Could There Have Been Women Shepherds Watching Those Flocks By Night?

A Shepherdess with her flock, Cornelius van Leemputten, 1841-1902

So I've been thinking about whether there were any female shepherds at the nativity.

The thought arose because a female friend recently asked a question I had never considered before: Why are all the shepherds in Christmas creches men?

A quick look at our own creche showed she was right; both shepherds are male.

My friend went on to suggest that, back in Jesus’ day, women also watched the flocks; it wasn't just men. So why don't women appear in our holiday creches or Christmas pageants?

After all, Luke doesn't say whether the shepherds were men or women; he ascribes no gender to them.

Faced with the question, I did what everyone does in a situation like this: I Googled it.

The first website that came up was Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE), an organization that believes the Bible, properly interpreted, teaches the equality of women and men.

In an article titled The Way of a Shepherd, author Beulah Wood—who grew up on a sheep farm and looked after them herself—says that “possibly half the shepherds in Jesus’ day were women, and probably half the shepherds of the world today.”

She goes on to note that we first meet Rachel as a shepherd in Genesis 29:6-9. (“Rachel came with her father’s sheep for she was their shepherd.”)

We are also introduced to Zipporah as a shepherd in Exodus 2:16: “Now a priest of Midian had seven daughters and they came to draw water and fill the troughs to water their father’s flock.” 

Says Wood: “These matriarchs of Israel both met their husbands at wells where they led their flocks to drink. During the course of their daily work, the contact occurred that led to their marriages and many more years of caring for flocks.”

Next up was Women From the Book blog, by Karen Meeker. He goal is to bring to life the “scores of women who appear within the pages of the Bible.”

In a post titled Life as a Shepherdess, Meeker says “in ancient Israel it was not unusual for women to work outside the home, young women at least. When a girl was eight to ten years old, she began leading the family herd out to nearby pasture.”

At the end of the day, she says, “the shepherdess brought her sheep back home. At night the animals were housed in stone-walled pens attached to buildings or compounds, or on the ground floor of houses in the cities, or corralled in thorny, fence-like enclosures typical of nomadic enclosures.”

Tending the family herd “was reserved primarily for girls, and they continued this work until married at age fifteen or sixteen,” she adds.

When local grass was insufficient, she says that “men took the herds further afield . . . women worked close to home.”

In another blog post titled Could the Shepherds Who Visited Jesus Been Women?, Tracy J. Robbins poses an interesting question: 

Considering Jesus’s revolutionary way (for his time) of including women, why not have women be the first to see the arrival of God on earth, just as they were the first to see the resurrected Jesus?

Admittedly, there isn’t a lot of evidence to say women were present at the birth of Jesus. But there also isn’t any way to say conclusively they weren’t. 

The Bible doesn't say anything about it, one way or the other.

But what we can say for sure is that, over the centuries, women have been marginalized women in the Christian religion—their roles in the Gospels and the New Testament downplayed, prevented from being leaders, and forced into stereotypical gender roles.

So even if it can’t be proved women were there, maybe it’s time to promote a little gender balance in the Christmas story.

Perhaps at future Christmas pageants we will see some female shepherds. 

And in the spirit of goodwill, some female magi wouldn’t hurt, either.

Christmas, or What Was God Saying to Indigenous People 2,000 Years Ago?

So I've been thinking about what God was saying 2,000 years ago to people living in North America, or what Indigenous people call Turtle Island.

At Christmas, Christians celebrate how they believe God came into the world through Jesus.

But when God came into the world 2,000 years ago in Palestine, what was he saying to Indigenous people in North America at the same time?

That’s the question that was posed to me recently.

I have to admit: I had never thought about that before. I went looking for more information.

The person who asked the question said he was quoting my friend Terry LeBlanc, an Indigenous Christian leader and director of NAIITS, an Indigenous Christian learning community.

I sent Terry an e-mail. Did he really say that?

Terry said yes, the gist of it was correct. Then he amplified what he meant.

First off, Terry said, he wanted to affirm “if there is a singular Creator of all things, something about which I am in agreement, then unless he is the deist’s god (who created the world and then left), God has been and is omnipresent by default.”

What this means, he said, is that while the history we read about in the Bible was unfolding for the Jews, “there was an historical timeline of equal length unfolding here and in other places of the globe.”

Terry was quick to add he’s wasn’t saying “God as Jesus, specifically, was here [in North America], though there are prophecies of the arrival of the message of Jesus.”

