I had considered going into full-time ministry for over a decade. And yet, somehow, my arrival on the seminary’s campus felt sudden.
As I stood in the lecture hall doorway surveying seat options for my first class, I noticed a stark gender disparity that would only grow. Not only was I one of the first women to arrive that day, I was one of the few women in the class.
As excited as I was, a sliver of doubt dimmed my joy:
They all seem so sure that they belong here. Do I belong here?
Seminaries were originally founded to train men to be pastors. Only in the last 60 years have these institutions begun to accept and graduate female students. Now, each year, thousands of women navigate spaces that weren’t created for them. Unfortunately, culture evolves slowly. For women in seminary, their very presence is a catalyst for change, yet it is their presence that also reveals just how much change is needed.
John Calvin famously said the heart is a veritable factory of idols. I used to think this was just typically dark, hyperbolic, Calvinist misanthropy. The older I get, though, the more I concede it to be a sober statement of fact. Idols are our specialty. We churn them out at a furious rate, an extravagant assortment of false gods, deities, and spirits that we’ve cooked up over the centuries. Zeus, Odin, Marduk some real classics. Our capacity to lie to ourselves about divinity is impressive and extends as wide as creation itself.
More impressive, though, is our pantheon of false images of the living and true God. It’s not for nothing the Ten Commandments quickly move from ruling out the worship of false gods to censuring the false worship of the true God. While the first command is the most basic for a reason, the second is the more insidious and tempting for Christians to break. Satan’s been a liar and murderer from the beginning (John 8:44), and his first trick was to deceiv
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