Lin,
Oh boy, that is a good example of why we need each other.  Some say that “men only” are designed for church “office” (whatever that is), but the fact that God made us different and put us together shows that it is God’s design to provide balance in all things.  No matter how good men are, they cannot provide the balance that women provide.  It is when we work together that we are the most powerful.

That was a good example that you gave of Diotrephes.  Those who want first place, like Diotrephes, are harming the church.

Words like incredible (which is quite worn-out these days anyway), incredulous, and a host of other adjectives, can’t even begin to describe the debacle that must have been for that mega-church!

If they follow the autocratic “Moses” model for church governance, good luck trying to replace those responsible.  But if they’re representative with respect to governance style, vote them out!

Like Diotrephes.

So, it had to ripped up at great expense to start over.

It has always been the case. Even in the 19th century, when the movement for greater equality in the church was still in its infancy, women were allowed to use their gifts outside the church.

William Baxter Godbey, the author of “Shall the Women Preach?” wrote, “Amid this universal cry [referring to the number of the unsaved], I am glad not a church in Christendom is found mean enough to say no to the women. All the churches on the globe endorse women preaching by sending them to preach to the heathens. Where is the church that has not her women this day in the heathenfield? “Brother Godbey, my church doesn’t allow the women to preach.” You are mistaken; your church has already sent out women to preach to the heathens over the sea, and you ought to be preaching to the heathens at home.”

Their job as “keeper” of the door to the church unfortunately is restricting the Holy Spirit as they work hard to keep him out with his work through his female “sons”.  Such a shame.

Maybe it’s really Sayers who is naughty?  We should expect Sayers to be naughty, dissident that she was!

(Cindy with very large smile on her face.)

I don’t think that most of these men that come up with these theories have enough work to do.   My husband thinks that they all need to get jobs.

You are a naughty one!  Tisk, tisk, tisk.

This changes everything!

My attempts to be Christ like are at best inferior because I am a woman. I can’t become a man and so become manly.

The male supremacists don’t seem to have noticed that they are actually teaching Gnostic heresy in this. From the Gospel of Thomas, Logion 114:

Simon Peter said to him: “Mary should leave us, for women are not worthy of the Life.” Yeshua answered: “This is how I will guide her so that she becomes Man. She, too, will become a living breath like you Men. Any women who makes herself a Man will enter into the Kingdom of God.”

Of course some Gnostics insist this is allegory, but even then, it’s hard to miss the fact that they believed the “feminine” to be inferior and perhaps even sub-human. (They argue that it is not aner but anthropos that the woman must become, but that’s even worse, because that makes her not even a person.)

It is sad to say that this whole masculinity movement is really off track theologically.  And it is like watching theology morph before my eyes when I hear them re-write it in masculinity terms–not to mention the Trinity re-write.    

I read in John Eldrige’s book Wild At Heart that… (a pharaphrase) it was men that fought Hitler, men that won the revolution and by gosh it was a man that hung on a tree.  He implied that it was masculine men that saved the world from evil and that masculinity had something to do with redemption.   He shows his ignorance of theology… Jesus was indeed a man but it is not some how Christ’s maleness that saved us.  If that had been the case… any manly man could have done the trick.  It was God incarnate in a human that rescued humanity from the fall. 

Further this whole masculinity thing creates a Christ and a salvation that is hard to identify with.  If being Christ like has to do with masculinity, then how do I be Christ like?  My attempts to be Christ like are at best inferior because I am a woman.  I can’t become a man and so become manly.  That’s why being Christ like has more to do with Christ’s character and acts of justice than his male flesh.  

Anyway, this subject gets me hoppin mad for sooo many reasons, primarily the redeinition of basic theology.   

Christ’s body redefines us all and we are all part of Him.  Our human, fleshly ways of ordering community are challenged by the union we have with Christ through the Spirit.  The Spirit constitutes community and communal ordering, not fleshly structures based on ethnicity, class, or gender. 
I think lifting up Jesus has much to do with delivering women from oppression… i did not mean to imply that it did not.
Thanks for your challenge.