OOPS! Due to a bug in Libre Office, I inadvertently posted the same Sunday book review twice in the same month. Here is the book review that should have appeared on Sunday, the 17th of September. (Actually, if I'd been a more alert reader this weekend, it would have been a new edition intended to introduce Soren Kierkegaard to the general reader. That one's forthcoming.)
Book Review: ¿Qué Sucede Cuando las Mujeres Oran?
Author: Evelyn Christenson
Date: 1975 (English), 1978 (Spanish)
Publisher: SP Publications (1975), Libros Clie (1978)
ISBN: 84-7228-372-0
Length: 144 pages
Quote: “El primer emocionante resultado fue una conversión.”
In a book that’s been very popular in the original English, Christenson describes her experience when the church ladies’ group shifted their focus from busywork to actual prayer. “Certain things began to change.”
In 1975, some mainstream Protestant churches interpreted two passages attributed to St. Paul as meaning that women had no active role in the churches at all. The churches were packed with restless, underemployed housewives, and the men weren’t taking the (mostly unpaid) jobs the churches were trying to reserve for them. At most, women might get the church hierarchy’s blessing on organizing a mission project, especially if sewing or babies were involved. Reserving the serious religious “work” of praying, preaching, and teaching for men was supposed to inspire men to take the lead in their families’ spiritual lives.
In practice, there were women in 1975 for whom “patriarch” was not a dirty word, who were proud of coming from families that had real patriarchs and wanted to marry potential patriarchs. Nevertheless, most guys just don’t have the potential. A patriarchal family is not just any family where Daddy or Grandpa lays down the law for everyone else and makes everyone else do all the work. Almost any man can act like the boss or the bully when he’s at home alone with a tired young mother and a few little children, but the case could be made that this behavior is the direct opposite of being like the Real Patriarchs described in the Bible.
When we actually study the life of Abraham, the quintessential patriarch, we find that (a) any needs he felt to give orders were met in his daytime job where he supervised dozens of younger men, and (b) kings and priests asked him for help and advice (and his own father chose to follow Abraham rather than stay at home with his other son), and (c) when people, including his wife and his children and the servants, did not ask Abraham for advice but demanded their own way, Abraham let them learn from their mistakes. Lot, that ungrateful foster son he’d brought up, couldn’t keep his employees from quarrelling with Abraham’s own. The time had come for them to part. Abraham did not say “Take your employees and go away from us.” He invited Lot to choose the direction in which Lot wanted to move, and promised to move in the opposite direction. Lot proceeded to mess up his life. Abraham rescued him once. In patriarchal cultures, most men were probably doomed by chance to be scullions rather than patriarchs; Lot’s tragedy was that he was not kept in a subservient position all his life.
But in the twentieth century, American churchmen were not into actually studying how Abraham, or Moses for that matter, interacted with their families. Their attempts to pretend that any man could be a patriarch, to create a “patriarchal social structure” that automatically placed all males a notch or two above all females, had had results that could charitably be described as ludicrous. Because ancient Greek and Roman laws often left widows penniless, the apostolic church took upon itself the ministry of feeding and sheltering widows. Some of these widows were physically able to work, and did work for the church. (Not necessarily as preachers; the only woman positively identified as both a church worker and a widow is Dorcas, who “made clothes for the poor.”) So there were actually churches in the 1970s that preached that the mere fact that a woman had outlived her husband qualified her for a church ministry, but so long as she was blessed with a living husband, she was supposed to be silent in church and stay at home during the week. I am not making this up.
Other Protestants, of whom Christenson was one, believed that women could effectively minister to other women or to children, but were not called to teach men or speak out in mixed groups. (When the two Bible verses that have to be put together to produce this reading are restored to their contexts, their meaning is rather different.) Christenson reports that in 1969 her group were asked to lead a “Week of Prayer” service. “Immediately, without praying, I gave a response...‘Tell the deacons no. God has called me to teach ladies.’...The ladies’ response was also negative.” Nevertheless, “After praying fervently we concluded that this request was really God’s will for us.”
For some church types, this historical documentation may be annoying or embarrassing by now. In other congregations the battle is still raging. As a non-churchgoing Bible Christian, all I can say is that when I hear either that the men are trying to forbid women to do any particular job in a church, or that the women are demanding the “right” to do it, I think a lot of people need to spend more time reading the New Testament before they have any insights to share. Neither side of the dispute has ever seemed either justified or sanctified to me.
When people seriously want to practice a religion, rather than quarrelling about man-made rules, I suspect we find situations more like the one Christenson describes, where those who have been doing a job ask whether the others want to do it to and the others hesitate to attempt it. So I’m motivated to read on about the rules Christenson’s prayer group adopted. They kept the most troubled or talkative members from distracting the group with personal concerns (or gossip) by sticking to a prearranged theme for prayer. They reminded themselves to keep prayers short, simple, and specific. They took time for silence. They kept groups small.
Since it was first published in English and was a bestseller in English, I don't recommend this one to second-year Spanish students looking for a book to translate. I recommend it to bilingual church groups, for whom side-by-side bilingual reading can help everyone improve their fluency in both languages.
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