Dare Mighty Things: Mapping the Challenges of Leadership for Christian Women - Softcover

Scott, Halee Gray

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0310514444 ISBN 13: 9780310514442

Publisher: Zondervan, 2014

Synopsis

The main challenges and strategies of success for

CHRISTIAN WOMEN LEADERS

Are you showing up for your own life? Or are you watching it slowly drain away, each moment emptied of its potential?

At age twenty, Halee Gray Scott was doing things her way when God challenged her with these two questions. Confronted with the brevity of human life, she determined to start living with purpose and passion and help others do the same. For the last seven years, Halee has been studying the lives of female Christian leaders to determine what keeps them from fully flourishing as people of influence. It’s not that Christian women cannot or do not want to lead; it’s that their way is fraught with roadblocks.

In Dare Mighty Things, Halee unpacks the results of her research, tackling the top challenges for Christian women, including:

• What prevents us from seeing ourselves as leaders
• How to discern what we are really, truly meant to do
• How to navigate between our roles as women and leaders
• How the myth that only “exceptional” Christian women can lead hurts all Christian women

Dare Mighty Things is a guidebook for women navigating the difficult waters of leadership. Packed with helpful advice and strategies for success, it will challenge you to claim your God-given potential and lead with confidence, poise, and grace.

About this title

About the Author

Halee Gray Scott, PhD, is an author and social researcher who focuses on issues related to leadership and spiritual formation and is the host of the syndicated radio show and podcast, Christian Curious. As the Creative Director of the Young Adult Initiative at Denver Seminary, she works with congregations as they seek to understand how to engage young adults in the 21st century. She is author of?Dare Mighty Things: Mapping the Challenges of Leadership for Christian Women. Her writing has also appeared in Christianity Today, The Washington Post, Christian Education Journal, Real Clear Religion, Relevant, Books and Culture, Outcomes, and Intervarsity’s The Well.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Dare Mighty Things

mapping the challenges of leadership for Christian women

By Halee Gray Scott

ZONDERVAN

Copyright © 2014 Halee Gray Scott
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-310-51444-2

Contents

Acknowledgments, 9, 
Introduction, 11, 
1. Terra Incognita: Charting New Territory for Christian Women, 19, 
2. What Is Leadership? What Leaders Do, 35, 
3. The Invisible Army: How God Is Using Christian Women, 53, 
4. Calling: What Is My Life For?, 71, 
5. Great Expectations: On Not Being Everything to Everyone, 89, 
6. Iron Ladies: Are You a Good Leader or a Good Woman?, 105, 
7. Superwomen: Exposing the Myth of the Exceptional Woman, 121, 
8. Brave New Women: Ministry by Christian Women, 139, 
9. Locked Doors and Detours: On Limited Opportunities, 157, 
10. Let's Talk about Sex: Building Healthy Cross-Gender Ministry Relationships, 175, 
11. The Audacity of Courage: Moving Forward through Fear, 193, 
12. Live Well, Love Well, Lead Well: Becoming a Leader of Virtue, 209, 
Conclusion: Act Boldly Now, 231, 
Notes, 235, 

CHAPTER 1

TERRA INCOGNITA

CHARTING NEW TERRITORY FOR CHRISTIAN WOMEN

To lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished notonly humanly but also spiritually.

—Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets

For as long as I can remember, I have been drawn to lonely places,to places long forgotten or places undiscovered. The badlands ofthe Texas Panhandle are the beginning of the American West. Mostpeople, from Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century to modern-daytravelers of US Route 66, thought of the Panhandle, an areasparsely vegetated with cacti, crooked honey mesquite, and junipertrees, as a land you just passed through.

Our family passed through it every year at Christmas as we madeour way from one set of grandparents to the other. Through the backwindow of my parents' Grand Marquis, I would peer out at the aridlandscape riddled with canyons filled with tall grasses, plums, andhackberries and long for another kind of life. I daydreamed aboutbeing a cowgirl exploring the Palo Duro Canyons on a palominoquarter horse.

Years later, while going to grad school, my husband and I lived ina parsonage on the edge of the San Gabriel Mountains in Glendora,California. Los Angeles County is the most populous county in thenation, but you would never know it from the top of Colby Trail.Despite a demanding schedule working three jobs in addition tofull-time PhD coursework, I still headed out my back door three orfour times a week to explore miles of often-isolated trails.

