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We were raised to believe women were Biblically excluded from preaching God's word, and questioning that was sin. But what if that isn't true? What if the Bible... clearly... says something else? What does that mean for us? For women? For today's church? Join us for episode 5 as we talk about the women who led.
Follow us on Instagram! https://www.instagram.com/wearemore.podcast/
We are Alyssa and Bri, two sisters who believe God wants more for women than we've been taught. Join us as we dive into the intersection of faith and feminism, learning together as we go.
Welcome to the We Are More podcast.
My name is Alyssa.
And my name's Bri.
We are two sisters passionate about all things faith and feminism.
We believe that Jesus trusted, respected, and encouraged women to teach and preach His
word.
And apparently that's controversial.
Get comfy.
Hello!
Hello.
Welcome back.
What episode is this?
Five?
Is it five?
It's five.
Ah, we're in kindergarten.
That's it.
Welcome to Kinder Roundup.
I remember in kindergarten a kid threw up on the table.
In kindergarten roundup?
No.
I was talking too much at the blue table so she moved me over to the green table.
And the day that she moved me over to the green table, Curtis threw up on the table!
And then the next day I was back at the blue.
Do you think you like went home and told mom that?
And mom gave her a call and was like, no.
I don't think so.
No more Curtis.
Stop puking!
I was like, whoa!
I don't know why that is such a core memory for me, but Curtis!
I feel like you've told me this story a thousand times.
Curtis, if you're out there, I'm not sure if you were my boyfriend or not, but you did
throw up on the table.
And that was nasty.
Do you think that he was your boyfriend?
Well there is a video of me saying like, oh, and I said, my boyfriend's Curtis.
Yeah, I remember that.
But it could have been a different Curtis.
Although how many people are named Curtis?
Are there any Curtises out there?
Yes, I'm sure we attract a lot of Curtises.
Perhaps!
Hey Curtis, are you interested in feminism?
Biblically?
Oh, I can't even say the word biblically.
So guys, we're actually recording sort of midday today.
Yeah, we're fresh!
So yay!
Good for us.
Perhaps not our bedtime, 830 at night!
I feel like other people are gonna watch this and they're gonna think something's wrong
with these women that go to bed at 830.
No, probably most women are listening to this and they're like, I get it.
You know what I saw?
Now, okay, I don't know if this is substantiated, but I was watching a TikTok.
Wow.
And the woman said that the studies, the sleep studies that they did to say you need eight
hours of sleep a night were only done on men.
And women actually need closer to like nine hours of sleep, ten hours if you're on your
period.
Makes sense for me.
I get it.
There's a lot of thoughts happening in my head, you know?
Like right now or on your period?
All the time.
Oh.
I need a lot of sleep.
We're much higher energy than normal.
Look at how loud we are.
I know.
I'm tired all the time.
Me too.
At some point.
So I'm drinking.
At some point maybe we'll catch up when we're 85.
We're not gonna make it to 85.
Oh.
At the rate we're going, we're likely if we make it to 67.
Well we're gonna run out of money.
We spend it all on Disney.
Yeah.
Although maybe we could just use Disney as a retirement home.
Yeah, I think that would work.
I think Disney should create a retirement home and be very popular.
Oh my gosh.
Although then it'd be like sad.
Like you're not allowed to die at Disney anyways.
So you wouldn't die at Disney, you'd die at the Disney retirement home.
But you're not allowed to do that.
Maybe it would be off property.
They'd just send Mickey there occasionally.
Let's get back on topic.
Okay.
But I'm having so much fun.
Today we're talking about?
Today we're talking about women in leadership.
Girl preach.
I said that today at work.
Intentionally or just for fun?
I said it and then I was like, ha ha ha.
We're talking about that later.
So historically women have been very left out of leadership in churches.
It's an interesting story.
So we grew up very conservative, as we have said.
So the churches that we were in, absolutely no women would have been in any position of
leadership.
Like you might have seen a woman teaching younger grades for Sunday school.
Well they're allowed to teach Sunday school.
Right.
Because men think that that's below them.
But even- Not all men, some men.
But even Beth Ellison Barr, who we love-
Beth!
Shout out.
So she talks about in her book that she on a normal basis would not have been allowed
to teach in youth group because those boys were at an age where they shouldn't be taught
by women anymore.
Didn't she say like any boy 13 and older shouldn't be taught by a woman?
