Pulpit Fiction: The Women They Renamed, Silenced, and Forgot

Women in church leadership is not a new idea; it's a biblical one. The record is full of women leading, prophesying, teaching, and apostling. The church just worked very hard to make you forget them.

In this episode, we go directly into the text: Deborah, judge and military commander. Huldah, the prophet, the king sent his priests to. Junia, the apostle whose name was changed to erase her. Phoebe, the minister, and leader Paul celebrated. Mary, whose Magnificat is not a lullaby, it's a liberation text.

We also address the passages used to silence women, 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2, and read them in their full context. We take on the teaching vs. preaching distinction, the complementarianism vs. egalitarianism debate, and the theological architecture of patriarchy from Genesis to Galatians.

And we ask: what has the church lost by silencing women's voices? We spend time with Pauli Murray, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells, women who prophesied to the church even when it wouldn't let them in the door.

This is a longer episode. Theologically heavy. Worth every minute.

This episode covers:

• The biblical record of women as leaders, prophets, apostles, and theologians
• 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2 in full context
• The teaching vs. preaching distinction, where it came from, and why it doesn't hold
• Patriarchy as a consequence of the fall, not God's design
• The cost of silencing women theologically, pastorally, and prophetically
• Pauli Murray, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, and Fannie Lou Hamer
• What Re-Imagining the church looks like when women lead

Episodes referenced: Ep. 17 (Mary Magdalene), Ep. 10 (Fannie Lou Hamer), Ep. 4 (Black theology), Ep. 6 (White Christian nationalism)

For women who stayed small and called it faithfulness : a reading list to start finding your way back. Get it here!

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Here’s to a faith that tells the truth, refuses silence in the face of harm, and follows Jesus all the way into healing and justice.

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Transcript

Pulpit Fiction: The Women They Renamed, Silenced, and Forgot

Deborah. Huldah. Junia. Phoebe. Mary. If the Bible is this full of women leading, prophesying, and teaching, why has the church worked so hard to make you forget them?

OPEN

Hey friend, welcome to another week of Jesus, Justice + Mercy. Today’s episode is a challenging one, especially if you grew up in a church that silenced women. And it’s something I am still deconstructing, despite my disdain for the overuse of that word. 

Today, we're going into the biblical text to meet the women who were always there, sitting with the ones who prophesied throughout history, anyway, and into the present, and then asking together what it looks like to Re-Imagine a church where women aren't just tolerated. Where they are celebrated.

One heads-up: this one is theologically heavier than most, and honestly, probably emotionally heavier too. I'm still working through some of this myself, so we're going to walk it together.

You might know I went to seminary in my fifties. And I remember sitting in my first theology classes thinking, what language is this? Why does everyone speak in these terms like I was supposed to already know them? Nobody handed me a decoder ring at the door.

So here's yours. I'll put more detail in the show notes, but these are the terms you're going to hear today:

Complementarianism. Men and women are equal in worth before God, but have different God-ordained roles, men lead, women submit. In the home and in the church. It's the framework behind the idea that women shouldn't preach or hold authority over men.

Egalitarianism. Men and women are equal in worth and in function. Gender doesn't determine calling or capacity for leadership. 

Hermeneutics. Biblical interpretation. The principles and methods we use to understand what scripture means. Everyone has a hermeneutic. The question is whether it's conscious and consistent, or invisible and selective.

Patriarchy. Not just "men in charge." But a system that is structural, institutional, often dressed as God’s ordained and immovable design. Male authority is assumed, built in, given all the weight of Scripture. 

Exegesis versus eisegesis. Exegesis draws meaning out of the text, letting scripture speak on its own terms. Eisegesis reads meaning into the text; you've already reached your conclusion, and you're finding verses to support it. A lot of what's been done with the silencing passages is eisegesis. 

Okay. You have your decoder ring at least for today. 

Before We Get to the Record, Let's Talk About the Passages

Before I walk you through the biblical record of women as leaders, prophets, and apostles. I want to stop and address the passages that have been used to shut down this conversation before it even starts. Because I know some of you are already holding them tightly. You were raised on them. You've heard them cited as the final word, and they still ring loudly in our heads.

