Why Honoring the Gifts and Abilities of Women Is Relevant to Dechurching

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Jim Davis
Welcome to as in Heaven season three. My name is Jim Davis. I am your host and pastor of Orlando Grace Church. And I am joined by my co host and dear friend Michael Aitchison, pastor of Christ fellowship also here in Orlando. And today we are joined by author and speaker, Jen Wilkin, who also serves as the executive director of care family and nextgen ministries at the village church in the Dallas area. And I actually I first got to know Yujin, when I moderated a debate that you and Jonathan Pennington did for TGC on whether or not parents should send their kids to public school. So nothing controversial there. And it was nothing. It was a great debate. And it’s funny because I do a lot of little debates and videos or whatever, for TGC. And I really don’t think many people in my life know that I do any of this. But when that debate went live, I was actually at a fundraiser for RTS. And I think every that evening, and every young mom came up to me and said, I saw your debate. I didn’t know you knew Jin, that was the main thing. And I was like, Well, I didn’t until then. But I say this, because I really want to give glory to God that you have had an impact on a lot of people, and specifically a lot of women through your books, your talks and your video series. And we’re just really thankful that you would give us your time here today.

Jen Wilkin
Well, I’m glad to be on thanks for having me.

Jim Davis
Well, this season on the podcast, we have been talking about living in a new context in the US an era that we call the great deed churching as 40 million people who used to regularly attend church do not anymore, which is changing so much about not only the church, but the fabric of the society that we live in. And so we commissioned Dr. Ryan Berge and Dr. Paul Juppe, PhD sociologists to do the most comprehensive, nationwide quantitative University reviewed study ever done on D churching. In the US, and we found in the study that almost 10% of those who have D churched. From an Evan Jellicle. Context cited misogyny as a reason. And when we drill down more on this, we found that a these aren’t all women leaving for this reason men are leaving for this reason to and be that this wasn’t peripheral to their departure, we found out that it was actually central to their departure. So today, we want to talk about church culture as it pertains to women in the church. And we want to talk about unhealthy practices in the church that lead to devaluing of women in the church. And we talk we want to talk about healthy practices that lead to the building up and the flourishing of women in the church. And the reason that we want to speak with you, Jen on this topic is layered. Jen is a woman in ministry leading in a large way. And you have had to personally navigate the things that we want to talk about today. So this is not academic to you. This is this is real life. But what I also appreciate is what you do behind the scenes to help pastors and church leaders like me, to build a healthy church culture where every everyone can flourish. So my desire in having Jen on this podcast, very much comes from the time that you’ve spent with me talking with me about how to lead my church, when it comes to specifically the flourishing of women. So with that context, let’s dive in. And I want to start about by asking you about your personal journey. As a woman with real gifts of leading and teaching, I have to imagine that many pastors would not know how to steward these kinds of gifts. So what have been some of the challenges and blessings that you’ve experienced through your ministry?

Jen Wilkin
Well, I don’t know that I ever expected to find myself and full time vocational ministry in the church. I mean, for one thing, at the time that I was a young adult and young adulthood, there just really weren’t a lot of spots on church staffs for women who would have wanted to pursue full time vocational ministry. And so I didn’t set out with any kind of agenda whatsoever. I really just started walking toward the need in the local church and trying to meet it. And I grew up in a home with four brothers who I was close with a father who I was close with and my brothers and my father loved and affirmed me and treated me as an equal and someone whose gifts were something to be celebrated. Not surprisingly, I married a man who was the same way Jeff was not he didn’t find the things about me that others might find threatening, threatening. He saw them as things to to lift up into, into celebrate and support work. And out of school, I took a job in working for a large department store chain in the buying offices. And it wasn’t until I started volunteering in a church setting, that I understood that not everyone valued the gifts and contributions of women equally. The first place that I felt that was in the local church. And I always hasten to say, when I talk about this, that there are no villains in my story. And I mean that I mean that deeply. I do think that there are some ways of treating women that have become normative over time. And that even good men can operate in those patterns, just because it’s the ecosystem in which they were raised up into ministry, and it perhaps has never been evaluated. So my experience was that I was an eager learner, someone who didn’t have access to formal theological training, but was teaching in the local church and very much wanted to grow in my teaching gift. And I didn’t know who I could go to for help. I did go to my pastor, my Church in Houston, and he actually was an open door for me, he offered to loan me commentaries, and he listened to one of my recordings of My Teachings and gave me feedback. But as you can imagine, if I had been a young 23 year old man who had shown up on his doorstep, and in fact, there was that guy at our church, there were so many more doors and opportunities that just naturally would open to him than wood to me, because, among other reasons, optics, right, that’s always a big concern. And often I have learned through the years I didn’t have, I haven’t not gone to seminary. So I would not have known this firsthand. But that often, men in ministry had been told that women are to be treated in a garden banner, because they are either showing up as a usurper, someone who wants to take a temptress, someone who wants to sleep with them, or as a child, someone who is needy, and is going to require more of their time than they can give.

