Let's Be Honest—Christian Women Have Been Hurt in Church - J. LEE GRADY CHARISMA MAGAZINE

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Let's Be Honest—Christian Women Have Been Hurt in Church

 9/26/2018 J. LEE GRADY  charisma magazine

(iStock/Getty Images Plus/AntonioGuillem)

Comedian Bill Cosby wasn't laughing yesterday when he was led out of a Pennsylvania courtroom in handcuffs. He was sentenced to prison for drugging and sexually assaulting a woman 14 years ago. The judge in the case labeled Cosby "a sexually violent predator"—a statement that brought tears of relief to dozens of Cosby's other alleged victims.

Welcome to the uncomfortable #MeToo era. Ever since Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein was accused almost a year ago of forcing actresses to trade sex for acting jobs, sexual harassment has become the dominant headline in America. Everyone is staring at this elephant in the room—especially women, who once were too afraid to talk about it.

Yet I have found that we really aren't talking enough in the church about the obvious tension between the genders. Christian women are deeply wounded—not just because of sexual abuse but also because of blatant gender prejudice and insensitive comments from their brothers in Christ.

I decided to do an informal poll on social media yesterday. I asked my female friends on Facebook and Twitter to share what they considered the rudest comments or behavior they had endured from men in a church setting. Reading their answers (some were posted publicly, and many privately) was overwhelming. I divided their responses into categories:

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1. Blatant sexual abuse. Many of the women I polled were victims of abuse that happened on church property. One woman from Alabama said she was groped and fondled by a church leader when she was a teenager—and she never went back to church until she gave her heart to Christ at age 30. Another woman was raped in the church parking lot, and no one on the church staff intervened or offered pastoral care.

2. Come-ons and inappropriate touching. Numerous women I contacted experienced this. One said that two married men reached over and kissed her, but she refused their unwanted advances. Another woman said a pastor looked down her shirt while standing over her. A female missionary said she was terrified after an ordained minister groped and fondled her. Several women said they felt uncomfortable when men from the church ogled them, stalked them, made sexual comments or tried to hug them too closely.

3. Bizarre gender bias. A woman was counseled by a man in her church that she should not have an epidural during childbirth "because pain is part of a woman's punishment for sin." Another woman was told that she was in sinful violation of 1 Timothy 2:15 if she did not immediately start having babies regularly after getting married.

4. Demands for "submission." One woman from Texas was told by a pastor that she must stay in her marriage regardless of her husband's physical and verbal violence. "I stayed in a very abusive marriage for 20 years," she said. By the time she did divorce, her children had grown up. "Unfortunately, the abuse had ruined their chances of a healthy home life by that time," she added.

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5. Insensitivity to single women. Several single women told me they were shamed publicly by men in the church with comments like "Why aren't you married yet?" or "What's wrong with you? Why are you still single?"

6. Comments implying that women are always to blame for sexual sin. One woman from Georgia needed a ride to the airport during a Christian conference, and she asked a male minister for help. He refused because he said he was not allowed to be in a car alone with another woman. "This wasn't harassment, but it was sexist in that I am a sister in Christ, a fellow minister," she said. Other women recalled being told in church that the reason men struggle with pornography is because women don't dress modestly. "I grew up feeling that I was to blame for men's porn addiction," one woman said.

7. Blatant condescension. A 30-year-old ordained woman from Georgia said she encounters subtle sexism when male ministers call her a "girl" after she preaches. "Men who are my age are not spoken to that way. They are treated as peers," she said. "Some people may not think twice about, and I know it's never meant in a bad way, but I feel it reveals how some people view a 30-something woman in ministry vs. how they view a 30-something man in ministry." Other women said they felt invisible because church leaders regularly referred to them as "John's wife" or "Bill's wife" rather than by their own first name.

