God created us to grow to adulthood – spirit, soul and body. Scripture calls us to do just that. The role of leaders, like the role of parents, is to encourage and affirm this process, not to ensure that everyone except the leaders remains perpetually one-down.
Two weeks after I asked readers to pray with me for wisdom and strength for a final push, my updated e-book is live! It tells my story of all the ways God answered, from the moment I finally asked him: “What about women, Lord? What do you say about how women in your kingdom relate to other people and to you?”
When the "threat alarm" goes off in an abusive church system, the response is orchestrated and brutal. But it's church: Appearances must be kept up. People loyal to the system confuse while pretending to clarify, cover-up while pretending to address, attack while seeming to answer, put-down while pretending to help.
Behind the scenes at Living Proof Live, I'd found a celebrity culture - not the "one anothering" of the church of the living God. So with all my heart, I cried out for change.
Few people mourned its passing. Few even knew that the TNIV Bible existed. Most Christians who did hear of it during its short but tempestuous life fled from it in fear.
Like many women in the church, I had been taught to smile and accept statements that ostensibly compliment, while firmly putting me in my place.