Yeah.
Now I hadn't heard that prior to that book.
That's not like something that was taught in our churches.
But the interesting thing is, so my husband Nathan grew up in Assemblies of God churches,
I believe.
He's slightly less conservative, pretty chill from my experience with them.
A little more structured, I think.
I think they have that upward structure.
But he said that nobody ever talked about women couldn't be in leadership.
It was fairly normal to have female pastors, female leadership.
So that's really interesting to me.
That is interesting.
Because I never saw that.
So today, because we're kind of doing a little mini series, going into the basics of why
we believe what we believe, why we believe women should be more.
We are more.
Do that again.
You do it every episode.
So we're going into a little bit of all of the basics and then we'll loop back as time
goes on and I'm sure we'll dive deeper into each of these topics.
Because there's just a lot to uncover and unfold.
So.
Just like watching your face do weird stuff.
That's really impressive.
It's just my face.
I don't know what to say.
It's very expressive.
I'm going to have wrinkles.
Someday if we record this for YouTube, then people can see how expressive you are.
Well, someday I'm going to get Botox.
Oh, that's fun.
Someday very soon I feel.
Okay, so I, Bri and I kind of researched and dove into different sections.
So I'm going to go first.
And most of my research comes from a book called Tell Her Story.
I believe it's a newer book.
I don't know how to say the author's first name.
His last name is Gupta.
So go ahead and look it up with that.
Yeah, maybe we can post like a picture of it online.
We need to do a book list.
That's a great idea.
Yeah, we've talked about it.
I think I've brought it up.
You have.
But the way that I found it is because our favorite Beth Ellison Barr.
Beth!
She wrote the foreword for this book.
So when I googled her name to see if she had any other books that I could read, this popped
up.
And one of the like endorsements on the back, it says, tell her story, maybe the final nail
in the coffin of Christian patriarchy.
And it's a very research based book.
So if anything could do it.
It's just whether people choose to listen or not.
The first thing that he kind of goes into in part two, the first part goes into some
specific women.
But one of the first things that he goes into is talking about how modern churches do not
operate the same way that their early church did.
Yes.
And we say this every single episode.
But the Bible was written for everyone, but it wasn't written to us here in 2024, listening
to each other talk about a podcast.
Hallelujah.
And as Christians, we have a hard time like recognizing that in so many ways.
We kind of make the Bible fit our vision of church in 2024.
So like you go to church, you start with a couple songs, you have your coffee in hand,
you get into the message, you hear some announcements somewhere in there, you sing another song,
do a little communion.
Maybe it's in a little cup and the little bread tastes like styrofoam.
Oh, why can't we have real bread?
Yeah.
You say a prayer and then you're done.
Yep.
And then you go home.
But that's just not what church was for the immediately post-Christ world.
So it might seem obvious to say that, but it also really needs to be said over and over
because it shapes how we operate today and it shapes how we see the Christian world and
some of the supposed rules that we have had so far.
So one thing to remember is that the church is very new at this time.
Christ had really just died.
So Paul was still alive.
So we're within the same generation.
I don't know what the exact years are, but it was very soon after.
And the church kind of had to build itself.
Like Jesus didn't really leave exact instructions.
It wasn't IKEA.
No, no IKEA.
Although those instructions don't work either.
No, they don't.
And I think we want to think that the way that we've structured our church came directly
from Jesus, but he didn't really talk about it that much.
He was a rabbi in the synagogue and that would have been structured way differently than
the early church was structured.
So the disciples, as they went out and spread Jesus's message, had to really like build
something from nothing in a lot of ways.
So what they did was they pulled a lot of traditions from the synagogue because that's
what they were familiar with.
But then as they, you know, they might have planted a church and then they went to the
next town and they planted a church and whatever.
These were not all Jewish people.
There were also Gentile people and that means non-Jewish people.
I feel like I say churchy terms and I forget that they're churchy terms.
So that means non-Jewish people.
So anyone who wasn't part of the Jewish faith wouldn't have been familiar with like the
synagogue and how that worked.
So the people that would not have been familiar with the synagogue and those rules would have
probably, you know, once the disciples left or whoever came to kind of plant their church,
they would have probably bounced to structures that they were familiar with.
So that would have come from the government, from other like, he calls them affinity groups,
so other religions, things like that.
You go with what you know.
