Importantly, 1V4C believes that having women keynote lectures is just one step, important though incomplete, toward changing our congregational life. Other steps include reinvigorating these conversations in our churches. Thankfully, Gal328 and Manhattan Church of Christ have compiled some wonderful resources for congregational studies. You can use these resources to engage the conversation in your own church.

And, if you are in a church that has made steps toward an egalitarian congregational life but have not become fully egalitarian, I encourage you to say “the time is now” to take the next steps. There are several churches across the country who, on paper, espouse fully egalitarian theologies, but have stopped short of practicing a fully egalitarian congregational life. Let those of us in those churches live up to our theological confessions.

The day to be faithful to God’s vision for the Church is always today. What will you do today?

For instance, yesterday I was following the lectures on twitter when Fate Hagood was preaching during a keynote lecture. Now, I personally know Fate (though not well). I met him when I was a student at Pepperdine, and many people at the church I once served in LA are good friends with him. I do not know whether he supports 1V4C or not, but something he said during his sermon resonated deeply with me. And it resonated with many folks in the audience if twitter is to be any indication. For example:

Worship is not an event or experience, it is an expression if who we are not something we do. -Fate Hagood #pbl13

— Aaron Scott (@airdamac1) May 1, 2013

We think heaven’s worship should reflect our worship. But our worship needs to reflect heaven’s worship. Faye Hagood #pbl13

— Chris Altrock (@chrisaltrock) May 1, 2013

Now, I don’t know the context of this quote and I don’t want to imply that Fate preached anything other than what he preached yesterday. However, I think the general theological thrust of these quotes is 100% correct. The church is a proleptic community. In a paradoxical way it “remembers” the future. It lives today as if tomorrow has already occurred. We believe that God has saved the world, that there is a new creation, a new heavens and a new earth, even as we pilgrimage in the old creation, the old earth.

And who we will be is a people in which sex, race, class, nation, language, and a host of other physical distinctions don’t matter. We believe that heaven will be a place where all have a seat at God’s banquet table, where all will worship equally, where all will profess the goodness of God. If worship expresses who we are, and we aren’t equals in worship, then worship says we are an unequal people. However, if our worship is one that embodies the vision of Galatians 3:28 we will be today the people we believe we will be in heaven. If we should worship here how heaven worships (and will worship) then sex should have no import to our worship on earth.

Importantly, not long after twitter recounted this part of Fate’s sermon to me people were tweeting Randy Harris‘s lecture. And, during that lecture, he apparently said something like this:

Theological Issue: Look at it through the lens of Jesus Christ and how everything will look when God is finished. @poperandyharris #pbl13

— Lee Scott (@leeascott) May 1, 2013

Again, I agree with the general thrust of this statement and believe it echoes Fate’s earlier point. And, again I must say, from the perspective of how everything will look when God is “finished” sex should not matter. All will be at God’s banquet table receiving an equal portion of God’s life. As a community trying to live now what is not yet we should embody this future in our worship and our life together. We profess these things in our churches and in our lectureships. All I want is for us to live what we profess. And I believe 1V4C can help us do that. That’s why I support 1V4C and that’s why I believe the time is now.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I submit that a revised version of these words needs to be heard by everyone who agrees with One Voice for Change theologically but disagrees strategically:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian brothers and sisters. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the moderate allies of gender justice. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that women’s great stumbling block in their stride toward freedom is not the theological conservatives or the outright misogynists, but the moderates, who are more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another’s ability to follow God’s call; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises women to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

The time is now.

“The time is now.” I’ve been asked why I keep using that phrase when talking about 1V4C. Here’s one reason: Our churches will continue to die, numerically and spiritually, if we do not follow God’s leading and affirm the gifts and callings of all of our fellow Christians. Any Church that does not follow where the Spirit leads is a Church that cuts itself off from the One who gives life.

I can’t count the number of people I know who have left, or who are considering leaving, churches of Christ because they have had a daughter. Indeed, after my initial blog post on this topic complete strangers reached out to me on social media to say that they left churches of Christ for exactly this reason. They often leave quietly, because they still have a love for the Church and its people, but they do leave. These people consistently say that they refuse to raise their daughters in churches that treat them as “less than”: less than their brothers, less than their friends, less than their callings, less than their worth to God, less than they are treated in the world. Many people who have remained in churches of Christ for years refuse to stay when staying would mean raising their daughter in such an environment.

Our churches form us. They train us how to see and live in the world. And too many of our daughters have been formed to believe that they are not worthy of being in a position of spiritual leadership simply because of their sex. They are being mis-formed into believing that they do not bear God’s image in the same way that males do. They are being mis-formed into believing that their words are less significant than the words spoken by men. They are being mis-formed into believing that their gifts are not meant to be used in public.

