Missional leadership

I just finished two long — but wonderful! — days with a group of colleagues across the country who are working on the task of theological education in a missional context. I’m too tired to do much but “play catch up” with my email, but Bob Carlton sent me a link to an interesting post on the question of why there is such a huge — 3:1 — ratio of men to women in many emerging church meetings. Quite frankly, that’s about the ratio of men to women we had in our meetings, too. For us that’s largely a consequence of theological education still being dominated by men, and that in turn has to be laid directly at the door of patriarchy (which is more evident than ever within Christian contexts these days). Nonetheless, I was very pleased that in our meeting, at least, women played a major role (I am, for example, the director of this project and Brenda Froisland was another key partner), and that our male colleagues were very much equal partners — NOT patronizing, or in any other way disrespectful or problematic. I take that to be a very good sign! (I also very much enjoyed having the choir sing Bobby McFerrin’s version of Psalm 23 at our closing worship…)