Soon after Ike and I got engaged my dad presented us with two books: His Needs Her Needs, by Willard F. Harley, and The Five Love Languages, by Gary Chapman. I had already read parts of The Five Love Languages, so we decided to start with His Needs Her Needs (which we really enjoyed and I highly recommend!). Only last week did Ike and I crack open The Five Love Languages and read it cover to cover.

In case you’re unfamiliar with this classic book on marriage, it is founded on the premise that there are five primary ways to express and receive love from others: Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service, and Physical Touch. Although most of us like to show and receive love in all five “languages,” most individuals gravitate toward one in particular. For instance, my primary love language is words of affirmation, which means that I feel most loved when Ike affirms me verbally. It also means that I am most likely to show him love by affirming him.

However, your spouse is likely to have a different love language than you, so the key is to discover one another’s love languages and express love to them according to their own inclination. My husband, for example, is a big quality time guy, so as much as I praise him and affirm him it doesn’t mean quite as much as my time and attention.

I knew all of this prior to reading the book, but upon reading it this week I made an interesting realization: Before getting married, I had diagnosed my primary love language incorrectly. As I already mentioned, I had read parts of the book before and I was very familiar with the categories. My misdiagnosis had nothing to do with a misunderstanding of the terms. Instead, I had misunderstood myself.

You see, when I was dating Ike I felt very frustrated in the “physical touch” department. I had concluded, mistakenly, that my primary love language was physical touch because it felt like the most passionate expression of my love. It also came easiest. And so I felt incredibly frustrated. Since Ike and I were committed to keeping our relationship pure, there were certain lines we could not cross. As a result, I was discouraged that I could not express love to Ike in the way that, I thought, came most natural to me.

Two years later, I now see that physical touch is NOT my love language. Of course, one glance at my platonic friendships would have made this truth painfully clear. I am not a hugger. Hugging people does not come naturally to me. It’s a learned discipline that I have picked up over time because it’s such a wonderful expression of hospitality. But it’s not my comfort zone. I have also never been the girl who likes to braid other girls’ hair or sit real close to people. Don’t get me wrong, I love when Ike holds my hand and I love sitting close to him on the couch. But is it my primary love language? Definitely not.

It turns out that what I thought was an inclination toward physical touch was instead physical attraction. Lust, as you may have noticed, is not one of the five love languages, but it is easy to confuse with physical touch.

I share all of this as a piece of retrospective insight to my readers who are currently in dating relationships. Whether or not you gravitate towards the love language of physical touch, I hope you can avoid making the same mistake I did by confusing the emotional exhilaration of physical attraction with a studied understanding of love and communication, or an honest assessment of yourself.

In addition to that point, I want to close with a lesson my dad shared with me when he gave me the book. Not only did he find it helpful for his marriage with my mom, but he also felt that the five love languages are a reflection of the five ways Jesus loved others. Jesus spoke words of love and affirmation to his disciples; he spent quality time with his followers, eating with them and listening to their hearts; he served his disciples by washing their feet and ultimately dying for their sins; he presented his followers with the gift of his presence; and lastly, he touched the untouchables.

My dad was right. Jesus exemplified all five love languages, which means we are to do the same. It also means that while these five love languages are typically discussed within the context of romance, we should also love our neighbors and our enemies according to the breadth of these five, just as Christ did. For Christians who are single, dating or married, that is a wonderful challenge for us all!

Right now I’m in North Carolina for a very brief visit, and with all this running around I haven’t had much time to sit down and compose a blog. So in the spirit of my last post, I thought I would re-post an entry from 3 years ago when I fasted from gossip during Lent. I know that sounds weird, but I explain myself below. Maybe it will give you an idea!

Also, as an update to my last post, my husband decided to give up t.v. for Lent…which basically means I am giving up t.v. for Lent. Feel free to ask us how it’s going–accountability on these things is always a wonderful help!

I’ll be back on here when I return safely to Chicago!

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This morning I watched one of the most insightful and convicting commentaries on human behavior that I’ve seen in quite some time. And of all places, it was on the Rachael Ray Show.

