Why We Need Women Involved in Ministry

Mike Kruger: We are talking about a topic that I cannot imagine more relevant to a women’s conference than the topic before us today, why we need women in ministry. And actually, I want to start by just talking about this title with you for just one moment. You’ll notice that it’s a rather short title, but I want you to notice it’s a very carefully chosen title, and particularly one word I want to draw to your attention as we start this time together, and that is the word need. The church needs women involved in ministry. It’s not optional. It’s not just a preference. It’s not something that should just be allowed or tolerated, but I would argue, and we’ll argue the day in our time together, but by God’s design, men and women together need to be involved in the ministry of the church. Now, that word need probably stands in contrast to many other views out there that, no doubt you’ve come across. There’s certainly some out there that think that ministry is not really for women at all, and that sort of ministry and theology and Bible instruction and training and so forth are sort of something that men do, but women don’t do it. So there are some that might argue out there that women really don’t do ministry and might not choose that title, then there’s another view out there, slightly better, only a little better than the other one. And that is, some might say, Okay, fine. Women can be in ministry, but it’s sort of a view that maybe they’re allowed in ministry or tolerated in ministry, or maybe, yeah, okay, we can have them doing certain things. We don’t really need them in ministry. My job today in this session is to remind you that that’s not really the way it works. To say that women are simply allowed in ministry, or tolerate ministry. It’s kind of like the sort of being picked last and kick ball on the playground. You know, if you ever go out in the playground, everyone picks teams. If you’ve ever been in the dreaded playground, kickball team picking moment, you know, everyone doesn’t want to be last, and you know, they pick you on the team. Technically, you’re on the team, but you kind of get the impression that you’re not really needed on the team, and maybe get the impression I really wanted on the team. What I want you to realize today is that this title is picked to reassure you that neither those other two options are the ones that we think the Bible affirms. Rather. The title here is why we need women in ministry. And my prayer is real, real simple today. My prayer is that you leave this session today more encouraged in your ministry than when you came in. So simple goal of encouragement, and if you’re like me or like all of us in the Christian life, rarely do you ever go through a week, and I doubt this is one of them, where at the end of the week you say, You know what? I think I’ve had all the encouragement I can handle this week all filled up. Thank you very much. No, we all need encouragement in ministry, and there’s a reason because ministry is hard. Ministry is really hard. And if you don’t know that yet, just wait, you’ll see how hard it can be. And there’s those of us who wonder if we should do ministry, whether we belong in ministry, whether we should stop ministry, whether we should give up in ministry. And my goal today to a women’s conference in a room filled with women, is that this is something that we as a church absolutely need your involvement in so how are we going to do that today? Well, I’m going to give you three reasons to be encouraged, and these are the three reasons why you’re needed in ministry in the church. I’m going to give you a theological reason. I’m going to give you a biblical reason. I’m going to give you an historical reason, a theological a biblical and a historical reason. Now, as you can imagine, all those overlap. Aren’t theological reasons, also historical reasons, and aren’t they also biblical reasons? Yeah, so they all intertwine, as you see, but these really are distinctive categories for I think, are where I want you to see that ministry is something that’s essential for all God’s people to be participating in in the church, both men and women. So as we dive into that, let me say a quick word of prayer for us, and we’ll get started by asking God to bless our time together. Let’s pray, Lord, we all need to be encouraged. Ministry is hard. Ministry is that odd mix of exhilarating and tragic at the same time, wonderful and difficult. Like most things in life, it’s a combination of both ups and downs, and maybe for this room in particular, there’s doubts about whether women are needed in ministry. My goal, and I pray you would help me achieve it is just to encourage everyone today that they are needed more than they think. We pray all this in Christ’s name. Amen. All right, let’s start with the first of our three things here, and that’s the theological reason why women are needed in ministry, and that’s simply this, men and women compliment with an E compliment each. Other, men and women complement one another. In fact, we see this from the very