Preaching With Impressive Women

As regular readers know I took a stand in my local church to not participate in any activity where women were excluded. This mainly involves preaching. I wanted to update you on how all this was going and share some happy stories in this regard.

First, women can teach at my church. It's one of the great blessings in my life that Jana and I co-teach our adult bible class at church. Some weeks I teach. Some weeks Jana teaches. And we both love talking to each other and bouncing ideas off each other about what we might say. Jana and I teach differently, but she's my equal intellectually. And I think the class enjoys the mix of styles. And whenever Jana teaches the class she gets tons of positive feedback from the men in the class. In fact, I'd say she gets most of her positive feedback from the men. Even though she wears huge flowers in her hair. (Wearing flowers is sort of Jana's trademark. In fact, it has become a verb around here. To "Jana-Beck-It" is to add a flower to your hair or wardrobe.) The point being, Jana's pretty "girly," but she's razor sharp and hilarious. And she blesses both men and women with her teaching, flowers and all.

Regular readers also know that I preach from time to time on Wednesday nights at Freedom Fellowship, a church plant of Highland that reaches out to the poor and homeless. Women can preach at Freedom. So the last time they asked me to preach I asked if Jana could join me. For a few weeks I preached and then Jana preached and then, on the last week, we preached together. I didn't really think about it at the time, but that was the first time we ever preached together.

And it was amazing. Well, Jana was amazing. If you asked me, Jana Beck might be the best preacher in the Churches of Christ. She's an undiscovered talent. The plan was for Jana to go first and then for me to follow. By the time I got up the whole place was crying. She's that good.

It's nice to be at a church where that can happen.

But women still can't preach on Sunday mornings which means I'm still not preaching on Sunday mornings. And yet, I was on stage for a conversation a few Sundays ago.

Jonathan, our preaching minister, who is also a dear friend (and a great blogger), asked me to participate in a sermon series he was doing entitled Sequels: Love After First Sight about love, romance, singleness, marriage, sex and relationships.

(BTW, if you'd like to see the Becks--and one of Jana's flowers--we participated in a video for this series. The topic was "first kiss." You can see Jana, a flower and I--along with two other lovely older couples from our church--here.)

Now Jonathan and I have talked a lot about my decision to not preach, and he's been gracious, kind, and respectful about my decision. But Jonathan suggested that there might be a way for me to still participate. Specifically, Jonathan was having my good friend Sally Gary participating in the sermon the week before I was to go. Sally, author of the new book Loves God, Like Girls, is the founder and director of CenterPeace, an organization that facilitates conversation in the Churches of Christ about same-sex attraction.

So the week before I participated Sally and Jonathan had their conversation. They sat in chairs onstage and talked to the church, back and forth. The following week I did the exact same thing. Sally talked about same-sex attraction and the idolatry of sexuality and I talked about gender roles.

All in all, Jonathan was very gracious in working with me, making sure a woman went before me so that I could keep to my commitment and promise.

And incidentally, I think Sally's presentation with Jonathan was a real watershed moment at our church and for our denomination. Heading home after hearing Sally that Sunday morning, Brenden, my 16-year-old son, turned to Jana in the parking lot and said, "That sermon was impressive. Sally Gary is awesome."

Yes, son, yes she is.

And so is your mother.

And so are thousands and thousands of women in our churches.