Lie #6
Adapted, with copy right permission, from the book, The Insanity of Obedience by Nik Ripken
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“‘Here I am Lord,... send my sister.’ That comment would be funny if it did not ring so true. ”
Nik Ripken addresses lie# 6 when he writes,
“Even in the toughest places, even in places wracked by war and famine, single women within the mission community outnumber single men seven to one. That statistic seems consistent across denominational lines and within different areas of the world.'“
“Why is this so? Does the heavenly Father have a communication problem with single men? Are single women simply easier to convince? Are single men reading past the biblical commands to go to the Nations? Is it that God, for some reason, needs more women than men? ”
A young woman I served with in Mongolia had grappled with this reality, weighed the cost, and left for the field on her first one-year mission journey. She had a good-looking Christian guy back home in the USA. He had just graduated from Bible school, and the two of them had talked about marriage. He didn’t feel called to “Go” at that time, and she did. Here is where her story takes a hard right turn from the usual montage.
She prayed about it and went anyway… something as a missions mobilizer, I can now state with confidence is an extremely rare occurrence.
She couldn’t ignore God’s calling on her to go and serve the orphans in Mongolia. Secretly she hoped he would either join her or be there when she returned, but she never asked him to. They took a "wait and see" approach. She wasn’t in Mongolia very long before she realized he was onto building the American dream. He was married a year later.
Before you begin to think that she felt “called to be single”, let me interrupt you. She did not. She felt called to missions, and she also wanted to be married and have a family. However, as statistics prove, it was going to be difficult for her to do both.
“Numerous campus ministers, youth leaders and pastors have been asked to comment on this social and cultural anomaly. Many have struggled to explain the apparent imbalance in biblical obedience between single men and single women. Two initial observations are emerging. Both of these observations suggest that there is a cultural illness infecting the church in the West.”
Here are Nik’s two observations:
Ladders of Advancement
Ladders of advancement found in our churches, seminaries, and denominational structures are generally the territory of males. This is not offered as a moral or theological judgment, simply as an observation. Many of these ladders are not available to women. Therefore, while men climb professional ministry ladders, women become much more familiar with service.
Nik Ripken continues:
“Mission fields are typically places with few ladders to climb. Even a proficient and growing missionary will rarely be rewarded with additional salary, a promotion, or a new title. Typically, leadership on the mission field may have more to do with longevity than aptitude. ”
Nik writes,
Advancement in a mission setting simply means that a person is given more tasks to perform. This lack of clear and measurable social and work advancement fails to reward men in ways their culture had conditioned them to expect. On the other hand, women who are more service-oriented, and who are already conditioned not to expect advancement and recognition, are perhaps more suited for the mission field.
This World Is Increasingly White Collar
Nik writes:
“Our ministry model is a polished, well groomed, articulate, socially adept speaker-leader-teacher administrator-pastor, standing behind a pulpit or before a classroom of students. This leader can move the masses and dazzle a television audience with wit and humor. The tools of the trade are commentaries, microphones, computers and carefully crafted words. ”
Clearly,
Nik writes:
these gifts are not always well suited for the mission field.
The mission field is typically more blue-collar. It often requires—or, at least, results in—callouses on the hands and the heart as the faithful struggle with lostness, persecution, starvation, and flying bullets.
“Scholarship is indispensable but where will today’s men learn how to be spiritually and physically tough? Where will they learn how to rewire a generator? Where will they learn to minister in a hostile culture that neither reads nor writes? ”
Seminaries are often geared toward the pastor/teacher rather than the evangelist/ church planter.
This brings me back to my ministry partner who watched the door to love close and then lock while she served in Mongolia. She learned to chop her own firewood, haul her own water from the well, drive in the most insane traffic on the planet and survive in the average negative 40 degrees below zero temps of Mongolia, all while teaching English to orphans and starting small group Bible studies among the unreached. She did this alone and with little complaint. It is possible to live and serve strong on the mission field as a single woman. However, I can attest to the richness of serving side-by-side with a partner and sharing the load of daily survival while reaching the Nations together. I see her decision to go and stay as one of great sacrifice and tremendous obedience. It was not easy for her. I sometimes wonder about the guy she let go. He is likely a well-rounded man by now, with a family. Perhaps he used his Bible degree to serve as a pastor, and this is commendable… unless he was indeed called to GO.
“What we need today are fathers and ministers and mentors who can model not only the ability to parse Hebrew verses in the book of Exodus , but who can also carry the Ark of the Covenant across the harsh desert into physical and spiritual battles. We need men to grow up and show up. ”
I’ll end in the recent.
As a missions mobilizer with Cup of Cold Water Ministries, it is my greatest heartache when a young man, poised for the mission field and passionate to GO is whisked away by his home church to serve in comfortable places, in safer ways. To me, it is a loss worth crying over.
“Is God really biblically commanding more women than men toward the tough stuff? Surely not. ”
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