To be a team requires at least two things: unity in purpose and commitment to a group dynamic. In other words, it doesn’t mean team if individuals merely work on the same staff as independent contractors who oversee separate domains.
We know, as followers of Christ, that biblically we are all members of one body. We are not to be isolated or in competition with each other. On the contrary, the apostle Paul plainly says that “there should be no division” in the body (1 Cor. 12:25). Instead there should be a striking unity in the body and on our ministry teams.
Regardless of one’s view of the role of women in ministry, virtually all Christians agree that ministry teams can be staffed with both males and females. Most of us agree that it’s God’s plan for men and women to serve him together corporately.
Let me offer some practical insights partly garnered from my own experience and partly gained from others. Three main attitudes—respect, humility, and love—are needed in every leader who wants to harvest the full blessing that a mixed gender team can bring.
Show some respect
Men love to be respected, and they hate to be disrespected, especially by a woman. Though women in the church already know this, they don’t always realize what showing respect to men entails. From a woman’s perspective, it isn’t necessarily disrespectful, for instance, to interrupt a man mid-sentence. Though to him it may appear that she simply cut him off—which is obviously disrespectful—to her she just got excited and overlapped his speech—which is perfectly acceptable, even affirming.
According to Deborah Tannen in You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, women typically talk simultaneously to each other. To them, doing so is natural, not rude. Women, therefore, may be less sensitive than men to how offensive interrupting can be.
I start with this example, not for the purpose of justifying women who interrupt, but simply to make the point that both men and women can be disrespectful to each other unintentionally.
Not all women approve of overlapping speech. But even those who do probably don’t interrupt as an intentional act of disrespect. The offense, more likely, goes unnoticed. But that’s exactly the point—disrespect is characterized by inattention to others.
The English word respect literally means to “look again.” It comes from the Latin spectare, “to look,” and the prefix re-, which means “again.” To respect someone is to notice them again instead of being focused on oneself. To respect is “to show esteem, deference, or honor.”
Some women in the church do feel esteemed; they see no reason for other women to complain. To be honest, I used to have that mindset myself. For me it was easy to measure things strictly by my own experience and not empathize with women who were struggling.
Back in college when I attended First Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, I was asked to be the teacher of five hundred college students. How was I to know that women in other settings were prohibited from serving as teachers of their peers? Later I learned that my mostly positive experiences were not representative of theirs.
It’s hard for people to flourish when they are disrespected, especially by team members. That explains, in part, why many women leaders prefer to work with men. When women disrespect women leaders, problems in the church multiply.
There is also a problem with men not respecting women. At the risk of being too blunt, I dare to say that the reason some pastors pay less respect to women is because that pastor has unresolved issues with his wife.
Some pastors are married to wives who feel threatened by women leaders in the church. As a result, those pastors may be afraid to respect women leaders, not because they fear women in ministry, but rather because they fear the wrath of their wives at home. Of course, the opposite can happen as well. Some pastors feel embarrassed because their wives have giftedness that appears to outshine their own.
Disrespect of women runs deep. If that were not the case, then why does it appear that the ultimate jeer against manhood is to call a man a woman? And why is it so laughable for men to think of having women role models?
Recently I asked a group of pastors to name the women in Scripture whom they pray to emulate. They laughed.
Following that, I said, “If women in Scripture, including the woman whom Jesus said should be remembered for anointing him, are not upheld as role models, then how can women today be lifted up as role models in the church? How can women today be taken seriously when they speak?”
I know very few women who feel listened to in staff meetings where men and women both are present. Almost every woman I know who serves in ministry with men feels she’s given too little space in group discussions.
Granted, some women tend to meander when they talk and thereby burden the group rather than stating their remarks more concisely. But what I’m talking about here is more subtle. Though Christian men routinely are polite to Christian women and sincerely wish them well, they put them in an awkward situation while working together.
On one hand, men want women to quickly get to the bottom line. On the other hand, they desire to hear the special insight women offer. If a pastor wants to access women’s insight, he has to let women talk freely. Pastors have to listen and engage the conversation with patience and expectancy alike.
Personally I’ve been listened to a lot. The lead pastor at New Song Church, where I serve, literally invites me to “interrogate” his ideas and give the best feedback I can. He’s not threatened by my input. On the contrary, he appreciates hearing what I, and other women, have to say.
For women in less welcoming environments, being sought out for critique simply doesn’t happen. In many settings, women struggle to be heard at all. In many settings, a woman who asserts herself by jumping into the conversation is likely to be labeled as “pushy.”
Here I want to acknowledge that some churches are way beyond having these issues. I can think of several I know in which women at every level feel esteemed.
But overall, I can think of far more in which women feel disrespected.
To clarify, I’m not talking primarily about women who want to be senior pastors feeling disrespected. I’m talking about women who work as lawyers in society or mothers who stay home to raise their kids.
This fall I got a letter from some stay-at-home mothers in Texas who wrote to let me know of their idea to write a book to all the un-esteemed mothers who feel totally invisible in the church. How can those women effectively communicate that they feel disrespected?
More generally, how can women say to men that their desire to be respected is really no different from a man’s?
