I didn’t grow up in the Church.
I was raised with the belief that I was to go to school and work hard to build a career. This notion was only reinforced when I attended an all-girls high school, where girls were taught robotics and STEM.
Where girls were taught that the world’s ceilings were the floors they’d not only walk across but continue to pave in the future.
Where girls were taught that being truthful, virtuous, and lovely was not mutually exclusive to being intelligent, fierce, and strong.
Rather than restrict, my gender only reinforced these understandings.
It was only once I was in the Church that I began experiencing marginalization for the first time and recognizing how other women are also marginalized.
People acted from the thought that women were lesser than men.
People acted from the thought that women were not to be as educated as men.
Too often, women’s roles are constructed and made ‘permissible’ by men.
Too often, women are viewed as reactive rather than proactive in the eyes of men.
Too often, men only salute women to the degree that is comfortable and beneficial to them.
The Book of Genesis shows us that humans are to work and to be in relationship with one another.
To live in a harmonious relationship with another involves men and women loving each other well.
To live in a harmonious relationship with one another involves each gender honoring one another and loving them the way God loves them, not associating them to sociopolitical roles or upholding them against a Scripture removed from its context.
Pondering what it means to love well and to honor, we ought to understand that segregating men and women through means such as, ‘women’s conferences’ and ‘women’s ministry’ while ‘men’s ministry’ remains synonymous to ‘ministry,’ is not a solution but only a perpetuation of the gap dividing gender equality.
We ought to continually seek God and seek to know God, and in doing so, truly understand that His Love is not one of division, but one of unity.
To the men who feel these matters are merely sweeping generalizations, take them up with your fellow men who perpetuate them. Have the courage to contribute to the change women have been making.
It’s time for men to be as courageous as God the Father commands all of humanity to be.
It’s time to have the courage to be uncomfortable.
It’s time to have the courage that women have had to have in this male-dominating society far too long.
Photo by Retha Ferguson.