Preaching That Speaks to Women

Alice P. Mathews

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780801023675
• eBook ISBN: 9781441206404
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

In most twenty-first century congregations, women outnumber men by as much as fifty percent or more. Unfortunately, masculine anecdotes and a lack of understanding of the different ways women and men listen, learn, and perceive ideas of leadership and power leave many women feeling detached from the messages conveyed from the pulpit.
How can a pastor effectively minister to both men and women? How do the ways in which women understand sermons differ from those of men? Preaching That Speaks to Women invites preachers to consider how gender affects the way sermons are understood and calls them to preaching that relates to the entire congregation.
Drawing from her experience as a teacher of ministry students, as well as her experience as a missionary, conference speaker, and radio Bible teacher, Alice Mathews explores both the myths and legitimate boundaries for speaking about women as listeners. She considers the ways women think about themselves, make ethical decisions, handle stress, learn, and view leadership and power and applies the results to the task of preaching. Mathews advocates effective preaching that does not ignore women or merely typecast women in narrowly defined roles.

1

Is It True That Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus?

In the lighthearted film What Women Want, Mel Gibson’s character accidentally receives the ability to hear audibly the unspoken thoughts of women around him. As a ruthless and chauvinistic advertising man, he starts out using this astonishing new resource against the women in his professional life. But as time goes on, he finds that women’s unspoken thoughts begin to shape his own way of thinking—and his ability to communicate more effectively with women.

Mel Gibson’s character was “a man’s man.” He knew the “male” way to think and act, and he displayed a contempt for anything that differed from that. So the sudden ability to get inside women’s heads shook him up. Much of what he had thought or assumed about women turned out to be inaccurate. Only when he began to “hear” their unspoken thoughts was he forced to revise his assumptions about women.

Most of us go through life with sets of assumptions about gender that are largely based on myth. This is the stuff of comedy—on the stage, in television sitcoms, or in films such as What Women Want. These assumptions are usually not as funny when played out in real living rooms or bedrooms. And it is not funny at all when these myth-based assumptions inform sermons that deal with matters of life and death for both men and women.

This book is about the myths and the realities surrounding the lives of women sitting in church pews week after week. And it is about the ways in which these myths and realities determine the messages women hear from the pulpit. Most importantly, this book is about the ways that pastors can preach so that women can hear God’s truth plainly and convincingly and incorporate it into their lives.

When a preacher’s assumptions about women correspond closely to the reality of women’s lives, it is far more likely that the message women receive from the pulpit will speak with power and conviction to the issues of their lives and the needs of their hearts. Unlike Mel Gibson’s character, however, pastors cannot hear audibly the unspoken thoughts of women. How, then, can a pastor gain reliable clues to the messages women are actually receiving from the pulpit?

Take a moment to step out of your skin mentally. Close your eyes and imagine that you wake up tomorrow morning and almost immediately know that something is “wrong.” Your body has changed as you slept. If you went to bed as a man, you wake up as a woman. If you went to bed as a woman, you wake up as a man.[1]

First, there is the shock of discovering that you have to deal with many routine habits in a different way. You use the bathroom differently. You struggle to put on very different clothes. You may have to deal with whiskers that grew during the night: How does a former woman deal with shaving? Or how does a former man manage a bad hair day, having no prior experience with curling irons or hot rollers? That’s the initial shock.

But the real shock steals over you as you begin to discover what this mysterious change means for your work life and your home life. You discover that as a result of this change you understand differently what it is to be a man or to be a woman. And you find yourself with a different attitude toward half the human race. Your expectations for those around you who are different from you have changed. Perhaps uncomfortably, you discover that their expectations for you have changed as well. These expectations define in new ways what you can and cannot do. You may quickly discover that you are expected to perform in areas that were previously unfamiliar to you or that now, disappointingly, you are prohibited from participating in activities that fascinate you or in relationships you once found satisfying. The “idyllic” existence you once believed the other half of the human race enjoyed has now been reduced to the drudgery of daily responsibilities. As you move through the day, you find yourself confronted with beliefs and expectations that leave you uncertain, socially disoriented, and subtly at odds with yourself and others.[2]

You may wonder why you should bother with such an improbable test of your imagination. Folk wisdom tells us that we cannot understand another person’s problems or life until we have walked a mile in that person’s shoes. And while that is usually not an option for us, there are lesser ways in which we can virtually walk that mile. Losing a game of Monopoly is not the same as losing your life savings in the real estate market. But the game can, nevertheless, help you grasp some of the principles behind the risks.

