Equality In Christ

An intensive study of the meaning and significance of Galatians 3:28, which is often cited as a critical text in the debate on the biblical teaching of gender roles.

2017 Foreword INDIES Book Award Honorable Mention Publishers Weekly's Five Best Religion Titles of 2017 Is privilege real or imagined? It's clear that issues of race and equality have come to the forefront in our nation's consciousness. Every week yet another incident involving racial tension splashes across headlines and dominates our news feeds. But it's not easy to unpack the origins of these tensions, and perhaps we wonder whether any of these issues really has anything to do with us. Ken Wytsma, founder of the Justice Conference, understands these questions. He has gone through his own journey of understanding the underpinnings of inequality and privilege. In this timely, insightful book Wytsma unpacks what we need to know to be grounded in conversations about today's race-related issues. And he helps us come to a deeper understanding of both the origins of these issues and the reconciling role we are called to play as witnesses of the gospel. This expanded edition includes a new afterword with further reflections on race and privilege in today's cultural context

"When people are committed to gender equality, what gets in their way of achieving it? Why do well-intentioned people reinforce sexist outcomes? Why does dissonance persist between organizational actors' good intentions of equality and sexist outcomes? This book provides answers to these questions by applying the critical lens of gendered organizations to moderate-liberal congregations that separated from their mainline denomination in support of women's equal leadership yet remain predominately male in positions of authority. This critical methodological study investigates congregations affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) with some dually aligned with The Alliance of Baptists. Although the CBF identifies the equal leadership of women as a core component of its collective identity and women are enrolling in Baptist seminaries at almost equal rates as men, only five percent of CBF congregations employ women as solo senior pastors. This book provides an organizational analysis investigating gendered congregational processes on the individual, interactional, and organizational levels including themes such as gendered hiring criteria, a perceived incongruence of women's bodies and leadership, unconscious biases of organizational actors, and how women pastors' experiences of discrimination influence their more risky approaches to leadership"--

Kevin Giles has been writing on women in the Bible for over forty years. In this book, What the Bible Actually Teaches on Women, he gives the most comprehensive account to date of the competing conclusions to this question and the issues surrounding it. To understand the bitter and divisive debate among evangelicals over the status and ministry of women, it needs to be understood that those who since 1990 have called themselves "complementarians" argue that in creation before the fall God set the man over the woman. Thus, the leadership of the man and the subordination of the woman in the home, the church, and wherever possible in the world (the whole creation) is the God-given ideal that is pleasing to God. It is this "theology" that Kevin Giles deconstructs and shows to be without a biblical foundation. Giles shows that he is fully conversant with the complementarian position and yet is unpersuaded by it. He sees it as an appeal to the Bible to preserve male privilege, similar to the appeals to the Bible to validate slavery and Apartheid; appeals to the Bible made by some of the best Reformed and evangelical biblical scholars, and now seen to be special pleading. Carefully studying the limited number of texts on which complementarians predicate their theology of the sexes, Giles finds not one of them actually teaches what complementarians claim. Furthermore, complementarians too often ignore the texts that are very difficult for them. In this book the ordination of women gets only passing mention. The constant focus is on whether or not the Bible subordinates women to men as an abiding theological principle.

When Christ came, died on the cross, and the veil was opened to the throne of God, did Christ then silence half of His body or empower them to be disciples and take the gospel to the world? Was mutual submission the work of the Cross? This study gives only a few examples from God’s Divine Word of His completed work.

Without ending the inequality within the largest of our Christian Religions, how can we expect it to be ended elsewhere? EQUALITY = Equal Rights, Equal Respect, Equal Opportunity. The fullness of the Universal Golden Rule, to treat others with equal concern, as you would most want to be treated. It does not mean everybody should have equal amounts of anything except for a universal safety net. Many in the world trying to live on wages of less than $3.00 a day because profits have become gods, to the few who control most of the worlds economy, people, as well as resources, better meant to be used for benefit of all? What you need to know, what can be done!

Ronald W. Pierce and Rebecca Merrill Groothuis (general editors), with the aid of Gordon D. Fee (contributing editor), assemble a distinguished array of twenty-six evangelical scholars firmly committed to the authority of Scripture who offer a fresh, positive, up-to-date defense of biblical equality.