Instead, he said, what he meant was “God as Creator and God as the Spirit were here.”

If that’s the case, I asked him, what was God saying to the Indigenous people of North America?

God was speaking about things like the seven teachings, Terry said: Love, respect, courage, honesty, wisdom, humility and truth.

As we know, when Europeans arrived they assumed North America’s Indigenous people were heathens—that they had no knowledge of God. (At least, not God as they understood him.)

But they did, Terry said. They just used different language and stories to express it.

But Christian missionaries assumed those stories “were irrelevant and/or replaceable by the biblical narrative, instead of recognizing the universal applicability of those [Indigenous] narratives.”

When I read Terry’s comments, I was reminded of what Richard Twiss, a noted American Indigenous Christian leader, said in his book Rescuing the Gospel from the Cowboys.

In it, he noted that “the Creator’s presence” was active among native people before Europeans arrived.

Unfortunately, he added, they were blinded “to the already existing work of Creator among Native nations of the land.”

Instead of coming alongside Indigenous ways of understanding God, they sought to convert them to “white man’s religion.”

The result was a disaster for Indigenous people as Europeans suppressed their spirituality, culture, languages and ways of life.

But back to the original question: When God came into the world as a baby in Palestine over 2,000 years ago, how was he communicating with the inhabitants of North America—or people in other countries around the world? And what was he saying?

Those are questions I will be pondering this Christmas. What do you think?

Photo at top: Norval Morrisseau, Indian Jesus Christ, 1974.

John Chau: Martyr or Misguided Zealot?

I’ve been thinking about John Chau, the young missionary who was killed trying to bring the Gospel to the people who live on North Sentinel Island.

Was he a martyr, or a misguided zealot? Opinion is divided.

First, a bit of background.

Chau, 26, was killed trying to evangelize the Sentinelese, a remote and isolated group of a few hundred people who live on an Island in the Bay of Bengal.

The Sentinelese have resisted interaction with the outside world for centuries, ever since a terrible encounter with the British in the late 19^th century.

To protect them, and keep them safe from diseases against which they have no immunity, the country of India has made it illegal for outsiders to go to the island. 

As for Chau, he had been gripped by a desire to go to the island since he was 18, according to Mary Ho of All Nations, a mission agency based in Kansas City, Mo. that partly supported him.

“It was his life's mission to go to the island and share the goodness of Jesus Christ," she is quoted as saying.

The first time Chau tried to get to the island, he hired local fishermen to take him as close as possible before he went closer in a kayak.

"My name is John!" he yelled when he spotted some Sentinelese men onshore. "I love you, and Jesus loves you. Jesus Christ gave me authority to come to you."

He went back a second time, retreating when an islander shot an arrow at him.

"Lord," he wrote in his diary after that encounter, "is this island Satan's last stronghold, where none have heard or even had a chance to hear your name?"

In his final journal entry, on Nov. 16, Chau left instructions with the fishermen for contacting friends, family and colleagues if his third visit went wrong.

"You guys might think I'm crazy in all this," he said, "but I think it's worth it to declare Jesus to these people. Please do not be angry at them or at God if I get killed."

The next day the fishermen saw the islanders dragging Chau's body along the beach and then burying it.

As of this writing, Indian police have decided it’s impossible to retrieve his body, given the risk of a confrontation with the Sentinelese people.

So: Was Chau right to do what he did, or not?

Non-religious commentators are pretty unanimous in their condemnation.

This included Steven Corry of Survival International, a group that champions the rights of indigenous people.

“The Sentinelese have shown again and again that they want to be left alone, and their wishes should be respected,” he said in a statement on the group’s website.

“The British colonial occupation of the Andaman Islands decimated the tribes living there, wiping out thousands of tribespeople, and only a fraction of the original population now survive. So the Sentinelese fear of outsiders is very understandable.”

Remote tribes like the Sentinelese “must have their lands properly protected,” he wrote.

For British journalist Janet Street-Porter, Chau’s adventure “was an act of cultural imperialism and insane arrogance.”

Writing in the Independent, she called it “another example of two of the worse kinds of environmental pollution: aggressive pushing of faith to another culture and the introduction of ‘gifts’ which undermine their way of life.

But John Stackhouse, an evangelical who teaches religious studies at Crandall University in Moncton, sees it differently.  