8. Refusal to affirm a woman's spiritual gifts or callings. The majority of responses to my question related to this topic. Women have been told they should never preach or lead in the church, and some who did step out in their leadership gifts were called "Jezebel" or worse. Others were installed in pastoral roles but not allowed to use the title "pastor." Others were told that the only time God uses women in leadership "is when a man refuses to step into his rightful place." (Almost all women called to full-time ministry shared stories of an uphill battle.)

I don't believe the women I heard from this week are resentful. They are not grinding an axe or looking for ways to punish men. I know many of these women personally. Some of them hesitated to share their pain because they don't want to be perceived as whiners or complainers. They have tended to be quiet about these injustices, and they only talked about them because I asked. They are godly women who simply want dignity and a seat at the table.

I believe it's time for godly men to offer sincere apologies and genuine sensitivity. The devil wants to divide men and women, and he can manipulate the #MeToo movement to trigger a nasty gender war. We can diffuse that tension by changing our macho attitudes. It's time for us to listen to each other and value each other. It's time to stop abusing, muzzling and minimizing the spiritual gifts of our sisters in Christ.

J. Lee Grady was editor of Charisma for 11 years before he launched into full-time ministry in 2010. Today he directs The Mordecai Project, a Christian charitable organization that is taking the healing of Jesus to women and girls who suffer abuse and cultural oppression. Author of several books including 10 Lies the Church Tells Women, he has just released his newest book, Set My Heart on Fire, from Charisma House. You can follow him on Twitter at @LeeGrady or go to his website, themordecaiproject.org.

Islam, Sexual Violence and the West - Noah Beck ISRAEL TODAY

Islam, Sexual Violence and the West

Sunday, July 31, 2016 |  

Noah Beck  ISRAEL TODAY

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Topics:

Islam

Originally written for the Investigative Project on Terrorism

The mass rape of hundreds of German women mostly by Muslim migrants last New Year's was recently revealed to be far worse than originally acknowledged. Authorities now believe that more than 1,200 women were sexually assaulted – over twice the original estimate of 500. While more than 2,000 men were allegedly involved, only 120 suspects — about half of them recently arrived migrants — have been identified.

One explanation for why it took half a year for the full extent of the crime to be revealed is the German police's effort to avoid a public backlash against refugees. But ultimately, Holger Munch, president of the German Federal Crime Police Office, acknowledged to the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung that there is "a connection between the [sexual assaults] and the rapid migration in 2015."

Denial is not a strategy. Western countries that cherish women's rights must wake up to the fact that many migrants could challenge those values. Most of the mass migration comes from violence-plagued, Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa, where women are second-class citizens subject to honor killings and various legal restrictions, and where the local culture often condones rape, encourages wife-beating, and treats women as sexual objects (with 72 virgins promised to Muslim men who reach heaven).

Thus, just as the mass migration from the Middle East and North Africa raises the specter of regular Islamist terror on European soil, it also augurs the kind of sexual abuse that those regions have traditionally tolerated. German officials implicitly seemed to acknowledge as much with their laughably impotent campaign to re-educate migrants using signs that explain acceptable behavior towards women.

Non-Muslim ("infidel") women are especially vulnerable to sexual assault: Christian women are often abused and denigrated in Islamic societies, as extensively exposed by Raymond Ibrahim, author of Crucified Again. The Islamic State (ISIS) regards the Yazidi, another religious minority, as devil worshippers and reportedly enslaved up to 5,000 Yazidi women, subjecting them to rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution and other acts of extreme brutality, like burning alive a 20-year-old girl "because she refused to perform an extreme sex act."