Mike Aitcheson
Wow, Jen, I’m sure that there’s so many more details to the arc of your story. I just want to say for one, I appreciate you sharing it with us and then to our ministry has been the personal beneficiaries of your story. And your work early in the days of planting Christ United fellowship, we use, she reads truth. So that was a pretty foundational study for our women. And that’s let’s say, now, we’re talking almost 10 years now. So appreciate all your contributions to the kingdom. What do you think, just building off of what you shared, are some of the core insecurities or idols male pastors have to work through to lead a church into a healthy culture as it pertains to women in the church.

Jen Wilkin
I honestly think particularly among younger pastors, the insecurities around like the stereotypes that I just mentioned, they’re not so much there. I actually think that’s kind of an older demographic of pastors who are thinking about things from a different lens, younger guys face the pressure of conformity, it’s if I decide to step out of line and actually operate out of a brother or sister mentality, if I actually believe that the New Testament one another’s mean, don’t mean men over here, and women over here, if I believe that the church really is the family of God, I’m going to meet with scrutiny from my peers who are going to say that I’m doing something dangerous or even unbiblical. And so, you know, at my own church, this was a real journey for us at the village, we started writing our paper that you can find on our website now about eight years ago. And it was because it was, I would love to tell you it was because we were concerned about our theological position, it was actually born out of a deeply pastoral moment, a huge public failure that the church had in regard to a counseling case that went sideways, a care case that was mishandled. And at that point, we began to ask, let’s say, for the sake of argument that we have a pure theology, and that is something that every church I think, has to go and re examine. Many of us dragged and dropped someone else’s version of this into our website. But let’s say for the sake of argument that our theology on men and women is pure, is our practice that has resulted from it pure. And in our case, we could not reconcile that we held the practice as it related to our current theology, which meant that we went back and revisited theology, philosophy and practice administering in these areas.

Jim Davis
Well, I’ve read that paper and one of the things and this connects to the whole line that we have here, one of the things I’ve written that paper and heard you talk about, is the primary relationship in the church being that of siblings. Can you flesh that out for us?

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, I think that what many of us have come into You in the discussion around complementarianism is the language of headship and submission, or authority and submission being the primary notes that we sound over and over and over again. And I’m not wanting to take authority and submission off the table. But I think what happened at our church is we began to ask, what is the Bible as a whole saying, like, what’s the overarching metaphor, the authority submission metaphor is heavily dependent on marriage as a central type for what we’re looking at in scripture from from beginning to end. And again, marriage is something that we should pay attention to as a type from beginning to end in scriptures. But when we asked what is the Bible telling us is true about the church. And I think about Jesus’s words, when his family, his biological family, comes to find him and he’s told your families outside, they want to see you and he looks around, and he says, Who are my mother and my brothers and my sisters, those who do the will of the father or my mother and my brothers, and my sisters. And of course, he’s not discounting our biological families. He’s reframing and showing us that there is a true and better family for those who are Christ’s followers. And then he, he begins expounding the law into one another’s, right, he takes the Old Testament moral law, I would argue that everything in the 10 Commandments can be found in some form, and every single one of the New Testament, one another’s and it’s the great command, right to love your neighbor as you love yourself. But what we have done is said Who then is my neighbor, and and men in the church in particular have said, well, my neighbor is my is my male fellow believer, it’s not my female fellow believer, because and this is all linked to the fact that we exist in a hyper sexualized culture. I think everybody would acknowledge that. And the problem with that is that the culture around us is telling us that you can’t, you can’t have friendship, you can’t have brother sisterhood, that any relationship and I would say, this doesn’t mean just male, female, any relationship and someone you feel a strong emotion for who is not your spouse. It has to be sexual or romantic. There’s no such thing as just a pure friendship, or a deep, true and abiding friendship between men and men, women and women, men and women, watch, watch any movie that’s coming out in the theaters, and there’s almost no friendship that endures for the full length of the movie, at some point, any deep relationship turns romantic or sexual. And so that means that for the church in a in a post Christian culture, where else should we expect the culture to turn to know what true friendship and brother sisterhood is going to look like, if not us, and yet too often, what we’ve done is we’ve taken in the message of a hyper sexualized culture and said, You know what, it’s just too dangerous.