Exactly.
There's nothing wrong with any of those things because they're all still following Jesus's
teachings.
They're all still spreading the gospel.
It's just done in a different way.
But one of the things that tended to be common amongst all these churches was that they met
in homes because the Jewish homes were public spaces.
Like they had, it wasn't like now where like you're not going to invite somebody into your
house.
I feel like I'm picturing Encanto.
Yeah, that's a good one.
Where there's like a big public space, but then everybody has their little rooms.
Yeah, they called it the atrium.
And they said that usually the church would be held in like wealthier members homes, because
they might have had an atrium that would fit like 20 to 30 people.
Because they're probably not having enough money to go buy like a community center.
No, by chance.
Would that even be an option?
Like is there land to build on?
How long does it take to build something?
I don't know what the logic of that is.
So it makes sense for it to be in a home.
But those people, because it was a much smaller group, you know, you're not a church of 10,000
like we have today.
It's 20 or 30 people.
Those people weren't just showing up once a week, singing songs, listening to a sermon
and leaving.
They were living life together.
They were spreading the gospel together.
They all had a role.
I think that's where when we say like the church is not a building, it's the people.
That's really what I focus on.
That's what I envision.
Yeah, with that group of people.
Yeah, and I think that's, that's what they had to be for each other.
Because they were also being persecuted.
So that interestingly, also the term pastor, and I'm not going to try and say it in the
Greek because it sounds inappropriate.
I wish you wouldn't.
It only appears a couple places in the New Testament, which is so interesting to me because
that's the title that we so significantly banned women from.
And it's only used twice.
It's used once in Acts and once in Peter.
And acts like the body spray.
Yes, that's what I was referencing.
It smells really terrible.
It smells like a middle school boy in here.
Yeah.
So I think it's really funny that that we've taken that term that's only used a couple
times and like said women can't have this biblically.
But it's hardly ever used.
And the author of this book also says that if you showed up to an early church and asked
to meet like the pastor or the leader, they wouldn't know what you were talking about.
Because they just didn't structure their churches in a pyramid like that.
There wasn't like one person at the top and everybody else was below them like so many
of our churches are today.
That just wasn't how it worked.
So they wouldn't even know who to direct you to as their leader.
But there were three main leadership roles and I'll kind of go into each of them and
then I'll let Bri share hers and then I'll talk about Phoebe afterwards.
Phoebe.
Yeah.
So the first one has to do with Phoebe, who we love.
We love.
Also, I just think of friends and I love her and friends too.
She's pretty great.
So the again, if I mispronounce this, guys, it's not my fault.
I think people are going to come after you with pitchforks and feather and tar.
Wow.
It's really dramatic.
Kill the beast.
Great.
So the first term is Diakonos.
And based on the translation, there's going to be different ways that that is said.
But the kind of general definitions can be servant, deacon, or ministry provider.
The author of this book really likes the term ministry provider because it kind of encompasses
a little bit more than servant.
You know, when you think servant, you might think below everybody else.
Right.
Just doing the grunt work.
Right.
But this term kind of meant like living in service to the church.
Okay.
So you spent your life serving, spreading God's word, things like that.
So it's not just like making the coffee in the morning.
You know, it's not being the grater.
Not that those things aren't critically important to the church.
That's just not what this meant.
So the concept behind it was essentially the greatest among you becomes the least.
So we see that with Jesus.
The least of these.
Yeah.
So we see that many times throughout the Bible.
And they would have a service oriented heart of leadership.
And they would kind of set the tone for leadership in the early church.
These people that would go by this title.
So this term was also used in the broader Roman world.
And I always like to look at the history of things like look outside of the Bible too.
You know who else likes that?
Our good friend Beth.
She does love that.
She's a historian.
We need to count how many times we mentioned this woman.
If you hear the word Beth, take a drink of water with me.
So in the Roman world is used as well, not necessarily to mean servants, but again to
mean someone in a position of leadership who was serving the broader community.
Oftentimes it also meant suffering and hardship.
And you know, I mean, a lot of the disciples were crucified.
So there you go.
So Phoebe, who we will talk about later, is the only person named as a Diakonos in
the Bible.
A woman.
That got so dramatic.
It was a great book.
I actually, sidebar, I remember when we first started going to that church when we were
in like middle school, high school times.
And there were female deacons, but they called them deaconesses.
