The Slow, Slow Art of Urgency for Women in Ministry
By Calvin Miller

(Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Dr. Calvin Miller’s sermon given at the Woman’s Missionary Union annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, in June. Dr. Miller is Professor of Preaching and Pastoral Studies at Beeson Divinity School, Sanford University, Birmingham, Alabama. Excerpts are reprinted with permission from Christian Ethics Today and the author.)

We met in Atlanta because we believe that Jesus saves and that preaching the gospel is urgent business! We … believe that everybody has a right to know Christ and we all have the responsibility to tell the world that Jesus saves.

We are most urgent about it … because life is uncertain and hell is eternal. This urgency has driven us to circle the globe, preaching hurriedly, evangelizing hurriedly, telling hurriedly. In previous decades, our urgency led us to think it was important to evangelize by building schools and hospitals, appointing teachers and doctors.

We took time for medicine, because as one fine missionary doctor pointed out, a hospital bed in any foreign culture is more effective than a pulpit for preaching the gospel.

Now, of course, it is easier to ask two questions than to build a school and it is a whole lot faster. Roman Roads, Evangelism Explosions, Four Spiritual Laws booklets have some place in a culture where evangelism is seen as a sales technique. But they major too much on bottom-line sales figures. They seem to be falling out of favor in a fast-track missions world where we often want to apply 10-minute evangelism programs in complicated cross-cultural settings.

It is all a kind of Dow-Jones evangelism, where you can watch the big board telling you just how it’s all going.

It is faster to read somebody a four spiritual laws booklet than to build a hospital. But that was the way that we used to Missionize. It was pitifully slow. Yet it was this slowness that created the credibility for our witness.

People who care enough to build hospitals, find themselves listened to when they do get around to reading the four spiritual laws booklets. It is my general opinion that pressing American sales forms into ancient, class cultures does not work very well.

The world is urgently lost, but the most formidable kinds of urgently lost people, probably can be saved only gradually. Now, I want to say what will likely seem the most sexist thing I’m going to say in this sermon. Women are generally not as good at the four spiritual law booklets as men are. Why?

Who can say? I believe that women have always been more intuitive and sensitive. It is harder for women to read a booklet and say, “Sign here.”

Women better missionaries

Women have a penchant for feeling their way into every situation, and it is harder for women to condense the Bible to two propositions and a signature. Maybe that’s why they have generally been the best missionaries.

They can plug into a culture and live there for years after men would have read a four spiritual laws booklet and flown back to the states in time for the Super Bowl. Women seem to find time for being human. They love Jesus but they are bigger on listening men and women into the Kingdom than they are on talking men and women into the Kingdom.

Women are more likely to go to the mission fields to be a doctor or a nurse or a teacher, I think, than men are. Once they get there they can work with a situation by living in it better than men can.

They can more easily embrace people of other faiths with other value systems than men can. In short, they are able to go more slowly in redeeming a complicated world than men are, and in going more slowly they change the world about them, step by credible, slow-paced, and very human step.

There are many reasons we should slow our missionizing methodologies down.

First: A rapid fire evangelism often shows a disregard for the cultures we want to evangelize … before we seek to displace the culture of whatever religion we wish to replace, we should at least show some interest in it.

Second: Those in the more liberal wings of Christianity now discourage all missions because they believe that it is immoral to try and change anybody for any reason.

There is no way to harmonize such a view with the great Commission, but we should let it teach us that we are confronting the lost whose lostness should get our special and studied consideration.

We have the God-given right to seek to change others, but we do not have the right to trivialize what they believe.

Third: Multiculturalism and its acceptance is viewed as the only way to the kind of tolerance that makes it possible for a world to live together. As long as any one world religion insists on its right to live above all others, the world will continue on in bloodshed and wars of one kind or another. This is the philosophy that sponsors ethnic cleansing or white supremacy or supremacy of any other culture.

Only Jesus saves, but until he does it, we ought to live at peace, respecting those with other faiths.

At the heart of all things Christian, there also lies the issue of our humanity. If we do not approach a lost world as human beings genuinely interested in their welfare, then we eventually wind up with a huge sales program that wants to rack up sales at the expense of those being evangelized.