There are two specific passages that have been read without context. Applied without care. And they have done enormous damage.

So let's just go there.

I Cor. 14:34-35

"Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak."

I know that verse. I grew up with that verse. And if you did too, here's what I want you to notice: three chapters earlier, in the same letter, Paul is giving instructions for women praying and prophesying out loud in the gathered assembly. He doesn't tell them to stop. He tells them how to do it. He is managing a practice that is already happening.

So either Paul contradicts himself within the same letter, or chapter 14 is addressing something more specific. Most scholars think it's the latter. Men and women sat separately in ancient assemblies. Women may have been calling out questions across the room to their husbands. "Ask your husbands at home" fits that situation exactly.

There's also a question about whether these verses were even original to the letter; they appear in different locations in different ancient manuscripts, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes serious New Testament scholars, including Gordon Fee, raise their hands and say: Something's off here.

But here's the real question: if you believe Paul meant this as a universal prohibition, are you actually applying it that way? Is it consistent to silence women at the pulpit but let them lead worship, share testimonies, raise their hands in Bible study, and teach Sunday school? And while we're at it, 1 Corinthians 11:5, same letter, same author, says a woman who prays with her head uncovered dishonors her head. Are we applying that one? Because if we're taking chapter 14 as a universal command, chapter 11 is right there waiting.

The moment you start deciding which parts of this passage are culturally specific and which are timeless, you're doing the same interpretive work you're accusing others of doing. You just drew the line differently.

Second, 1 Timothy 2:11-12.

"I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet."

This one I want to slow down on, because it's doing a lot of work in a lot of churches, and it deserves a closer look than it usually gets.

Start with the word translated "authority." In Greek it's authentein. aw-then-TEH-oh And here's what's interesting: this word appears exactly once in the entire New Testament. Right here. Paul has a perfectly good word for authority, exousia ek-soo-SEE-ah, and he uses it constantly everywhere else. Authentein is something different. Scholars who have done the word-level research, Philip Payne, Cynthia Westfall, and others, argue it's describing something coercive or domineering, not simply the exercise of teaching or leadership. So "assume authority" is already an interpretive translation. Someone made a choice there.

Then there's the context. Timothy is in Ephesus, which was the center of the cult of Artemis, a powerful female deity. The church there was dealing with specific false teaching that women were apparently spreading. Paul is writing into a particular crisis, in a particular city, at a particular moment. Notice his language: "I do not permit." That's how Paul writes when he's addressing a specific situation. Compare it to how he writes about the gospel, about resurrection, about sin; the language is categorically different. One sounds like a local correction. The other sounds like the foundation of everything.

Right before the silence instruction, Paul says, "A woman should learn." In the first century, that was the radical statement. Women weren't supposed to receive theological education at all. Paul says let them learn. In quietness, meaning as a student, not yet as a teacher. That's a posture of formation. Not a permanent prohibition.

And here's the pattern worth naming before we go further: the church has been remarkably consistent about which verses it calls timeless and which it calls cultural. The ones that uphold male authority? Universal. The ones about head coverings, greeting each other with a holy kiss, and women braiding their hair? Cultural. That's not exegesis. That's eisegesis, and we defined that word earlier for exactly this reason.

Now, on to the teaching-preaching distinction.

I want to address something that is very real for a lot of us: the idea that women can teach women's Bible studies, lead Sunday school, disciple other women, but should not preach from the pulpit on Sunday morning to a mixed audience.

I understand why this position exists. But I want to ask: where does that actually come from?

Because it is not a biblical distinction. The New Testament doesn't have a category called "Sunday morning sermon from the pulpit." That is a modern church structure. The early church gathered in homes. There was no stage, no elevated platform, and no formal ordination required to speak.

When Apollos arrived in Ephesus and began preaching boldly, Priscilla and Aquila took him home and corrected his theology. Priscilla is named first. In the ancient world, that means she was the prominent one in the room.

When Phoebe carried Paul's letter to the Romans, she wasn't just a delivery service. Letter carriers in the ancient world read and interpreted what they brought. That was proclamation. That was what we would now call preaching.