beginning in the book of Genesis, even at creation, we see that God made men and women to fit together in a complimentary way. It’s a fascinating thing to read the early chapters of Genesis and the creation account, because you’ll know, and you’ve read it. So you do know that God is very keen to announce that everything in his creation is good. It is good, it is good, it is good. And he goes through all of these seven days of creation and declares the goodness of it. But the very first time something is not good, in the book of Genesis, in the entire Bible, the very first time God says, you know, but this is not good. It’s in Genesis 218 when God said it is not good that man should be alone. And after his whole chapter of it is good, it is good. This not good, sort of stops the reader in the tracks and says, Hold on a second. Adam is not okay by himself. Man is not okay alone. And so he creates woman. And after God made woman, he brought her before Adam, and then Adam quoted the movie Jerry Maguire and said, You complete me. If you’re not familiar with the term complementarianism, it’s in the very sort of organizational commitments of the gospel coalition. It’s an idea that men and women are both made in the image of God, both share equally in their value and dignity and humanity. And yet God made them different. They are not exactly the same. They fit together in a complimentary way, unless they have distinctive sort of giftings, perspectives, roles in the church and family, and so the very first place we began when we talk about why women are needed in ministry, is this concept of complementarianism. Now I know that in some of your minds, you think, Wait a second, why is this a place worth starting? Isn’t this the reason some don’t let women in ministry? You might think that complementarianism is a reason to not have women involved in ministry. I want to suggest you that biblically, it’s exactly why we need women in ministry, because it’s not good for men to be alone. It’s not good for the body of Christ to not have both men and women represented in it. It’s interesting to think, when you look at the Bible, that the Bible presents the church as a big family. No doubt you’ve seen that in so many passages I’ve only have time to get into today, that the church has not just people in it, but they have spiritual fathers and spiritual mothers and spiritual brothers and spiritual sisters and spiritual daughters and spiritual sons, all working together for Kingdom goals. And just like a human family needs both fathers and mothers. The church family needs both fathers and mothers, in fact, isn’t interesting. This is exactly what we as evangelical Christians have been arguing for for generations. In the midst of a very chaotic cultural time. We want to argue that, look, men and women are not just interchangeable. You can’t just swap them out. God made them complimentary. And so we would not want a family that’s got two fathers. We would not want a family has two mothers. We would want a family with both a mother and the father. And wouldn’t, wouldn’t we want the family of God to have the same? Here’s what I want you to realize. The church needs, yes, spiritual fathers, but the church needs spiritual mothers, which are many of you in this room, spiritual daughters, spiritual sisters. It doesn’t operate the way it should. It’s not a complete family of God. So complementarianism, despite this, the concept in many people’s minds actually is the basis for why you’re needed in the family of God. And if you if you realize that the practical implications are massive. I spend a lot of time trying to talk to my students who are putting their churches together, and I’ve written about this in other places, about the need for churches to hire more women on their church staff. This is a, I think, a logical, sort of derivative conclusion from complementarianism. Yes, of course, when you start a church, you start with pastors. No one’s denying that. But as a church grows and has the financial ability, I always encourage my students hire women on staff. They’re bringing different perspectives, different voices, different gifts. They see things you won’t see. They balance out the family of God. You can’t have just spiritual fathers. You need spiritual mothers. It’s just practically true that men and women just see things in different ways. Let’s be honest. How many times you’ve been out to dinner with your husbands and you’re noticing things with the other couple. You’re at dinner with interesting dynamics, back and forths, comments made, statements you take notice of and after this dinner with another couple, you drive home and you say, Wow, what did you think of all that? And your husband looks at you and goes, I have no idea what you’re talking about, right? But