Still even more years later, I chiseled out my dissertation on theedge of another range of mountains—the Colorado Rockies. Locallore is filled with harrowing tales of expedition and discovery, butthe story that made the biggest impression on me was the story ofLewis and Clark, who passed through the Rocky Mountains nearLincoln, Montana.

When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark embarked on theirlegendary expedition in May of 1804, President Thomas Jeffersoncommissioned them to find a direct water route across the continentto facilitate commerce, and to discover and document theresources in the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase. In May 1804,the land stretching from North Dakota westward to the Pacific wasterra incognita—unknown territory.

The story of Lewis and Clark underscored something I hadbelieved from those early days sitting in the back seat of my parents'car: it is not that lonely places have no stories; it is that their storiesare still waiting to be told. I guess it is this same impulse to find theuntold stories that first stoked my interest in female Christian leaders.In the twenty-first century, we are inclined to think that thereare no unknown territories, no frontiers left uncharted. Yet whenwe seek to explore and explain the experiences of female Christianleaders, we are embarking, like Lewis and Clark, on a journey intoterra incognita.

Though there are women leading in almost every area of Christianministry, they are not that visible. We know very little about theirexperiences and the challenges they face. Because of this, Christianwomen are often either sidelined or their efforts are altogether derailed.

TALES FROM THE SIDELINES

Samantha was thirteen months old when her parents divorced. Herfather was never around or involved in her life, and her motherworked seventy hours a week to support Samantha and her threesiblings. For most of her life, Samantha felt that she had to figurethings out on her own. I met Samantha during her sophomore yearat Azusa Pacific University (APU), where I worked as an adjunctprofessor and reference librarian.

When you are nineteen years old and fresh out of your parents'home, it's easy to get caught up in the carefree college days and putoff making big decisions like which major to pursue or what careerGod may be calling you to. But Samantha did not waste any time.She double-majored in political science and history and workedpart-time at the library to pay the amount of her tuition that wasnot covered by her scholarship.

Samantha was thoughtful, disciplined, and desperate to make adifference in the world, but she was often frustrated by the lack ofthoughtful resources for Christian women. "I feel called to do somethingin ministry," she told me, "but I have no idea how to get there.When I go to a bookstore to look for guidance on how to developas a female Christian leader, I don't find any meaningful Christianresources to help me. I don't know any female Christian leaders inthe organizations I'd like to serve in."

Helen was a fellow professor at APU. One spring morning wetalked softly in the library, savoring the lull in activity that alwayscomes midsemester. The semester had been launched, lesson planswere written, and final exams were in the distant future. We talkedabout theology, about our students, about our stage fright whengiving lectures. But most of all, we talked about our futures. Bothof us had achieved significant accomplishments at a fairly early age:she had been the recipient of the only full scholarship that FullerTheological Seminary offers MDiv students, and I was a publishedwriter wrapping up the final semester of coursework for my PhD.

Both of us had been encouraged by mentors throughout our academiccareers, about our potential for contributing to the academiccommunity, about charting new territories for female Christianscholars. And we loved academia and the life of the mind. We neverthought—in all our years of learning and studying and teachingand writing—that anything, even our gender, would stand in ourway. Both the feminists and our fathers had taught us that we couldaccomplish anything we wanted to, that the world was ours for thetaking, that we were limited only by the things we chose not to do.

But on that March morning, we secretly admitted that we didnot feel the academic world was all we wanted out of life. We didnot just want to be Christian scholars and professors; we wanted tobe mothers. And we wondered how on earth two such demanding,seemingly opposing spheres of life could ever be reconciled andhow we could participate fully, incarnationally, in both worlds. Iremember the tension building as we spoke, our minds scramblingfor answers to what we thought were new questions. "The problem,"I said, "is that we have no maps." At the time, neither one ofus had appropriate role models to guide us; our mentors were eithermen or women with no children.

Sally was one of the best in the business. She knew how to getthings done and how to build relationships with potential donors.For years, she had been a happy stay-at-home mom to her three kids,until her husband lost his job and the financial house of cards cametumbling down. Sally got an entry-level job at a local nonprofitChristian ministry, and soon her quick mind for business catapultedher through the ranks of the organization.