The teaching-preaching distinction is a way of using women's gifts while denying their authority. If a woman can teach the Bible to adults, men and women, in a Sunday school classroom, she has authority. If she can lead a women's Bible study that shapes the theological formation of half the congregation, she has authority.

What the pulpit restriction really enforces is not a biblical principle. It is a visibility principle. Women can do the work, they just can't be seen doing it in the most public way. I want to name it for what it is: the same logic that has kept women's labor invisible across every sector of human life. Do the work. Just don't expect the recognition or the pay.

But the pulpit question is actually the symptom. Let's talk about the diagnosis.

Because beneath the argument about preaching is a whole theological architecture, one that says God designed a hierarchy. God over Christ. Christ over man. Man over woman. Husband over wife. And that this order is not a cultural artifact. It is the creation order. It is God's intention from the beginning.

I want to sit with that claim, because it is the load-bearing wall of most complementarian theology, and it deserves more than just dismissal.

The primary texts used to build this hierarchy are Ephesians 5 and 1 Corinthians 11. But here's what's almost always left out of that conversation.

Ephesians 5:22, "wives, submit to your husbands," does not exist in a vacuum. The verse immediately before it, verse 21, says: "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ." Mutual submission. To one another. The wives passage is not the beginning of a new argument. It is an application of a principle that cuts in every direction. The husband passage that follows calls men to love their wives the way Christ loved the church, which meant emptying himself, serving, and dying. That is not the posture of someone sitting at the top of a hierarchy. It's self-emptying love.

Then there's the hierarchy in 1 Corinthians 11: God, Christ, man, woman. Here's the theological problem with building gender hierarchy on that text: if you argue that the Father-Son relationship establishes male authority over women because Christ is subordinate to God, you have just articulated a position that the church condemned as heresy in the fourth century. It's called subordinationism. Orthodox Trinitarian theology holds that the Father and Son are coequal, coeternal, of one substance.

You can't use the Trinity to argue for gender hierarchy without undermining the Trinity itself.

But I want to go all the way back. Genesis 1.

"So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." Both of them. In the image of God. Both were given dominion over the earth. The text does not say man was given dominion and woman was given man. It says them.

Then Genesis 2, the one they use to argue women were made to be subordinate, because woman was created second and from man's rib. But the Hebrew word ezer, translated "helper," is used sixteen times in the Old Testament. Most of those times, it refers to God. "The Lord is my helper." Ezer is not a word of subordination. It's the word used for God. If it implies inferiority, we have a much bigger theological problem than the issue of women in leadership.

Now Genesis 3. After the fall. God speaks the consequences of sin into the broken world, pain in childbirth, toil in the ground, and then this: "your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."

He will rule over you.

That is not a prescription, it's a description. God is naming what sin does to human relationships. Patriarchy, the domination of women by men, was not God's design for creation. It is what the fall looks like in the realm of gender. It is a consequence of sin that Christ came to undo.

Galatians 3:28 is Paul's vision of what the new creation looks like: "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." This is not a statement about heaven. It is a statement about the community of the redeemed, what the church is supposed to be now. The barriers that sin erected, ethnic, economic, and gendered, are all broken down in Christ.

Which means a church that institutionalizes patriarchy, that builds hierarchy into its structure and calls it sacred, is not preserving God's creation order. It is preserving the fall. It is choosing the broken world over the new creation. And then calling it faithfulness.

This isn't a concession to feminism. It's not a cultural accommodation. It's the whole arc of scripture taken seriously. Creation. Fall. Redemption. New Creation. The direction of the biblical story is toward the restoration of what sin broke, including the relationship between men and women.

The pulpit question is a symptom. Patriarchy is the diagnosis. And the gospel, the actual gospel, is the cure.

Take some time with this. Ask yourself what you actually believe, and where that belief came from.

SEGMENT 1: The Biblical Record They Skipped

With all that, I want to go to the women in the text. Because the conversation about women in church leadership too often starts with Paul, specifically those verses that have been read in isolation, without context, for centuries.

So let's start where it rarely does. With one of the women.

Deborah.