Mom was just telling me about this.
Yeah, and I thought that was totally bizarre.
Just coming from the world where we came from, which was like very small church for so long.
I was like, there's women who can do that?
What?
Okay, but did you know that they were really in charge of like setting up?
That's what mom said.
It's just like, we're going to give you a fancy title, but only because like we need
someone to make the coffee and set up the sanctuary and do the grunt work.
We'll come back to deaconess.
That comes in with Phoebe.
Precursor.
We're foreshadowing.
Yeah, that's what I meant.
So that's in Romans 16.1 is where Paul calls Phoebe a deaconess.
And we'll talk a little bit more about her later.
But she's the only named person.
Now, this term is used a lot throughout the New Testament, throughout Paul's letters specifically,
but it's not in reference to someone.
She's the only person that gets named.
So this person probably would have served under the leadership of the next category,
the overseers or kind of the person who usually owned the house of the house church.
So when Paul used the term deaconess for Phoebe, he's using it while commending her as a leader
from Corinth.
So again, we'll get into why later, but this implies that she would have been a key leader
in her church community.
So not.
Someone who was just serving.
She was a titled leader in her church community.
She was an important leader.
So in 1 Timothy 3, Paul talks directly to deacons and he references what their character
is supposed to be.
So this section is thrown against women a lot.
Paul, he gets a bad rap.
I honestly, I was not a fan of Paul for the longest time.
Well Paul, if you weren't so confusing.
Paul is a little confusing, but I feel like he's just been so misinterpreted.
Because as you really read it, so much of what we've been told about what he said is
very clearly not what he said.
Right.
So anyway, in 1 Timothy, he is writing to Timothy's church.
And in verse 11 is where he specifically talks to women.
It's sandwiched between multiple verses talking to deacons, which implies that he's also talking
to women in this same position.
And yes, women would have been more rare in these positions just because again, they're
living in the patriarchal society.
What?
Her, um, oh, her beauty brand.
So it would have been more rare to have a woman in a leadership position because they
were living in a patriarchal society.
As are we.
So talking to the men specifically makes sense.
But then he does also reference women in the same section.
So we got to stop taking stuff out of context here, people.
Yeah, people.
People.
So yeah, so this term was not necessarily a super formal office like it is today.
Like we have deacons at church that lead, you know, certain things in the church.
It wouldn't have been that at the time, but it would have been a title that someone would
have gone by.
So it would have been, he calls it, the author calls it a ministry provider, kind of like
you would say a medical provider.
So like someone with expertise.
I'm a medical provider.
You are.
Which frightens me a great deal.
Sorry.
All right.
So then the next term is episkopos.
What your mouth?
You can't say that.
I'm sorry.
Sorry, grandma.
And that would have been the overseer or manager.
It's kind of the best translation.
So this would have been one of the most formal titles for leadership that they had.
Again, they didn't have a lot, but this would have been that.
And in the broader context, because we love that, this also could have been a title used
for like a temple manager or a civic official, like someone who is kind of guarding the institution
or the community.
So somebody pretty in charge.
This term was not used as much as the last one that I won't say because you keep making
fun of me for how I say it.
He does mention it in Philippians, like the two terms together, but he doesn't necessarily
say how they differ.
But it does seem like it would be more of like an overseer.
So someone that was in charge, right?
And usually this would have been the person that owned the home that the house church
was in.
So the person or couple, as sometimes it happens in the Bible, that owned the house because
they were already running a household, they had the experience to handle finances, to
handle people, to handle conflict and things like that.
Or just their space.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it would have been the natural choice for this person to be.
Not saying that would have always been the case, but it likely would have been the case.
There are no named people with this title that I won't say because you keep making fun
of me.
What is it called?
Episcopal.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
So no men or women are specifically named with this title.
Again, I'm going to say, I'm going to just one more time.
No men and no women.
Nobody has the title.
Nobody got it.
No boys, no girls.
That's singing number two.
No hard speed.
We can't cut that out.
No, that's staying in.
I have to let you sing at least.
So the argument that this particular role is only for men, and this would be the one
that people in leadership are really going to want to hold on to, is because it, again
in 1st Timothy.
So 1st Timothy 3, Paul says that overseers must be the husband of one wife.
So that very specifically, some people think, precludes women from being able to hold this
role, which then we convert today as kind of the pastor or the leader of the church.
But what the author says, and I think this is so interesting and so good, he says the
comment on one wife is less about men specifically leading than about fidelity in marriage.
So he's talking to men in a broader picture because men would have been most of the overseers.
Because again, they're in a patriarchal society, this is very normal.
Men would have primarily been in leadership positions at this time.
So he's talking to the broader picture.
But he's not saying, okay, but women, if you're in leadership, you can be the wives of however
many men you feel like.
Is that what we're saying?
Really?
So he makes a great comparison in the book.
And if you have the opportunity to read this book, it is very academic, but it is fantastic.
There's also an audible version.
So I'm like listening and reading it.
So it's that it's so helpful because if you're an audio learner, audacious, that can't be
it.
Let's go with if you're a visual learner, you have the ability to read.
But if you learn better by listening, then you can kind of do both things or plus also,
if you're illiterate, that does help.
But anyway, he makes great comparison where he says that if a golf course had a sign up
that said golfers must have well kept facial hair.
Well I wouldn't be allowed to golf.
Your facial hair is a mess.
Unruly.
That doesn't necessarily mean that women can't golf here because stereotypically women may
not have facial hair.
It means that if you have facial hair, then it has to be well kept.
Those who don't have facial hair would not have the same expectation.
So if you are a man, have one wife.
Don't have perhaps seven.
Well but that would have been common at the time too.
That's true.
Polygamy was very common then.
Essentially, the leader of the home would have been the natural choice to lead their
congregation and there are several instances where that while women weren't given that
title specifically by Paul, like they weren't named with that title, there are several instances
where women are talked about as having a house church.
Right.
Including Phoebe.
It would have been legally allowed in the Roman culture for women to be householders.
And the book says that as many as 25% of householders in certain areas may have been women.
Lydia was also a female householder.
Shout out to Lydia.
So Lydia was a female householder, a named female householder who influenced her entire
house to get baptized and acts.
And then her home became a hub for the Philippian church.
So while it's not stated that she was the Episcopal, I'm so sorry Lydia, it is implied
that she probably would have been the overseer of that church.
Alright, and then the last one before we go, maybe have dinner or finish recording, would
be in Presbiteros.
That's not a Presbiteros.
See, that one doesn't sound bad.
It just sounds like a pizza place.
And that would have been like a senior elder, or I'm sorry, a senior leader or an elder.
So we have elders in churches now, and I feel like a lot of times churches either have deacons
or elders.
I don't think you see as many with both.
Or the elder board is like more, not hidden but not talked about, but maybe they have
it.
So one of the churches that we were at recently for a very long time, they had an elder board.
And something that really bothered me is that no one really knew who they were.
Even the pastors, if you asked for like, hey, I was wondering if I could contact one of
the elders or something like that, they literally didn't know who they were.
It was very strange, very secretive.
You have these people who are in charge of making decisions for a church that you don't
know.
Well, you'd think it would be like elected or something along those lines.
I don't know.
It was very strange.
Anyway, that was an offshoot.
So this term is not really outlined in detail in the Bible.
It's kind of one of the most vague terms that Paul has.
Part of that is because it wouldn't have really been a job description like the other two
were to some degree.
It was more just like, like the term elder, like it would have been an older, wiser member
of the community who maybe the church or the people of the church turned to for advice.
Yeah, which makes sense.
Like, hey, this person has more knowledge, experience.
I'm going to go to them for guidance.
So since this wasn't an official title, like elder Brianna.
That's me.
Elder.
I've been meaning to tell you.
Hey, you're older.
Yeah, but it bothers you more.
It does.
I'm sad.
I'm sorry.
But because it wasn't an official title, the author of this book specifically says this
is like the goofiest one to say that women can't hold.
I love the word goofy.
So goofy.
I was going to say a different thing that I thought I shouldn't.
And there were, this was, it was a formal thing and it was still important to some degree.
Like there is one point where Paul says, I believe it's in Titus.
So Titus 1.5 where Paul tells Titus to appoint elders in his church that follow certain criteria.
It still wasn't like, like a specific leadership title.
What the author says as well is that if you, if you were known by another title, like if
you were the overseer or if you were a deacon, you could also be an elder.
You just wouldn't go by the title elder.
More?
You could be more.
Do you think at some point in this podcast we'll stop doing that?
We'll run out of more.
No, I use that on our Instagram all the time.