This book is designed to help you (if you are a male reader)[3] to step virtually into the skin of a woman, to listen as she listens, to hear what she hears, and to think as she might think—about God, the Bible, and the Christian life. If you are a preacher, this book can help you shape your sermons and your delivery in ways that connect more profoundly with women’s experiences. It may also enable you to avoid common pitfalls in preaching that can obscure the truths of the gospel for many women. In short, as you stand before your congregation each week, you may find that applying the insights in this book will radically change your pulpit ministry. That could be good news for women in the pews.

Those of us who have worked closely with Haddon Robinson over the years have often heard him describe the difference between amateur and professional or skilled speakers in this way: An amateur speaker usually leads off with the question “What should I talk about?” The skilled speaker starts with the question “Who is my audience?” Before you can decide on a topic, you need to know whether you are being asked to talk to a group of teens, a group of business people, or a group of senior citizens. In such groups, the differences in interests, attitudes, and even vocabularies are somewhat self-evident.

Less self-evident are the possible differences in interests, attitudes, and even vocabularies between a group of men, a group of women, and a mixed audience. Consequently, the tendency in preaching is to think that where gender is concerned, one size fits all. Unfortunately, failure to recognize powerful social differences between women and men can result in failure to communicate truth at a level that reaches people’s lives.

When I was a child growing up in Detroit, Michigan, during the 1930s and 1940s, my parents were active in a rapidly growing church near our house. During the nine-year ministry of a dynamic pastor, the congregation grew from fewer than 250 to more than 1,400 during the Great Depression and the Second World War. Yet even as a child, I was miffed each time I heard the pastor boast from the pulpit that he did not have to make an effort to bring in women and children; he simply focused on the men. He was sure that if he had the men, he would have the wives and kids as well. That was in the 1930s and 1940s, and he was probably right. On Sunday mornings he taught a men’s Bible class of four hundred men in an abandoned bank building across the street from the church, and he got not only those men but also their families. The unusual growth of the church seemed to bear out his basic church-growth philosophy.

Would that pastor have the same success in the twenty-first century? Almost certainly not. The world has changed dramatically in the last fifty years. I think of the surprising range of change in my own life. Some of the messages I heard as a young girl would chase me out the door today. However nostalgic some people may be about the simpler certitudes of that earlier day, those certitudes have been eroded. The world in which we now seek to speak the good news of the gospel has been shaped by a succession of wars, the civil rights and women’s movements, the shift from an industrial to a technological society, and the impact of postmodern questions and answers in the wider world of media, politics, and education. Today the answer to the question “Who is my audience?” is far more complex than most speakers think when both women and men are part of that audience.

When we talk about an audience, however, we also talk about its context. A talk-show audience is not the same as a Sunday morning congregation. Nor is a staid congregation in a formal church the same as an audience in a less formal megachurch. The social context of an audience is as important as the makeup of the audience itself. Furthermore, in a single church with similar people in the pews, the audience can be different depending on the personality, beliefs, or attitudes of the speaker. Listeners who may be open to new insights from one speaker may reject those same insights when spoken by a different preacher. The pastor is also part of the context that shapes listeners’ responses.

What are the messages the average woman may hear when she attends church on Sunday? She may hear the messages contained in the pastor’s words. She may hear other messages in what the pastor does not say. She is likely to pick up nonverbal messages from the preacher’s stance in the pulpit. She may receive unintended messages from the informal social interactions that occur before or after the service. But whatever the messages she receives, the way in which the contemporary woman hears is likely to be vastly different from my mother’s way of hearing in the 1930s.

In subtle ways, preaching to women is not the same as preaching to men. When the pastor steps into the pulpit on a Sunday morning, the challenge of speaking God’s Word effectively to all the people may be greater than the preacher realizes. In Telling the Truth, Frederick Buechner describes a typical audience:

In the front row the old ladies turn up their hearing aids, and a young lady slips her six year old a Lifesaver and a Magic Marker. A college sophomore home on vacation, who is there because he was dragged there, slumps forward with his chin in his hand. The vice-president of a bank who twice that week has seriously contemplated suicide places his hymnal in the rack. A pregnant girl feels the life stir within her. A high school math teacher, who for twenty years has managed to keep his homosexuality a secret for the most part even from himself, creases his order of service down the center with his thumbnail and tucks it under his knee.

Buechner then goes on to describe the preacher:

The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher. Two minutes from now he may have lost his listeners completely to their own thoughts, but at this moment he has them in the palm of his hand. The silence in the shabby church is deafening because everybody is listening to it. Everybody is listening, even himself. Everybody knows the kind of things he has told them before and has not told them, but who knows what this time he will tell them, out of the silence he will tell them? Let him tell them the truth.[4]

That is your privilege. That is your challenge.

