To Women

The church owes you more than it can ever repay

During Advent this year, I’ve been writing pastoral letters to people the church has too often wounded instead of welcomed. They aren’t arguments or position papers. They’re attempts at honest apology, lament, and solidarity.

Today’s letter is for women.

My dear ones,

The church taught you that you were dangerous.

We told everyone that your body could make a man stumble, your voice could usurp authority, and your leadership could unravel the natural order. Mostly, I think, because somewhere deep down, the men in charge suspected that was true.

So, we made elaborate theological rules to contain you, dressing up our fear in Scriptural finery, and calling it “God’s will.” We built hierarchies that somehow magically ensured we’d land on top and you always wind up in the “helpmate” role.

We preached about a woman’s submission as if it were some kind of key to understanding God’s design for creation. Unfortunately, what that really meant was nothing more theologically compelling than: “Stay in your lane so we don’t have to feel threatened.”

And when you refused to shrink down to a manageable size, we called you divisive. We said you had a spirit of rebellion when what you actually had was a calling that frightened us.

I’m so sorry.

I’m sorry for every time you felt the call to preach and were handed a pot holder and a nursery schedule instead.

I’m sorry for every meeting where you offered an idea that got ignored, only to hear it praised ten minutes later when a man said the same thing.

I’m sorry for every sermon that made submission sound like a sacrament while maintaining a conspiracy of silence about the men who weaponized it behind closed doors.

I’m sorry for the way we talked about Mary. We made her a passive vessel, a sweet girl who said yes and then receded into the background. We stripped her of her prophecy, her protest, her full-throated declaration that God was pulling tyrants off thrones and lifting the lowly. We turned a revolutionary into a Hallmark greeting card.

I’m sorry for every woman who reported abuse and was told to pray harder, forgive faster, or think about what she might have done to provoke it.

I’m sorry for the ones who were handed back to their abusers with a blessing and a Bible verse.

I’m sorry the church became the most dangerous place instead of the safest one.

And I’m sorry for the silence. For all the pastors (myself included, God help me) who knew something was wrong and weighed the cost of saying so against the comfort of staying quiet. For all the times we chose peace over truth, and called our cowardice prudence.

Here’s what I need you to know, the dirty secret we’ve tried to keep hidden:

The God who actually shows up in Scripture isn’t the God we described to you.

The God of the Bible isn’t embarrassed by women with power. God spoke through Miriam, Deborah, Huldah. God trusted Rahab with an entire military operation.

On Easter morning, God had the most important news in human history to deliver. The men were barricaded behind locked doors, terrified. So God entrusted the first sermon of the Christian faith to Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, Salome, and the other women who showed up when the men wouldn’t/couldn’t/didn’t, and sent them to preach the resurrection to disciples who were too afraid to leave the house.

Jesus didn’t tell Martha she’s too ambitious. He told her she was distracted by the wrong things, then let Mary sit at his feet in the posture of a disciple, a role everyone knew was reserved for men. Jesus healed a woman who’d been bent over for eighteen years and called her “daughter of Abraham,” a phrase that appears nowhere else in Scripture, as if he were minting new language altogether to make sure she knew she belonged.

The early church had women apostles. Junia is right there in Romans 16, “prominent among the apostles.” Later translators tried to turn her into a man by renaming her “Junias,” but that name doesn’t exist in any ancient record. To put a finer point on it: they invented a fictional man rather than acknowledge a real woman.

So when someone tells you God made you for the background, they aren’t reading the same Bible I am.

I also want to say this.

If you’ve walked away from church because church was where you learned to hate your body, distrust your voice, and doubt your calling, your leaving isn’t a failure of faith. It might be the most faithful thing you’ve ever done.

If you can’t sing the hymns anymore because the words taste like all the lies they dressed up in sacred language, God isn’t angry at you.

If you flinch when men quote Scripture because you’ve heard those same verses used as clubs to beat you down and silence you, we ought to be holding you up as an example of wisdom and bravery.

You aren’t broken. The Jesus who shows up in the Gospels isn’t standing with the dudes holding stones, but with you, with every woman who’s been convinced she’s the problem, rather than the knuckle-draggers trying to erase her. That Jesus sees you and calls you by name, saying what he said to that bent-over woman in Luke 13: “You are set free.”

I don’t know how to end this except with the truth.

You deserved a church that celebrated your voice instead of shushing it.

You deserved a theology that honored your body rather than treating it as a threat.

You deserved leaders who protected you, not the men who harmed you.

You deserved better. So. much. better.

You still do.

And for all the ways we failed you, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

May the God who chose Mary to bring heaven down to earth to live among us, who sent women to announce the resurrection, who gifts and calls and refuses to be boxed in by our small ideas of who gets to lead, may that God heal what the church has broken.

May you find communities that see your full humanity and refuse to let anyone shrink it.

And may you know, in whatever part of you still has room to hear it, that your voice matters, your body is holy, and your calling is real.

Be gentle and brave,

Derek