it’s not just practical issues. It’s theological issues. The amount of theological insights that I’ve been blessed by with the women in my life that I’ve listened to are just stunning. My wife, Melissa, who’s getting ready to do the plenary address just momentarily after this, has just had so many moments in her life. I just look at her in awe, like I’ve read that passage for. So many times that I thought I kind of saw everything in there, and in this one fell swoop, you see something I’ve never seen. I’m amazed. It’s also practical ministry observations that she makes that are so stunning to me. She when Tim Keller passed away last year, she made an amazing statement about Tim that I thought was so penetrating, so insightful. She said, you know, Tim was the kind of leader that could make you feel seen but not watched. I’m like, Whoa, right, seen but not washed. It’s just boom, just light, click on. In fact, so insightful. I actually ended up writing a blog article about that whole concept. It’s because I thought it was so amazing. Here’s another implication. I tell my students, when you go and you preach, you need to have a sermon feedback committee. How are you reaching the church? How’s your how’s your preaching resonate with the people? And half that committee, of course, need to be composed of women. They hear things differently, they they take sermons differently. They see scripture differently. They might actually tell you that endless Lord of the Rings. Illustrations don’t always work for everyone in the church. Here’s the thing. Is that complementarianism is not a reason for women not to do ministry. It’s a reason for them to do ministry. We are Better Together. Okay, that’s the theological reason. We’ll move on to a biblical reason. Biblical reason is that women played a critical role in the ministries of Jesus and the apostles. Women played a critical role in the ministries of Jesus and the apostles. Now this is a massive topic. I’ve actually written on this in my book, Christianity at the crossroads, as I will a number of other things in here that I’ll get to that is amazing how much women pop up on our biblical sources, but particularly in the in the in the unfolding of the early Christian movement, they pop up all over the place, in the ministry of Jesus, in the ministry of Paul, in the book of Acts. We have so many passages that we could discuss to make the point here, but let me just mention two key texts that you know of that, I think, are so essential to establishing the critical role that the women, the Ministry of Women, played in the early church. First of those two passages is Luke, chapter eight, in the ministry of Luke, of course, or in the Gospel of Luke, rather, the ministry of Jesus is being cataloged as he goes throughout Galilee and does his various things. And of course, I think you probably know that Jesus travels with more than just himself. He travels with, of course, the 12, which is not surprising, but I think you know reading not just the passage I’m getting ready to talk about, but many other gospel passages, Jesus had quite a significant entourage of people that traveled with him that were part of his ministry beyond the 12. And what Luke points out is one of the key examples of that entourage are all the women that traveled within Jesus’s ministry. Let me read the passage for you, and then I want to make a few observations about it. Here’s what Luke writes in chapter eight. Verse one, he writes this, soon afterward, Jesus went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the Good News of the Kingdom of God, and the 12 were with him. Okay, we already talked about that as standard fare for the Gospels, but notice what Luke points out, and also some women who have been healed of evil spirits and infirmities. And then he lists their names, Mary of Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Cusa Herod’s household manager and Susan and Susanna and many others who provided for them out of their means. Now, this little nugget of attacks is fascinating for all kinds of reasons, and I wish there was more time to unpack it, but several things stand out to me here that are noteworthy. One of the things that stands out to me is that Luke mentions their names. This is not a mere throwaway line that well, yeah, well, some women were around. He actually knows their names. He knows their stories. He knows their families, he knows their backgrounds, he knows their ministries. To have named people in the Gospels is very significant. There’s all kinds of scholarly work that’s been done on this. Sometimes the names in the gospels are actually the names of eyewitnesses, key players, also within the ministry of Jesus. One other thing we notice here is that some of these women are quite well to do. I’m going to come back to that later, when we’re talking about women in the early church. But these, some of these women, apparently were quite wealthy, actually helping Jesus out with his ministry. And this is interesting, because as early converts to Christianity happened, as we’ll see in a moment, a number of them are women, but also a number of them are wealthy women. The other thing that’s noteworthy here, and I think this is particularly interesting, is Joanna. Joanna, we’re told, was the wife of Cusa Herod’s household manager. Now this is significant. She is married to the person who is running basically Herod’s