Judges, chapters 4 and 5. Deborah is a judge, which in the ancient Israelite context means she is the highest civil and military authority in the land. She is also a prophet. People come to her under a palm tree to settle their disputes, and the text says this plainly in Judges 4:5. No hand-wringing. No apologies. No footnotes explaining why God had to make do with a woman because all the men were unavailable.

When Barak, the military commander, is called to lead Israel into battle, he says he won't go without Deborah. She goes. She calls the battle. Israel wins. And then in chapter 5, she and Barak sing a victory song together, and Deborah is called "a mother in Israel."

The text does not apologize for Deborah. Neither should we.

And she's not alone.

Huldah.

Second Kings, chapter 22. King Josiah has just found the Book of the Law in the Temple; essentially, they've rediscovered scripture, and he wants it interpreted. He wants to know what it means for the people. So he sends the high priest, along with a delegation, to get a word from God.

And he sends them to Huldah.

A woman prophet living in Jerusalem. She speaks the word of the Lord with authority, and that word becomes the foundation for one of the most significant religious reforms in Israelite history.

The king sent the priests to her.

Go back further. Miriam.

Exodus 15:20, Miriam is explicitly named a prophet. Nabi'ah Na-BEE-ah in Hebrew. After the crossing of the Red Sea, she leads the women in song and dance. She holds a timbrel, calls the people to worship, and leads them in it.

Let's stay with Miriam a little longer, because her story is complicated. In Numbers 12, Miriam and Aaron challenge Moses. They question his authority. And Miriam is struck with leprosy, but Aaron is not.

Her silencing is part of the story, too.

I'm not going to explain that away. But I am going to call it out: the pattern of women being punished for speaking, for leading, for questioning, that's not a new pattern. It didn't start with the Southern Baptist Convention. It goes all the way back. And the church should sit with what it has inherited.

That pattern of punishment for speaking shows up in unexpected places, including in how scripture itself has been handled.

Junia.

Romans 16:7. Paul writes, and this is the ESV: "Greet Andronicus and Junia, my kinsmen who were in prison with me. They are well known to the apostles." Some translations say "outstanding among the apostles."

Junia. A woman and an apostle. Named by Paul and celebrated.

For over a thousand years, no one questioned this. John Chrysostom, one of the most influential church fathers of the fourth century, praised her. In his Homily 31 on Romans 16:7, he said: "How great the wisdom of this woman must have been, that she was even deemed worthy of the title of apostle." (where)

And then, somewhere along the way, Junia became Junias. A male name. A name that does not appear anywhere in ancient Greek literature. Invented to make the apostle a man.

That's not translation. It's blatant erasure. And it wasn't until the late 20th century that scholars restored her name to most major translations. She was always there. They just kept changing the story.

She wasn't the only one they tried to minimize.

Priscilla.

Acts 18. Priscilla and her husband Aquila are significant figures in the early church. They travel with Paul, host a church in their home, and are instrumental in shaping the movement. Priscilla is named first in three of the six times she and Aquila appear in scripture. In the ancient world, you named the more prominent person first. She wasn't the footnote. She was the point.

When Apollos, a gifted preacher who doesn't yet have the full story, comes to Ephesus, it is Priscilla and Aquila who take him aside and explain to him the way of God more accurately. (Acts 18:26) She taught him. She corrected his theology and made him a better preacher.

Then, Phoebe.

Romans 16:1-2. Paul calls Phoebe diakonos, dee-AH-ko-nos the same Greek word translated as "deacon" everywhere it applies to men. In older translations, when it applies to Phoebe, it becomes "servant." That's not a translation choice. That's a theological decision dressed up as a translation choice.

Paul also calls her prostatis, pros-tat'-is patron, protector, leader. A term of authority and standing in the Greco-Roman world. She delivered Paul's letter to the Romans. That means she carried it, read it, and almost certainly interpreted and explained it to the congregation.

Phoebe was a minister and a leader. The text says so.

And I haven't even gotten to Lydia, Ruth, Rahab, Esther, or the woman at the well. The list does not end here. It never did.

But I want to stay with one more. Mary.

