Equipping Women for Gospel-Centered Lives

At a recent women’s retreat, I met ladies I had never known before and continued conversations with others that I had already casually known. At some point in the weekend, casual conversations changed to something deeper. Women that I had thought of in relatively straightforward ways began to reveal circumstances that had seriously complicated their lives. The church leader’s wife whose husband had struggled with homosexuality. The Sunday School teacher whose father had taken his own life the year before. The trim, well groomed, single career woman whose brother and best friend had died in a car accident when she was eighteen. The church secretary who was fired from her position after complaining over sexual harassment from a pastor. It dawned on me over time that though the women walking around the retreat all looked relatively well adjusted, the vast majority of them had dealt with or were currently dealing with serious trial and struggle. Something had invaded the boundaries of their lives, decimating their naïve notions of how their lives would play out. A brother dies. A father commits suicide. A pastor betrays them. A husband walks away. A boyfriend stops returning calls. Miscarriage robs, and the pregnancy test never shows two lines again.

There is something in the gospel that meets wounded women in their brokenness. Scripture certainly gives general comfort that transcends gender. Male and female find healing from their woundings in the gospel. But there is also a particular balm to women that meets us in the woundings tied specifically to our gender. For some of us, our woundings are tied to our own failures – we have sought to find our identity in something God has not declared good and then we are frustrated when it does not satisfy. But for many more, our woundings are tied to wanting exactly what God has instructed us to want. Loving our brother, mother, or father is a good thing. Desiring marriage to a godly man and raising children for the Lord is consistent with God’s earliest designs for man and woman. Submitting to a church elder fits with God’s design for church authority. Confronting them for their sexual harassment fits as well. Yet many women’s greatest struggles, fears, and woundings stem from their vulnerability over the very things that God has declared good for them and His specific commands to them in light of those purposes. Women need to be taught what God declares good for His daughters. But women also need to understand how the gospel equips them to deal with the vast gulf between what God declares to be His good plan for them and the reality of their daily lives.

In light of this, may I speak for a moment to those leading women’s ministries and organizing women’s teaching events? If your message doesn’t resonate as well with the single woman watching her biological clock ticking away without a date in 8 years as the wife and mom who homeschools her children, you have missed the fullness of the message of the gospel. You may have communicated some out of context Scripture on women’s roles in the church and home, but you missed the gospel that equips us to bridge the gap between God’s good plan and the depraved world in which we live. That’s a bold statement, I know, but hear me out.

We need to teach on marriage and family in a way that ministers grace to the single, widow, or infertile woman. We need to teach on submission and church authority structures in a way that equips women abused by the very leadership to which they were called to submit to boldly live out their giftings as co-heirs with Jesus Christ. We need to teach on motherhood in a manner that sets not it as the highest good but our conformity to Christ through its trials and our failures in it.

If by the term conservative you mean someone who believes Scripture means what it says and its instructions can be taken at face value, then I am as conservative as they come. But I am not comfortable with the tone of teaching I have heard the last few years from conservative evangelicals on women’s issues. Day in and day out, I hear from woman after woman who doesn’t fit the mold, perhaps by her choice but more often by circumstances completely out of her control, who feels lost in our evangelical construct of what the godly woman looks like. The problem is that she was not taught clearly that the image in which she was created is God’s and the image to which she is now being conformed is Christ’s. She feels pressure to be like Ruth or the Proverbs 31 woman but not so much to be like Christ. But Scripture doesn’t give us that leeway. She was created in God's image and is being conformed back to Christ's. Period.

In just the last two weeks, I have had three different women (2 single and 1 married) tell me of the disconnect they feel when they hear teaching on women’s issues. Each loves God and is seeking His plan for their lives. Yet there is a vast disconnect between the peer pressure they feel from their churches and study groups and the reality of what it means to be a woman in their particular personal circumstances. Maybe I’m just reacting to a perception that is not the reality. But as my husband often says, perception is the reality of the person who perceives it. I think I perceive this as reality not because Christian leaders don’t believe the right things about the gospel and God’s plan for women but because we haven’t been careful to parse it and present it clearly. When we leave open the opportunity for misinterpretation, we can’t be defensive when people misinterpret it.

It is not good for man (or woman) to be alone. And, yet, God calls many women (and men) to live in that very state for the majority of their lives, a state that He Himself calls “not good.” Children are a blessing from the Lord, and yet their presence in or their absence from our lives can be the biggest source of struggle a woman faces. There is something in the gospel and all that Christ has accomplished on the cross that equips women to deal with the difference. Longing for what God declared good, yet living abundantly in Christ until His kingdom comes and restores all that lacks now in our lives.

A single friend and I had a long conversation about this over dinner a while back. She articulated to me so beautifully the doctrine of living in this tension between what God declares good verses what He has allowed in her life. I have asked her to write her thoughts out and hope to post them here in the near future. Until then, I hope simply with this post to provoke thought on what it looks like to teach to women on every subject from the constant foundation of the gospel bridge between what God created us to be in His image and what we now find in our reality. May our ministries minister grace to women—single, married, widowed, with kids, without kids—to live in Christ and be like Christ, overcoming with joy at every stage of life.