court. Herod, of course, you know, is the king that has no love for Jesus, and really has is pagan as you can be. And we find out later in the Gospel of Luke that he’s he’s intrigued by Jesus more like a circus performer. Four and certainly had John the Baptist beheaded, and He’s no friend of the gospel. And yet, the guy who runs his whole palace, that man’s wife is converted. Now we don’t know if CUSA was converted. We don’t even know if Herod knows that, cuz his wife is converted, but what we likely have an image here of is a mixed marriage. Now, this was very common in the early church, and I’ll come back to it in a moment, but you have a lot of moments where women are converting to Christianity and are heavily involved in ministry, but yet they’re married to husbands who are still unsaved. It’s hard to know what risks she was taking here. Did her husband approve of her traveling with Jesus? We don’t know what would Herod have done? We don’t know. Here’s what’s curious, though, in the early church, women were so involved with the ministry of Jesus, this is one of the reasons that often sort of scandal was attached to the early Christian movement. It would not have been sort of seen as a pristine sort of thing to do, to travel with women. No doubt it raised some eyebrows that you would have included women like this. Lots of religions in the ancient world actually split men and women, and yet Jesus is traveling with these women, which, no doubt raised questions. You may know that that when the early Christians celebrated the Lord’s Supper, the non Christian rule didn’t know what to do with that and assumed that Christians were doing diabolical things in their secret meetings, right? And one of the things they thought Christians were doing in this diabolical secret meeting was sexual promiscuity. Why would they think Christians were engaged in sexual promiscuity in their secret meetings? Because women were there too. In the Lord’s Supper celebrations, in the family meal of the church, it was both men and women which was scandalous. And people think, well, the only reason you’re gonna have women there is because no doubt you’re doing things you shouldn’t be doing. Things you shouldn’t be doing. And all these rumors spread that early Christian secret meetings were a nefarious affair. But actually that was because women were so abundantly around. This little passage then hints at all kinds of things that women’s names were known. Jesus has them with them. They’re doing all kinds of different things with the ministry, probably creating some scandal as a result, because scandals result because of the image it projected. But nowhere does Jesus? I only travel with men. Nowhere does Jesus? I only have men involved in my ministry. They’re right there from the very start. And Luke points it out. Here’s a second passage I want to mention in terms of the role that is played by women in the early Christian movement, and this is probably an unexpected place in the book of Romans, chapter 16. One of the things that’s, of course, well known in Paul’s letters is, at the end of all his letters, for the most part, he gives his final list of greetings. Remember, those are the passages that we all skip. Right when we’re done with the book, you’re like, Okay, it’s a bunch of names, and bring me my cloak and I forgot the scrolls, and tell so and so. Hello. And okay, la, la, la, we’re done. So when you have a Bible study, you sort of do the Romans, and then you get to 16, you’re like, Okay, let’s knock this out in a few minutes, and we’ll be done. Okay, fair enough. Romans 16, though, is curious for a couple reasons. First of all, Romans, of course, being Paul’s sort of flagship letter, the first one in the sort of Pauline corpus. It is the longest greeting we have of any of his letters. So many names listed. This makes it very detailed, very thorough about the ministry of Paul at a very mature point in his ministry. But the other thing that’s noteworthy about this list of names is nearly half are women. This is one of the remarkable things that scholars have observed for a long time, is that Paul mentions this long list of women that he sees as CO laborers in the Lord in fact, exactly the language he uses. We don’t have time to turn to the passage here, but let me just make a few observations in this long list of names, he knows their names. He calls them workers in the Lord. He refers to several of them as those who worked hard in the Lord. He mentions the name of Phoebe, who’s the very first name in the list, by the way, of all these names, the first is a woman named Phoebe, who he calls a patron, which means she probably supported the church financially too, maybe even hosting a church in her house, which is very common for women to do. He also mentions Priscilla, who hosted a church in her house elsewhere in Colossians. Paul mentions nympha, who also hosted a church in her house. These are called by him directly as CO laborers, co workers in the gospel. He even refused. Refers to the mother of Rufus, and he says this, who has been a mother to me as well.

