Re: Let Her Lead: Creating A Better Future For Women In The Church
Totaly Benoit
Our role in the Primary Education Project was to listen to what people wanted to achieve, support pioneers in changing mindsets, provide relevant training and facilitate them in creating an environment that would be a catalyst for change.
Let Her Lead: Creating a Better Future for Women in the Church
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In the rural Sindh where I worked, low-caste Hindus had suffered generations of disempowerment and poverty; they are marginalised in society, denied and often unaware of their rights. Many work as farmers: bonded labourers with few opportunities for decision making, in debt to landlords, living with a sense of hopelessness, unable to imagine that life could be any different.
However, when individuals and communities refuse to identify themselves as victims but as change makers, when they gain relevant capabilities to achieve their goals and when they find ways to make decisions for their lives and access their rights, transformation occurs.
For most of my years in Pakistan I worked with a low-caste Hindu man called Kanjee. He is a man of deep conviction and motivation. His parents were the only couple in his isolated village near the Indian border who agreed to send their son away so he could go to school. He lived with an uncle for his early education and in a hostel for his last two years.
As a member of a marginalised minority community, he struggled to overcome barriers due to discrimination and was determined to ensure that other members of his tribal low-caste community, particularly girls, would not experience those same barriers. I recognised that in addition to changing his mindset, he was a man taking every opportunity to change his capacity, developing his skills to be better equipped to achieve his ambitions.
He increased his agency by creating a wide network of contacts: in the media through writing articles for local newspapers and being a social activist; in civil society through becoming a member and then a local representative for the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP); with the diocese through becoming a teacher in one of their schools; with development NGOs, taking his community members to seminars which nurtured their vision and determination to provide a different future for their children, including their daughters.
At first communities found it hard to imagine that sons of farmers with limited education could become teachers, but as they observed the confidence and knowledge that their children were acquiring, they started to respect the teachers. The teachers not only taught effectively in the classroom, they also helped families with their personal problems and advocated for their village to access further government resources, especially in times of crisis, bringing flood relief and facilitating rehabilitation.
For the girls in the first class of the first Village LEAP school that opened in 2001, this required strategic decisions. After four years, they realised that it would be impossible to fulfil their dreams unless they moved nearer a town since there was no accessible middle and high school in their area. Kanjee and his brother-in-law therefore motivated 15 families to uproot and create a new village near a town.
To achieve change always requires a calculated risk: the villagers owed debts to their landlord, but Kanjee judged that their contacts with HRCP and his personal relationship with a key Pakistani human rights lawyer would mean that the landlord would be reluctant to take action against them. Their accumulated government and media contacts informed them of vacant government land which they occupied; the diocese, as a Christian minority group themselves, were sympathetic to providing scholarships for these students; other contacts gave them access to government grants and support from NGOs to develop their village.
Through working alongside the poor to bring social change, we also saw a gradual spiritual change emerging. At first there were barriers, but gradually, we of different faiths learned to respect each other, recognising our common goal to deliver quality education for our children. We learned the power of encouragement and working together as a team.
God calls men and women to pursue holiness, to guard the marriage bed, to do all things for his glory, including dating, marrying, making love, and pursuing sexual purity. He calls both men and women to protect and serve one another in complementary ways, but from the beginning, he lays a heavier burden on men.
God designed sex to avert and reject temptation within a marriage (1 Corinthians 7:5), not to embrace temptation and undermine your future marriage. Sex before marriage numbs us to temptation, hardens us against repentance, and plunders the trust in the relationship, leaving us less ready for marriage and less able to date wisely and with purity. Precisely when we need space to reflect, confess, refocus our hearts, and build healthier boundaries, we often dive further into intimacy, instead, perhaps continuing to sin sexually, and hoping it all works out and we get married.
This kind of intimacy, however, is ultimately an illusion. It may look like genuine intimacy, and even feel like genuine intimacy, but it will expire, and often quickly. Very often, what we need in the wake of sexual sin in dating is the opposite of intimacy: space.
To be absolutely, extravagantly clear, this is not a word from God, but a word of Christian advice that I hope will prove to be wise in your life. As someone who previously committed sexual sin in dating relationships and who now has counseled couples through sexual sin, I am offering guidance I wish I would have received (and heeded) sooner:
What does fasting do for a follower of Jesus? Fasting intentionally forgoes some good for the sake of fixing our hearts on a greater Good. By laying aside food, or sex in marriage, or some daily technology, or any other pleasure, we say to our souls: there is something more satisfying than this, more urgent and vital than this, more central to my life than this. We fast to see that God is supreme, to savor that God is supreme, and to say that God is supreme. What if we were willing to do this, when necessary, even in dating?
The church in Acts fasted over serious decisions (Acts 13:2; 14:23), and who you marry will be one of the most serious and consequential commitments you make in your life. And sexual sin makes that decision all the more difficult and complicated. Why not stop, for a season, to regain your spiritual sanity and seek clarity from God?
While temptation to sexual sin resisted and rejected by faith should accelerate our momentum to marry a particular man or woman, sexual sin should decelerate the relationship, giving us an opportunity to see more clearly what went wrong and what God really wants for and from us in our pursuit of marriage.
A real break will give both of you time and space to weigh the seriousness of sin and its consequences. Newfound love can cloud the eyes of our hearts, making it more difficult to truly discern reality. The infatuation we often feel in dating can blind us to ourselves and to problems in the relationship. Some intentional distance may blow away the fog long enough to see how sexual sin despises God, cheapens grace, and harms everyone involved.
When you're engaged to somebody and are set to get married in the near future, there are a lot of big decisions that you'll need to make as a couple. For example, where do you plan to live? How much money do you want to save up each month? When do you want children? These are practical questions that are important for any couple to discuss. But if you're both Christians, there's another significant question that you may need to figure out:
If you're both already attending the same church, than this would likely be a non-issue. But the problem arises if you attend different churches. In some situations, the solution is simple. If one of you attends a church that teaches the Bible while the other attends the church that teaches heresy, then you should probably attend the Bible one. Or if one of you is a member of your church while the other is a visitor of theirs, then it makes sense to attend the member's church. Or if one of you loves your community while the other isn't fond of theirs, maybe attend the church that's loved.
But what do you do if both of you attend relatively solid, biblical churches? What if you're both committed members of your church? What if you both love your community and want the other person to join your church? If you're a Christian couple and this is your situation, whose church should you go to?
It seems like the logical answer to this problem would be to simply go to the better church. But the problem is that this is often difficult to gauge. I mean, how do you determine whose church is better? You may compare the size and judge off that, but is size really the best way to determine a church's spiritual health? You may compare the quality of the preaching and teaching, but won't you both likely prefer your own pastor's preaching style? You may look at the strength of the community, but how is this not subjective?
So usually what couples do is attend each other's churches for a time and see what the Sunday worship is like. However, the problem with this approach is that each person will inevitably play the comparison game and end up noticing all the shortcomings of the other person's church. That's because deep down, you really want your significant other to notice the beauty of your own church. So while each person will say they're going to each other's Sunday service with an open mind, they can't help but be biased in their assessment.
What makes this more problematic is that if you're in this situation, you don't really have many people you can turn to for help. That's because in situations like this, you would usually ask your pastor or church friends on what you should do. But your pastor and church friends can't help but be biased. I mean, they don't want to see you leave. But the problem is your partner is likely meeting with his/her pastor and church friends and is receiving the same advice.
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