Shout out to our Instagram.
Follow us over there.
Yeah.
I posted on Facebook the other day.
I shared about episode three.
I think I was like, we are hilarious, but also we are more.
On Instagram we are, we are more dot podcast.
And I think Facebook is the same.
Not sure.
I need to get the Facebook better.
I need to figure out how to tick tack like those youths do.
We can hit the whoa and whatnot.
The what?
You haven't heard that?
No.
I don't know what it is.
It's not good.
I think it's a dance move.
We're cursing in Shenzi.
I'm sorry.
Anyway.
So there's nowhere in the New Testament that says that women cannot be elders.
It's not said.
It's not mentioned.
There's nothing about it.
We have made this garbage up.
Garbage.
And again, most elders probably would have been men, but that's cultural.
That's normal for the time.
And if you look at several of the women that Paul talks about in the Bible and you research
them and you find out who they were, like Phoebe or Priscilla or countless other ones,
they clearly would have qualified as elders, even though again, no one is specifically
named.
Well, I think we mentioned this back a couple episodes ago, but women, like when you think
like Christian women 2024, you do think someone like very mild mannered, someone in a maxi
skirt, like just like very like level headed, calm, quiet, whatever.
But that's not what the women in the Bible really were.
Not to say that there's anything wrong with that, but like jail stab someone and her name
is written down in the Bible.
She tent pegged him.
You know who I think about for the stereotype actually is the the Duggar mom.
Oh, that's what comes to my head.
Yeah.
All right.
So to round this out and pass it over brief because I'm tired of talking.
One of the things that I think is so impactful that's said in this book, again, if you have
the opportunity to read it, highly, highly recommend.
He talks about imagine if God gave us another Deborah today.
Big Debra.
Yes.
Deborah!
We love Debra.
I got really loud.
You got so loud, it didn't know what to do with you.
So imagine if God gave us another Deborah.
Would we tell her that she couldn't be an elder or a deacon or an overseer?
And if we did, what would be our reasoning?
Because God put her in a position of leadership.
So what would be our reasoning?
And you can't even say, well, she led when no men would lead because there were two men
alongside her.
She just happened to be the one that the Bible talked about.
Right.
The one who did the biggest thing.
Who is named after a bumblebee.
She was more.
And if we did tell her this, if we said to her she couldn't lead, what would we be depriving
the church of?
The world of.
And what are we currently depriving the church and the world of?
Because I got to tell you, I think God has given us plenty of Debra's and we've told
them to shut up.
Do you want to get a hammer so we can nail something?
Oh, no, don't say that.
I was thinking of nailing the coffee.
I'm going to keep that in.
No, don't.
I was misunderstood.
Alright, now it's your turn.
I can stop talking for a while.
So when I was researching this topic, I found an article from someone named Angela Harrington
and she has a book that is kind of about recovering your faith and recovering from church hurts
so that's very interesting.
I haven't looked into it at all, but maybe you can.
But when I first started thinking about this, I'm like, actions speak so much louder than
words and we say that all the time.
But when you look back on the actions of Jesus throughout the Bible, like the Bible has changed
through translations and all of that, but I feel like the actions of Jesus have mostly
stayed the same.
Jesus never discriminated, talked down to women.
He never told them that they couldn't preach.
He never told them that they were less than.
He pulled them in.
He brought them into his community.
He said, follow me, just like he did for the men too.
There were plenty of women that followed him along.
So we should probably be modeling our lives based off of Jesus more than anything else.
Groundbreaking, I'm looking very deep into your eyes right now.
So diving into 1st Timothy, 1st Timothy 2 verse 11 in the KJV because that's, you know,
why does my mind just go?
I don't know, we recorded earlier.
I don't know.
1st Timothy 2 verse 11 says, let women learn in silence with all submission.
And I do not permit women to teach or to have any authority over a man, but to be in silence.
So in referring to that verse, many scholars believe that Paul was referring to specific
women in Timothy's church, not to all women in general.
And going back to what you said before, like probably the people were coming from different
backgrounds and different traditions.
So they may have been causing a ruckus or whatever it may have been.
So maybe they were distracting people from actually learning the word of God.
So he's saying, hey, chill out, maybe.
Well one of the things that I've researched before says that in that passage, the women
of this particular church, because they hadn't been allowed to learn any of this before,
they were like constantly asking, well, what does that mean?
