Women in Leadership: What’s the Big Deal?

As a woman, I have consumed many different messages about what I can and can’t do and who I should and shouldn’t be in the context of church. The external voices of limitation have somehow found their way to becoming my inner doubts and self – talk. I can’t help but ponder the impact my environments have had on me.

As humans, we are products of our environment. I experienced the extreme of this concept as a support worker for a fostering foundation. I saw how a child’s behaviour is often a direct response to the environment they are or have been in. In a more subtle way, I can see this as a little girl learning what it meant to be feminine. The barbie dolls for birthdays, princess dress ups and endless cartoons about magical ponies or pink themed superheroes shaped my identity and assumptions around gender. Part of me wonders how factors of my environment up til this day have affected how much I have truly stepped into my feminine identity. How much of the way I act and present myself has been conformed to society’s norms or the lack of being exposed to another way of being?

This week we have celebrated international women’s day. In the lead up to this, I have reflected on the tension I have held in Christian contexts of both being female and feeling called to lead and preach. 

Growing up, one particular Christian context I was part of held a very conservative view of women. I was taught that men were to teach, preach, lead, and hold the power while women were to do household chores, submit to a man’s control, and play more of a background role. During my teen years, I was torn between this idea and the prompting of the Holy Spirit and other mentors in my life to rise up and explore different leadership opportunities.

When I came out of that conservative context, I expected to find a new sense of freedom to explore all God was calling me to be. However, though I wasn’t consuming these explicit messages, I was hit with an implicit hesitancy. I realised that although the context had changed, there were underlying systemic issues that influenced the way that women were and are perceived in church.

When I go to a church service and see another man preaching in a church led by yet another male pastor, how am I supposed to imagine myself in that position? When I continue to hear stories of women struggling to make it as pastors, how am I supposed to feel like I could be supported as one? And when God is only referred to with male pronouns, how am I supposed to see my feminine image in “Him”?!

The problem churches have is not the lack of women with the skills and potential for leadership, it is the environment in which these women are raised. As women in church, we learn to take on the hesitancy for leadership that is projected onto us. I believe that if we are to cultivate church as a more empowering space for women, we must both intentionally realign the culture around female stereotypes and expected roles, and reassign to women positions, power, and opportunities to speak. In 2020 Heather Ameye-Bevers created a report on women in leadership in Baptist Churches in New Zealand. The report shows that at the rate that Baptist Churches are heading, it would take 44 years till there is an even split between men and women pastors. The same report showed that 29% of Baptist elders in 2020 were female and of senior/sole pastors only 10% were female!

More and more women are beginning to come through pastoral training, social media has developed conversations that show a move away from traditional ideas about women, and society has begun to encourage women to express and explore their feminine identity. Will the church be able to expand and adapt to accommodate for a generation of ready and willing women?

The idea of being able to expand to accommodate reminds me of how wineskins used to be used. My understanding of them is that they were used essentially as a container for wine. New wine, which expanded, was placed in new wineskins which would grow with the wine. Old wineskins had already reached their capacity to grow and could not accommodate the expansion that new wine brought. The growth would simply cause them to burst. 

Jesus used wineskins to describe a traditional way of thinking about the old and new covenant. I think this can also be applied to traditional ideas about a women’s role in church, as the old wineskin, and the freedom and empowerment Jesus has bestowed upon women, as the new wineskin. If we invite women to preach and lead without changing the environment, we are essentially pouring new wine into old wineskins – something will burst! I believe, as churches in Aotearoa New Zealand, we need new wine skins. We have so many beautiful, powerful female voices that are ready to be heard and to lead in our churches, but we seem to hang on to the old wineskins; to the hesitation and discomfort of shaking things up. The door appears open and yet there is still no room.

I believe that in the realigning of church culture and the reassigning of roles, we may just form wineskins that grow with our women. We have the potential to create an empowering environment for women to rise into a new realm of their identity.

The exciting part about the concept of being products of our environment is that if we change the environment, we have the ability to change what is produced. As a church, we create an environment for women. What kind of environment are you creating?

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Grace Doak is a student at Carey Baptist College - Te Kareti Iriiri o Carey.