On paper the gendered discourse of Southern Seminary stands in opposition at the other end of the field from Asbury Seminary. Asbury knows this and stands in opposition to the common forms of complementarianism in the evangelical world today.
Discourse does not always match realities, as her study will eventually reveal.
Lisa Weaver Swartz, in her exceptional new book, Stained Glass Ceilings: How Evangelicals Do Gender and Practice Power, examines Asbury Seminary’s approach works an evangelical egalitarianism rooted over and over in the Bible. She finds two discourses at Asbury: the Equality Story and the Difference Story, but a Mission Metanarrative overwhelms both.
To make for a thicker description, she examines Asbury’s “public genderblind equality” along with a “privatized difference.” At work in Asbury’s discourse is a distinctive individualism that counters stronger forms of collectivism (women as women).
Public Genderblindness
Most Asbury students support women in ministry, which means pastoring and preaching and professoring. I’d like to know what percentage of students attend a church with a woman pastor, a church that permits women to preach, and how many of its women students become pastors and then eventually senior pastors.
Asbury’s Equality Story forms into a multiphasic, complicated reality. Genesis 1-3 looms over her interviews, and students believe that text presents an original equality rooted in the image of God that was distorted into battles for control by the sin of Adam and Eve. The origins were a “nonhierarchical unity.” The Bible’s narrative is unity, disunity, redemptive unity and final unity. Men have a dominating compulsion according to at least one student, but that compulsion came from the fall not creation. The original creation was equality and unity.
Weaver Swartz discovers that at Asbury there’s a push against gendered constructions of theology, gospel, and discipleship. Individualism is what she perceives to be the cultural frame. Personhood matters; individual piety matters; individual gifting matters. Instead of a gendered discourse Asbury students “subordinate” the collective to the individual while they seek to become unified in Christ in their individual giftedness.
Thus, Asbury wants to ask not Should we have women as pastors? so much as Is this person, regardless of gender, gifted for pastoring?
The attempt then is to transcend gender into genderblindness.
A second theme is Reading the Bible in Context, and here she appeals to the well-known works of Craig Keener and Ben Witherington III (BW3). When the Bible is read in context, gender domination narratives can be conquered by what the text actually meant. Thus, Paul actually fought misogyny and subordinations. She found the men fighting for context in a battle for the best interpretation while the women discovered context liberating them to be who God made them to be.
Weaver Swartz observes a few times that Asbury’s contextual sensitivity did not engage contemporary contextualities as it could. Are the current church assignments of women and men culturally conditioned? That sort of question was not prominent among the students she interviewed.
A third theme is the need to maintain genderblind unity because not all are on board with the genderblind frame at Asbury, where a minority of complementarians study. She also points to Sue Russell’s important work that presses very hard against the collective theory of understanding relations of genders in the church. Russell is wary of the category of gendering women because it permits a much easier dismissal of women. She presses then for individualism at some level. What matters is our identity in Christ. Language matters and not all at Asbury have mastered the art of egalitarian rhetoric. (I have not read Russell’s book.)
A fourth theme I found very interesting because it diverges from Northern Seminary’s egalitarian frame. Asbury students expressed considerable disagreement and hesitations with feminism. Many consider feminism extreme and divisive and too gendered in discourse and aim.
Here anticollectivism comes to the fore with a push for a more individualistic frame.
Feminism, Weaver Swartz discovers, mitigates their individualist approach, it fosters disunity at times, and it finds the activism as disruptive to the church – men, women, and those who wanted nuance in feminism all had troubles with feminism. Thus, Asbury’s genderblind unity “precludes egalitarian activism.” Which means it struggles with structural or systemic analysis and solutions.
Genderblind is no more possible than colorblind or ethno-blindness.
She discovers the work of Christine Pohl as an outlier in some ways: Pohl thinks the church and Christian institutions are inhabited and shaped by male perspectives and experiences. Pohl’s right.
So, how does Asbury resolve those systemic issues? That’s a takeaway question for me that I will be looking for as the book moves forward.
Next Substack: “Private Gendered Difference” or the Difference Story.
Since their development in the 1950s, a plethora of feminisms have vied for ascendancy as the best books (older now!) tell the story of the range from radical feminisms to "Christian" feminisms. In evangelical circles, it may be best not to use the term [Feminism] because it usually evokes fear or anger, depending on who is using it (GRIN). Greg Wack is on target in his comment; the bigger story MUST be about men and women being sent out to work together. Period. Amen. Amen.
This is such a valuable, and far reaching, story you’re dispatching to us, Scot!
The seminal story of the struggle for equality - gender. Today, it includes so much more than female- male equality! We haven’t learned too much from it, ever, so we keep repeating it over and over and over! We keep looking for evil “fruit” and who’s to blame, rather than the bigger story of being sent out to work it out together.! The proof could be in the pudding. But, it’s more likely to be found in a nutritionally beneficial stew that benefits the whole body, rather than an unsatifiable craving.