We talk about the Magnificat as if it were a gentle little prayer a teenage girl prayed before the baby came. We put it on Christmas cards and set it to soft music.

But read it again.

"He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty." Luke 1:52-53

That is not a lullaby, it's a liberation text. It is a young woman, who was unmarried, poor, Palestinian, under occupation, declaring that the world is about to be turned upside down. That the God of Israel is on the side of the lowly. And that the powerful should be very concerned.

The Magnificat is a song rooted in the Hebrew tradition of women's victory hymns. Miriam sings at the sea, Deborah sings after the battle, and Hannah sings at the birth of Samuel. Mary is standing in a long line of women who open their mouths and declare what God is doing in the world. She knows the tradition.

This is a theology of reversal. The current order is not God's order. And it comes from a teenage girl in an occupied territory who has just been told she is carrying the son of God into the world.

The church has spent centuries turning the Magnificat into something soft and liturgical so we don't notice the edges.

But Mary wasn't softening anything. She was doing theology. Hard, structural, and liberatory theology. Before Jesus took his first breath.

If the church let women preach the Magnificat the way Mary lived it, we would look very different. The biblical record is clear about women as leaders, prophets, teachers, apostles, and theologians. The ambiguity has been manufactured. Full stop.

So, here's what I want you to hold: every time the church has silenced a woman's voice, something has been lost. Not just for the woman but for the whole body.

Think about what we lose theologically. When half of the image of God is muted, the church's understanding of who God is shrinks. Women's experiences of God, of suffering, of resilience, of the body, of birth and loss and survival, these are not peripheral to theology. They are theology. And when they are excluded from the conversation, what gets called "theology" is actually just one-half of a much fuller story.

Think about what we lose pastorally. When women can't lead, whole categories of human experience go unnamed and uncared for from the front. Women who have been abused and need to hear someone in authority name it. Mothers who are drowning and need a pastor who understands the particular weight of motherhood. Survivors who need someone who won't make them explain themselves before they can be believed. When the only voice at the front is male, those needs don't disappear. They just go unmet.

There's also a loss to the structure of the church itself. When you build a community around the principle that half its members cannot fully exercise their gifts, you have built a community that is, by design, incomplete. You have built limitations into the foundation. And then you wonder why the building keeps having structural problems.

First Corinthians 12 says it plainly: every part is essential, the parts that seem weaker are actually indispensable, there is no hierarchy of importance, only interdependence. The body suffers when any part is suppressed. That's not my reading. That's the text.

And that suppression does not land equally on everyone. Black women in predominantly white churches have often been doubly silenced, by gender and by race, expected to be grateful for access to spaces that were shaped without them in mind. The women who have done the most prophetic work, who have named the hardest truths, have been Black women working at the intersection of two sets of closed doors. There's actually a term for that: intersectionality.

And lastly, there's the prophetic loss, maybe the one that costs the most. The church has repeatedly silenced the very voices that were telling the truth. Women who named racism and abuse, who named the gap between what the church preached and what it practiced. They were sidelined, dismissed, and pushed out. And the church limped on without the correction it needed.

It goes all the way back. I discussed Mary Magdalene in Episode 17, the first witness to the resurrection. The apostle to the apostles. The one who ran to tell the others that Jesus was alive. And then for centuries, the church called her a prostitute. Made her story about her sin rather than about her witness. We buried the apostle under the scandal.

Ask yourself: What does the church become when the first person Jesus chose to send with the good news gets silenced?

Many of you know Beth Moore, her teaching, her humor, her self-deprecating Southern style. And her story is worth naming here, because this isn't just ancient history.

For decades, she was arguably the most prominent women's Bible teacher in evangelical Christianity. She sold millions of books, led Bible studies attended by millions of women, and was a beloved figure in Southern Baptist life. And she spent years, quietly, then not so quietly, raising concerns about what was happening to women in the SBC. About the abuse scandals. About the way women's voices were being used, their gifts, their labor, their money, without real authority or standing in return.

In 2021, she left. Publicly. She named what it cost her personally and spiritually, and what she believed it was costing the institution.