I don’t normally watch Rachael Ray, but I saw a preview for this particular episode that hooked me right away. She interviewed four friends who decided to diet from gossiping. The way the diet worked was that they would abstain from gossiping for 7 days straight. BUT, if someone broke the diet then they all had to start over. At one point they made it all the way to midnight of Day 6, but someone broke the diet and they were back to square one.

Interestingly, the parameters of the diet were more strict than I would have expected. Not only were they to abstain from talking about people behind their backs, but they also had to avoid reading celebrity gossip magazines and websites. And while seven days doesn’t seem too difficult, it proved to be quite a challenge for these women.

As I followed the story of what the ladies learned during this experiment, I was dumbfounded by their insights. One woman noticed that she developed new ways to gossip without breaking the rules. For instance, instead of turning to her co-worker and saying, “Can you believe how ugly Alice’s sweater is???” she would instead point at the sweater and make funny faces, or she would laugh in a way that communicated her thoughts. No, she wasn’t outright gossiping, but she was still engaging in the spirit of gossip.

Another woman remarked that, in the course of the experiment, her co-workers decided that she was no longer fun to be around. What a telling commentary on the nature of her relationship with them! It certainly forced me to pause and ask myself if my friends would enjoy my company as much if I were to abstain from talking about others.

A third woman came to the wise conclusion that she could best succeed at the gossip diet if she avoided people who would tempt her to gossip. She realized that if she was even around people who were gossiping, she would crack under the pressure and give in, so she began to stay away from people that might pull her down. Again, quite a convicting word of truth–am I spending time with people who encourage me toward godliness, or do my friends and I simply feed off of one another in our slander of other people?

The final statement that really convicted me came from a woman who explained, “I understand that it’s wrong to gossip about your friends, but I don’t feel bad about celebrities because they’re not like real people.” Well Miss Rachael Ray jumped all over that statement and exposed it for its faulty logic. Not only are celebrities real people who get very hurt by the gossip about them, but gossiping about a celebrity is really no different than gossiping about a friend–you are tearing down a person who does not have the chance to defend themselves. That is the definition of gossip.

With all of that in mind, I have a challenge for you. In a week and a half we will be starting the season of Lent, a 40 day period in which many Christians decide to fast in preparation for the celebration of Easter. This year, I am going to fast from gossip.

To an extent, this is somewhat of an absurd fast, because we shouldn’t be gossiping in the first place–it’s not like fasting from chocolate or television. But even so, I want to set aside 40 days of intentional non-gossiping. I am going to ask my friends to hold me accountable in this, and I would encourage you to try it yourself.

And make no mistake, it’s going to be hard. Females in particular are masters at the art of subtle gossip–we can make it look like a prayer request, or that we have been victimized by another woman and we are turning to our friends for moral support, but in the end it is all just dirty gossip. As women of God, as members of the body of Christ, we should be sickened that we do this to one another–funny how it took me watching a cooking show to realize it.

Lately my husband and I have fallen into a bit of a bad habit. In fact, even as I write this post I’m engaged in the very act of it! We are sitting on the couch, next to each other, both on our laptops with the television on, not speaking. We are together, but we aren’t interacting with each other. And unfortunately this happens a lot. At the end of a long day we are both exhausted and barely up to the task of talking, so we opt for the low maintenance quality time of studying together or watching t.v. together  (although the “quality” aspect of it is rather questionable).

I think this is a pretty normal problem for couples, as well as friends. It is amazing how less intentional I became with friends after we moved in together. Rarely did we schedule meals to catch up and chat. We just assumed that, by the very nature of living together, we knew what was going on in one another’s lives.

The thing is, intimacy is not a passive activity. It’s not something that just happens on its own. In fact, it can require a lot of hard work, which means we’re likely to take the path of least resistance instead. Rather than put in the effort of getting to know someone, we either make no effort at all and spend our time on less demanding activities, or we find less demanding, superficial ways of bonding.

When I realize this has happened to a relationship in my life, I work toward re-centering it. Oftentimes, that means cutting out the activity that has distracted us from genuine closeness. For example, one of the ways that women bond with one another is through gossip. It may start out with the best of intentions–concern about a friend, perhaps–but it easily morphs into something dishonorable. Another way that women bond is through shopping together, which is not in itself wrong, but it can reinforce bad habits or encourage materialistic temptations.