In a blog post on Context, he acknowledges what Chau did was illegal, and could have exposed the islanders to disease against which they have no resistance—although he raises doubts about whether that might have happened.

He also questions whether it would be so bad if they were able to enjoy the benefits of modernity.

But beyond the disease question, “there seems little to argue against Chau’s initiative—at least from the point of view of anyone not already hostile to Christianity.”

Christians, he went on to say “believe—perhaps wrongly, but sincerely—that our message of salvation through Jesus Christ is the best news in the world, the solution to every culture’s fundamental problem, the hope of flourishing in this life and in the next.

“Nothing therefore can be seen as more important than hearing this good news, and John Allen Chau risked his life accordingly.”

For Stackhouse, Chau was a “brave young man doing what brave young Christians should.”

But other Christians disagree.

Writing on the website of The American Conservative, Rod Dreher, who is Eastern Orthodox, said "even though I share his faith, Chau had no business going to those people."

If Chau had been a missionary trying to sneak into North Korea, “I would have thought him insanely brave,” he said.

“But the law against visiting that island was there for a very good reason: this tribe has had no exposure to outsiders, and is enormously vulnerable to communicable diseases.”

He went on to note that Chau could not have preached to these people, anyway—he doesn’t’ speak their language.

In fact, said Dreher, “nobody speaks their language. How on earth could he have witnessed to them?”

Unless he planned to spend many years living with the Sentinelese, “trying to preach to them was a pointless endeavor,” he stated.

“He might easily have been an angel of death for this tribe!” he went on to say. “The vanity and hubris of that man is really something.”

Worse, he adds, Chau’s adventure has angered Hindus in India, where Christians can be viewed with suspicion.

“So Chau’s act is now bringing pain and misery onto innocent Christians living in India under difficult conditions of bigotry and persecution. Great.”

For Dreher, the conclusion is simple.

“Chau ought to have left those vulnerable tribespeople alone. He had no chance of converting them to faith in Christ, but a good chance of giving them a disease that could have wiped them off the face of the earth. How could any Christian justify this?”

                                             *                 *                *

For Christians, Chau’s misadventure raises interesting questions.

They are, after all, commanded to preach the Gospel to the whole world.

But what is the best way to do that?

Throughout much of history, missionary and imperial impulses were often mixed. Christians missionaries didn’t just bring their faith, but also colonialism—and a sense of western superiority—to other countries and races.

True, those missionaries also brought health care and education. But death and destruction came, too—both overseas and among Indigenous people in North America.

Today, thoughtful Christians are wrestling with the question of how to be a witness for their faith abroad, and in their own countries.

There isn’t agreement on what that should look like. But, at a minimum, I think it should similar to the oath doctors take: Do no harm.

Using that minimum standard, Chau was wrong to undertake his mission (apart from the fact that culturally and linguistically it made no sense, not to mention his lone-ranger style.)

Anyway: That's what I'm thinking. What are your thoughts?

About Gretta Vosper, and the Reaction to the Decision by the United Church of Canada Not to Fire Her for Heresy: Updated

On November 7, a settlement was reached between atheist United Church minister Gretta Vosper and the Toronto Conference of the United Church to let her stay on the job—despite not believing in God.

Vosper, the minister at West Hill United Church since 1997, publicly declared herself an atheist in 2013.

Things came to a head in 2015 when she publicly criticized the denomination for posting a prayer on its website after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris.

In her open letter, she denounced the “existence of a supernatural being whose purposes can be divined and which, once interpreted and without mercy, must be brought about within the human community in the name of that being.”

In 2016, the Toronto Conference conducted a review that found Vosper “not suitable” to continue as a minister because she was no longer in "essential agreement" with the church's statement of doctrine.

The Conference also found she was "unwilling and unable" to reaffirm the vows she made when she was ordained in 1993. 

The Conference went on to ask the General Council, the top governing body of the United Church, for a formal hearing to determine whether she should be placed on the Discontinued Service List (Disciplinary)—fired, in other words.

Before that took place, an attempt was made to mediate the dispute. It failed. 

The hearing by the General Council was then scheduled for November and December, this year. 

But before it took place, the Toronto Conference and Vosper reached a settlement.

In a brief joint statement, the Toronto Conference, Vosper and West Hill Church said the parties had "settled all outstanding issues between them."

The terms of the agreement are confidential.

Those are the essential ingredients of the story. What to make of it? I have a few thoughts.

