Gospel.com Blog

March 8 was International Women’s day, a day set aside for inspiring and celebrating women worldwide. International Aid drew attention to the fact that over 500,000 women will die due to childbirth complications this year. It’s a number that could be drastically reduced with proper health care like the kind they support in the Philippines.

Here’s the UNICEF video they linked to on a recent blog post.

If you watched the Olympic opening ceremonies, you witnessed a small but upsetting detail that has prompted discussion and debate in the media since: the nine-year-old girl out on stage singing “Ode to the Motherland” was not, in fact, actually singing it: she was lip-synching the song while the real singer, a seven-year-old, was concealed behind stage after officials decided that her physical imperfections (crooked teeth) rendered her unfit for a public performance.

The subjects of beauty, femininity, and living as an image-bearer of God are often explored over at Jonalyn Grace Fincher’s blog, and she tackles the Olympics incident—and what it says about our ideas of beauty and physical perfection—in a recent post. Here’s a short excerpt:

…this substitution perpetuates the myth that flawless (read Hollywoodesque) people are also good at everything else. For a few days we all believed the nine year old Miaoke was flawlessly singing. In the days that followed we compared her face to Peiyi’s. What’s interesting is that no on has actually heard Miaoke sing. Wouldn’t that be interesting to compare her voice to Peiyi’s?

We have to shoulder on against this myth that beauty means goodness, beauty means talent, beauty means perfection. We must face the actuality that people with perfectly straight teeth are just as deceptive, ashamed, broken, manipulative, confused as people with crooked teeth.

It’s an insightful post, and just one of many that touches on issues of femininity and human-ness; see Jonalyn’s recent interview with Molly Aley for more discussion about aging and beauty.

Jonalyn Grace Fincher’s blog is consistently deep. She’s not one to write light and fluffy pieces about her day, but rather in-depth analysis of issues or extensive glimpses into her thought process.

She recently had some great insight into the often vitriolic debate about the roles of women in ministry and the household. Her thoughts jump off of two articles from Christianity Today last month titled Wounds of a Friend: Egalitarian and Wounds of a Friend: Complementarian:

While I do not believe Adam’s first sin was his silence (God never judges or rebukes him for this) I do believe men are guilty of silencing their God-given partner. Koessler warns complementarians from using Scripture to push a certain social construct and control over women, one of which is manifest in calling stay-at-home mother’s as those who are accepting “God’s highest calling.” As one woman friend tells him, “My children are grown and out of the house. So when I hear people say that a woman’s ‘highest calling’ is to be a wife and mother, I find myself wondering if there isn’t anything else for me to do for Christ.”

This is precisely what some complementarians have done to women, in their eagerness to uphold the excellent work of mothering, they’ve allowed all other valuable, excellent jobs, vocations, ministries to pale in comparison. This is not what Christ teaches, which Koessler points out in detail in his article. I mention this here because of a recent post and long, dedicated discussion many of you contributed to the topic of stay-at-home mothering.

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In a follow-up article, Dr. Sarah Sumner warns egalitarians (those who believe women and men should serve in any capacity in which they are gifted be it elder, deacon, pastor, teacher) in her article “Wounds from a Friend: Egalitarian” that egalitarians need to be careful to use carefully exegeted passages to defend their belief in women’s public ministry, not political ideologies (and I’d add gut feelings like, “I feel very strongly that women should be permitted to preach.”) Egalitarians must be careful about taking Scripture out of context, not slapping just one definition of “head” on I Cor 11, to be wary of a marriage where there is no mutuality, but only independent individuals operating without the other’s input or love and to guard against a genderless church.

There’s more to the post on Jonalyn’s blog. And if you’re interested in more of her thoughts, check out her book, Ruby Slippers.

In the 1930’s Helen Baugh hosted a dinner where the gospel of Christ was presented in a loving and relaxed manner to other women, after that first meeting the women asked if they could come back again the next week. The weekly meetings took off and soon Stonecroft Ministries was born. From those humble beginnings the ministry branched out to include Christian bookstores, tracts, and bible studies. Currently there are Stonecroft Ministries’ bible studies in sixty-three countries around the world!

Here are some informative pages from their web site:

An interesting set of videos about people’s perceptions of Christians from Stonecroft media.

Stonecroft daily news.

The main page for Stonecroft Ministries’ small groups. If you’re interested in joining a Stonecroft group they have a location finder here.

Main page for Stonecroft bible studies.

Stonecroft Ministries, “is a non-denominational organization that equips women to impact their communities with the Gospel of Jesus Christ, providing resources to enable women to connect with God, each other, and their communities.”