In both cases, the strength of those friendships might benefit from an intentional pruning of the unhealthy behaviors. When it comes to shopping or talking about others, the women might consider taking a break. In the case of me and my husband, we might consider turning off the t.v. for awhile. In each of these scenarios, the relationships would benefit from a period of fasting from the habits that stifle their growth.

Fasting is perhaps one of the most unobserved Christian disciplines in all of Scripture. I suspect that one of the main reasons Christians brush off fasting is because we don’t understand it. It is difficult to discern any direct correlation between fasting and discipleship. Why would God ask us to abstain from something like food in order to seek Him? Is prayer not enough?

Given this confusion, I hope the above illustrations are a helpful way to conceive of fasting. Of course, there is more to fasting than intimacy with God–such as obedience–but one of the chief functions of fasting is to temporarily remove distractions from our lives in order to focus more intentionally on Him. Through fasting, we remove those low maintenance security blankets that have gradually morphed into God-supplanting idols. And food is a significant one. What else do we depend on more for our very existence? What sustains us more on a daily basis? Is there anything more basic than this most basic necessity?

Practically speaking, most of us depend more on food than on God. For that reason, fasting from food is a relational wake-up call. We might be following God but we are depending on food, and that mindset has an effect on our relationship with Him. So we fast, on occasion, to check our hearts and remove anything that has grown to a place of unhealthy standing between us and Him.

With all of this in mind, I encourage you to consider fasting during Lent this year. It begins in just over 2 weeks (Ash Wednesday is on March 9) and extends until Easter. It is a Christian tradition to fast during this season, but many believers observe the practice as an act of sheer willpower, a test of their personal discipline. They approach it the way someone might approach running a marathon, not growing in intimacy with the Lord.

To resist this pitfall, I encourage to spend the next 2 weeks searching your heart and studying your life. What stands between you and intimacy with God? What does your heart gravitate towards instead of doing the hard work of cultivating a relationship with Him? Once you have pinpointed an area that needs to be pruned, resolve to fast from it during Lent and choose an accountability partner in the process. Maybe the two of you can fast together! Ultimately, the challenge is not whether you can last the whole 40 days, but whether you are closer to the heart of God afterward.

And if you have any particularly creative ideas for observing Lent, please share them here! I’m still praying about how I will observe Lent this year, and I would love to hear from you.

In my last post I told you about an interview I had scheduled for this this week on the True Sisterhood Podcast. Today I want to fill you in on how it went! The podcast format is like a Christian, radio version of The View. The podcast features four women of different ages and gifts who get together each week to talk about issues relating to women. They invite a guest for each show, and I highly recommend you subscribe so that you can get in on the conversation. They talk about some very thought-provoking subjects, and each woman has a refreshingly unique perspective. I don’t even think I brought anything particularly special to the mix–these ladies were all so incredibly sharp!

If you click on the link above, it will take you to the main page and the audio from my interview is on the left. Let me know what you think!

One issue we wanted to discuss further but didn’t have time was the question of how our appearance affects others. I broached this topic some in my last post, but as I’ve thought about it further I believe there are three Scriptural teachings to consider when it comes to makeup, appearance, or even the shoes you buy, the food you eat and the movies you watch: Your love for God, your love for your neighbor, and your love for yourself.

Love for God

Makeup and other spiritual crutches can threaten our love for God when we depend on them more than Him. In the case of makeup, it’s striking how often women use the language of “confidence,” as if increased confidence is a healthy theological justification. While it is not wrong to like wearing makeup (it certainly can be fun!), we need to examine our hearts when it becomes the source of our security and social courage. Our confidence comes from the unshakable foundation of the love of Christ. Period.

Love for Neighbor

Makeup can also threaten our love for our neighbors when it is worn in a way that causes our sisters to stumble. This guideline should not, of course, lead to a kind of legalism in which all makeup is declared to be evil. The women around you are responsible for their own hearts as well. But knowing the degree to which women grapple with body image, we need to think carefully about how we are encouraging our sisters, rather than reinforcing their insecurities.