When I met Sally, she was a senior vice president at a nonprofitChristian ministry, the only female vice president the company hadever had. For the most part, Sally loved her job, her staff, and herrelationships with donors, but she struggled in her relationship tothe president and the other vice presidents. As is the case with mostorganizations, a great deal of knowledge and information was sharedduring informal meetings, such as at lunch or during an afternoon ofgolf, but because she was female, she was often excluded from theseinformal get-togethers.

As a result, Sally found it impossible to get decisions made in herdivision. She cared about the quality of her work and the ministryher organization did, and she wanted to find out how to circumventthis issue. "I'm the only woman VP I know," Sally told me. "Howdo other women manage this?"

The stories of Samantha, Helen, and Sally illustrate the felt needthat Christian women have—to respond well to God's calling ontheir lives by exercising and stewarding their giftedness. But theyalso point to a certain degree of isolation and confusion about howto do so. Though there are women serving as leaders in most Christianorganizations, the stories of these women have been lost.

LOST WOMEN IN CHRISTIAN MINISTRY

It is not just contemporary stories of women that have been "lost."A quick review of published history texts reveals that women havedisappeared from the annals of church history as well. In their book,Daughters of the Church, Ruth Tucker and Walter Liefeld note thatthe role of women in religion "down through the ages has beenf lagrantly neglected, despite longstanding appeals to historians to dootherwise." Tucker and Liefeld wrote Daughters of the Church, whichtraces the contributions of Christian women throughout churchhistory, because they believed "separate volumes on women in thechurch are the only way of telling their story."

Tucker and Liefeld dive deeply into ancient texts to uncover andtell the stories of women in church history. But how do you tell thestories of Christian women serving in ministry today? One of thebest and most efficient ways we have for uncovering truth—fortelling the stories—in our time is research, which is the systematicinvestigation into a particular subject. Like the detective work ofSherlock Holmes or the best investigative reporting, research helpsus to explore, explain, and describe. From research we are able tounderstand reality and take action accordingly.

For example, throughout most of history, if you went to thedoctor for a headache, he most likely would have tried to alleviatethe pain by removing small amounts of your blood using vacuumcups, lancets, or leeches. Bloodletting was the most common medicalpractice throughout the world. It was such a common practicethat the Roman encyclopedist Aulus Cornelius Celsus wrote that"to let blood by incising a vein is no novelty; what is novel isthat there should be scarcely any malady in which blood may notbe let." Luckily, the research of a young scientist named LouisPasteur, by changing what was known, changed the practice ofmedicine. Bloodletting fell into disfavor with the emergence of thegerm theory of disease, which postulates that illness is caused bybacteria, not by an imbalance in bodily humors.

Research tells us what is, and from there we are able to makeinformed decisions and take appropriate actions in a given situation.It inoculates us against isolation and the futility of recreating thewheel or repeating the same mistakes because it shows us that othershave already been where we are. For female Christian leaders servingin ministry, the trouble is that there is hardly any research thatspeaks directly to their situation. This is one reason why Samanthafound it so difficult to find thoughtful Christian resources to helpher grow as a Christian leader.

In contrast, there is so much secular research about female leadersthat one can hardly get to the end of it. Since the early 1970s,at the height of the feminist movement, researchers the world overhave investigated whatever question or concern one could possiblyhave regarding women and leadership. We know the efficacy offemale leaders in a variety of contexts—from business to politics tolaw to the military to secular nonprofit humanitarian organizations.We know, roughly, the number of female leaders in a given context,how female leaders compare with men, the styles of leadership thatwomen adopt, how to expand opportunities for female leaders, thecommon challenges they face, and how these challenges are overcome.

We do not have the same information about Christian female leadersbecause Christian female leaders have rarely been subjects of seriousstudy. Even in a lightning-fast information age, female Christianleaders have escaped our notice largely because we do not have enoughof the right people asking enough of the right questions. The Associationof Theological Schools (ATS) is an organizing body of 253 seminariesand other graduate schools of theology. Thirty-five percent ofthese graduate schools are related to an undergraduate college or university.Though women earn more than half of both master's degreesand PhDs in the US overall, women in ATS-accredited schools compriseonly 34 percent of the student body and 22 percent of the faculty.Fewer women in these schools leads to fewer women examiningChristian leadership issues at the doctoral or faculty levels.