Saudi Arabia, arguably the leader of the Sunni Muslim world, has a legal system based on strictsharia law, which prohibits women from dressing as they wish or even driving a car. Saudi rulings are notoriously abysmal when it comes to rape. Last year, a Saudi woman was sentenced to 200 lashes after being gang raped by seven men. In 2013, a Saudi preacher who raped, tortured, and murdered his 5-year old daughter was punished with just eight years of prison, 800 lashes, and a $270,000 fine. With such legal norms, it's not surprising that when members of the country's ruling elite travel to the West, their behavior may not change accordingly (last October three womenaccused a Saudi prince of sexual assault in Beverly Hills). By ironic and tragic contrast, U.S. soldiers stationed in Muslim majority countries are trained to respect local norms to the point that marines stationed in Afghanistan were actually taught to look away if they find Afghanis raping children, a common local practice.

While sharia advocates often claim that the Islamic dress code protects women, the brutally unfair treatment of women by Islamists seems driven more by power-hungry male chauvinism and/or sexual insecurity than by any genuine concern for women's welfare, judging from the staggering hypocrisy of its proudest proponents. The 9/11 jihadists visited strip clubs, and paid for prostitutes in their motel rooms. Anwar Al-Awlaki, the American-born imam whose sermons continue to attract recruits to jihad, frequented prostitutes. Osama bin Laden had an extensive pornography collection, and is among the many examples of jihadis obsessed with porn and prostitution collected by Phyllis Chesler, a CUNY emerita professor of psychology and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Between 1997 and 2013, well before the recent mass migration to Europe began, an estimated 1,400 children had been sexually abused in Rotherham, England, predominantly by gangs of British-Pakistani men.

While that scandal involved mostly "white" victims, an Oxford-educated Pakistani-British woman revealed her own exploitation, noting that "sexual abuse has been systemically under-reported among Asian girls due to deeply entrenched cultural taboos – obscuring the reality that there is a similarly rampant problem of minority girls being abused by members of their own community."

A few weeks ago, Swedish police received 35 complaints from girls aged 12 to 17 who claimed that "foreign young men" sexually assaulted them at a popular music festival.

Soeren Kern, a distinguished senior fellow of the Gatestone Institute, compiled details of dozens of sexual assaults by migrants in Germany during the first two months of 2016, and noted the enabling reaction from "the upside-down worldview of German multiculturalism: Migrants who assault German women and children are simply rebelling against German power structures. Germans who dare to criticize such assaults are racists."

In contrast to the initial cover-up by German police of the mass rape by mostly Muslim migrants, France's top security official recently spoke with candid alarm about the threat that his country faces. Just two days before the truck-ramming, ISIS-inspired massacre in Nice, Patrick Calvar, chief of the Directorate General of Internal Security, warned members of the French parliamentary commission that France is on the verge of a "civil war" that could be sparked by the mass sexual assault of women by migrants.

There are remarkable exceptions within Islam itself, such as the Tuareg, an Islamic tribe in Africa, where women embrace sexual freedoms, dictate who gets what in divorce, and don't wear the veil because men "want to see their beautiful faces." But how long can the Tuareg's enlightened version of Islam survive in southwest Libya when ISIS is expanding there, or in Mali, Niger and northern Nigeria, where Boko Haram is on the march?

There are also brave Muslim reformers trying to improve the way Islam treats women. However, they mostly operate in the West, where they still face death threats; one example is Irshad Manji. Another, Fadela Amara, founded Ni Putes Ni Soumises, a group that defends Muslim French girls against the pressures they face to wear the hijab, drop out of school, and marry early without the right to choose their husband. Amara went on to serve in the government of Nicolas Sarkozy, but she, too, received death threats for her efforts to liberate Muslim women.

Muslim feminists outside of the West assume far greater risks. Pakistani social media celebrity Qandeel ‎Baloch, who openly expressed her feminist views online, was recently strangled to deathby her brother in their family's home, in an "honor killing." Her "intolerable behavior" is what drove him to murder her, he said, because her risqué persona was bringing "dishonor" to the family. There are an estimated 1,000 honor killings per year in Pakistan.

Even in the West, few feminists dare to criticize Islam because doing so can invite threats and violence. Absurdly, those brave enough to do so also risk being prosecuted for "hate speech."

