RelationSHIFT 2: It’s More than a Sex Narrative

Kay >> Hi. I’m Kay Daigle of Beyond Ordinary Women Ministries. I’d like to welcome you to the second in our series on It’s Time for a RelationSHIFT dealing with men and women working together in the church. My guest is Dr. Jackie Roese. Jackie is the Founder and President of The Marcella Project. And you can read more about her and her ministry online on our website at BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org. And I hope you will take advantage of that so that you can even contact Jackie if you need to.

Jackie, in our first video, we talked about the fact that the situation between men and women and the way that we work together in the church is more than just the biblical and theological beliefs that we have. In this video, we’re going to talk about the fact that there’s more involved than just a sex narrative.

And I wanted to tell you that not too long ago, a friend highly praised a sermon that she had just heard, so I went online to hear the sermon. It was about men and women together. And I think in light of all of the various things, the sermon focused on how to avoid any kind of sexual contact with anyone of the other sex.

But I was pretty horrified because really if you followed what it said, pretty much you wouldn’t talk to many men. And he seemed to suggest he told a story about a pastor who was having a book signing and whose son said, why are you so rude to the women? He said, “Oh, they’ll whisper their hotel room number in your ear. They’ll give you their key.” It seemed to be perfectly fine, according to the sermon, to just be rude to women to avoid them tempting you sexually.

So with that background of my horror, really, at thinking about how does somebody even do this in this age with work and things like that, I don’t even think it’s a practical solution. But even if it were, there’s something wrong with treating people poorly just because you think they’re a threat. So I want to hear what you had to say.

Jackie >> Yeah. So, wow, there’s a lot there. First, I would say not only is it wrong because it’s not biblical.

Kay >> Oh, yeah.

Jackie >> So, and this person that you were listening to, they’re still teaching this danger romance narrative as the only narrative we see in Scripture. And it’s actually not the largest narrative we see. It’s not the emphasis of the New Testament.

And so I want to talk a little about that. Before I do, let me just say with the #MeToo #ChurchToo movement, there has been a lot of sexual exploitation. And I am very aware and want to be very sensitive to the fact that when there is sexual failure in the church or in the home, it’s devastating.

And I want to be sensitive to that because people have experienced that. It has blown up their church when their pastor has been inappropriate with a woman or left with an affair. And that does happen—rarely, but it does happen. And it’s painful.

But if we move over to that being the major way in which we deal with one another, we’re actually being unbiblical.

And so what do I mean by that? Well, let me just say, we have the danger narrative/danger romance narrative is the only narrative we talk about in the church about what men and women can be together.

I remember meeting with a pastor one time, and he and I were talking and he said, “I can’t get in the car and drive away with you. It’s the Billy Graham rule. Because basically men think about sex all the time.”

And I googled it. And I told him, You know that’s not actually technically true? Men don’t think about sex every 60 seconds. That’s actually not true.”

And then I said to him, “And furthermore, if a woman came to you and said, “I just had this urge to buy a blouse every 60 seconds. Or if she said, “I just can’t stop thinking about eating ice cream every 60 seconds.”

I would say, “That’s an addiction,” you know? Like this isn’t how God made you. That’s an addiction.

And so when we say things like men can’t help themselves, I wonder what exactly what Paul did mean then when he said, “You are a new creation.” What did he mean when he said, “He has given us the Spirit of Christ.” I mean God Himself is redesigning us into this new creation. Now God is pretty powerful, right? And he says that we can have the mind of Christ.

So when we say these things about our brothers—you know that they can’t help themselves, that men just always think sexually and then therefore it’s a women’s responsibility to be pure and stay away from them.

And all of this conversation, I’m like, really? Because that doesn’t sound like an image bearer to me. That feels like we’ve so lowered the bar. What it sounds like is we are saying men are pigs. My husband is not a pig, and I have two sons and they are not pigs.

So I’m not willing to dehumanize my brothers by that kind of story that we tend to teach in the church out of fear of moral failure.

I’ll give you a quick example of how this played out in my life and why I’ve had to dig deeper into the Scriptures and go, what is going on here?
I actually applied to get my doctorate in preaching at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and at the time I was the only woman in the class with 26 other senior pastors. And so the first year that I was on campus doing our residency, these men had all been taught—don’t get in a car; don’t go to lunch. Right? So I stayed by myself and ate lunch every day, and they all went out and talked and had offline conversations, learning from one another that I didn’t get to participate in.