The SBC didn't correct course. They pushed out congregations that allowed women to lead. Every annual meeting is a battleground. The fracturing is ongoing.

What Beth Moore did was prophetic. She told the truth at significant personal cost. And the institution chose to lose her rather than hear her.

That is still happening. Right now. In churches across this country. And the church wonders why people are leaving.

But here's what the church couldn't stop, no matter how hard it tried: women kept prophesying anyway.

I've been building something on this podcast, figures throughout history who spoke truth even when the institution wouldn't let them in the door. For this episode, I want to bring a few of them into this specific conversation about women and the church.

Pauli Murray.

Pauli Murray is one of the most extraordinary figures in American religious and legal history, and most people couldn't pick her out of a lineup.

Murray was born in 1910 in Baltimore. She was Black, she was queer, though that language didn't fully exist yet in the way she might have used it. From very early on, she refused the terms other people set for her. She studied law at a time when Howard University was still resistant to women in its program. She wrote a term paper in 1944 arguing that Plessy v. Ferguson, the "separate but equal" precedent, should be overturned, not on the grounds that separate facilities were unequal in practice, but on the principle that they were inherently unequal. Thurgood Marshall read that paper, and it shaped the strategy that became Brown v. Board of Education.

She coined the term "Jane Crow" to name the specific double burden of being both Black and a woman, experiencing discrimination not just from white society but from within the civil rights movement, which was not always interested in centering the experiences of its women. She named that. To the men in the movement. At a cost.

And then, in her sixties, after a long legal and academic career, she felt called to ordained ministry. The Episcopal Church ordained women beginning in 1976. Pauli Murray was ordained in 1977, at 66 years old, and on the day of her first Eucharist, she celebrated in the same church where her grandmother, born into slavery, had been baptized.

She had been prophesying her whole life, to the legal system, to the civil rights movement, to the feminist movement, to the church. And the church finally caught up. But the prophecy was always there, with or without her collar.

Pauli Murray was naming the incomplete gospel decades before most people had language for it. And she wasn't alone. A generation earlier, Anna Julia Cooper was making the same argument from a different angle.

If Murray named the double burden, Cooper named the theological cost. Her 1892 book, A Voice from the South, opens with a striking image. She says the South is like a choir singing with one voice, the voice of the white man. And she says: the South has a voice. But only one note is heard.

She was writing about race. But she immediately extended the analysis to gender. She argued that you cannot speak for a group unless you hear from every member of it. That the Black man speaking for the Black community was doing the same thing the white man had always done, assuming his experience was the whole story.

She explicitly applied this to the church. She said the church could not speak the full gospel until it heard from its women. Not as a matter of fairness. As a matter of truth. Because the part of human experience that women carry, the particular suffering, the particular endurance, the particular encounter with God that comes from living as a woman in this world, that is part of the revelation. Leave it out, and you have a partial gospel.

Cooper earned her PhD from the Sorbonne in 1925, at the age of 65 or 67, her birth year is uncertain because she was born enslaved, and the records of enslaved people were not kept with care. She was the fourth African American woman to earn a doctorate in the United States.

She did not wait for the church to give her permission to think. She thought. She wrote. She taught. She shaped students who shaped the next generation. And she is finally, slowly, being recognized as the theological and intellectual figure she always was.

Cooper made the argument in writing. Ida B. Wells made it in the streets, or more precisely, in print, at personal risk to her life.

I've talked about Ida B. Wells before, and I will keep talking about her because her witness is limitless. She named lynching. She documented it, analyzed it, and published it at personal risk to her life. And when the white women of the suffrage movement told her to stand down, told her that bringing racial justice into the women's movement was going to make things complicated, she named that, too. She named the white supremacy inside the justice movement.

The church of her era could not contain her. She prophesied to it anyway, through the work of naming what was true.

What I find most powerful about Wells is that she understood that silence was a choice. That the church's failure to name lynching was not neutrality, it was complicity. She wrote that the only way to stop mob violence was to meet it with the same force of public exposure. That you had to say the true thing out loud, in print, on record, even when, especially when, the people who could stop it were pretending not to see it. This is the kind of courage I aspire to.

