May 2023

Note: In this piece I write from my experience as a cisgender woman. It’s hard to critique the gender binary without incidentally falling into it. I acknowledge that transgender men can experience childbirth, and for the purposes of this article I use the word “woman” as it is how I identify.

Easter may be over, but I’m not over it. Which, as a Christian, I think is ok. We are to be "resurrection people" after all, right? I just no longer believe Jesus lived to die, rejected and alone. We need new narratives. It is true that many of his disciples rejected, abandoned, and doubted as Jesus prepared to die, was crucified, and resurrected. Notably we have the stories of Peter, Judas, and Thomas, and the story of the disciples who fell asleep when Jesus asked them to watch and wait while he prayed.

Another story exists on the very pages of the four gospel accounts that we most likely overlooked in the past so that we could get back to what the “main characters” were doing. So that we could continue to identify our failures in the failures of the men who were always emphasized. The men who were allowed to fail and find redemption. The men who, despite Jesus’ radical teachings of inclusivity for those on the margins, still managed to craft and create a religion throughout the centuries that excludes most people.

How would the church have been different, how would our world have been different, if women had been allowed to lead and influence?

If women were allowed to shape the dominant narratives of the Church from the very beginning, we would have seen, for example, that when the men abandoned Jesus in his time of great suffering, the women had the capacity to stay.