Well, at the end of that semester, that residency, we had to form a cohort of about five of us. Of course, you know, it was like, who’s going to get the loser girl? And this group got me, and they were great. And for a whole year we talked online together.

We get back to residency the second year. They didn’t even, the school didn’t know what to do with me. They put me in this huge inn all by myself. Not another soul. I felt so safe! And the guys were across the driveway in a house together. Again, all kinds of offline learning that I don’t get to be a part of.

So I had heard that where we were going to have class was quite dangerous, and I was really nervous. And I’m not a very good driver and I don’t have a real good sense of direction. So that morning I woke up and I was a little nervous and I went to breakfast and I’m standing up, standing in the doorway and everybody’s eating. And I see one of my cohort’s guys way in the corner, and I yell probably because I’m nervous, right? I say, “Hey, Bill, can you give me a ride today?”

And like, it was like a movie. Everybody just stopped mid-air, like, oh, my God, did she just ask to get in the car with him? And I was like, okay, what am I listening to? Danger Romance, right? I said, That’s it. Enough, enough of this story. And I wanted to at that point insert the more biblical story, which is we’re brothers and sisters.

And so I literally yelled across the room, “Bill, I don’t want to have sex with you. Just as your sister in Christ, I just don’t want to be raped. That’s all I’m asking for.” And everybody kind of got nervous and giggled, and Bill gave me a ride.

And lo and behold, we functioned as brothers and sisters. That statement, putting it out there, changed the whole paradigm of the rest of my doctoral program with those men. We got to do offline learning together. It was fabulous.

So we have this narrative. I had to ask the question, “What do we do with this narrative? Is it biblical?” Well, lo and behold, it’s not. The largest metaphor in the New Testament talking about men and women in the church is sibling-hood. It is not sex. It’s siblings. One hundred twenty-four times the word siblings are used when referencing the church male and female together in the church compared to the metaphor of the church, which is used 45 times.

The reason Paul—Paul by the way, uses the metaphor in 1 Corinthians 60 times, men and women siblings, 60 times—and the reason he chose that is because he was playing upon siblings in antiquity. And in antiquity, brothers and sisters had the strongest bond of any relationship, more so than marriage, so he’s playing on this because I know that in this community they only honored blood kin, right

Furthermore, Matthew 22 says we’re not married in the new heavens and new earth, and we’re still gendered. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be female, pretty sure I’m going to be short and still have curly hair, you know. And the relationship that lasts in the new heavens, new earth, that’s going from here to there is not marriage. It’s brother and sister. And so I keep asking if that’s the relationship that we will live in in eternity, shouldn’t we figure out how to live that way now as we move there? So I just want to end with this example. I had a woman, a man come to me one time and we were talking about— can men and women be friends because we got to deal with this sex issue. And he shared with me that he started a church plant. And when they started the church plant, they had women on the leadership team with them.

It was all hands on deck. You can’t be picky when there’s too much work to do, all hands on deck. And so they start serving together. Well, when the church started to get structured and established, they decided the elders had to be all male, and so the women were removed from the leadership table. He says, now what happens, Jackie, is we have these meetings together, us men, and we come up with a solution. And then we go home and we tell our wives what we’ve come up with, and they will ask questions that we didn’t ask.</p>

So we have to have another meeting to discuss the questions that we didn’t think to ask. And then he said this profound statement. He said, “We were better when women were at the table.”

Kay >> Great story.

Jackie >> Yeah.

Kay >> Great story. Absolutely. And I certainly ran into some of that being on staff that in situations where women weren’t asked that there would later on be some repercussions from that were not anticipated because only men were talking about it. So thank you.

Jackie >> I tell people there’s always women elders, whether you’ve elected them or not, because those male elders go home and they talk to their wives and then they have input. So we actually are getting female input we just haven’t voted them to be elders. But there’s always women at the elder table.

Kay >> Right, right. Well, thank you. We have one more video in this series, and it is going to be about God’s dream team. So if you want to hear what it would really look like for us to shift these relationships between men and women, in the church, I hope you’ll join us for video three.

And you can find all of these videos on our website at BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org.