Love for Self

Given that Jesus tells us to love our neighbors “as ourselves,” healthy self-love is implied in his words. This means loving ourselves as God created us to be. Our self-acceptance is not contingent upon anything other than God’s sovereignty, trusting that He created just as we are for a reason.

As I close out this discussion of makeup and appearance, let me reiterate that makeup neither encourages nor hinders the above commands to love. It is all in how you use it. We should give sober consideration to the reality that makeup and beauty have been tremendously perverted in our culture, so let’s not be naive about it. But we are also free in Christ and there are numerous ways to celebrate our bodies. Whether we accent our favorite features through lip gloss or a green scarf that brings out our eyes, we should never feel ashamed to do so. As long as we are honestly loving God, loving others, and loving ourselves in the process.

About a month and a half ago I posted an entry called Taking Off Your Makeup, and this past week a version of it was re-posted on Christianity Today’s blog for women, Her.meneutics. Surprisingly, Christianity Today has a wider readership than my personal blog (please note sarcasm) and I received a lot of wonderful feedback as a result! For example, this week I will be interviewed on the True Sisterhood Podcast as a follow-up to my article (I’ll post more info on that later this week). My preparation for that interview leads me to the topic of today’s post.

As I reflected on the topic of the interview I decided to watch a documentary called America the Beautiful. I highly recommend this film if you have not seen it, although I should warn you that it does contain harsh language and sexual images. It is not a film for young girls. I do, however, want to watch it again with my husband so that we can talk through it together. The overall aim of the documentary is to expose the methods by which our culture objectifies women in ways that are emotionally and physically harmful. One of the chief questions raised by the film, in my opinion, concerns the true nature of beauty. To what extent is beauty culturally defined? And given that extent, how much are we really in control of it? We might claim that we enjoy makeup and fashion in a healthy way, but there’s a blurry line between personal desire and culturally imposed standards.

The film raises so many different issues that I can’t possibly discuss them all here, but there was one moment that really stood out to me. Near the end of the documentary, the filmmaker interviewed a married couple who had lost a daughter to bulimia. As they reflected on the steps that led to her eating disorder, the mother recalled, “I would have never complained about the way I look in front of my daughter had I known she was struggling with her own self-image. When you think about it, most young girls grow up believing their moms are beautiful. But when we complain about the way we look, we reshape their notions of beauty and pass on our insecurities to them since they probably have the same body as us.”

This statement hit me square between the eyes. First of all, it resonated with my own childhood. When I was a little girl, I thought my mom was the most beautiful women in the whole world. In fact, I distinctly remember thinking how lucky I was to have such a pretty mom, and feeling sorry for other kids whose moms weren’t as pretty as mine! I can only assume my children will have similar sentiments.

Given that assumption, I have spent the last 20 years instilling some dangerous habits in myself. I complain about my body a LOT to my husband. There are certain aspects of myself with which I am never satisfied. But never had I considered that I could pass those insecurities on to my children.

In the Old Testament we are reminded of the power of a person’s legacy. Exodus 20:5, 34:7, Numbers 14:18 and Deuteronomy 5:9 all warn about children being punished for the sins of their parents. Fortunately, Christ has received the punishment for our sins so we no longer live in fear of those passages. Even so, there is an element of them that nevertheless stands true. Our sins impact those around us. Especially those who look up to us.

Whether you are a mom or a mentor, your personal insecurities and vanities can have consequences for the women around you. Whether it is your daughter or a young woman in college who looks to you as an example of godliness, your actions speak louder than words. I am greatly humbled by that reality. My weaknesses and insecurities are great, and I tremble to think of the example I set when younger women witness their ugliness.

All of that to say, the fight against insecurity and poor body image is not simply about ourselves. It is about the women around us as well. When we stand before God we will not only have to account for how we treated the body He gave us, but we will also have to account for the ways in which we were a stumbling block to others. From this perspective, loving ourselves is intimately connected to loving others.