This slower speed will demand that we become determined to listen people into the Kingdom of God rather than talk them into it … gentle intuitive missions may in the long run be the most effective.

History reveals women’s involvement

Women have not just recently become involved in missions. They have been involved in missions from the very beginning. The scriptures themselves are filled with the tales of women in ministry.

Yet, … our denomination is perceived as being anti-feminist. This is due in part to a partial hermeneutic that sees the role of women totally in terms of the family.

In the New Testament, women are often defined in terms of the family but there are a great number of New Testament passages that define the role of women in missions and evangelism as well.

Therefore, they hold as legitimate a place in the spread of the gospel as they do in the role of the home. This can hardly be a new insight, but I recommend that when defining the role of women in the ministry, that the people of God stack along side 1 Timothy 4, 1 Peter 3, and Ephesians 5:22 or 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, not a new hermeneutic for women in ministry but a very old one. I believe the Bible, but I believe in developing our rules for faith and practice by using the whole Bible and not just those parts that support some particular viewpoint.

Our new hermeneutic should be our old hermeneutic for Women in Ministry. It should include these passages:

1. Acts 2:17-18: this is a primary passage regarding the coming of the Holy Spirit in which women are seen being filled with the Spirit and prophesying just as men are.

2. Romans 16:1-7: in this remarkable passage, more women are mentioned than men and they wear such titles as “deaconess” and “apostlette.” None of these women are mentioned in terms of their family roles but in terms of their kingdom roles.

3. Galatians 3:28: this passage seems to teach that there is to be no gender distinction in how men and women serve in the kingdom. Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, men and women are all to share equal status in the kingdom enterprise.

4. Ephesians 5:21: this is one of those six “hupotasso” (subordinate) passages in the New Testament that speak of submission. But this one, different from the other five, does not speak of a woman submitting to a man but all Christians submitting to each other. This passage precedes what Paul is about to say on the home, but it is not really a part of the passage.

All of these passages speak of women … in terms of their kingdom callings. We are here to celebrate our Savior’s last command. We are here to be effective in our evangelism. Jesus died for the whole world. It is too important a subject to exclude the fifty percent of ministers who are not men.

Interpretation needs to be broadened.

It is time for a healthier hermeneutic … wider and more inclusive. We are not arguing for Sophia and the Mother Goddess Movement. We are not out to call the Father Mother, nor our Lord the Lady.

But we are out to recognize the courageous evangelism and missions of the gentle and intuitive sort that remembers that most people come out of sin slowly and that the hunger to call the world to Christ has never been a gender-exclusive task.

Never a gender issue.

Our mission has always been a matter of Expediency. The most indicting line in Lottie Moon’s letter: It seems odd that God would call 500 preachers for Virginia and leave one lone woman for all of China.

The Kingdom of God is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female. The world is lost and its lostness, in neither the 19th or 20th century was never in the mind of God a gender consideration.

I met on a recent round-the-world trip four steel magnolias who impacted forever my view of women in missions and ministry. The first was a woman in Xian, China, whose heroic and courageous ministry had won many beautiful converts. She did all this really without much human support, and she was unmarried, so she ministered alone.

Secondly, I met a woman in Mother Theresa’s house for the dying. She left her super-executive- CEO husband in the United States and served alone among a team of volunteers in India. She worked tirelessly day after day, made few converts but resembled Christ.

Thirdly, I met a woman in Calcutta who passed out day-old bread to the hordes of insane who roam the midnight streets of Calcutta. She was assisted always by her husband, and their ministry goes unrecorded since most of the insane are not likely to be Baptists (at least in India).

Finally, I was in India at the time of Mother Theresa’s passing and happened to see her as she lay in Calcutta. I was struck by her bare feet, protruding from under the flag of India, and I wept when I realized that she had literally worn them out in ministry. What man would be so presumptuous as to say that God has no place for women in ministry? Not, I.

They not only have the right to do what they do, they have the commendation of God. Women are God-called; and thank God for their callings.

The world is obviously broken and in great need. Come; let us come slowly and thoughtfully to such a world. The world is in desperate shape. We dare not go too fast.

September 1999