Half the Church - Are we missing out on the gifts of women?

In your typical evangelical Church this past Sunday more than half of those present were women, and not just because of the Super Bowl.

Each week women constitute a significant majority of most congregations. Yet the church seems unsure what to do with women.

For the most part churches shape their ministries around the assumption that being a woman is defined as moving from young and single, to wife, to mother, to the sweet grandma who hugs you every Sunday.

How many women are left out in this picture? What about the 52% of women in the U.S. who are single? What about the married woman who can’t have kids? What about the wife and mother who has more in common with the guy in the next pew who is passionate about creative writing than she does the typical women’s ministries crowd?

It forces us to wrestle with what being a woman in the Church should look like, and if we are getting it wrong. Yes that entails discussing women in ministry, but we do a disservice to the issue by making that the sole question, there is much more to ask than that. 

Carolyn Custis James has been wrestling with these questions too, and the result of that wrestling is a book entitled Half The Church: Reclaiming God’s Global Vision for Women.

The video below lays out the central premise of Carolyn’s book, which is due out in March.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts!