Christian relationships crucial to church image

by Mark Brolly

The way Christians treated each other in the Church was of singular importance at this point of human history and could impede the spread of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, a former Melbourne Anglican priest and leading scholar told the Christians for Biblical Equality international conference in Melbourne last month.

The Revd Dr Graham Cole, who is Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and a former Principal of Ridley Melbourne, said religion in general, and Christianity in particular, was under scrutiny, including the way men and women related in the Church.

Dr Cole, in the opening keynote speech of the conference entitled "Better Together: The Biblical ideal", said the way Christians related with each other would either undermine what they said the Good News of Jesus Christ was or underline what it was.

"I think in our particular juncture in history, the way we treat each other in the Church is of singular importance because it can impede the Gospel of Jesus Christ and its spread," he said.

The authority of someone to preach lay in faithfully explaining that Word and applying it to the lives of those who heard that Word, not in the gender of the preacher. Godliness and giftedness were the keys, not the preacher's sex.

About 250 people from New Zealand, Nigeria, South-East Asia, the United States and from every state in Australia attended the 19th annual CBE conference on the Queen's Birthday weekend at the Jasper Hotel in Elizabeth Street. More than 40 per cent of participants were men.

Plenary addresses and about 40 workshops considered topics including theological arguments used to discriminate against women, liberating themes in Scripture, the dynamics of change at work in the churches, servant leadership, abuse in the home, men in a changed world, indigenous culture and women, the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and women and "third wave" feminism and the churches.

The President of CBE, Dr Mimi Haddad, said the conference was a wonderful success, "possibly the most moving and memorable of the many I have attended".

Mrs Lynley Giles, the chair of the conference committee, said: "I am overcome by the number of people who told me the conference was a milestone in their journey, something that really empowered them in their life and to work for a better and more equal world."

Dr Cole said many Christians believed that "better together" was the biblical ideal. But for some, togetherness was a complementarity based on a hierarchical structure, while he and others favoured a complementary togetherness without hierarchy.

It should not be surprising that Christians acting together was in keeping with the relational nature of the God they worshipped as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God acted together in creation and in a broken world, he said.

"If anyone is in Christ, he/she is a new creation," Dr Cole said. "The old has gone and the new has come.

"The characterisation of the new creation is the emphasis in the New Testament on togetherness."

He asked what the watching world saw when it looked at the Church. "Does it see something of the new creation or only some more of the brokenness of the world?"

In a paper presented to a meeting of Anglican Curates, Dr Haddad said the being of females had been devalued by the world's major philosophical and religious traditions and this had led to abuse and injustice. The teachings and life of Jesus and St Paul opposed these devaluation of women but the church had been slow to embrace the implications of what they said.

Dr Haddad said that in the early Church, women had participated in  agape meals and served beside men as teachers, evangelists, missionaries, apostles, prophets, co-workers with Paul, and by doing so, they engaged with men in social and theological spheres. Women also were martyred for advancing the gospel. Christian marriages were monogamous and Paul asked both  husbands and wives to submit to  one another (Ephesians 5:21, 1 Cor 7: 3-5).

"Marriage is viewed as a one-flesh relationship for the purposes of love, intimacy, and reflects the mutual love and sacrifice within the Godhead," she said.

"The presumed inferiority of women has translated into the painful and crippling reality that one in four women have been sexually and/or physically abused by a man, usually someone she trusted. At the very minimum, 25% of the world's women carry the crippling shame of abuse because of the ideas ascribed to gender. The cultural devaluation of women, with its subsequent injustice, is one we can redress, with God's power. But it means taking captive every thought to Christ and making good use of every opportunity living out the gospel, as men and women... When will it become the clear teaching and practice of churches today?"

The Revd Dr Kevin Giles, a retired Melbourne Anglican priest and former theological consultant to World Vision, told the conference that Jesus was not depicted in the Gospels as a radical social reformer or as a modern-day "feminist" - however that word was understood - but He had consistently subverted the patriarchal culture of his day by consistently affirming women, offering them salvation, calling them as disciples, teaching them, endorsing their ministry and witness and by making marriage a partnership where both man and woman were equally responsible. Not once did Jesus utter a word that could suggest He had anything but the highest estimation of women.

Dr Giles said that in relation to "male headship", there was not one saying in all the Gospels that suggested that Jesus thought that God had set husbands over their wives, let alone that this ordering was a given. On leadership in the Church, Jesus was explicit and adamant only that those who would lead were not to assume pre-eminence or make claims to personal authority; they were to be servants. And servant leadership was open to men and women.