Where This Leaves Us

Holding the Whole Bible, the Black Church, and an Honest Place to Land

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28 (NIV); see also Joel 2:28–29; Acts 2:17–18

So What Do You Want Me to Do With This

At the end of every long conversation, somebody finally asks the real question. Alright. So what do you actually want me to do with all this? It is a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer.

We have walked a long road together. We sat with the two verses that sound like a closed door, and we read them in the rooms where they were written. Then we went looking for the women God actually used, and we did not have to look hard. Deborah running the nation. Huldah vouching for the word of God. Miriam and Anna speaking for Him. Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb. Phoebe, Priscilla, and Junia in Paul’s own circle of coworkers.

So here at the end, let me be honest about where that leaves us, and where it leaves the people we love.

The Tension That Does Not Fully Go Away

I will tell you straight. Thoughtful Christians who love God and take the Bible seriously still land in different places on this, and I am not going to pretend that tension just disappears. People who hold the church office for men are not villains. They are reading the creation argument in First Timothy 2 and the qualifications for elders, and they are trying to be faithful to what they see on the page. I have given their case real room in this series on purpose, because a position you cannot state fairly is a position you do not really understand.

But you have read enough of me by now to know where I land. I believe the sweep of Scripture, from Deborah all the way to Junia, shows a God who calls and uses women, including as leaders and as voices for His own word. I believe the two hard verses were spoken into real situations and were never meant to be the whole story or a permanent muzzle. I am telling you my position plainly. I am also telling you I gave the other side a real hearing, because that is the only honest way to hold a conviction worth holding.

The Thing the Black Church Has to Face

And there is a piece of this the Black church in particular has to face, because it is our own contradiction. Walk into most any Black congregation and the women are carrying it. They teach the children. They run the ministries. They sing the church into the presence of God. They cook the meals, count the money, organize the funerals, and pray the whole thing through its darkest seasons. And in plenty of those same churches, the one thing a woman was told she could not do was stand behind that pulpit and preach.

A generation of Black women scholars has named that contradiction and refused to let the church look away. Renita Weems read the women of Scripture as real people with real callings, and she argued that Black women, who have spent centuries being used by institutions that did not fully honor them, bring the most honest lens to the biblical women who lived the same pattern.

Katie Cannon, the first Black woman ordained in her denomination, built a whole way of doing ethics out of the lives of Black women who kept their faith under impossible weight, arguing that the survival, dignity, and moral agency those women practiced under slavery and Jim Crow was itself a theological tradition the academy had never stopped to name.

Delores Williams went back to Hagar, the enslaved woman God met out in the wilderness, and found a God who sees the very ones everybody else used and threw away, making the case that Hagar's encounter with God was not incidental but a genuine divine commissioning, and that Hagar is the only person in the Bible who gives God a name.

Wilda Gafney went back through the Bible putting forgotten women back on the page, doing close work in the original Hebrew to recover women the tradition had mentioned once and then moved past, showing that what the text actually says about them is almost always richer than what our translations gave us. They gave this work a name. They call it womanist, a word the writer Alice Walker handed them, and it means reading faith and Scripture from the exact place Black women have always stood, a place the church spent far too long never bothering to ask about.

And there is real hope buried in this, so let me name it. The same AME Church that first told Jarena Lee no, that made her wait years just to be allowed to preach, went back in 2016 and ordained her, almost two hundred years after she had died. The church that shut the door reopened it. Richard Allen changed his mind in one room on one Sunday. A whole denomination changed its mind across two centuries. That is slow. It is far too slow. But it tells you the door was never nailed shut, and that people of conscience keep finding the nerve to push it back open.

That is why this series started with my own friend, an independent Black woman who began to open up to the church at a young age and got told to sit down. And with my mother, who came up believing a woman in the pulpit just did not sit right. Two women, one Bible, sitting right there in my own family. This whole series has been an attempt to put the whole book in front of both of them, and in front of you.