So as I close, I want to end with one final word to my readers. Every week I get on this blog and I write about the things that God is teaching me. However, I do not write as an expert but as a woman in process. Most of the time I am preaching to myself, praying for the mercy to live out the things I know to be true. My life is not an example of perfection but of redemption. I admit there are and will continue to be inconsistencies between what I teach and how I live. I confess that and I repent. I also pray for the grace to lessen that gap. Please know that my struggles are just like yours, and I apologize if I ever feed into your insecurities, rather than point you to the One who can lift you out of them. I am just a spiritual pauper pointing other women to the One who gives me food. Christ alone is our all in all, and I pray that my personal inadequacies never distract you from him.

Earlier this week I had a fascinating conversation with some friends about how much honesty is helpful in a dating or marriage relationship. For instance, how much should a dating couple share about their past experience? Or in a marriage, how much should a man divulge his sexual thought life to his wife? This is an extremely delicate question because there are two opposite yet dangerous errors that you can make in this area–sharing WAY too much and hurting someone more than is necessary, or sharing way too little and losing the element of trust and open communication in your relationship.

I shared with my friends that, when Ike and I were dating, we had a rule of full-disclosure about our past. We didn’t go into great detail about our past relationships because we didn’t want to create visuals that the other couldn’t forget, but we also wanted to know each other thoroughly.  I might not like the things that Ike did or the decisions he made, but I still want to know the path that led him to me. I want to understand the experiences that shaped who he is today. I also wanted him to know that I love him entirely and unconditionally, flaws and all. At times the conversations were intensely painful, but I’m glad we did it. The knowledge of his past doesn’t hurt me anymore, and I now trust him immensely.

For us, we were concerned about the danger of hiddenness and lies in our marriage. We promised each another that we would never lie to one another (except about surprise parties!) or intentionally hide anything that the other should know. If one of us gets a text message from an ex, even an innocent one, we tell the other. No matter how seemingly small or insignificant, we are careful not to dismiss such interactions with the excuse, “It doesn’t matter” or “He doesn’t need to know.” If we do, then that little white lie (or omission) becomes an entryway for deception to enter our marriage and damage its structural integrity. As you can tell, we take this VERY seriously. And we have enjoyed the fruits of that decision.

However, Ike and I also benefited from the fact that our “baggage” prior to our relationship was about the same. Neither one of us had more or less experience than the other. That made it a little bit easier to be honest with one another. But in relationships where one person has more baggage than the other (especially when it is significantly more), there is a new level of complication. The truth can almost be violent to the person with less baggage, and while that doesn’t mean that it is better left hidden, it does require a greater degree of mercy and calculated timing.

As I reflected on the above discussion with my friends, I decided to survey a number of colleagues who have been married longer than I have, and also serve as pastors at local churches. I compiled some GREAT advice that I am going to bear in mind for the future, so I thought I would share it with you now. As you think through the nature of honesty and truth-telling, here are some pointers to bear in mind:

+ Jesus dealt differently with different people. He did not speak truth to the woman caught in adultery in the same way he spoke truth to the Pharisees. That said, consider the person with whom you want to be honest. Do you have the kind of relationship in which they feel safe, and honesty is well-accepted? Will they be hurt by the truth and is there any way to prime the conversation in advance? Should you unload everything all at once, or gradually build up to it?

+ If you are too eager to tell a hard truth then you should probably wait. When you know that you are going to hurt someone with a truth, the telling should come from a place of godly sorrow, not harsh judgment.

+ Do not engage in honesty for the sake of honesty. One friend pointed out the danger of a culture that is all about “being real,” thereby leading people to share MUCH more than they should. With this in mind, remember that honesty is only a tool for love. Sometimes loving people means hurting them in the short-term by sharing difficult truth, but that does not make transparency a virtue unto itself. There are times when withholding information can be loving.

+ Don’t wait too long to share your past with your boyfriend or girlfriend. It only becomes more painful the longer you are together. One colleague recounted his early dating relationship with his now wife, sharing that he informed her of his past after just a few months of dating. Things were getting more serious but he didn’t want to proceed under false pretenses, so he explained that he had a rocky past and that he would be happy to share as much as she wanted to know. At that point in their relationship, it was early enough that she could receive the information without being devastated by it.