First, I am saddened by the comments being made by other Christians about the United Church.

There has been some self-righteous piling on by some people. To me, it feels smug and self-congratulatory;. "See! We told you they really weren't Christians."

It's also hypocritical. While I don’t support Vosper being able to retain her job in the United Church—she’d be much more suitable in a Unitarian Universalist pulpit—people from other denominations need to think carefully before they throw stones.

After all, Roman Catholics have their terrible child sex abuse scandal, and evangelicals in the U.S. keep voting for Trump. Other denominations have various skeletons of their own in their closets.

Second, not all United Church members or congregations agree with the decision.

The United Church is not monolithic or hierarchical. It has a governing structure, but basically operates on a congregational model.

In that model, individual congregations and conferences are free to make their own decisions about the best ways to be the church in their communities (subject to agreed-upon denominational guidelines).

The Toronto conference can reach this agreement with Vosper, without consulting other conferences. There’s no United Church pope who can enforce the rules. 

In my own denomination, which also operates on a congregational model, there are clergy and churches that make me feel uncomfortable with their views about women, the environment, and politics. 

But I cannot force them to leave, just as they cannot make my church change its perspectives.

Third, while the reasons for the settlement are not being disclosed, there is a suspicion that money—or lack of it—is an important reason.

I'm told that is top of the list for some United Church members and staff when they discuss the issue. Lawyer's fees are expensive!

And no wonder; the United Church is facing severe financial challenges. When I once asked one of the denomination's fundraisers what the church's fundraising strategy was, I was told: "To slow down the inevitable crash.”

The decrease in giving across Canada has resulted in changes to the governance structure, and also to a downsizing of the denomination's staff. 

The issue of cost was hinted at by Vosper’s lawyer, Julian Falconer. 

He was quoted as saying “both parties took a long look at the cost-benefit at running a heresy trial and whether it was good for anyone (and) the results speak for themselves.”

It could be that Toronto Conference officials had to make a stark choice between paying to fire Vosper or to keep open some homeless shelters or services for at-risk youth.

Fourth, I feel sorry for my friends who work for the United Church.

They have been put in an awkward place by this decision. Without any information about why the settlement was reached, they cannot offer any explanations—whether they oppose it or not.

"We are caught between a rock and a hard place," says a friend who works for the United Church.

Asking your staff to shrug their shoulders and say don't know does not constitute a good communications strategy for any organization. 

Fifth, most denominations are lousy at handling disputes like this.

Whether its congregations, conferences or whole denominations, Christians of all kinds have trouble dealing with difficult disputes.

No matter what happens, we want to get along, be nice, and make everyone feel welcome—no matter how badly they behave.

It takes a lot for a church or denomination to actually disbar, disfellowship or fire someone for any reason. 

This is partly because many groups are ill-prepared to deal with difficult people or situations. 

It is also because they have an innate disposition towards repair and restoration of broken relations.

Which is not a bad thing, in the main. In the past, too many churches were harsh, judgmental and exclusive, making people feel unwelcome over trangressions of all kinds.

(In my own denomination, at one time people were excommunicated for marrying someone from another Christian church.)

This desire to make things right goes double for the United Church, which is even more disposed towards inclusion and understanding than many other church groups. 

The denomination sees itself as a big tent, with room for everyone. Including now, it seems, also Gretta Vosper.

Sixth, although Vosper has taken things to the extreme, many Christians today no longer believe in the traditional God she is rejecting; one who is harsh, judgmental, punitive, requires women to not be leaders and who hates gays. 

Many people who grew up with that kind of God today feel no any affinity for that type of deity—no matter what denomination they belong to.

Many are asking deep questions and expressing fresh doubts about faith. Does God really intend to send all unbelievers to Hell? Does God really hate gays? Is the plan for the world to burn it down and start over, or should we care about climate change?

Some are expressing these questions and doubts quietly, since they are members of churches that would frown on them.

And yet, this kind of questioning is a good thing. It's healthy. And the United Church, to its credit, is a denomination that not only permits, but encourages, that kind of exploration. 

Gretta Vosper may simply be the most egregious result of the United church's willingness to be generous and open to all sorts of questions and ways being Christian in the world.

A few other reasons have also come up since this blog post was was published.

One is the idea that a heresy trial in the 21st century would be ridiculous and make everyone look bad. (Shades of Monty Python and the Spanish Inquisition.)

Plus, in our increasingly secular country, who would care?