Well, you know, like loudly.
And all of a sudden they had the privilege probably to speak.
And so they were disrupting the church as a whole.
And obviously like that's not conducive for anybody else.
So they were essentially told like, hey, we want you to learn, which was revolutionary,
but don't do it where you're going to cause a problem for everybody else is trying to
learn.
Paul says women shouldn't usurp authority over a man, which usurp means to steal away
or to take away something that's not rightfully yours.
So think overthrowing of government.
So pretty much also anyone probably in that situation shouldn't take the authority from
someone else, don't steal someone else's thunder, essentially, is what he's saying.
So many scholars believe that Paul's words were situational, not like written to all
of us everywhere here in 2024.
Is it 2024?
Literally all day today, I thought it was 2023.
Like I was writing down 2023.
When I was working today, I kept trying to write down 2025.
I don't know.
I'm living in the future over here.
I'm living in the past.
Where are we?
So she goes on to say in her article that if we choose to believe that the Bible always
provides universal statements, then we need to be consistent and apply the same logic
to the rest of the passage, which continues to say women shouldn't braid their hair where
gold pearls or anything expensive and that women are to be silent.
So that means no female greeters, no worship leaders that are women, choir members, no
women reading scripture, no women making announcements, no women teaching Sunday school.
The list goes on and on and on and the church would fall apart.
Yeah.
Can you imagine how quickly everything would crumble?
Yeah.
She goes on to say like there's so many passages in the Bible that refer to everyone and all
and each of you.
And over time, through translations, we've taken out each of you and everyone and all
of you and replaced it with absolutes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So she pretty much says like God's word never changes, but man's translation of God's word
definitely does and has throughout time.
And then she goes on to talk about like examples of female leaders in the Bible.
So you are going to talk about Phoebe later on, but there's Deborah who we've talked
about before.
Big Deb.
Big Deb.
She was an Old Testament judge, which means that she led Israel before there was a king
to help them lead.
But she was leading Israel, which is amazing.
And Anna or Anna, I'm not quite sure how she wants to be pronounced.
She wasn't in frozen.
I don't know.
Unless she was a prophet who dedicated her life to praying and praising and teaching
in the temple.
She was also one of the first people to meet Jesus as an infant and recognize and proclaim
his divinity.
Now I read into her story.
She was like married for seven years and then she was a widow for like 84 years.
So Anna when she met Jesus was like a hundred something.
Geez.
Yeah.
She's ancient.
And Holda, who's an Old Testament prophet who is trusted, who is a trusted source of
interpreting, understanding scripture.
And she was even sought out by the king of Israel to teach the men about the meaning
of prophecies from God.
So there's so many examples of like strong, powerful women in the Bible, but we're teaching
women now that that's not their place.
And it doesn't make sense.
It doesn't add up.
The first preachers of the gospel were women.
Well, and I think to bounce off of that into my notes, which I have to pull back up, you
know, Paul in that verse sounds kind of rough as he says, you know, I don't permit women
to have authority over men or whatever.
Shut right up.
But the interesting thing is as we're going into Phoebe, clearly Paul did allow women
to teach men because of Phoebe.
Well that's it.
Like if you read a singular verse and build your whole faith off of that singular verse,
you're not going to have a very full faith.
You have to look into the history and the verse before and the verse after and the whole
chapter like read more.
Right.
So you have to look at who Paul is as a person.
When Paul writes lists of, and we skip over these a lot when we read the Bible because
it's just lists of names.
That probably you can't pronounce them.
That's very true.
But Paul talks about all kinds of women that he respected, that he allowed to teach, that
he worked alongside, that he calls co-workers and sisters.
And that one statement doesn't erase all of those.
So you have to make that make sense within the broader context.
So it makes sense that he was talking to a specific group in Timothy's church.
Well, and these letters were very specifically to one church.
So that begs the question, if this is really a sin for women to speak or lead or teach,
why did Paul only tell Timothy's church?
None of the other churches would have had this information.
He would have written the same thing in every single book that he wrote, which is a lot.
Because Jesus didn't say it.
So Paul would have had to have that revelation from God and then spread it out amongst the
people, which is something that he did in a lot of his letters.
But that's something that's only said once.
Right.
So anyway, so Phoebe, we love Phoebe.
Again, she's the only named deacon in the Bible.