Western countries must support courageous Muslim reformers while protecting all women living in their territories from the sexual abuse often encouraged by Islamist culture – whether that abuse is perpetrated by recent immigrants or long-time residents. The survival of the West depends on it.

Noah Beck is the author of The Last Israelis, an apocalyptic novel about Iranian nukes and other geopolitical issues in the Middle East.

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12 Trail-Blazing Christian Women You Should Celebrate - J. LEE GRADY CHARISMA MAGAZINE

12 Trail-Blazing Christian Women You Should Celebrate

3/2/2016 J. LEE GRADY  charisma magazine

We should all celebrate these great women of faith.

March is Women's History Month, so for the next few weeks we will be hearing a lot about women inventors, humanitarians, entertainers and entrepreneurs who are changing today's world. We will probably also hear a lot about Hillary Clinton and her chances of shattering the glass ceiling in American politics—but I'm not convinced that all the great women heroes of the past would be cheering for her political views.

When I think about the empowered women of my generation I'm reminded that they stand on the shoulders of brave women pioneers who didn't have today's advantages. We should especially be grateful for the Christian women who defied religious and cultural traditions—and sometimes paid with their lives—to free African slaves, protect children from abuse, denounce injustice, preach the gospel in foreign nations, heal the sick and win women the right to vote.

This is certainly not an exhaustive list, but here are 12 women I'm celebrating this month:

1. Mary Magdalene – She was the pioneer of pioneers and the forerunner of all forerunners. As a passionate follower of Jesus, and the first person—male or female—to be commissioned to preach the gospel, she proved to a male-dominated, first century-world that God can and does use women to do His work.

2. Jarena Lee (1783-1855) – Authorized to preach in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, she traveled hundreds of miles on foot to share the gospel. When people questioned a woman's right to preach, she told them: "If the man may preach, because the Savior died for him, why not the woman, seeing he died for her also?" She was the first black woman in the United States to publish an autobiography.

3. Sojourner Truth (1797-1883) – Born a slave in New York—and later sold to a second owner for $100—she eventually became an abolitionist. In her most famous speech, "Ain't I a Woman?" delivered in Ohio in 1851, she demanded equal rights for both women and blacks. She became a Methodist in 1843 and felt God calling her to ministry. "The Spirit calls me, and I must go," she wrote. During one speech in Boston she admitted that she once hated white people, but that after she met Jesus she was filled with love for everyone.

4. Phoebe Palmer (1807-1874) – A Methodist revivalist, Palmer and her husband, Walter, helped fuel the holiness movement in the mid-1880s, which led to the Pentecostal revival. Although she and Walter were well-known preachers, she was the more popular speaker at a time when women preachers were an oddity. In one of her books, The Promise of the Father, she called for the acceptance of women in ministry. In 1850 she also founded a mission for alcoholics in a New York City slum.

5. Fanny Crosby (1820-1915) – Even though she was blind from birth, this "queen of gospel song writers" composed more than 8,000 hymns. Raised as a Baptist, her most famous songs include "Blessed Assurance," "Rescue the Perishing" and "Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior." She always prayed that her hymns would bring people to Christ, and she believed her songs were divinely inspired. Some theologians criticized her for "feminizing" church music.

6. Catherine Booth (1829-1890) – At a time when people threw eggs at women for speaking in public, this brave firebrand preached on the streets of London and ignited a gospel revival movement to help the poor. Not only did she establish the Salvation Army with her husband, William, she also carved out a path for women ministers by writing Female Ministry: Women's Right to Preach in 1859 and by mentoring hundreds of "Hallelujah Lassies," women who served as evangelists in the Salvationist movement.