Jim Davis
Well, so Mike, Aitchison and I, we were both in we’re very thankfully. So in the RTS, Orlando orbits. And as such, we have the blessing we both have women in our midst who have great teaching, gifting, lots of training. And we are pastors that I think I speak for both of us, we desire to be that kind of pastor that would, that would platform those gifts, I would also say, we don’t always know how to perfectly do it. And you know that from our conversations, but we want to do that. And I think the women in our church, even if they have critiques of us, they would see our heart to see this happen. And one of the core conversations that that comes up, goes back to First Timothy 212, where Paul says, I do not permit a woman neither to teach nor have authority. So you have this authority issue, you have the teaching issue, how have you and your church, how have you flush that out and applied it, it gets to the heart of a lot of questions that pastors ask.

Jen Wilkin
Absolutely, it does. And I have if there’s one thing I’ve learned is that trying to summarize a highlight controversial passages interpretation in a podcast is just giving fodder to them. So I would say that, and also, you know, according to everybody on Twitter, I’ve actually never heard that verse before, because they’re so faithful to tweet it at me on a regular basis. The paper is there. And I would say, the exegesis is there that the elders did on this at my church. And so you can go and read it. And I think it is best understood framed out by the context. Here’s a short version and a long version, that paper the long version is where all of the work is done around that particular passage. You know, one of the things that we we wrestled with, and the writing of the paper was how how very proof texted this particular discussion has become and that’s why it was important to us to zoom out and ask, what’s the bigger idea and the bigger idea being the family of God? Therefore, how can both men and women flourish in the church and so, what I will say about the question of authority and specifically teaching authority, and just for anyone who is curious, I do not preach at the village church. I am not an L older and we reserve that for for preaching. And I teach my primary place of service is our women’s Bible study. That’s, that’s where I’m teaching. That’s what I love, I feel a call to to teach women specifically. But our paper position does leave room for environments that do not require to be taught by an elder pastor elder to be taught by either a man or a woman. And that doesn’t mean that we stop there, it means that we would actively seek to find both men and women to serve in those spaces. And I think that’s something that can be missing, as a lot of churches are there. They feel good about having written a good paper, but they don’t actually take the steps necessary to implement the paper that they have written in a way that means that it’s doing what they were hoping that it would do. And here’s the thing that I think is not often talked about when we talk about teaching with authority. And that’s this, any teacher that you’ve ever sat under teaches with authority, that’s the nature of being a teacher, right? Your first grade teacher held authority when she taught you. And so I think we have to ask a question of what kind of Thor of authority is in view? In Paul’s words? Now, when I teach the women’s Bible study, am I teaching with authority? Yes, I am. am because I’m opening up the scriptures, right? Anyone who then has this The other thing that I think we don’t often distinguish the Bible has authority. So if I were to stand and just read the Bible to a room of women, in some sense, there is an authoritative thing happening, right? But is that the kind of authority that Paul has in view? Now, some people would say yes, and they will not even allow for a woman to read Scripture. She’s only allowed to share her testimony, my church did not land there. Now, am I teaching with elder authority, when I teach in the women’s Bible study, no, I am not an elder. But I am teaching under their authority. And I am teaching according to the doctrine that they have set, and they guard. So in another sense, I am teaching with a delegated authority out of the elder room. And so when you think about authority, here’s the other piece that I think is often foggy in the minds of some and that is that elder authority is something that we guard in the elder room, it’s a little little bucket, and we keep it there. And we elders are the ones who are responsible for it. I would say that what my church has done is seen elder authority as something that is to be pushed out of the elder room into into the priesthood of all believers. And so therefore, it’s not a question of just what are we going to do with women? And where can women teach? It’s a question of what are we going to do with all of the non elders, male and female who have a teaching ability or have a leadership ability in the church, in a church the size of mine, we would never assume that the pastor or the other pastors on staff, the lead pastor, or all the pastors on staff would be sufficient to the needs of the people in our church. And so I think some of these things can can seem a little more clear to us just simply because of the size of the church that we’re in. But again, if authority is something that is guarded and kept in a room behind closed doors, then you’re going to think differently about the way that those who are in your church who have gifts and abilities I bring to the table are going to be exercising them.

