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I didn’t grow up in a church community. So when I became a Christian at 18 years old, I had no idea that some people thought women shouldn’t be in church leadership. It wasn’t that I hadn’t noticed that men held an overwhelming number of pastoral positions. I just assumed it was a leftover from a previous generation’s culture.

ISIS executes members of the Iraqi National Army. Photo from CNN.com

During the Winter War of 1939 & 1940, the entire Finnish population of Karelia, some 422,000, people were evacuated to avoid potential civilian slaughter. In May and June of 1940, Operation Dynamo removed 339,000 British and French troops from Dunkirk, France, shuffling them across the English channel before they were annihilated by oncoming German tanks.

More recently, from August to October of 1990, Air India found its way into the Guinness Book of World Records for the most people evacuated by a civilian airliner. They removed over 111,000 people from Amman to Mumbai via 488 flights over a span of 59 days. In 1999, the Kosovo War resulted in 800,000 refugees sweeping into other parts of Europe and even Israel, where locals opened up their homes and took them in. 

Right now, there’s approximately 40,000 Iraqi civilians facing dire circumstances at…

A couple of Sundays ago a prominent pastor preached on 1 Timothy 2:11-15 in a sermon entitled “Women in the Church”. He has a rather interesting understanding of verse 15 (“But women will be saved through childbearing — if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety”) and rests his premise in part on his understanding of current cultural issues.

Rather, I should point out that he rests his premise on his misunderstanding of cultural issues.*

Falling Over Figures Of Speech

Domenico di Bartolo

First, we need to see how he views verse 15. The pastor acknowledges that many people in church history have considered that verse as referring to the birth of Jesus: a woman gave birth to our Savior, and this childbirth is part of salvation. The pastor, though, thinks this teaching is faulty and that Paul really did mean all women – women in every generation…