With regard to church ministry teams, what does it mean for male ministers to pay respect to females? Here’s a short list of suggestions:
1. Give women leaders the benefit of the doubt. Trust that they’re on board with the church’s mission statement. Trust that God has called them to be members of the ministry team.
2. Coach the women. Invest in the women on staff by providing opportunities for them to develop their giftedness.
3. Talk up, not down, to women. Ask two or three trusted women to draw it to your attention if you ever unintentionally sound patronizing.
4. Seek women’s input. Take it seriously without being defensive or dismissive.
5. Give women credit. Acknowledge female team members for their ideas and contributions.
Banish pride and prejudice
Humility is essential for mixed gender teams because pride is so destructive. Pride leads us to presume and prejudge one another. This in turn leads to issues of stereotyping, transference, and entitlement.
How many men and women feel offended by one another based on an unfair presumption? A man presumes, for instance, that a woman is against him—when really she is trying to help him. Or a woman presumes, for instance, that a man is avoiding her—when really he is busy with a task.
While both of these accusations sometimes truly fit the situation, many times presumptions are mistaken, and the truth does not come out because people fail to be humble enough to take the time to clarify team-splitting problems such as these.
Presumptions are akin to prejudice. To presume is to pre-judge, to decide you already know when, in fact, you haven’t heard all the facts.
Presumption can destroy church unity. It leads people to assign malicious motives to each other. The result, too often, can be stereotyping and transference.
To stereotype is to generalize, that is, to conclude that all people are like one person that you know of. Stereotyping tends to happen at the level of impressions rather than as clearly articulated thoughts.
It is not uncommon, for instance, for a woman to stereotype men as all being oppressive, based on a bad experience in the past. Conversely, it’s not unusual for a man to stereotype women as being weak and emotionally immature.
The issue of transference, by contrast, is more complex. Transference refers to the act of transferring onto another the unresolved issues that you have with someone else.
I can’t speak as a psychologist, but I have heard counselors say that men and women in the church transfer their issues frequently.
For example, if a male leader has a strained relationship with his mother, he may transfer his frustrations with her onto another woman in the church. Men who have either domineering mothers or especially frail mothers may see other women as being either too strong or too weak. For women serving on staff or in key volunteer posts, this can be particularly hurtful, especially if it causes the man to limit her unfairly.
Humility is the antidote to presumption and the defensiveness that drives it.
Humility is also the antidote to a sense of entitlement. How many women, for instance, feel utterly entitled to dress however they want? I have heard Christian women, even worship leaders, claim that they have “the right” to dress fashionably, even if the fashion is immodest.
Entitlement in this context is a form of human pride. To feel entitled is to feel as though you deserve to have certain privileges, regardless of anyone else.
However, not all women who dress immodestly have a prideful sense of entitlement about it. I’m convinced that most of them have no idea of how desperately men at church need women to dress modestly, especially during worship services. Part of the problem here—perhaps the bulk of the problem here—is that men and women lack the trust to participate in frank conversations about sexual temptation. Typically it is said that men should talk to men and women should talk to women, and that genders shouldn’t mix when dealing with our respective struggles.
Overall, I agree that it’s unwise for men and women to discuss sex in detail. But I believe it would be healing for followers of Christ to humble themselves to the point of making it a goal to help each other be sexually mature.
Since most sexual problems are heterosexual in nature, it makes sense to me that we need to work together—and pray together—to solve them. Yet many Christian leaders are taught not to be friends with the opposite sex, not to share meals with women.
It is notable that Jesus was friends with Mary and Martha. He shared meals with them and talked to them without sexualizing their friendship in the least. How many pastors have the spiritual formation to be friends with women and invite women leaders to sit at the table with them?
Certainly it is foolish for men and women to over-share. But if they can establish genuine friendships in the Lord, they can develop into becoming each other’s allies in the war against sin. Once men and women truly fight on the same team, all kinds of petty issues will dissolve, and big issues will be attacked by them jointly.
Love your brother—or sister
1 John 4:18 says, “Perfect love casts out fear.” If men and women will decide to put on an attitude of true love, we’ll no longer feel so threatened by one another.
To love means to believe in one another. It means for men to champion women and help them advance the Kingdom as much as they can. Likewise, it means for women to trust and respect the men instead of giving up on them.
On this point, the church lacks vision for this kind of church unity. One of the great blessings of my life is that I am very close to my brother. He and I even chose to live together in our twenties. In those younger years, both of us struggled against sexual temptation. The interesting thing is that we never had that struggle with each other. We couldn’t have that struggle because we were siblings, and that in our minds, made it a nonissue.
I believe it’s possible for Christian men and women to learn to regard each other as brothers and sisters. Siblings aren’t afraid of each other’s sexuality unless terrible violations are made. The same should be true of the church.
Christians shouldn’t be afraid of each other’s sexuality. Rather, we should be protective of one another. But how are we going to cultivate a sibling mentality?
I believe the answer is for church leaders to pray and cast vision. Pastors can pray for God to help them paint a picture and model it in the staff and ministry teams, of brotherly-sisterly love in Christ.
Sarah Sumner chairs the ministry department at Azusa Pacific University. Her new book is Men and Women in the Church.
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