There is also the worry that the church, no matter how solid its reasons, wouldn't win. And even if the church won in the court of doctrine, in the court of public opinion it would be a big loser. 
Vosper and her supporters are masterful at public relations.

Also, there is also the feeling that by not pursuing the case it will fade away more quickly. That's a viable public relations strategy. Take a quick hit, grimace at the pain, done.

Going all the way would only turn the spotlight on Vosper for weeks or longer, giving her a bigger pulpit, and making the agony for the church last longer.


(It could also be that the settlement also binds Vosper to silence about this in the future. So far, except for a post on her website announcing the settlement, and her relief that the "ordeal" is over, she has not said anything else that I am aware of.)

Finally, there is the feeling the church has bigger issues to worry about, like how to serve a hurting world, not to mention all the internal issues the denomination is dealing with these days.

                                                             *      *      *

The story isn’t over yet. I think there is more that could be told. I intend to keep following it, to see if anything else turns up.

In the meantime, I anyone who reads this blog post, including United Church members and staff, to send me their ideas and views and information about the decision about Gretta Vosper. 

You can leave comments here or e-mail me at jdl562000 AT yahoo.com. If you wish to remain anonymous, please say so.

Depending on how much more I can find out about this situation, sometime in the future I might publish more on this topic.

To read more about this, check out:

Articles about Vosper in the United Church Observer.

A recent article by Douglas Todd of the Vancouver Sun.
My own column on this subject from 2015.

. . . About Whether it’s time to Stop Preaching Sermons

 

That question came to mind when I saw research from theology professor Perry Shaw showing that people remember only 5% of what they hear in a lecture after 24 hours.

Perry, author of the book, Transforming Theological Education, notes that “delivering lectures to passive students . . . is no longer an adequate approach for promoting learning.”

He goes on to say that in most lectures students are not paying attention 40% of the time, and that the longer the lecture goes on, the less attentive they are.

Shaw was talking about seminary classes, but his thoughts caused me to wonder about sermons, too.

After all, what is a sermon, really? Just a lecture, if you think about it. 

If anything, it’s worse than a lecture. 

In a lecture, at least, students are permitted—even encouraged—to stop the speaker and ask questions of clarification, or even to voice disagreement and offer other opinions.

Try that in a church one Sunday morning and see what happens; you might get a visit by an usher.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying sermons didn’t have their time and place.

For a long time, they were the best way to deliver theological education to people, especially when many were illiterate.

Plus, they mirrored what was happening in the culture, when people were accustomed to getting information that way.

That's what happened during the famous 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates in the U.S., when Abraham Lincoln debated Stephen Douglas in a series of seven three-hour long debates about slavery.

At each debate, the first debater spoke for 60 minutes, the other spoke for 90 minutes, and then the first one had a 30-minute rejoinder.

The halls were packed for the debates; reports indicate the audience was spellbound.

Such a thing would be impossible today.

Today, attention spans are much shorter (about ten seconds online when people visit websites).

But still, in many churches, the apex of the service is the sermon, even though all the information we could possibly need about faith, or anything else, is available on our phones. 

To be clear, I'm not questioning the quality of the ideas being shared by preachers, or the courage of their convictions.

I’m just saying the world has changed, and what happens on Sunday mornings may need to change with it.

I know my own way of communicating has changed. I grew up with long-form journalism, and for many years that's how I shared information.

But we live in a Twitter, Facebook and Instagram world today. Shorter is always better when it comes to capturing attention.

Does that mean hyper-short is the best way to communicate? Probably not. 

But as someone trying to communicate important information to people today, I don’t have the luxury of debating the best way to transmit it. 

I just need to be an effective communicator, using the tools that most effectively reach people.

Plus, unlike in church, I don't hold people captive. They can leave whenever they want. 

(Try walking out when a sermon goes to long . . . . )

But back to Perry Shaw. How are university professors adapting to this new world? 

When I ask my professor friends, they say they are cutting down the amount of information they share in each class, using more visuals, and encouraging more participation.

I wonder if preachers might want to consider doing that, too—especially the part about participation.

What if, instead of speaking for 30 minutes, they spoke for 10-15 minutes, then came down from the platform to lead a discussion about the point they were trying to make?

After all, if retention goes up the more people are engaged, wouldn't that be a good thing?

Any preachers out there brave enough to try it? 

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been thinking. What are your thoughts?