Mike Aitcheson
Thank you. Thank you, Jen, for outlining that for us. I let I want to take a different take a look at this from a different direction. What if there is a church leader out there listening who does not feel like he has women in this church who have the gift and calling to teach? Why does this conversation matter to him?

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, this is actually a funny comment that I’ll get well meaning and actually a kind comment that people will say to me, pastors will say, well, but I don’t have a Jen Wilkin at my church. And I always want to say, Well, how do you know? Like, how do you know, I know how hard it was for me to sort of get on the radar of leadership in the church. And often that’s because since women are most commonly only teaching in what I affectionately call the pink ghetto, they’re in women’s ministry settings. I’m gonna say this gently. But often women’s ministry is suffers from a benign neglect from pastoral staff. It is, it is beneath the regard, sometimes of those who are in charge of adult discipleship, and it is not seen as part of the scope and sequence of adult discipleship. It’s its own little thing. And so one of the reasons that pastors often don’t know if a woman has a teaching gift or not, is because they never set foot in the pink ghetto. They just let that happen. And as long as the women are happy, then that’s great. And the issue with that, and I can tell you I know so many female leaders who have had this happen is that if you’re never in the pink ghetto, then the second you start to hear that something’s happening there that you’re not crazy about. Then you drop the hammer, right and you’re Nope, we’re not doing that we’re gonna shut that down. And we’re gonna remove that leader because she’s been operating out there. And you know, on her own, she has a siloed ministry. And I promise you, the woman who is in charge of that ministry was dying to have access to those in leadership, and to say, please, if you don’t believe what I’m doing is valid, let’s make it something valid, that is in alignment with the greater goals and vision of the church. So I call it a benign neglect. Unfortunately, intent and impact are not the same thing. And so if you don’t have any sense that there are women in your church who can teach, I would ask first, have you gone to the places where women are teaching and your church? Because I think you will find that they’re there. And they’re doing humble and quiet work, and they could probably use some help and advocacy.

Jim Davis
So you said that this came out for you out of it more of a deeply pastoral moment than a deeply theological moment, and you weren’t minimizing the theological side in any way. I’ve heard you say, to me, that, really, this whole conversation is, is more of a pastoral exercise than it is a theological exercise. So pulling on that original thread applying that how can you flesh that out? Can you explain what you mean by this being as much or more of a pastoral exercise as it is a theological one?