Of course, there are ways to learn about the stories of femaleChristian leaders apart from research, such as through networking,media, social media, and think-tank groups like the Barna Group,but the issue of female leaders is greatly complicated by the oftencontentious theological disagreement between complementariansand egalitarians on the nature of women's leadership.

A HOUSE DIVIDED

The bulk of the conversation about female Christian leaders is centeredfirmly on the theological debate between complementariansand egalitarians. The arguments of complementarians can be summarizedin three statements. First, complementarians believe thatwhile women are equal to men in value and status before God,men and women are designed for a complementary relationship, oneenhancing the role of the other. According to John Piper and WayneGrudem, men are to serve as the "head" or leader in the home andin the church, while women are to serve as helpers in submissiveassistance to men. Piper and Grudem further state, "Biblical headshipfor the husband is the divine calling to take primary responsibilityfor Christlike, servant-leadership, protection, and provision inthe home. Biblical submission for the wife is the divine calling tohonor and affirm her husband's leadership and help carry it throughaccording to her gifts."

Second, the fall disrupted God's original created design, introducinga host of issues within the relationship between the man andthe woman, including a desire on the part of the woman to "conqueror rule over, or else an urge or impulse ... to oppose her husband,an impulse to act against him, which would ultimately result in manruling over her not as one who leads among equals, but rather onewho rules by virtue of power and strength, and sometimes even rulesharshly and selfishly."

Third, through redemption in Christ, gender roles between theman and woman in marriage and in the church are properly restoredto what God created them to be and differentiated from one another.Man is instructed to exercise male headship and woman is instructedto graciously submit to the authority of her husband.

The complementarian argument for differentiation in genderroles is generally centered around six passages of Scripture, includingGenesis 1–3; 1 Corinthians 11:1–16; 1 Corinthians 14:33–36;1 Tim othy 2:8–15; Ephesians 5:21–33; and 1 Peter 3:7.In contrast to the positions articulated by complementarians, egalitariansbelieve that women are both equal to men in value and statusbefore God, as well as functionally equal to men. Women should havethe same opportunities for leadership as do men, without prohibitionsbarring them from official positions such as senior pastor.

The logical flow of the arguments by egalitarians can, like thecomplementarian arguments, be summarized in three statements.First, egalitarians believe that it is logically inconsistent to say that menand women are equal in essence or being, but not in function. RebeccaMerrill Groothuis writes, "The question of whether a being/functiondistinction is logically applicable to a defense of gender hierarchy is acrucial one, because this distinction is foundational to every traditionalistargument today. When traditionalists affirm in theory the essential,spiritual equality of women and men, but feel no obligation toadvocate the full practical ramifications of such equality, they invokeas their rationale the notion that women's subordination is only 'functional'and has nothing to do with her essential being." Both men andwomen are created in God's image (ontological equality), and both aregiven the task of stewarding the rest of creation (functional equality).

Second, egalitarians claim that the fall disrupted the equalitybetween men and women. Men and women were given dominion(i.e., stewardship) over the earth, and when Adam and Eve transgressedand used that dominion inappropriately, the punishmentinvolved a disruption in the relationship between the man and thewoman. Consequently, "her sociability was mixed with the problemof social enmeshment, which continues to hamper the properexercise of her dominion in the world at large," while the man'slegitimate dominion "became laced with the problems of domination—which has been interfering with his relationships—to God,to the creation, and to other people, including women, ever since."

Third, egalitarians maintain that through the life and teachingsof Jesus, as well as his atoning work through the cross, the effects ofthe fall have been reversed and equality has been restored. Into thepatriarchal society that had been inappropriately dominated by menthroughout history came a rabbi with a surprising view towardwomen—who openly taught women, encouraged their learning andgrowth, whose teachings included feminine perspectives at times, who"allowed women to be the first witnesses of his resurrection and awoman to proclaim that event to his male disciples."

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0310514444
• ISBN 13: 9780310514442
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256