And it’s not just our daughters. Our sons are being mis-formed as well. They are being mis-formed into believing that their sex makes them superior to their sisters. They are being mis-formed into believing that there is something inherently wrong about women’s voices being heard in public. They are being mis-formed into people who will silence and subjugate women in the future. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that Jim Crow hurt white people as well as black people. Just as it wrongly taught black people that they were “less than” and inferior to whites, Jim Crow wrongly gave white people a false sense of superiority, entitlement, and led them to believe that they had a right to treat others unjustly. Jim Crow, in short, taught white people to be sinners who regularly hurt other people. Sadly, many of our churches and institutions teach men to be sinners who hurt other people (their sisters) as well.

Our daughters and our sons are being mis-formed by our practice of silencing our women. It is because of them that I insist that the time is now. It is not tomorrow, next week, next year, or twenty years from now. The time is now. Our daughters (and our sons) must see women leading in their churches (and speaking at events like lectureships) if they are to be formed into people who can recognize and affirm whomever God chooses to call. If they do not they will continue to be mis-formed. And people will keep having daughters (and sons) and rightfully choose to have their children formed elsewhere.

1. It is biblically and theologically sound. Like many, I grew up in a church that denied that women can serve in public leadership roles over men. What this meant in practice was, generally, that women could not lead prayers, Bible readings, or preach in service, and that they could not be appointed as elders, deacons, or paid ministry staff. The Bible verses that are interpreted to support this view are well-known and I won’t rehash them here. The interpretations of those verses that do not support that view are not as well-known, and One Voice for Change has a resource page with links to those interpretations, so I won’t lay them all out here. However, I would like to mention the theological “aha!” moment that initiated me on the journey of rejecting the theology of denying women the opportunity to exercise public spiritual leadership and authority.

I grew up, again like many American Christians, reading the gospels as, primarily, historical texts. By this I mean that I read them as straightforward accounts of Jesus’s life and teachings. Thus, I remember much energy in Bible classes being spent on making certain discrepancies between the gospels cohere together. They were read primarily as biographies or history textbooks. Importantly, they were not read as “doing theology” in the way that Paul’s letters were read as “doing theology.” The church I grew up in took great pains to read Paul’s biblical letters “in context.” I knew a lot about ancient Corinth and Thessalonica as a teenager. Much was made about the culture, history, and events in the cities and churches Paul wrote to. I was taught that to read those letters out of context was to misread them. However, I was never given those same lessons regarding the gospel letters.

In college and seminary, however, I learned that the gospels, too, were letters written to specific churches or people (in the case of Luke). And I learned to read them primarily as theological rather than primarily historical texts. In other words, the gospel writers were trying to teach the churches they wrote to theological truths just as Paul did in his letters. However, they used a different literary form to teach those lessons than Paul used. The form of the gospel was relatively common at the time, and they weren’t used simply to “tell history” but to teach theology. The gospel writers chose which stories about Jesus to tell (did you know Mark totally excludes Jesus’s birth from his story?), in which order to tell them, and how to tell them. For instance, in Luke Jesus reads from the scroll in the temple much earlier than he does in Matthew and Mark. Does this mean he did the same thing more than once as I was taught as a child? Not necessarily. Read as a theological text it means that Luke thinks this incident has a certain theological significance that merits telling it to us early in his story of Jesus. And, if you read all of Luke, you see that Luke is teaching his audience that Jesus really cared about the poor a lot and taught some radical things about wealth and poverty. That is why Luke tells that story so early on in his letter.

Read this way the gospels quickly become theological letters, akin to Paul’s letters, that teach a radically egalitarian theology. It is a woman who is the only one who bests Jesus in a theological discussion (the story of the Syro-Phonecian woman). Jesus treats women as a rabbi would his disciples – a radical departure for his day. He treats women as equals and crosses all kinds of religious and cultural boundaries to do so. And, of course, we can’t forget that it is women who are the first evangelists – the first preachers! – after Jesus’s resurrection. Read theologically, the gospels clearly teach that women and men are equally capable and called to be in public leadership.

It is not just the stories that teach this theology but the way these stories are told. Luke, for example, employs a strategy of pairing parallel stories of men and women doing similar things next to each other. For instance, in Luke 1 both Mary and Zechariah sing songs regarding the miraculous birth of their children. And in Luke 2, when Jesus is presented at the temple, a male prophet (Simeon) and a female prophet (Anna) give praise to God for Jesus’s birth. The rhetorical effect is that women and men are seen as equally capable of speaking authoritatively about God’s work in the world.

Thus, paired with Paul’s theological statements regarding male-female equality in the Spirit, there are many NT resources to suggest that women and men are equally called by God to be in positions of public spiritual leadership. The passages where Paul teaches that it is inappropriate for women to do certain things in certain contexts (pray with their head uncovered in Corinth – importantly assuming women are leading public prayers! – or remain silent in Timothy’s church) must be read in conjunction with those passages that teach women are equally called and gifted by God to teach and preach. Read this way, the NT is a radically liberating text that insists that all – regardless of class, race, nation, physical abilities, or sex – can be called by God to God’s ministry of reconciliation in the world.

2. God is calling women to ministry.Perhaps the strongest impetus for my conversion to a fully egalitarian position is getting to know women called and gifted by God for ministry who have been denied the opportunity to fulfill that calling. It is truly a painful, an injurious, situation to be in to be called by God to God’s service only to be denied the opportunity to fulfill that call by your fellow Christians. Too many women have been deeply hurt by our refusal to recognize God’s call on their life to continue with the status quo. Our churches are doing great spiritual harm to our sisters. This must stop. Now. Many talented women have left our churches to serve in other churches because we refuse to recognize God’s call on their life. That is wrong. It is sinful. And we can no longer be churches who sin in this way.

3. The time is now.One of the constant criticisms of One Voice for Change that I have heard from those who agree, generally, with the theological stance laid out above is that “it’s not the right time” or “it’s the wrong strategy.” Instead, we must continue our hard work of teaching in local churches and convincing people one at a time. I hear this, but it is, in my opinion, gravely mistaken. Some of the greatest movement towards fully equal churches happened in the early to mid-1990s. At that time, several congregations around the country moved toward having women lead prayers, read scriptures, and, on occasion, lead the Lord’s Supper on Sunday mornings. Several churches moved to hiring women to serve as children’s or education ministers. However, twenty years later this is still the same situation. No more progress has been made toward the full inclusion of women in a generation. A whole set of young adults has grown up in a church no more equal than the one that existed during Bill Clinton’s first term as president. Simply put, we’ve waited too long. The time is now. We can’t wait another generation. For twenty years those women who have been called by God to certain forms of ministry have been denied the opportunity to practice that ministry by good-hearted allies who say to them “just a little longer.” And they suffer the pain of being denied, rather than affirmed, the opportunity to fulfill God’s call in their life. This. Is. Wrong. Stated bluntly to those who advocate the path we’ve been taking for a generation: We’ve tried those methods and they haven’t worked. Let us try something new. This doesn’t mean that the methods used over the last generation are wrong or should be stopped. No, lasting change must happen in local congregations at the lived level. But this is not enough. More must happen. Or we will continue to do injustice – to sin against – all our sisters called and gifted by God. This is not an acceptable option.

This is why I support One Voice for Change: it is biblical, it is faithful with God’s movement of calling women to public leadership, and it is the right time. Will you join me?

I have become fully convinced of the previous three statements and so have many others. Thus, a new movement has begun: One Voice for Change. One Voice for Change is a movement toward the full inclusion of women in the life of the church – including in public worship and in positions of formal leadership. As a starting point for this public movement One Voice for Change is asking that women be included as keynote lecturers at CoC lecture programs, including Pepperdine Bible Lectures, ACU Summit, and the like. This focus does not preclude the need to continue working toward full inclusion in local congregations, but it recognizes the need for some broader and more public forum for such inclusion to take place if people in local congregations are to be able to imagine life in a fellowship that treats all its members justly.

One Voice for Change offers an important theological rationale for this movement, and is in concert with others who have paved the way in previous years (such as Gal328 and Half the Church). I ask all who are affiliated with this tradition to join the movement and lead the charge in your local setting. I ask those in positions of influence, especially my fellow men who are the ones often asked to fill these speaking and preaching appointments, to join the movement by writing letters and standing in solidarity with the movement in any new ways that emerge.

I will blogging more about the movement and the subject of full inclusion in the future. The time is now for change. Faithful discipleship demands it. The justice of God demands it. The way of love demands it.

We can’t wait any longer. The time is now. God is moving. Will you follow?

I am in the middle of writing a dissertation on transitional justice and teaching a three-month Sunday school class on biblical justice. In both of those endeavors Christopher Marshall’s work has proven to be vital. In his previous books on biblical justice as restorative justice (Beyond Retribution and The Little Book of Biblical Justice), Marshall has proven himself to be a world-class scholar of both the Bible and of the restorative justice movement. His work on this subject has influenced theologians, ethicists, and even political scientists to begin speaking of justice after crime and violence in primarily restorative rather than retributive terms. (For example, see the work of theologian John W. de Gruchy and political scientist Daniel Philpott.) Thus, I was very excited to read Marshall’s newest contribution to this topic.