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, I think anything that a church is serious about, that is hard to talk about, and potentially controversial, is usually born out of a crisis moment. Otherwise, why would you do the work and you know, we know this in our own lives as well, the things that we care the most about, we probably had a painful learning around. And in the case of women flourishing in the church, I think that when you are a male and leadership, and you look around, and you see that the men are, you know, all using their gifts and serving, and you can see like, oh, well, the men in our church are thriving, you know, it’s just the women, I don’t know if the women are or not. But if the women in your church are not thriving, then the men in your church are not thriving, because we’re meant to do the work together, the Great Commission goes forward by the contributions of both men and women brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers in the church. And, and I think that the reason that this is not at the top of the list for for some pastors is because their hearts have not broken over it. So one of the things that I have tried to do is to break a few hearts along the way around this because I believe that is truly heartbreaking. When a local church functions in a way that we would never want a physical nuclear family to function. So if I told you that there was a family in your church that had an authoritarian father, who, who dictates a lot of rules, and a mother who is either never around or never says a word, and then parents who, and then children who just tow the line, you would say, Man, that’s a really unhealthy family, we’re worried about them, we want to see what’s going on is that woman, okay. But too often, in theologically conservative churches, we function as single parent, authoritarian families with a father and children and an absentee mother. And the reason that this is terrible, there are a number of reasons this is terrible, but one is because because when women don’t see church, mothers in their local church, they don’t stop looking for mothers. So like, I think about that PD Eastman book, or you my mother, it was a children’s book that I loved when I was growing up in the little bird is going around looking for his mother the whole time. And that’s the way that many women in the church are. And so when they don’t see these women in their church, they don’t defer to their pastor, they have a father, they can see him, they’re looking for a mother. And so they look to women outside of the church. And in my experience, often the senior pastor, if I were to give him a list of the top 10 most influential women in on Instagram, in the Christian circles, they would not recognize those names, they would not know whether those women were teaching sound doctrine or not. And they only know about them when something big blows up. And then they’re all about it, you know, but it’s like, well, this woman’s already had 10 years of being of mothering the women in your church, because there was a vacuum in your family structure.

Mike Aitcheson
I’ve got multiple follow ups. But I’ve got to behave myself. Could you could you lend some insight Jan into just circling back again to this document? I have not had the privilege of reading through it. But I am curious, could you tell us more what the process looked like? Right. So you’d mentioned a lot of times we don’t identify who these influential Christian mothers are until there’s a crisis. All right. But you all have worked through a document and discuss some things that could potentially help us avert that same type of behavior. What did that look like?

Jen Wilkin
Well, the process of writing the paper was a process of two and a half years. And it was a paper that was written in the elder room with the help of a couple of non elders and two female staff. I was one of those female staff members. And the first thing that we did when we realized that we had a problem and needed to rethink our, our practice, certainly, and go back and revisit our theology, this other staff, woman, Caroline, and I asked for permission to go solicit anonymous feedback from the women on our staff, about their experience of being employed at our church. And we guarantee those women that they would not, you know, their names would not come out. And this is not because we had we were dealing with bad men, like I said, these were the good guys think that every single one of the guys in that elder room was is a good man. And so we sat with these women, and they gave their feedback. And I’m not going to share it here. But it was heartbreaking. I mean, some I will give you some examples. One was a woman overhearing another man saying he could never work with her because she was too attractive. One was that if a woman was driving the car, the minivan in the parking lot on Sunday morning, then clearly she was on submissive to her husband, if he was not driving. There were all kinds there were and then we had a real culture where the men knew each other and love each other deeply. But they would kind of like high five us, you know, it was like, Oh, hey, girl, they knew us only a tiny bit. And so, again, because they had been told that this was admirable that this was something desirable, and it made them honorable if they maintained a safe distance between them and us. And so we, we took that into the elder room, and we just read these these women’s feedback, and we grouped it according to categories. And they were heartbroken. They were devastated because they were the good guys. And how could this be the case in their church, and this was not even addressing whether we were handling issues of abuse correctly. You know, when women women were coming in and reporting, they had a troubled marriage, it was actually an abusive situation, we’ve had to work through all of that as well. And what resulted from this paper was also a revision of our care, philosophy around people coming in, in situations where they needed care for abuse. So it was a huge thing. But until the elder room knew it wasn’t someone else’s problem, that it was our problem, they weren’t ready to do the hard work of changing. And so then we worked through a process of re evaluating all of the typical passages that you would think of when you think about this discussion, and trying as much as we could to get out of the echo chamber that we so often find ourselves in. And one of the things people don’t like to hear in this conversation is that when you start to seriously evaluate your position, you will have to do a little bit of promiscuous reading, you will have to read counter arguments, if you’re going to make sure that your argument is one that you are feeling a deep conviction about. So we did that. We had conversations, there were a lot of very heated conversations, people did not all agree. And I will say that even when we got to the end of the paper, not everyone was in the same place on every single aspect of it. But it got to a point that they they can live with and that we felt like we could operate under. And then we did something that I think was really important for our church in particular. One of the things I appreciated most was that my lead pastors, Matt, and Josh said, we are not writing a paper for everyone else, we are writing a paper for us, it is for our church, we will stand before the Lord and give an account for this church. So we’re not worried about what everyone’s gonna think. And so we decided, rather than put it out with a big, you know, like, hey, we wrote this paper, everybody come jump on it, we decided to just quietly implement it so that by the time people were aware that the paper existed, we would have a beautiful practice that illustrated what the paper was pointing to. And we did it. We have it, we went through the whole org chart, I mean, the number of things that we did to try to ensure that we had not marginalized women just add a force of habit, because we’re better connected. You know, so much of this is just like the men on our staff if they have an open role on staff, they know more men, they have trust with men. Those are the first candidates they’re going to think of and so the work that we had to do to surround even filling positions that we said no, this could be a man or a woman was a lot but we’ve done it our staff is now 5050 men and women and men are still everybody take a deep breath. Men are still in all of the roles. wasn’t that you know, they would they should be in. But we take an employment survey every year to sort of gauge workplace satisfaction. And two years ago, the question that’s that says, I believe my gifts are used here. And I feel fulfilled on this staff. Historically, it had been answered very differently by men or women, the men had answered it high. And the women had answered it significantly lower two years ago, and even now out. And then this past year, the women actually surpassed the men in workplace satisfaction in the question. The question is asked if you could take another job at another church that was similar, would you consider it? And the men were like, I mean, you know, maybe and then women were like, Heck, no, because we know this. We know that we can’t necessarily find this somewhere else. Right? We know we have a good thing. So it’s been, it’s been really sweet. And hard.