You do not have to land where I land. But you do have to read the whole book. A faith that only quotes the verses that keep certain people quiet is not the whole faith.

What This Means for Where You Are

So here is what I actually want you to do with all this. Not fall in line behind me. Read the whole book. All of it. The hard verses and the women God used both. Then take it to God yourself and do the honest work of deciding what you believe and why.

If you are the one who walked out of a church that told you to sit down, I hope you have seen by now that the God of this book is far bigger than the man who hurt you. He judged through Deborah, spoke through Huldah, and sent Mary Magdalene to proclaim the Resurrection before anyone else had the news. That God is not the one who shrank you. Do not let the smallest version of the church convince you it is the only version there is.

If you came up unsure about women in the pulpit and you are still unsure, that is alright too. You do not have to settle it all today. Just keep reading, keep the conversation open, and keep your heart soft enough to let the text stretch you. That is all any of us can do, and it is enough.

And if you are a woman reading this with something stirring in you, a pull you have been told to ignore, a sense that God keeps handing you His word to carry, hear me carefully. I do not get to decide your call, and I am not going to try. But I will tell you this much. The God of this book has put His word in the mouths of women before, on purpose, and called it good every time. Whatever you decide to do with that, do not let anybody talk you into believing God could not possibly be speaking to someone like you. He has done it before, more than once, and He was not embarrassed about it.

There is a verse worth sitting with as we close, the one at the top of this page. Paul, the same Paul we have wrestled with for two whole posts, wrote that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor male and female, because we are all one in Him (Galatians 3:28). People argue about exactly how far he meant it to reach, and that argument is fair. Some careful scholars, including serious complementarians, read this verse as speaking to salvation alone: Paul is saying we are all equally counted in before God in Christ, not prescribing who holds what role in the church. That is a live debate and I want to name it honestly before I use this verse to say more. But even if Galatians 3:28 is a statement about salvation, the functional argument of this whole series does not depend on it alone. It depends on the whole sweep of what God actually did: Deborah judging Israel, Huldah speaking for Him, Mary Magdalene commissioned to proclaim the Resurrection, Phoebe given the title Paul used for his male ministers, Junia called outstanding among the apostles. That whole pattern is the case. Galatians 3:28 is the theological ground under it, and the verse itself shows us why. He lines up the three great dividing walls of his world, the wall between races, the wall between the enslaved and the free, and the wall between men and women, and he says the gospel runs straight through all three. The Black church has staked its life on the first two. We have preached with everything in us that in Christ there is no slave and no free, that the color line is a lie the gospel breaks. The honest question this whole series has been circling is whether we are willing to read the third wall in that same verse with the same nerve.

The conversation does not end here. It moves down to the comment box, into your kitchen, into your group chat, into your own quiet time with God. So talk it through. Disagree with me if you need to. Just do not close the book. There is too much in it, and too many of God’s daughters in its pages, to keep reading only the parts that keep people quiet.

REFLECT & RESPOND

• After this whole series, where do you honestly land on women carrying God’s message, and what moved you, if anything did?

• The Black church often lets women do everything but preach. Why do you think that contradiction has lasted so long, and what would it take to face it?

• Is there someone in your life who walked away from church over how women were treated? What would you want to say to them now?

• The conversation moves to the comment box from here. What is the one honest thing you want to say, ask, or push back on?

SOURCES

[1] Weems, Renita J. Just a Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women’s Relationships in the Bible. San Diego: LuraMedia, 1988.

[2] Cannon, Katie G. Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community. New York: Continuum, 1995.

[3] Williams, Delores S. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993.

[4] Gafney, Wilda C. Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2017.

[5] For the two positions in their own words, see Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, “The Danvers Statement,” https://cbmw.org/about/danvers-statement/; and Christians for Biblical Equality, “Men, Women, and Biblical Equality,” https://www.cbeinternational.org/resource/men-women-and-biblical-equality/.

[6] New International Version. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011.