One of the benefits of being a Patheos blogger is the opportunity to participate in a book club-themed conversation about a particular book during a certain two-week or so time period. It’s interesting to get a lot of different perspectives from a variety of good thinkers on an author’s work. If you decide to purchase the book in question for yourself, you’ll bring all the questions and insights from book club bloggers into the pages as you read it. If you don’t choose to read the book, the posts serve to acquaint you with the work, which can be helpful if the either the title or subject matter arises in conversation.
I missed the first round of internet conversation about blogger Sarah Bessey’s Jesus Feminist: An Invitation To Revisit The Bible’s View of Women (Howard, 2013) when it released last fall, so I’m glad to catch a second wave in order to interact with Bessey’s thoughts on the topic. Bessey is a well-known Canadian blogger who had a mostly-positive, egalitarian Vineyard church experience as she grew up. As she headed to college in the Charismatic Bible belt of Tulsa, she discovered that her experience in the church with women in leadership was far from universal. After graduation, Bessey and her husband Brian moved to Texas so Brian could become a youth pastor in a large church. It was there that the dissonance she was feeling crystallized into questions about the way some churches do a work-around on the issue of women in leadership: [Read more]