7. Mary Slessor (1848-1915) – This short, red-headed girl from Scotland was inspired by a Presbyterian pastor to go to the mission field at a time when women were discouraged from such work. She ended up in a dangerous region of Calabar (modern Nigeria), and she established a mission station among tribal people by traveling to them in a canoe. Her work laid the foundations for the widespread growth of Christianity in Nigeria today. With her characteristic spunk, she opposed African traditions and successfully stopped the ritualistic killing of twins in Calabar.

8. Amy Carmichael (1867-1951) – This brave Irish Presbyterian sailed to India and founded the Dohhnavur Mission—which pulled hundreds, if not thousands, of children out of ritual prostitution. Known to the children as "Amma," which means "Mother," she dressed as an Indian and even dyed her skin with coffee to fit into the local culture. When a British woman asked Carmichael what missionary life was like, she simply wrote: "Missionary life is simply a chance to die."

9. Ida Robinson (1891-1946) – She was an early Pentecostal pioneer ordained in the United Holy Church of America and appointed to pastor a small church in Philadelphia in 1919. A few years later she felt God gave her an assignment to "loose the women" so more females could be ordained in ministry. Thus she founded the Mount Sinai Holy Church of America, which became a network of 84 churches by the time of her death in Florida.

10. Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944) – Born in Canada, she preached the gospel to her dolls as a child. But after she began preaching throughout the United States in the 1920s and 1930s—often under a large tent—she was more popular than evangelist Billy Sunday. People loved "Sister Aimee" because she used drama and theatrics to make the Bible come alive. When she built her church, Angelus Temple, in Los Angeles in 1923, people came from all over the nation to hear her—including Hollywood stars. She eventually founded the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, which today has more than 8 million members worldwide.

11. Corrie ten Boom (1892-1983) – The daughter of a Dutch clockmaker, she led a rather boring life until Nazi forces invaded Holland. At that point, Corrie and her Christian family began hiding Jews in their home to protect them from German death camps. But their work was exposed, and she was sent to Ravensbruck, a women's labor camp in Germany. Her horrific experiences there prepared her for a worldwide ministry that took her to 60 countries. She preached about forgiveness and Christ's love well into her 80s.

12. Gladys Aylward (1902-1970) – This simple British woman wanted to go to China as a missionary, but she was told that women could only serve as teachers or nurses—and she was neither. So without official backing she used her life savings to buy a one-way ticket to Shanxi Province. Once she got to China, she became an official "foot inspector," helping Chinese officials enforce a new law against the cruel "foot-binding" of Chinese girls. This led to her work among orphans. Her brave attempt to protect children from the Japanese invasion of China was memorialized in the 1958 film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness—a film that Aylward hated because it glamorized her very simple life.

It was Catherine Booth who said: "If we are to better the future we must disturb the present." We need more women today who will disturb the status quo. I pray that this year's celebration of Women's History Month will inspire a new generation of women to rise up with holy courage. 

J. Lee Grady is the former editor of Charisma. You can follow him on Twitter at leegrady. He is the author of several books including 10 Lies the Church Tells Women, 10 Lies Men Believe, Fearless Daughters of the Bible and The Holy Spirit Is Not for Sale. You can learn more about his ministry, The Mordecai Project, atthemordecaiproject.org.

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8 Women Christian Men Should Never Marry - J. Lee Grady

8 Women Christian Men Should Never Marry

2/19/2014 J. LEE GRADY CHARISMA MAGAZINE

Last week my column “10 Men Christian Women Should Never Marry” went viral. More than 1.2 million people have shared that message so far—most likely because so many single men and women are seriously asking for guidelines on finding a compatible mate.

In response I received numerous requests to share similar guidelines for men who are looking for wives. Since I am mentoring several young men right now and have seen a few of them marry successfully during the past few years, it wasn’t difficult to draft this list. These are the women I tell my spiritual sons to avoid:

1. The unbeliever. In last week’s column, I reminded women that the Bible is absolutely clear on this point: Christians should not marry unbelievers. Second Corinthians 6:14 says, “Do not be bound together with unbelievers; for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship has light with darkness?” (NASB). Apart from your decision to follow Christ, marriage is the single most important decision you will ever make. Don’t blow it by ignoring the obvious. You need a wife who loves Jesus more than she loves you. Put spiritual maturity at the top of your list of qualities you want in a wife.