Paul doesn’t say well to the women’s ministry out there. Here’s a few parting remarks. Paul knows their names. He knows their ministries. He’s labored alongside them. He commends them for their work in the Lord, and what you realize is that women were abundant in early Christianity, starting with Jesus and moving on to Paul. Now this shocks people, because people who get into debates about men and women in the church, like I thought Paul was the was the anti woman person, right? Isn’t Paul the problem, not the solution. But then when you read this, you’re like, well, actually Paul’s ministry. Perspective and the way he involves women and sees it as an essential part of all these doing actually sounds a lot like Jesus from Luke eight, and we can see these women’s involvement from the very start. So this, there’s so much more that can be said about both these passages, but I just want you to see how personal, how intimate, and how detailed this is, and how involved these women are. Now that leads us to our third thing, and I want to spend one more time on this point here with you this morning, and that is the historical reason, or this afternoon. What day is this anyway? Okay, so theological reason because of complementarianism, biblical reason because women played a historic role, as Jesus brought up his ministry and as the apostles brought up theirs. But then third, an historical reason, women were heavenly involved in the early church in ways you probably can’t even fathom. To put it another way, when we look at the sort of precedent set by Jesus and the precedent set by Paul, we might wonder, did that continue right? Has that been lost? Has it been forgotten? Did the early church recognize the abundant value of women’s involvement in the various ministries of the church, and in my own research here, and again, I’ve written about this in my book Christian at the crossroads, among other places, is that I was stunned by what I discovered, particularly in second century Christianity, about the abundant activities of women. Sometimes in the scholarly world, we have a field we feel like we have a fairly decent grasp of, and I felt like I’ve got a fairly decent grasp of, sort of these early Christian segments, movements and demographics. And I was surprised, honestly by how extensive the women’s involvement is. In fact, the evidence we have now suggests that one of the things that’s noteworthy about early Christianity is that the early Christian communities were made up probably, from what we can tell about two thirds women. Let me just start with that observation. This is a stunning statistic, the work of Rodney Stark, a sociologist of early Christianity, has made the case for this has been supported by a bunch of other evidence I’ll lay out in a moment. But that means, if you were to walk into any given congregation in the second century, or even the third century Christian world, it’d be made up of approximately two thirds women, 1/3 men. Several things about that are noteworthy about that stat? First of all, what’s noteworthy about that stat is that Christianity was wildly unpopular in this phase of history. In fact, Christianity was at the sort of Pinnacle in the second third centuries of being mocked, ridiculed and disdained by the broader Greco Roman world. But yet, apparently, to Greco Roman women, it was a place they wanted to flock to Christianity, for them, at least, was not a place to be avoiding, but a place to find refuge, so much so that they seemed to flock to it in droves. The other thing that’s noteworthy about this statistic is it’s almost the exact inverse of the statistic of the Roman world. If you were to go into a normal Roman context. In the Greco Roman world, it would be about two thirds men and 1/3 women. But you go into a Christian church, and it’s reversed. Now, why is that? Why is it that women were about 1/3 of what we know of the population in the Roman Empire during this time? Well, lots of reasons, but one of the main reasons, and this is a tragic, sad reason is female infanticide. It was very common and very accepted and very normal that if you had a female baby, you would leave it out to die. By the way, Christians were the ones who rallied against that at a later point. So what you realize then is in early Christian movement, there was already a sense that this was a place that was welcoming and warm for Christian women as they flocked to it in significant numbers. I suppose, if you were a Christian man in the second century, you would have statistically a better chance to find a Christian wife. However, in reverse, if you were a Christian woman in the second century, you would have a very much more difficult time finding a Christian husband. And some of you are thinking, not much has changed in 2000 years. Okay, now, how do we know that women were this dominant? Well, I’m not going to go into all the evidence that stark brings up, but in my own research, I’ve noticed a number of things I’m going to walk you through, and here’s where I’m going to give you a little bit of a quick tour of historical figures. Okay, so hang in there with me. The whole point here is for you to see that you are not the first woman to step into a ministry context in a tough place. And they did it in the early church, which was even