The church has a long history of calling that kind of naming "divisive." Of asking prophetic voices to soften, to wait, to consider the unity of the body. Ida B. Wells understood that unity built on silence is not unity. It's just a well-managed lie.

And then there's Fannie Lou Hamer, who you've already met in Episode 10, so I'll just say this: the tradition of women who testified at great cost, who stood up in rooms that wanted them to sit down and said "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired", that tradition is deep, and it is alive, and it runs straight through the history of the Black church and the women who have always been its backbone and its prophetic edge.

So what does Re-Imagining look like here?

It doesn't look like adding women to the existing structure and calling it progress. That's not reimagination, that's renovation. Sometimes, what needs to happen is not renovation. It's something altogether new.

It looks like asking: what does the church become when the full image of God gets to speak? When women's theological voices aren't a special category but the center of the conversation? When the womanist theologians, Renita Weems, Katie Cannon, Emilie Townes, and the scholars they trained are assigned in seminaries alongside the standard white male canon? When the women who've been holding churches together in the background are given the authority that matches their actual function?

It looks like liturgy that draws from the full breadth of women's theological writing, not as a diversity add-on but as the living tradition it is. Teresa of Ávila and Julian of Norwich. Jarena Lee, the first woman authorized to preach in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, who was told no and just kept preaching anyway, because the Spirit didn't check with the bishop before showing up. The tradition runs deep, and it runs wide, and it runs through women.

It looks like seminaries that train women without telling them, implicitly or explicitly, that their call has an asterisk. That their voice comes with conditions. That they will be asked to perform a kind of professional smallness in exchange for access to the credential.

It looks like Beth Moore continuing to teach, write, and do public theology, outside the institution that once confined her.

It looks like churches where women leading isn't the exception, it's the expected expression of a community that takes its own theology seriously.

And it looks like this podcast. It looks like the women who started seminary in their fifties because they couldn't not go. It looks like the consultants, coaches, facilitators, speakers, and writers who are doing theology in spaces that don't hand out titles, and who are doing it anyway, because the calling doesn't wait for permission.

I have spent a lot of my vocational life making myself smaller in order to be useful. Calibrating how much truth to tell in a given room. Choosing not to push certain conversations because I needed the relationship, or the contract, or the access. And I have watched other women do the same thing, women with extraordinary gifts and ferocious callings, pressing themselves into shapes that would fit through institutional doors.

I don't fully regret those calibrations. They were often wise. But I am in a different season now, and part of what Re-Imagining means for me personally is releasing the posture of asking permission. Not recklessly. Not without care for the people I'm in relationship with. But with the clarity that if God put something in me, the institution not having a category for it is the institution's problem, not mine.

I am finishing seminary. I am leading and teaching. I am on this microphone. I didn't wait for every door to open. I walked, albeit anxiously, through the ones that were cracked, built some new ones, and kept going.

If you are a woman listening to this who is sitting at the edge of something, a call, a conversation, a gift that keeps pressing on you, the record is clear. The women were always there. They were always preaching. The question was never whether you belong. The question is what you're going to do with the voice you already have.

Here's the reflection I want to leave you with:

Think about a woman in your life, or in history, or in scripture, whose voice shaped you. Whose teaching stayed with you.

Now ask yourself: what structures told her she was too much? And what did it cost her, you, and the community when she was silenced?

Then ask: what would it mean to build something where that doesn't happen?

That's the work. That's the re-imagination. And it doesn't stop here, because the women aren't the only ones the church has silenced, erased, and renamed. Next season, we're going somewhere harder. And sadly, it is still necessary. The Reckoning is coming into the history that the church has avoided, the theology of repair and restitution, and what faithfulness costs when racism isn't subtle anymore. Stay close.

Before we get there, May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and that conversation is personal for me and long overdue for the church. And then we close Season 3 together with our Pentecost finale. You don't want to miss the ending.

Also, something new is coming on Saturdays. Short, unscripted, thinking-out-loud theology. More soon.

If this episode stirred something in you, share it with someone who needs to hear that she was always supposed to preach. And if this podcast has meant something to you, a review helps more people find us.

I'll see you next week.