Side by Side: Changing worldviews on Leadership

In the Hindu family in which I grew up, the division of labor was clear. Men were the bread winners and women looked after the house, the kids and hospitality. This was the pattern all around, at least in middle class homes. The women kind of enjoyed a level of autonomy in this space. In most homes, the men handed over all or most of their pay cheque to their wives and then the wives could use the money responsibly and wisely. Men did not interfere; indeed, people thought it unseemly to do so.

In religious matters, although the priests were all men, women took care of piety and public participation by the families. They would take the task of fasting and encourage others to do so. The women were custodians of faith and values in the family and of observing and handing down spiritual traditions and practices to their children. 

When I became a Christian, I brought this worldview into my new-found faith. Of course, I had little real perspective on this and many other matters at that stage. I was more pre-occupied with learning the fundamentals of doctrine and picking up matters of sin and salvation. It was probably some years before I reflected on other matters as I observed among my friends several shades of the practice of Christian spirituality. Many were passed on from generation to generation through their respective churches or other institutions and in some cases, views were formed and unformed by what the church taught on leadership roles and gender. I observed that mainline churches often had a fixed tradition that they passed on without questioning, whereas independent churches with a less rigid tradition were more likely to question and challenge the status quo.

I guess I first looked at debated issues of various segments of the church at least a decade after I became a Christian. It took that long for me to journey far enough to say that the Christian faith was now fully my own and I was no longer a passerby who had a chance encounter with Jesus and Christians. Since the faith was now my own, I felt free and comfortable enough to speak into it, understand the Scriptures and interpret them for myself and even critique some of the interpretations presented to me. On my journey, I had arguably developed my own theology and felt free to comment on what I saw and heard – both on and off the pulpit.

Initially, I had naively assumed that the Christian faith was monolithic, that everyone believed in the same God and understood him in the same way. In a way, this was true, at least compared to Hindus whose beliefs could be widely divergent. Of course, I knew there were Catholics and Protestants and they were different in how they ascribed roles to men and women. Catholics were more or less clear-cut. The distinctive roles and authority of priests and nuns was clear. Priests were mostly in charge and the nuns were the worker bees, humming everywhere and generally keeping the giant institution of the Church running. Among Evangelicals, the position was not clear to me at first; the distinctions were more subtle and layered.

In a midsized city like Pune, close to cosmopolitan Mumbai, where my faith was born, I could see non-formal scenarios outside the church, like Bible Studies and the Evangelical Union, with no distinction between men and women in formal or informal leadership roles. I remember serving as the secretary of the Evangelical Union when a lady was the president and there was no unease on either side. Indeed we worked well together. In the church that I attended of course, there were things only men did and some things women did. Men delivered the sermon, women got the elements ready for communion. These I took for granted and moved on without stopping to think or analyze why it should be so. All the churches I attended whatever their tradition unwaveringly taught St Paul’s teachings about what men and women could or could not do and my own reading of the Scriptures was no different.

I suppose I started seeing the world with different eyes only after I got married. I expected my Catholic-background wife to have the mindset I observed in other observant Catholics – the demure, submissive wife. However, it turned out different. She was moving on from her Catholic faith and although she treasured many things about it, she was questioning matters she had previously taken for granted.

As she met my friends, she gravitated towards women who also questioned traditions they had grown up with and began sporting what I may call “non-conformist views. This was about the role of men and women in the church and Christian organizations and also about things in general, driven by the spirit of curiosity and enquiry. The questions became more real for me too as I became more active in the church and Christian organizations and became involved in the governance of some. Then I discovered the unspoken glass ceiling in many – certain things were not done, spoken about or brought up for discussion and if one did, the discussion was hastily steered away in a different direction by someone more tactful and wise.