+ There is no true imbalance in baggage. Although people may come to a relationship with past baggage that is more hurtful than other types of baggage, the reality is that we are all broken people saved by grace. While it is important to understand how your past can injure the person you love, it is also important for the person with “less baggage” to work toward showing grace. Chances are the person with more baggage feels sick about it, but they are helpless to change the past. This is an opportunity to reflect God’s grace back to them. It is difficult and painful, but consider Matthew 18:21-35 (The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant) and work toward showing mercy and forgiveness.

+ Have an accountability partner for on-going struggles. While it is important for married couples to talk about their weaknesses, any sins that are particularly hurtful to one’s spouse need to be handled tactfully. Have a same-gender friend with whom you can share the gritty details, because it is not loving to share them with your spouse. He or she needs to be aware of it and know that you are taking the necessary steps to fight it, but anything beyond that is not merciful.

When it comes to honesty in relationships there is no formula. There is also no way to take away the pain of difficult truths. Sin results in brokenness, and that is the reality of the world we live in. That said, I will close with a passage of Scripture that is a helpful directive amidst the messiness of honest relationships: Ephesians 4:15-16

Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.

The verse is ultimately about spiritual maturity, and it reminds us that in order to cultivate a mature community of believers in which Christians relate to one another in edifying ways, there must exist a careful mixture of both truth and love. Truth can be conveyed in ways that are unloving, but love without truth is not really love.

This weekend my church had a guest preacher named Dr. Dan Allender, a psychologist, who spoke on the topic of intimacy. He preached out of Genesis 1-3 and raised an issue that I had NEVER before considered. In Genesis 3 we read about God’s curse upon Adam and Eve as a result of their sin, a curse that we continue to experience today. For women in particular, our plight is spelled out in verse 16:

To the woman he said,“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”

I’ve read this verse many times before, so none of it was news to me. That is, until Dr. Allender made the following comment in regard to the pain of childbearing. He said, “Women cannot avoid this curse simply by not having children.”

Dr. Allender’s words revealed a tremendous deficiency in my prior reading of the curse upon women. My assumption of its scope had been far too small. Whenever I considered the pain of childbearing, my mind immediately flashed forward to the delivery room where I would be in massive pain for a day, and then it would be over. End of story. The second part of the curse, I chalked up to the occasional difficulty in marriage.

But what if I hadn’t gotten married? And what if I can’t have biological children? Does that mean the curse doesn’t apply to me? Are only married women and mothers especially cursed?

Clearly not. The effects of the Fall are cosmic in nature–nothing is left untouched or unbroken. So when the Bible talks about the “curse,” it is not so much an arbitrarily designated punishment in two areas of a woman’s life, but instead a description of the all-encompassing brokenness of her life and relationships.

But how does the curse relate to women who aren’t married and don’t have children? Here, Dr. Allender pointed to the reality that women experience pain and hardship whenever they give birth to new relationships, whether it is a mother-child relationship, or simply a friendship. For women, relationships are both our greatest source of strength as well as our greatest source of agony. Broken relationships with parents, children, spouses, or trusted friends can wound us in ways that we almost never recover from. That is not to say that men are not wounded by their friends or family members, but when I look at my life in comparison with my husband’s, there is a thematic difference between the two of us. For me, the pain of wounded relationships has a recurring role.

Similarly, the broken male-female relationship described by the second part of the curse is not limited to marriage. It can play out in dating relationships, friendships, or even in families. Any time a woman looks to a man for wholeness in an idolatrous way, and any time a man dominates a woman in an oppressive or violent manner, it is a mark of the curse.

Why does this matter? Why bother harping on the curse? First, because it gives a name to the common turmoil of female relationships. From the time we were little girls, our relationships have been under the curse. Rather than feel isolated by or enslaved to those broken relationships, we can be empowered by the knowledge of our common condition.

But more importantly, the whole span of the Bible is the story of God’s undoing of the curse. And we are a part of that story. As daughters of God we are called to serve as agents of redemption in a world plagued by the curse of Genesis 3. Its reversal is ultimately accomplished by Christ, but we still get to be a part of the overturn. Our lives are signposts of hope directing people toward God’s good and perfect future. No matter our life circumstances we are all under the curse, but as Christians we are all part of its redemption as well. Our relationships may test us by targeting our greatest vulnerabilities, but they’re also the destination for our mission of hope in this world.