Mike Aitcheson
Okay, so So Jan, I really respect and honor that the process, as you articulated, was particular to village right. But I’m wondering if I could get you to speak outside of that context just a little bit, and provide us with some helpful core principles that you think could lead to establishing some common ground between people on either side of the issue. So maybe some of those things are specific to village. But in terms of what you’ve witnessed and broader, you know, church circles, where you think are some things that could be helpful?

Jen Wilkin
Well, I’d say the, the biggest and most overarching important principle is, you can either land more conservatively or more, I hate this word, but liberally on this issue. But you have to land. Because what has often been the case is it’s like, well, I mean, I think a woman can do that, and maybe not, but you know, or in this case. And so you can imagine if you’re a woman with a leadership or a teaching gift, it means that you are constantly having to diagnose and then chameleon to the version of male female theology of the person who is in charge of a particular space. And so it may not, you know, your senior pastor may look at it one way. But if there’s an associate pastor who looks at it differently, and it’s his environment, then you got to figure out what he wants, try to do that. If he’s more liberal on it than the senior pastor is, and then you go and do what he’s told you to do. And the senior pastor finds out about and then penalizes you because you’re obviously a harpy feminist trying to take over the church. So one of the things that I always try to say is, clarity is kind, right, just be clear land stay where you land on things, because otherwise, the women in your church are walking through a minefield. And that’s not fair. That’s not thriving, that’s not flourishing. It’s not brother sisterhood, for sure. And then once you’ve landed somewhere, make sure that you haven’t just written a good paper, make sure that your practice is in fact, beautiful. This is one of the breakdowns that I see in this whole conversation is we have people who have written entire volumes on this. Who would say that is exactly what I meant to say. And yet we have 1000s of churches that have been influenced by those volumes, who do not have a beautiful practice associated with it. So something either is wrong with the theology, or has not translated down to the practice. And that’s actually the job, I believe, of every local church to do the work on that.

Jim Davis
Well, I love the way that your elders listened. My My wife is a therapist, and we speak in family life things. And she often says that listening is like one of the best gifts you can possibly give somebody, whether it’s your spouse, or somebody else, can you could you dive in just a little bit more to the role or the blessing of listening in this conversation, and maybe in light of living in a context where we just don’t listen? Well?