Maybe a decade ago, the Evangelical Fellowship of India led by its then General Secretary, Rev. Richard Howell, the Union of Evangelical Students of India and a small group of people calling themselves “Pilgrim Partners” – all of whom happened to by my friends – got together to hold a consultation called “Side by Side”. That the consultation happened is not unusual except that the two larger sponsors were generally known to hold conservative views on the subject, except that their top leadership of the time happened to be egalitarians in their view. (It could be argued that most others in their constituency were largely certainly complementarian.) These were all new words for me. When I attended this conference I knew none of these words. I was sucked into the conference because I had roots in the UESI movement, knew the EFI General Secretary and perhaps more importantly, a lot of the organizers from Pilgrim Partners were my friends. (One of them is sadly no more with us.) These friends believed that I was a kindred spirit, thinking the way they did. Whether I actually did or not, I have no idea. I certainly was no traditionally conservative person in some ways, but I am not sure how progressive I really was. Certainly I had journeyed some distance compared to some of my friends from traditional backgrounds. I was in the fractured state where in public life, I had discarded conservatism but at home and family, the virus of patriarchy had surely not left me.

At any rate, I was invited to present a paper at this conference and it was from here as I read up and prepared that I began to intelligently grasp what the two schools, complementarian and egalitarian stood for and where they differed. In the course of my research, I learned that most of the leading scholars whose works we read and whose sermon recordings we listened to were complementarian and that groups like Christians for Biblical Equality had a relatively narrow support base.

The first passages that shaped my thinking were, as for most people, the teachings of Paul in his many letters. Traditional Christians believed that I Timothy 2, saying that women were created second, sinned first, and should keep silent, were the universal consensus of the early Church and its founder, Jesus. At any rate, in one form or the other these seemed to be practised in most churches, and found a rather extreme expression in some contexts.

When we approach the Apostle Paul's teachings concerning wives submitting graciously to their husbands (Ephesians 5:22) and women being silent in church (I Cor. 14:34), I learned much later that Paul's teachings were as controversial in the first century as they are today. The first-century biblical worlds of Judaism and Greco-Roman culture were characterised by male dominance and chauvinism. In these cultures, when the Apostle Paul writes to the church in Ephesus, he tells all the Christians, regardless of ethnicity, social rank, or sex (see Galatians 3:28) to submit themselves mutually to one another (Ephesians 5:21). Then, beginning in Ephesians 5:22, he explains in some detail how to express that submission and a servant heart within marriage.

In a culture where people saw wives as the property of their husbands, Paul commands a Christian husband to submit to his wife by loving her as Christ loved the church and to fulfil his God-given responsibility to protect, provide for, and lead the family in a godly manner. The wife is to express mutual submission from her side by submitting to her husband "as unto the Lord" or for the Lord's sake (Ephesians 5:22). Paul makes no hint in this or any other Pauline passage that women are in any way inferior to men, although that was the dominant rabbinic and cultural tradition of the time. The new, sacrificial demands on the first-century men who received Paul's letter to Ephesus must have felt profoundly shocking.

But understanding First century culture was one thing, transposing this to the late 20^th century was another. Some people believed Paul was highly sensitive to the culture and society of the time so that his instructions were not for all of the church and for all time, but rather for a particular church at a particular time. As evidence, they pointed to Paul’s glowing tributes to his many women partners in the ministry. Surely he would not have such praise for their contribution if they were defying his instructions.

The other side pointed out that it was not clear what these women were doing and that Paul’s prohibitions extended only to women preaching and teaching. They said he did not prohibit women from participating in other ways, and there were numerous avenues for ministry. They also rejected the culture specific interpretations that said a teaching could be flouted by saying it was meant for a particular place and time. It was all very confusing.

At the time, I was working in a Christian organization of some repute and I looked around to see what was happening there and elsewhere. I found that in professionally run Christian organisations, meritocracy prevailed. Women were in all forms of leadership depending on their competence and skills and this mix of men and women bringing their varied skills to the table proved to be an excellent blend. Although they sat with their head covered in their churches, women in Christian office settings took devotions with teaching as good or bad as that managed by the men. The same was true of their jobs.

Home was another paradox. A well-established church teaching said men were the head of the household. I have heard stories of course, where some men took this very seriously and behaved like tin pot dictators and despots in the home. But there was a range of scenes. In some homes men acted as head of the household like Old Testament patriarchs or even traditional Indian patriarchs. They were benevolent autocrats, generally meaning well. Then there were men who abdicated this role either because they were too lazy or too busy. Women who stepped into these vacant shoes could do very well.

