Emerging Middle-Aged Women
Written by beyondwords : April 14, 2008
If you’re old enough to understand the idiom, “You could have knocked me over with a feather,” you’re probably too old to be hip to its current equivalent. Since I’m both, I’ll simply tell you what happened yesterday and let you supply the metaphor.
A woman I know who’s pushing 60 works as an administrative assistant in a local, evangelical church. For the past 15 years, she’s been devoted to tireless service, nurturing the women’s ministry and a healing prayer ministry along with managing the church office. Her faithful labor, under the paradigm that men lead and women follow, has been split between implementing the details of the surrounding elders’ vision and helping the younger women in the church “obey God and love their husbands.”
Yesterday she told me she was considering stepping down from her position.
“We’re just a ‘G’ rated version of the world,” she said. “And I can’t be a party to it anymore. Our idea of being evangelistically bold and counter-cultural is bringing people into this building. But once we get them here, we don’t offer them anything different from what the world offers. We certainly don’t love and forgive each other and we don’t build into each others’ lives. I don’t think this is the way we’re supposed to do church. The secular world is doing a better job at loving people that we are.”
My friend went on to say, “Here’s a quote from a Korean leader: ‘When I encounter a Buddhist priest, I meet a holy man. When I meet a Christian leader, I meet a manager.’”
I was stunned to hear such words coming from this particular woman. By all appearances, she’d been submitting unwaveringly and unquestioningly to her elders’ authority and wisdom. To hear her say she thought something was wrong in the church was about 180 degrees from what I expected.
But here’s what’s more remarkable about this incident: it was the third time in the space of a week I’d had a similar conversation with a staunchly conservative Christian woman over the age of 45.
One woman I know actually left her church and hasn’t sought out another. I meet with her and pray on a weekly basis. Two other acquaintances in the PhD-level academic world told me they “don’t fit” in their churches, but they stay because of a sense of duty. But they’ve intentionally distanced themselves from the traditional programming aimed at or directed by women in order to be free to use their gifts and follow their calling to serve grossly unmet needs in the wider community–needs their churches don’t seem to have much interest in addressing.
But it’s not just marginalization of women and neglecting the “least of these” in the community that concerns these women. They say they’re grieved by a narrow, impoverished version of gospel that keeps believers in an infantile state of spiritual formation.
My friend put it like this, “It’s like inviting a horde of babies to church and dumping them in the foyer. Who’s going to help them grow up? Who’s going to change their dirty diapers in the meantime?”
I asked my friend what she believes the Spirit is calling her to do.
“It’s relational. It’s small. It’s one-on-one or two-on-two. It’s in living rooms and coffee shops and kitchens, not big sanctuaries where you get a rock concert and a seminar. I don’t know what God is doing. And I’m not worried about how big it is. All I can do is be faithful with what he puts right in front of me.”
What’s going on here? We tend to view the younger generation as the force of change and the fresh wind of the Spirit. But this generation of middle-aged women is unlike any previous one. These women are educated and informed, most of them have worked outside the home at some point in their lives, and even if they’ve followed the complementarian marriage model, they’ve had more freedom and decision-making power than women before them.
And they are rising up with a prophetic voice. They are emerging from their child-bearing and child-rearing years with spiritual wisdom and energy and integrity. And they are a tremendous resource for the upcoming generation seeking to be faithful in following Jesus in the midst of Empire. Younger people would be wise to listen to them and enlist them in implementing their missional and communal vision for the church.
Editor’s Note: The original location of the image above would be a good place to start exploring the voice of women in the emerging church movement– www.emergingwomen.blogspot.com
Beyondwords has far too much energy and imagination to admit she's a middle-aged woman living in the Midwest. A freelance writer and journalist, she hasn't figured out the writing life requires solitude, so her home is always full of children, teenagers, foreign exchange students, and people seeking short-term shelter. She's currently undergoing a subversion by the Holy Spirit. It's leading her out of empire, forcing her to dig in and unearth the gospel in hearth and home, community and relationships.
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Anchored in the West Bank neighborhood of Minneapolis, Missio Dei is committed to following Jesus' way of peace, simplicity, prayer, and hospitality.
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