Jen Wilkin
Yeah, well, I mean, listening is what builds relationship, and it’s what builds trust. And so I think that often the fundamental piece that is missing in the conversations that need to happen is relational trust, because men in leadership have been told you ought not to have a relationship that have deep trust with any with a woman who isn’t your wife. That is, even if it’s possible, it is professional suicide for you. And so then what you find is that we’re operating out of a place of fear instead of out of a place of love. And we do exist in a hyper sexualized culture. And we don’t get to pretend like we don’t, we don’t get to do whatever we want and interact with each other in whatever way that we want to. But there’s actually a lot of room in the way that we operate for us to operate from a place of Christian freedom instead of a place of fear. So like, for example, the question of well, I remember I was on a panel one time being asked about like, well, I know how to mentor, you know, the young men who are coming up through my church. But I’m just not really sure like, how am I supposed to mentor the young women too? And I, I always kind of giggle a little because I’m like, What are you having, like weekly slumber parties with the men? Like what is so different about the way? You know, there are 1000? If you are I have follow up questions. But, you know, there, there are so many ways for us to have interactions with one another that are in no way scandalous that no one would look at and critique or question. There are so many, so many ways, but we lack any imagination around it, because we have been told that those are verboten that those are, those are just off the list. And so I think some of this is just thinking, Well, why do I think that? Like why? Why do I think that I can’t meet with a couple of women? Or maybe it’s two women and two men, you know, who who need mentorship? Why do I think one on one is where the you know, the the real magic happens in a mentorship? Aren’t there some meaningful ways that I could extend help and training to people in groups or in settings where, you know, literally, no one is going to go, oh, that’s probably the beginning of an affair. And so when we, when all we’re fearing are the big blow up stories. For one thing, having had a front row seat to a number of those, I’m sure we all have in our time in ministry, here’s what I can tell you, I have noticed if someone wants to have an affair with someone, they’re going to do it, they’re going to find a way, and they’re going to make it happen. And so for the rest of us who might never be tempted toward that, or or act on any of that, to say we have to rob ourselves, the joy of having familial relationships with both men and women. Feels like a massive overcorrection.

Jim Davis
Wow, well, said I, the only thing that I have left to ask is What have we not covered in this in the span of this that you think is important?

Jen Wilkin
One of the things that I do in my role or have done is interview potential candidates to work at the church. And one of the questions on our application is who has had the greatest impact on your spiritual formation? And so people list who you would expect, you know, they’re like RC sprawl, you know, the John Piper, Tim Keller, and I’m always curious to see if anyone will list a female. And occasionally, I’ll get my mom, you know, which I do. I really appreciate that moms to show up on that list sometimes. But I wonder, does it concern us that those lists are all typically male? Do we see that as acceptable? Or is it perhaps a poverty in the family of God? And I wonder if 10 years from now, we might be able to see that the spiritual influence on a next generation has been formed by both Church Fathers and church mothers, who were well instructed in the deeper truths of our faith and who were able to pass on the good deposit. And not just that, but who were able to model a uniquely fatherly and a uniquely motherly role in a way that brought health and wholeness to sons and daughters in the family of God. I don’t want this to be driven by what we’ve done wrong, or by what we lack. I want us to see the beautiful vision of the churches, the family of God and say, What should it have been like an Eden? What will it be like in the New Jerusalem? How can the church live that way? Now?

Jim Davis
That’s really good. I really appreciate you and by God’s grace, I do think that you’re one of the people that when people give their list of spiritual formation, people do name you. So thank you for what you’ve done and the ways that you’ve invested and I am excited to announce for anybody who doesn’t know it, that we have a capstone episode of as in Heaven, live at TGC on spiritual formation in the church, and our two guests are going to be Jen Wilkin and Colin Hanson. We did cat live Capstone episode like this last year with Season Two with Tim Keller and Erwin it’s, and I’m so thankful and excited to be able to step into spiritual formation because this is a lot of, I mean, this is your this is your main thing over at the village church and you and Colin have thought through it really well. So if you’re listening and you’re going to be TGC 23. Join us in that breakout. Join us next week as we talk with Sam Albury and Michael Keller on how pastors can preach effectively in light of the de churching movement.