeled NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Dedication
For my grandmothers, my mother, my sisters, my daughters, and my nieces. The world is better, and I am better, because of you all. —L. M. D.
For my mother, without whose love I would never have written this book. And for my daughters, with hope for the world that will be theirs. —A. H. S.
Contents
Cover i
Half Title Page ii
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
Dedication v
Preface ix
Introduction: Women in Ministry Is Not a Twentieth-Century Phenomenon 1
Part 1: Women’s Leadership in the Early Church 11
1. Patrons, Missionaries, Apostles, Widows, and Martyrs 13
2. Virgins, Scholars, Desert Mothers, and Deacons 35
Part 2: Women’s Leadership in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages 57
3. Mothers, Sisters, Empresses, and Queens 59
4. Medieval Nuns 83
5. Beguines and Mystics 105
Part 3: Women’s Leadership since the Reformation 123
6. Women Preachers in America 125
7. Social Justice Activists 145
8. Denominational Missionaries and Bible Women 161
9. Faith Missionaries, Evangelists, and Church Founders 183
Conclusion: Women’s Leadership in the Church 203
Bibliography 215
Index 233
Back Cover 240
Preface
A s we wrote this book, we began to really understand John’s exclamation in John 21:25: “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.” Jesus’s followers, over the last two thousand years, have also done “many other things.” Library shelves are full of books recording those things.
For a number of years now, Leanne has been giving a presentation on women in the history of the church. She developed the presentation originally for a class on women in leadership at Philadelphia Biblical University, as it was then called. She chose to take a bird’s-eye view, covering women’s involvement in three eras of history in which their work was crucial to the spread of Christianity and was particularly visible: the early church orders of widows, virgins, and deacons; the medieval monastic movements; and the modern missionary movement. The goal of the presentation was to show that women have always—from the time of Jesus up to the present day—been crucial to God’s work on earth. God has always had a place for women with a vocation to serve. She wanted to show that women in ministry was not a new idea of the twentieth century as part of 1960s second-wave feminism, as she often heard claimed, but was instead God’s good plan from the beginning.
Next she started giving the presentation at retreats for women missionaries and for women in executive leadership in mission organizations. Pretty soon women began to ask, “Where’s the book?” They wanted to read the stories of these amazing women for themselves. They wanted to see, in print, how women had been engaging in ministry throughout church history.
Keenly aware that she is not a historian, Leanne invited Anneke to join her in writing the book. Anneke had previously done historical work on women, sexual ethics, and marital practices in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christian mission. She had long been interested in the church’s teaching on gender roles, and she knew that while scholars have been doing tremendous work to reclaim the stories of women in church history, most of those stories have yet to make their way into our churches. This book aims to pass down this scholarship to students, parishioners, and pastors so as to enable them to better answer some of the questions about women and ministry.
We struggled to decide who and what to include in this book. For every story we did include, there are many others that we didn’t and multitudes of stories beyond those that are completely lost to history. We also want to be transparent about our limitations. Although we have international experience and speak other languages, we are, first and foremost, English-speaking Americans. The material we can access is written in English; the perspectives we can obtain are primarily those of English-speaking Westerners. We have included some non-Western stories and perspectives in this book, but we are keenly aware of our limitations in that regard. We have not even scratched the surface of the contributions of women in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Nor have we done an extensive, critical examination of racism, colonialism, and other -isms that have plagued the church. We are grateful that people around the world are also taking up their pens and writing the accounts of women in their societies, and we are eager for those stories to become more well known. We believe that women in every society need to be reminded that God loves them, values them as daughters, and calls them to kingdom service.
There are numerous people we would like to thank for their support and encouragement throughout this book-writing process. First of all, we thank our editor, Jim Kinney, who believed in us and offered us a book contract. Thank you! We are also grateful for our mentors, Alice Mathews and Dana Robert. Thank you for modeling the way and showing us how to look for women’s contributions in church history. We also want to thank Lynn Cohick and Kristin Kobes Du Mez for offering helpful comments on early drafts of some of these chapters. And we want to thank Will Carpenter for conversing with us about the cover of this book and for painting the piece that is the current cover.
I (Leanne) received support and encouragement from many sources during the writing process. Wendy Wilson of Women’s Development Track was the first to ask for a book and then continued to request the book until I finally agreed to write one. Biola University granted me a course release one semester. For years, Paul, Kate, and Anna Dzubinski have listened to me talk about the importance of women’s stories and contributions to the church, and they have encouraged me every step of the way. Paul was unfailingly patient and supportive when I worked on the book at night and on weekends. Graduate student Stephanie Calley found sources, read drafts, and gave excellent feedback. Rob and Jackie Parke read early chapter drafts and also gave helpful feedback. Patricia Lantis read chapter drafts and described young women in ministry she knew who would “gobble this up like starved people.” And Kate Dzubinski read the first draft of the chapter on women in the early church within hours of receiving it. Her response was that reading it “was balm to the soul.” We pray this book will feed starved people and be balm to the soul for many more women!
I (Anneke) am grateful for a grant from the Lilly Endowment, which supported my research. I valued the input of students from my class on women in the mission of the church: Hannah Caringal , Cassie Olson, Kaylan Anderson, Hadley Wilson, Carolyn Logsdon, and Kailey Warner, who became my research assistant. Kailey’s collaboration in researching, writing, and processing ideas about American and Chinese women evangelists was invaluable, as was her work on Hadewijch and Macrina. Alison Henry helped with research on deaconesses, Alison Johnson found sources for chapter 9, and Georgia Mamalakis introduced me to the three holy mothers of the three hierarchs. Amy Nelson, Rusty Hawkins, David Riggs, Ryan Dalrymple, Sandra Spee, and Fr. Shane Chellis gave helpful feedback on chapters. I want to thank Mary Lou, Ellie, Ruthie, and Joseph for their patience while their mother was busy working and for their interest when Mommy was ready to tell them a few stories about some of the awesome women in church history. Above all, I want to thank my husband, Steve, for his help in thinking through the tone and content of this book and for loving me in the way Christ loves the church.
We believe that one of the virtues of this book is its interpretive framework: opportunities and obstacles in ministry throughout Christian history. The book illuminates the gender-based obstacles women have faced throughout the history of the church and the common strategies they have used to overcome these obstacles: for example, turning constraints into assets. We hope this interpretive framework will be helpful even to readers whose particular faith tradition or geographical region does not appear in this book.
A note on the capitalization of “Black” and “White”: we have chosen to follow the Chicago Manual of Style guidelines regarding the capitalization of these terms (in effect as of August 2020