Editor’s Ink -- By: William David Spencer

Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 19:2 (Spring 2005)
Article: Editor’s Ink
Author: William David Spencer


Editor’s Ink

William David Spencer

Every day people reared or still worshipping in very conservative Christian denominations find the reasons for full partnership between women and men so compelling that they make what they consider to be the bold and breathtaking paradigm shift from forbidding to supporting women in ministry. In point of fact, they eventually realize they have merely adjusted to God’s pre-Fall agenda, which was commanded to humanity from the perfect day of creation: joint authority in all areas of life (Gen. 1:26-30).

I, myself, reared and faithful for 20 years in a fundamentalist church from the late 1940s to the end of the 1960s, became increasingly aware, as I moved more and more actively into ministry, that, like the jalopy I was driving at the time, my understanding of ministry was not hitting on all God’s cylinders.

I had already widened my understanding of the perimeters of the Church universal in Intervarsity at Rutgers in the mid-1960s, when I met Lutherans and Episcopalians who were clearly Christians—an impossibility according to my birth church.

Son of a devout and active Sunday School teaching Mom and blessed with an older sister filled to the brim with gifts and graces and the certitude of faith (my mother once lost track of her at a department store when she was very small and found her sitting up on a counter, where the saleswomen had hoisted her, preaching away to them why they all needed to take Jesus as their savior), I grew up with a profound respect and appreciation for strong and godly women. As a child who noticed things, I also became aware that basically women ran these conservative churches as fully as the men did. If a pastor fell afoul of the powerful women of the church, they were on the phone to each other, and he was very shortly gone. Activated in my faith in college and already doing ministry when the Jesus Movement hit, I had my awareness of joint ministry further broadened as we all hit the streets, the coffee houses, the festivals, evangelizing together, girls and boys, blacks and whites, our hair down to our shoulders, our message about as complex as my sister’s had been—except for the additional illustration of the “vanishing hitchhiker.” My development also cost me my solidarity with my birth church, when my band was summarily replaced from performing in the evening service. We were scheduled to sing two slow acoustic guitar accompanied original choral selections. But, immediately prior to the service, we exhorted the youth group, to the beat of an added electric bass guitar, with such song lyrics I’d written as “Our Rebel Lord,” which began: “Christ was beaten all the way to the cross, then killed by religious and political bosses, who ...

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