In Compassionate Justice Marshall examines two of Jesus’s parables (The Good Samaritan and The Prodigal Son) through the lenses of restorative justice, and suggests that reading the parables through such lenses can influence contemporary justice practices. Here Marshall flexes his interdisciplinary muscles by engaging in critical biblical scholarship and dialoguing with the most recent scholarship in law and criminology. Marshall’s basic argument is that these parables are stories of justice as restoration rather than simply stories of mercy. Thus, Jesus teaches us the importance of compassion in justice by telling these stories.

The basic thrust of the restorative justice movement is that criminal justice should focus more on the needs of victims and the restoration of ruptured relationships than the mere punishment of offenders. Generally speaking, western legal systems understand justice as the punishment of criminals or, more metaphysically, the balancing of the cosmic scales of justice by inflicting an appropriate amount of pain and/or shame on those who have caused pain/shame. Crime, in this general framework, is understood primarily as a violation against the state or a cosmic scale of justice. Against this understanding, restorative justice advocates and practitioners argue that crime is primarily harm done to persons and relationships rather than primarily harm done to the state. Thus, justice is primarily the righting of the wrongs done to persons and relationships and not primarily about wrongs done to the state.

Reading Jesus’s two most famous parables through the lenses of restorative justice, then, highlights the ways that these parables are about the restoration of persons and relationships. Jesus teaches that what is required in instances of injury is the restoration of those persons/relationships that have been injured. For example, in the story of the good Samaritan we see the Samaritan take steps to make right all of those things that were made wrong. Where the robbed man is ignored the Samaritan gives him attention. Where he is robbed the Samaritan provides for him financially. Where he is physically injured the Samaritan provides for his physical healing. Where he is left in the elements the Samaritan provides him with shelter. It is not just that the Samaritan shows the robbed man mercy, but he meets the exact needs that arise from the injustice he endured. In this, the Samaritan engages in restorative justice.

In a similar manner, Marshall shows us how the father in the story of the prodigal son restores the son to his proper relationship as a son. The way that Jesus tells the story makes it clear that the prodigal does great harm to his relationship with his father (and his brother). In an honor/shame society the prodigal’s actions serve to sever the parent-child relationship he has with his father. Thus, when he is starving in a far-away country he can only imagine returning to his father’s house as a servant. However, his father restores him to the status of son by his treatment of him upon return. Similarly, the prodigal’s brother refuses to even call him brother but refers to his brother as “this son of yours.” However, the father pleads with the brother to accept the prodigal as a brother. The story, then, can be read as a story of the restoration of relationship – as a story of restorative justice.

Importantly, both of these parables highlight the place of compassion for the restoration of relationship and the doing of justice. Marshall, therefore, argues for a place for compassion in justice. Arguing primarily with Annalise Acorn’s book Compulsory Compassion: A Critique of Restorative Justice, Marshall employs these parables, as well as his vast knowledge of the literature in restorative justice, to argue for the appropriateness of compassion in criminal justice.

The book is interdisciplinary, well-researched, and accessible. It continues Marshall’s important contributions both to biblical studies and restorative justice. Anyone interested in biblical studies, criminal and restorative justice, reconciliation, and methods in interdisciplinary scholarship should read this book. It receives my strongest recommendation.

You can read about this incredible piece here.

I’ve long said in private that the thing I am most ashamed of in my time in ministry is teaching a bunch of impressionable teenagers “creation science” over a summer. Discovering in college that the first two chapters of Genesis contained two different creation stories started me on a long journey to rejecting fundamentalist/literalist readings of scripture. The Bible is a theological collection of texts. It is not a history textbook and it is most definitely not a science text book. I believe that Genesis 1-2 contains much theological truth about God, humans, the universe, and social life. For example, we learn that God’s creation is good, that humans are created in God’s image, that humans are called by God to be good stewards of the earth, that humans are created for community, and many other things. I also believe that attempts to use these beautiful, ancient, and sacred texts as science/history proof-texts is a gross abuse of the texts.

And for me, this is the takeaway: This version of Biblicism is an abuse of scripture to further political agendas and causes people to expend energy fighting fights that scripture is unconcerned with the faithful fighting. But those who espouse this version of Biblicism have convinced many that theirs is the only faithful way to read the scripture they abuse. In this way, those who insist that this is the way Christians should interpret scripture and expend their energy are our contemporary world’s false prophets. I speak this word out of my own experience. They once convinced me to spend my time arguing with science teachers instead of serving them. And they convinced me that my faith was more tied to my belief about the dating of the earth than about loving my neighbors. This was all wrong on a pastoral level and is also wrong on a theological level. There is no one “biblical account” of creation in scripture. There are at least two. And that teaches us that scripture is theology and not science. Those who insist we read it as science misunderstand the purpose of scripture and are misleading millions.