I’ll try to make this brief. It seems to me that it has become the new hip thing among evangelicals to talk about the feminization of the Church. Oddly, this complaint seems to have made bedfellows of the emergent and conservative reformed crowds. I’ll try to avoid a tangent here, but I find this platitude to be both at best imprecise and at worst offensive and un-biblical. It seems to me to reveal latent sexism and to be quite derogatory. Now to be fair, I think I know what most people mean when they say that the Church has been feminized, and I certainly don’t think that everyone who has said this is a closet mysoginist (I have said it myself), however, I do think it reveals a deeply psychological cultural tendency among conservative Christians that stands in real danger of proving the points of the feminist left.

In the first place, to say that the Church has been feminized, as if this is obviously a bad thing seems questionable. The Church is the bride of Christ. Were the apostles feminizing the Church and undermining its militant side by employing such terminology? No, of course not. Now if one means, that the Church has taken on a purely feminine ethos to the exclusion of masculine characteristics it should be agreed on all fronts that this is a bad thing. But making the Church “masculine” as if that should be its primary mode is certainly not the solution. The Church is made up of men and women, all of whom are made in the image of God and it should reflect that diversity. The Church should always be a model of feminine virtue: submission to Christ, quiet and humble service, industry, tender care and a gentle spirit. At the same time, the Church should always display masculine fortitude: strength and courage, a willingness to stand fast to protect the weak and helpless, and an ever present militancy against evil and the evil one.

My concern is that “feminized” is being used in present conversation, especially among hip young emergent types as a synonym for emotional, trite, soft and weak, and that masculinity, seen as the counter to the present situation is being viewed as rough, tough, in-your-face, and godlike. These conceptions owe much more to greek pagan philosophy than Biblical conceptions of femininity and masculinity. Read Proverbs 31. That kind of woman is not an emotional train-wreck who would rather sing prom songs to Jesus than be prepared for the advancement of the Kingdom in the training ground of the Church and Her worship. At the same time read the history of Israel’s kings. Read of the weak and emotional captivated men who led Israel into idolatry and apathy. The problem was not that they were feminine. It was that they were weak, shallow, ungodly men.

So the point I suppose I’m trying to make is that to blame the pathetic aspects of American evangelical culture on “the feminization of the Church” is both a cop-out and a completely ungrounded slam on women. If it weren’t for faithful women the Church in America wouldn’t exist as we know it today. Furthermore, the American evangelical Church’s problems have to do with shallow or non-existent theology, silly, pessimistic, fairy-tale eschatology, a trite obsession with personal fulfillment and happiness (as distinguished from joy), and the complacency that is satisfied with enjoyable emotions and vivid personal feelings rather than the challenge of personal holiness and contentment with God’s providential governance of all of creation. To call this “feminization” is both naive (do people have no conception of the history-changing influence of women like Monica, mother of Augustine, Joan of Arc and Mother Teresa) and belligerent. The failures of the American evangelical Church rest squarely on the shoulders of Christians, gender notwithstanding. (As a caveat, if one insists on parsing the failings of the contemporary church by sex, men must undoubtedly take the lion’s share of the blame. In the first place, they are the liturgical leaders of the Church and thus set the tone and the ethos, and in the second place they are the ones who cannot seem to distinguish the difference between genuine role differences between men and women and cultural fads that define femininity as silly emotionalism and masculinity as grunting barbarism.)

Okay, so maybe I didn’t avoid the tangent.