Is It Really True That Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus?

In the 1990s, John Gray made at least a small fortune with his book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. The book was on best-seller lists for years and was discussed on almost every talk show. It also fed some of the prevailing myths about women and men. Was that book on target? Are men and women from different planets?

When we look at some of the recent popular literature, we may conclude that John Gray was right. Both Christian and secular writers appear to have accepted his basic premise. For example, in Men and Masculinity, British evangelical leader Roy McCloughry concluded that “all conversation between men and women is cross-cultural conversation.”[5] He later elaborated by quoting Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation. Tannen makes the point that men and women use conversation for different purposes: Women use conversation to seek confirmation, to make connections, and to reinforce intimacy; men, on the other hand, use conversation primarily to protect their independence and to negotiate status.[6]

If, in fact, there is truth in these conclusions, the task of preaching to mixed audiences may be far more complicated than most preachers know. It is possible that the way a doctrine is taught or an illustration is selected can actually backfire on half (or more) of an audience, simply because we think that men and women hear the words we have spoken in the same way. Is it possible that men and women in the same country, in the same town, in the same church could actually move within different cultures, as the opening exercise may have shown us? If it is true, what are the implications for the preaching task?

Anthropologist and missiologist Paul Hiebert discusses culture as the way in which ideas, feelings, and values are shared by a group of people.[7] In normal use, the word culture refers to any group’s “way of life”—how people act based on what they believe, feel, and value. Churches have their own cultures—their shared beliefs, feelings, and values. Ethnic groups have their own cultures—their shared beliefs, feelings, and values. Nations have their own cultures—their shared beliefs, feelings, and values. It may be that men and women in North America have subtly different cultures, with somewhat different sets of shared beliefs, feelings, and values.

We tend to think that “all Americans” or “all Methodists” (or Baptists or Pentecostals or whatever) would hear messages in similar ways. Yet it takes only a few minutes of reflection to recognize that deep divisions exist even within our ethnic or denominational subcultures. That should alert us to the possibility that men and women may actually live in different worlds of ideas, feelings, and values.[8]

Historian Anne Firor Scott tells us that our culture grinds the lens through which we view reality.[9] A lens that allows us to see one thing clearly may also make other things fuzzy, impossible to see. Anyone who wears bifocals understands how that works: A near-sighted person needs one lens for reading and a separate lens for seeing anything more than a few feet away. Is it possible that men and women have different cultural “lenses” that cause them to look at reality in differing ways?

• Our culture shapes our ideas, our cultural knowledge.[10] Cultural knowledge is not only the categories we use to sort out reality but also the assumptions and beliefs we have about reality—the nature of the world around us and how it works. Our culture provides us with the basic building blocks of our thoughts, so we must ask if there is a separate male culture that provides men with ingredients for their thoughts that are different from those provided to women. Perhaps no. Perhaps yes. But it is a question we must ask.
• Our culture shapes our feelings about things—our attitudes, our notions of what is beautiful or ugly, our tastes in food and dress, how we like to enjoy life, how we experience sorrow or joy. Clearly, women have cultural permission to feel and express emotion in ways different from those of men.
• Our culture shapes our values, which help us judge which things are moral and which are immoral. Many women would assert that men have a different moral code with its own culturally defined sins—not identical to the moral code that defines sin for women. Men and women do not always agree on which acts are righteous and which are immoral.

It may be easier for us to grasp the reality of cultural difference in terms of different generations. When I am with any of my six grandsons, I hear them speak a language different from my own. Yes, they use words that are in my vocabulary—words such as cool or awesome or radical—but they do not attach the same meanings to them. So I might ask Chris, “When you say that Eric is cool, what do you mean? What’s cool about Eric? He seems pretty warm to me.” I listen to the vast array of inflections used in the ways my grandsons pronounce a word such as cool, and I know that it is an important word with many meanings and many uses. I just don’t speak that language.

But if my husband, Randall, and I sit sipping coffee together after breakfast, chatting about our family, our work, and the day ahe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Haddon W. Robinson
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Is It True That Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus?
• 2. Preaching for Moral Decision-Making
• 3. Preaching for Psychological Wholeness
• 4. How Do We Know What We Know?
• 5. Modern and Postmodern Listeners
• 6. Women, Spirituality, and Issues of Faith
• 7. Women and Issues of Power
• 8. Leadership with a Difference
• 9. Women, Roles, and a Biblical Identity
• 10. Understanding Women as Listeners
• Notes
• Index