tougher than it is now, and they flourished and thrived, and God blessed them. So I want you to see that. So here are some examples of that happening in these early centuries. First is a Roman governor by the name of Pliny. The younger you wouldn’t know the name Pliny, but he was a pagan government governor that had no love for Christians. The reason we even talk about Pliny is because he wrote a very famous letter in the Emperor. The Emperor’s name was Trajan. This is like early second century. He writes a letter to the Emperor Trajan, which he. Pretty regularly. And in this particular letter, he complains. And what’s he complaining about, you and me, basically, Christians all over the place. In fact, he complains that, wow, these Christians are coming out of the woodwork. I can’t even control the spread. In fact, Trajan, or rather, plenty complaining to Trajan, says these Christians have become like a disease. He calls them, literally a contagion. They’re spreading to the rich and the poor, the old and the young. They’re spreading also to slave and free, and then, most notably, says and to male and female. It’s interesting that he specifically mentions the way it’s spreading also among women. Why? Because in the ancient world. In the Roman world, many religions were just male only, or at least male dominated. Mithraism is an example of this. He’s like, look, it’s spreading to all the sexes. So here’s what Pliny does. He doesn’t like this Christian thing. It’s spreading like a contagion. Doesn’t know what to do, but he’s worried about what’s happening in these secret meetings, the secret meetings I mentioned a minute ago that were probably generated rumors by fact that both men and women were in them. And he says, Well, I’m gonna find out what’s going on in these secret meetings. So he finds a couple Christians to torture to find out what’s really going on. And in the letter to Trajan, he tells us the two Christians that he found, both of them being women. So just catch this moment. Plenty. This pagan elder has got no love. Pagan governor with no love for Christianity, wants to find out what Christians are doing in the secret meeting. And he goes to grab two Christians. And who does he grab? Two women, by the way, he does torture them. And he tells Trajan, yeah, I guess I really didn’t find out anything bad, but I’m gonna, I’m gonna make the Christians renounce anyway. And that led to a whole series of tortures that went on from there. But the very first people he turns to to find out what Christianity is all about are two female Christians. Here’s a second example of early Christian mention of the role of women and a group of writings called the Apostolic fathers. The Apostolic Fathers, despite the name, makes you think it’s writings from the apostles. It’s not. It’s not. It’s a bad name. I don’t know why scholars chose it, but there it is. The Apostolic fathers are actually writers after the apostles. There’s a whole bunch of them, but they tell us that they’re the earliest Christian texts we have outside our New Testament texts. And these writers tell us about just life in the church and what’s going on. They’re writing to each other. They’re talking about church issues and theological issues. And here’s the thing I want you to see, names of women are popping up everywhere. Tons of references to women in the Apostolic Fathers scattered around. What are they doing? They’re missionaries. They’re evangelists. They’re hosting churches in their homes. They’re supporting the church financially. Some are taking care of the poor. They started ministry for widows. Others are visiting those in prison, and we have their names again, Tavia Alce, epitropus gropte, and the names go on and on. Grope day is particularly noteworthy because she had a ministry to widows and orphans that had actually garnered the attention of some of the significant Christian leaders, and they were praising her work. Third example of the role of women in this early phase is a story we have from Justin Martyr, which is rather tragic. Justin Martyr highlights the fact that so many wealthy women were converting to Christianity, who were aristocratic and influential and actually well to do is it was causing problems with their husbands. In fact, Justin Martyr tells the story of a particular woman who converted to Christianity and her unbelieving husband didn’t know what to do. In fact, we have all kinds of records of this. Interestingly, there’s multiple reactions that unbelieving husbands have in these split marriages in the early church, some of them unbelieving husbands are like, OK, I’ll go along with it. And they have sort of this, what we call secondary conversion, which doesn’t mean they’re really converted, just means they kind of just play along, because nothing better to do, right? But that’s not what happened to most. Most actually despised the conversion and split these marriages. And in the case that Justin Martyr tells one particular woman got converted to Christianity, her husband found out, and her husband reported her to the authorities. What happened to her? She was arrested and thrown in prison and spent many, many years in jail. Why? Because she was a professing Christian, and she wouldn’t renounce Christ, and who was the one who got her there, her husband.