Then there were men like constitutional monarchs. They were the titular heads of their families in public, but once the doors were shut, the nuts and bolts of the household were run by the women. It was not uncommon to find houses were the men would hand over their salaries (in the days, when they were the sole breadwinners and women were largely home makers) to their wives, because they believed that women could manage money (and most other things) a lot better. Another demographic that I came across was that the more educated a couple was, the more likely it was that they would have read the Bible for themselves and drawn their own conclusions, irrespective of what their church might be teaching and practising on Sundays.

A time came when I realised that my views had changed on women in leadership, at least in public life. I do not ascribe that change to any one source, though the influence of some of my closest friends who I admired and whose views I respected perhaps led to a point where I read the Scriptures differently. However I do not claim not that I have understood everything perfectly. There are passages that I still wonder about – are they cultural or are they meant to be followed by all? I do not fully know. How did people react to my changing views – not just on women in leadership but on lots of things? I was slightly earlier to tread into what is called holistic or integral mission and this was at a time when Evangelicals were wary about such things and were uncomfortable about my forays. I was too deeply embedded in the Evangelical movement to find my moorings anywhere else by then, but I also read Catholic social teaching, Jim Wallis and Sojourners and my views were certainly not conventional. My theology grew from many strands, competing with the deep roots of patriarchy in the church. (An ordained woman from an Ecumenical Church recently lamented that although it appeared that the fact the church ordained her showed approval of women in leadership in the church, they had never actually permitted her to pastor a church. They had restricted her to peripheral roles.My changing views stirred mixed reactions. Some in my Bible Studies became uneasy with my departure traditional interpretations and encouragement of reflection and thinking from different angles. My family fairly liberal and urbane family offered no opposition, though they may not have understood my new views either.

 As I conclude, I cannot allude to my nearly three decade long involvement in the  NGO sector where is a documented fact that money invested in developing  women in leadership and empowering them in various ways provides lasting dividends and benefits, not just for herself, but also for her family. Although economic development efforts to combat poverty can only succeed if women are part of the solution. Doing so yields a double dividend: When women are economically empowered, they raise healthier, better-educated families. Their countries are more economically prosperous because of it, too, in many societies, women and young girls do not enjoy the same access to health as men, let alone the same rights or opportunities. But a society that does not cure and treat its women and young girls with love and care and with equality will never be a healthy society. Many in the global health community are working to weave a focus on women and girls more tightly into the framework of global public health efforts. The shape of the family is changing across the world and it is no longer appropriate or constructive to view family as one-dimensional. Families are diverse and shared experience, acceptance of difference and respect and are key values in any progressive society. Gender is a social contract, it is used to explain and justify men’s dominance over women across all dimensions of society. Women are no more inclined or able to cook, clean and care than men are to protect, provide and punish.  Evidence suggests legible differences between the sexes outside of physiological ones 

One specific area in which I used my changing views on women in leadership came through nurturing and mentoring young girls. Along my journey in the NGO sector, where I have spent the better part of my life, my passion drove me to train as a Life Coach and through that medium, I have been helping many young girls to realise their potential as leaders and I have encouraged them to develop their talents and gifts. This is frequently away from church contexts – more often where the glass ceiling is rather low for women. Perhaps that concern came from the fact I had a daughter. I was already weighing the support needed for her. I have come to understand that we don’t live beyond what we think about ourselves and if the expressions of self-doubt, insufficiency or fear of failure are loud enough, they will paralyze us. There are many contradictory opinions within our culture on the lookout for an opportunity to teach women on their value and purpose, so a robust understanding of God given identity is vital. The church has mostly sought to express womanhood in the light of Eve, dwelling on her failure rather than her unique design. Eve was intended to know God in close relationship and take charge in the world He created along with Adam. (Gen 1:28- 31). It is therefore unquestionably crucial that women comprehend God’s value of their worth and vision for their potential in Him.

My opinion that women could and should be leaders also showed while I worked with women bosses. People say it is hard for men under a woman boss or senior colleague, and I have myself seen this for some. Personally, I have so far had no difficulty with working under a woman boss. On bosses and colleagues, I am largely gender neutral. I have not felt this so much in a church context, however.  I think a key way to empower women in the church is not to have doctrinal debates which will never be resolved but empower women by freely talking about their stories as well as talking about significant Christian women in history and around the globe. It will always be a bit hard for a women to step out in leadership when she sees herself to be the only one. It would be wonderful for such women to be aware that they are in good company.