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 20th
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.