These are women who were committed to Christ and committed to the early church, and suffering for it, suffering for it through these split marriages. By the way, this also highlights, doesn’t it, First Corinthians seven, where Paul’s like if you find yourself married to a non Christian. Here’s the dynamics you’ve got to deal with in First Corinthians seven. Well, that happened both ways, of course, but it happened a lot with Christian women, and we have the records from the historical sources that here’s another remarkable example of women in early Christianity that will just sort of blow your mind, Hippolytus, one of the early church fathers, tells us about a certain woman by the name of Marcia, was Marsha’s role. Well, turns out, before she was converted, she was the emperor. She was the, basically, the. Mistress of the Emperor Commodus. Now, you’re like, Well, I don’t know who the Emperor Commodus is. Yeah, you do, because you’ve probably seen the movie Gladiator. Have you seen the movie Gladiator? Remember the bad guy, Emperor there? That’s Commodus. Now, of course, he doesn’t actually look like that in the ancient world, right? Wasn’t nearly as sort of diabolical as I’m sure the movie made out, but he was no friend of Christianity, and he was a wicked well known as a wicked person. He has a mistress named Marcia. She converts. What happens now? Well, Hippolytus, in his account, tells us Marcia starts evangelizing the Emperor. He starts, she starts sharing the gospel with the Emperor Commodus. Now we have no evidence that Commodus ever converted, but just, just imagine, talk about being put providentially in a moment, right? She’s, she’s, she’s a mistress to the to the most powerful man in the world, and she converts. And there she is with a chance to share her faith. And she does. Might have turned out a little different for Russell Crowe if he had converted, but that’s a whole other conversation. Here’s one final thing I’ll tell you about early Christian ministry in terms of evidence of women that we know they were so abundant, doing ministry and doing things, and this is stunning to observe, and that is, we have all kinds of evidence that the pagan critics of Christianity mobbed Christianity for having so many women around. You may not realize it, but in these early centuries, we actually have, not only Christian sources tell us about the way Christianity was, we actually have pagan sources critiquing Christianity. It’s fascinating to watch the interplay between these two, two of the most famous critics in the second century by the name of Celsus or Celsus, if you pronounce the Latin C soft or in Lucien, they despised Christianity, and they wrote all kinds of disparaging things about Christianity. But you know what was top of the list for the disparaging things about Christianity? That it was all women. This is a remarkable thing in the Greco Roman world that was seen as something, you know, weak and bad. And so if you wanted to mock a religion, what you would do in the ancient world is mock it for being all it’s all women and children. Now notice that, you know, when you have criticisms, there’s always an element of truth of them. And the element of truth here is, there was a lot of women, okay? And that’s what I want you to realize, is that Celsus and Lucien were noticing something real, is that the women were flocking to Christianity in droves. And so they had to sort of find a way to attack it and punch at it. And so they mocked it for being so pro women. Just let that sink in for a moment. So our modern day tells us that Christianity is anti woman. Probably hear that, or have heard that, that Christianity is hostile to women. I’m not sure this conference bears that out, but okay, you got 9000 women here this week. Saying, not so fast, but nonetheless, we have a cultural message saying, hey, Christianity, evangelical Christianity, is hostile to women. In the ancient world, it was being mocked for being so pro woman. In other words, in the ancient world, apparently the women weren’t getting the memo that it was a bad place to be. They went there in droves, and so much so that the pagan critics had a heyday making fun of Christianity for having so many women around. What does all that mean? Well, that means is you have a heritage you may not realize. You have a theological basis for why you are needed so desperately in the church. You have a biblical one that I barely scratched the surface of and you have a rich historical one. One of the things that’s interesting here, as a corollary that we just don’t have time to fully explore, is is sort of the why Christianity was so popular with women. I’m giving the evidence that it was. And by the way, that’s just the start, but one of the reasons why I hinted at a moment ago, do you know that Christians were the ones who were the ones who were against female infanticide, which, if you want to be pro woman, that’s a pretty good way to do it right, stop killing female babies. And Christianity was leading the way in that. You know, another reason that Christianity was popular with women