2. The material girl. One young friend of mine was engaged to a girl from a rich family. He saved up money for months to buy a ring, but when he proposed she told him he needed to go back to the jewelry store to buy a bigger diamond. She pushed her fiance to go into debt for a ring that fit her expectations. She wanted a Tiffany’s lifestyle on his Wal-Mart budget. I warned my friend that he was stepping into serious trouble. Unless you want to live in debt for the rest of your life, do not marry a girl who has dollar signs in her eyes and eight credit cards in her Gucci purse.

3. The diva. Some macho guys like to throw their weight around and pretend they are superior to women. Divas are the female version of this nightmare. They think the world revolves around them, and they don’t think twice about hurting somebody else to prove their point. Their words are harsh and their finger-snapping demands are unreasonable. Some of these women might end up in leadership positions at church, but don’t be fooled by their super-spiritual talk. Real leaders are humble. If you don’t see Christlike humility in the woman you are dating, back away from her and keep looking.

4. The Delilah. Remember Samson? He was anointed by God with superhuman strength, but he lost his power when a seductive woman figured out his secret and gave her man the world’s most famous haircut. Like Delilah, a woman who hasn’t yielded her sexuality to God will blind you with her charms, break your heart and snip your anointing off. If the “Christian” woman you met at church dresses provocatively, flirts with other guys, posts sexually inappropriate comments on Facebook or tells you she’s OK with sex before marriage, get out of that relationship before she traps you.

5. The contentious woman. A young man told me recently that he dated a girl who had serious resentment in her heart because of past hurts. “Before I would propose, I told my fiancee she had to deal with this,” he explained. “It would have been a deal-breaker, but there was a powerful breakthrough and now we are engaged.” This guy realized that unresolved bitterness can ruin a marriage. Proverbs 21:9 says, “It is better to live in a corner of a roof than in a house shared with a contentious woman.” If the woman you are dating is seething with anger and unforgiveness, your life together will be ruined by arguing, door-slamming and endless drama. Insist that she get prayer and counseling.

6. The controller. Marriage is a 50/50 partnership, and the only way it works is when both husband and wife practice mutual submission according to Ephesians 5:21. Just as some guys think they can run a marriage like a dictatorship, some women try to manipulate decisions to get their way. This is why premarital counseling is so important! You don’t want to wait until you’ve been married for two weeks to find out that your wife doesn’t trust you and wants to call all the shots.

7. The mama’s girl. It’s normal for a new wife to call her mom regularly for advice and support. It is not normal for her to talk to her mother five times a day about every detail of her marriage, including her sex life. That’s weird. Yet I have counseled guys whose wives allowed their mothers (or fathers) total control of their marriages. Genesis 2:24 says a man is to leave his parents and cleave to his wife. Parents should stay in the background of their children’s marriages. If your girlfriend hasn’t cut the apron strings, proceed with caution.

8. The addict. So many people in the church today have not been properly discipled. Many still struggle with various types of addictions—to alcohol, illegal drugs, prescription medicines or pornography—either because we don’t confront these sins from the pulpit or we don’t offer enough compassionate support to strugglers. Jesus can completely set a person free from these habits, but you don’t want to wait until you’re married to find out your wife isn’t sober. You may still be called to be married, but it is not wise to tie the knot until your girlfriend faces her issues head-on.

Your best rule to follow in choosing a wife is found in Proverbs 31:30: “Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised.” Look past the outward qualities that the world says are important, and look at the heart.

J. Lee Grady is the former editor of Charisma and the director of the Mordecai Project. You can follow him on Twitter at @leegrady. He is the author of 10 Lies Men Believe and other books.

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