Diakonos.
Diakonos.
And her story is so cool.
So she's kind of a, I don't want to say a footnote because she's so important, but it's
really a brief mention.
So you really have to dig into historical context to understand who Phoebe was and what
her story looked like.
So she was the person that carried Paul's letter to the Roman churches.
So she took the book of Romans, like one of the most important, most impactful books of
the Bible.
And she took it from Paul, who was in prison and walked it all the way to Rome.
Can you imagine?
No.
Do you remember that walk that we did in Disney just hurrying up trying to get on the list
for the Star Wars ride?
Yes.
Can you imagine that for days and days and days and days and days and days and days?
No.
Like, I mean, weeks probably.
I don't know how long it took.
I would shrivel up and die.
They didn't have Birkenstocks back then.
They did not.
I don't know what they had, sandals, but bad ones.
Bare feet.
So she was commissioned by Paul to take this letter, right?
And again, we think of things in our modern day context.
Like, okay, she's a letter carrier.
And our letter carriers today, they're not going to open the mail.
They don't really do anything with it other than take it out of your mailbox.
They go and rain and sleep and snow.
They do.
Thanks goodness.
So they don't really have a lot of role in what the message of your letter is, or if
it necessarily gets to its destination.
One person picks it up, they hand it to the next person, who hands it to the next person.
Ideally, no one intercepts it.
But that wasn't the case at the time.
There was no formal mail system.
So if you wanted to send a letter, you had to send somebody that you trusted completely
to get it there, to not change the words inside of it.
And also someone who was actually willing to do that.
Yeah, for sure.
Someone who knew you and loved you enough to do that.
Sounds like a bad time.
And also this person, particularly with Paul's letters, this wouldn't have necessarily been
every letter, but particularly with Paul's letters, this would have been someone that
delivered the letter, but I don't mean just handed it off.
I mean delivered as in, gave a speech.
Not performed, but...
A theatrical presentation of the Book of Romans.
She would have read it to them, she would have interpreted it for them, because she
talked to Paul, and Paul would have probably said, okay, I want you to use an inflection
here.
I want you to make this point really important.
Or diving deep into everything and being like, this is what this means.
This is what this means.
And she would have had to take it to every house church in Rome, because remember, there
wasn't one centralized church.
And they didn't have a Xerox machine.
They did not.
Do we have Xerox machines?
That's an old reference.
They don't have a copier.
They don't have a copier.
I don't even have a printer, Brianna.
They don't have a staples.
Like, get like 17 copies of it.
There was one copy, probably.
Yeah.
And she walked it all the way to Rome, and then she walked it to every single church,
and then performed it for every single church.
So Phoebe was the first preacher of Romans.
And before I get these people that are going to tell me, well, she was just sharing her
story, and that's okay if a woman gets up and shares her story, but she can't preach.
And if you don't understand what I'm saying, that's really something that people say.
It's fine if women get up on stage in church and share their stories, but they're not allowed
to preach, which is insane because it's the same thing.
Right.
But she was interpreting and sharing Paul's words.
The gospel.
Yeah.
And how is that any different from a pastor today interpreting and sharing Paul's words?
There's no difference.
There is no difference.
Phoebe was doing the same thing.
She was a preacher.
She was a preacher who was endorsed and sent by Paul himself to share one of his most important
letters with one of the biggest churches, biggest groups of churches that there would
have been.
So yeah, there's a lot to this story, and I would love to do honestly a whole episode
on Phoebe because I think she's amazing.
We believe that Jesus, that Paul, that the Bible...
Stop it.
That everything in the Bible very clearly points to women not only being allowed to
teach and preach, but encouraged to teach and preach, encouraged to lead their churches
on the same level that men are leading their churches.
And without that, I think the American church specifically is losing out on so much incredible
wisdom, on a connection with God.
Women are the future.
Time number three.
Teach them well.
Let them lead the way.
I'm going to cut all of that out.
I'm going to leave the one.
Thanks for listening to episode five.
Thank you for spending a little bit of your day with us.
Enjoy following us on Instagram.
I'm pretty proud of this one.
I think this is a good one.
Yeah, this was really good.
Yeah, follow us on Facebook and Instagram and we will see you guys again in a couple
of weeks.
Except we won't see you because this is a podcast.
You'll hear us again in a couple of weeks.
Talk to ya later.
you