in the Roman world is because it had a different sexual ethic. When Paul writes in his letters that both men and women should be sexually pure in marriage. We read that in yon thinking, Well, okay, yeah, everybody says that. No, they don’t in the ancient Roman world, they did not say that. In ancient Roman world, it was radical to tell husbands that you have to be as sexually pure and faithful to your wife as she is to you, because in the Roman world, it was quite quite standard that the woman was expected to be sexually pure and faithful, but the husband could go have mistresses. And that says standard fare. Paul says, No, it’s not standard fare. If you were a woman in the ancient world, you had to pick a religion. Which one would you want to pick? Probably one that protected you, probably one that defended you, probably one that held up a sexual ethic that was in your favor. You know, another thing that Christianity was against in the ancient world was was frivol. Was was frivolous divorce. If you read all the passages about Jesus, say in the Sermon on the Mount about divorce, we always think, well, this is just fine tuned theological wrangling. Theologians will fight over anything. Well, maybe they will. But when Jesus was talking about divorce, he was that the thrust of that was to protect women. I. Because they were the ones that were getting sent out into the cold, so to speak, when divorce happened, because the man had all the power, all the money, all the standing which is why they were forced to remarry when they were divorced, because they had no way to support themselves, which was exactly what Jesus addressed on and on it went. I want to suggest to you, though that one of the major reasons that Christianity was popular with women. And really the thrust of my point to you today is that they found a home where they could serve their Lord faithfully. So many things to do, all the conversations about women, ministry, we often get hung up on the on the what you can’t do, speech, which I think is unfortunate, because when you think about all the ministry in the church, there’s only one little sliver that is really done by people in the ordained office, so much ministry is done by everybody else. In fact, I would argue the biblical model is that every Christian uses their gifts to do ministry in wherever place God puts them. And of course, my point to you has been a simple one this morning or this afternoon, is that we want you to be encouraged that God has such a special place for you in the kingdom, and it’s not optional. It’s not just allowed, it’s not just tolerated, it’s needed. So what’s the takeaway for you? Well, a couple thoughts for you as we bring this to a close. One takeaway for you, some of you is that I want you to keep going. Some of you may have shown up at the conference here needing to get a reboot. And that’s what the TGC Women’s Conference is designed to do, is to hopefully give you a reboot. And I trust that not just this session, but all sorts of sessions are going to be that reboot for you. But if you feel like I think I’m done, I think I think I’ve done all I can do. I think I think I’ve hit enough roadblocks and had enough barriers and had enough opposition. I think I’m just going to cash in my chips and go do something else. If that’s you this afternoon, I encourage you to think long and hard about how much you’re needed and all those people that came before who worked through those roadblocks and those difficulties and those challenges. Why? Because there’s so much ministry to do. The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. For others of you may not be so much that you’re thinking about quitting ministry, but maybe you’ve not even started ministry. Maybe you’re young, maybe you’re single, maybe you’re young mom and haven’t really thought much about your role in the church. Maybe you don’t have an open runway for where you feel like you can plug in, fair enough. I know those are so many challenges and churches to figure out what your your space is, where you can serve. My prayer for you, though, as a takeaway is that you find it, look for it, search it out, ask God to open up the doors. Why? Just so you can feel better about yourself? No, because you’re needed. The Kingdom needs you. God has set it up for the church to need both spiritual fathers and spiritual mothers. What a tragedy would be to have a church with just one parent. We need a church with both that thrive together. We’re best when we’re not separate. We’re best when we’re together. Amen. Let me pray for us, Lord, we pause with thanksgiving for the reflections here, but I particularly pray for these women that you would encourage them. Can never use enough encouragement in our fallen world. I know some probably are here feeling pretty discouraged for a variety of reasons. My prayer is that they would feel like there’s a great heritage behind them, pushing them forward to serve you in the kingdom, and I pray you find help them, find that FAITHFUL PLACE they can do that. We pray all this in Christ’s name. Amen. Thank you very much.