Yesterday I was fortunate to catch up with an old friend who serves as a pastor at my last church. He is thinking about creating a women’s ministry for the ladies in his congregation and he wanted to pick my brain about the process. I was SO excited to hear how the Holy Spirit is working in and through the women there–I really do love women’s ministry and it is especially encouraging when my brothers in Christ catch a vision for it too. However, in the course of our conversation I realized that he has been running up against an obstacle that is very common in evangelical churches today: the first woman problem.

At churches across the country there is a tremendous desire for strong, female teachers from whom the women of the church can learn and be challenged to grow. While Christian women want to hear from women who can encourage them with the wisdom that is born out of life experience, there is also a desire (particularly in younger generations) to study the deeper theological truths of the faith. And while it’s usually not too difficult to find women who would teach in in the former category, very few would volunteer to teach the latter.

When it comes to teaching Scripture in a way that is intellectually challenging, most Christian women don’t feel up to the job. And yet the popular demand for it persists.

That is the problem of the first woman. Churches will not have solid, female teachers if there is no system in place to train them and nurture them. Unfortunately there are few pre-existing female leaders to remedy that problem, and male pastors are often hesitant to mentor women. What results is a Catch-22 in which the church needs female teachers but has no female teachers to train them.

Given this predicament, there will have to be a “first woman” in every church who sets aside her insecurities and fears about inadequacy and blazes a trail for the women behind her. This will not only require courage, but it will also require initiative. Fortunately, we’re not starting from scratch. For those women who possess a seminary education, you are ahead of the game! God has provided you with the knowledge and the training to equip your sisters in Christ, so don’t be afraid to use it. Ask God how He intends to use your education for the edification of the Body, and then respond in obedience.

For the remaining 99% of Christian women who have not attended seminary or Bible college, don’t rule yourself out. Remember women like Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of evangelist Billy Graham, who never went to seminary but grew deep in the Word through her own personal study. Not everyone with the gift of teaching attends seminary, but God nevertheless calls you to exercise your gift in faith. If you suspect that teaching is a gift God has granted you, I challenge you to use it to serve God and His Church!

And for those of you who do not have the gift of teaching, or you do not feel called to women’s ministry, I would encourage you to affirm the women in your life who do. It is tough being the “first woman.” It can be lonely and the footing often feels unsure. Fears and temptations abound. Which is why these women need affirmation, prayer, and truth. Encourage them and reflect back to them the gifts that you see.

Before I close, I thought I would leave you with a few helpful websites that are great resources to female leaders and teachers. Although not all of these sites are explicitly leadership-oriented, many of them are theologically challenging and/or thought-provoking. You can find each one of these in my blogroll, but I thought I would highlight a few here:

Practical Theology for Women–Wendy Alsup wrote a book by the same name, and while she is the kind of women you can relate to she also writes in a way that pushes women to go to the next level. I really love the way she thinks and the way that she is not afraid to say difficult things.

Her.meneutics–This blog is a part of Christianity Today and the content is consistently excellent. The word “hermeneutics” means “interpretation,” and each post offers a Christian woman’s interpretation of varying cultural topics. It is a great example of how to engage relevant topics from Biblical perspective, a skill that EVERY woman needs to have in this day and age.

Gifted for Leadership–The blog also belongs to Christianity Today but it specifically addresses questions surrounding women and leadership.

Leading and Loving It–This is a very special site in that its resources for women are unique. It specifically targets pastor’s wives and women in ministry, offering encouraging blog posts, online e-conferences featuring influential Christian women, retreats, and virtual online communities. The virtual groups are especially neat because they connect women to one another from all over the country. It’s like having a small group in which every member is from a different city.

That’s just a start, but there are many other resources out there. If you think I need to add one to the list, just post it below!

When it comes to women and leadership, God is definitely on the move. In the coming years we are sure to see more books written by women on the topic of theology, and there will be an increasing number of outlets for women who have leadership and teaching gifts and want to hone them. We are in a period of transition right now, which can often feel clumsy and difficult, but we also have great reason to rejoice in what is to come!