Women - asset in church or huge liability?

So Wendy Virgo (wife of Terry Virgo, leader of the New Frontiers network) has written a new book this year called Influential Women: How women can build up or undermine their local church (this follows her classics Women Set Free; Mainly for Mothers; and Leading Ladies: Old Testament Principles for Leaders' Wives Today). The little blurb I read begins 'women can be a tremendous asset in a church or a huge liability'. This kind of view makes me so angry and hopefully is a diminishing one among Baptist churches. Will their be a sequel by Terry on how men can equally be a tremendous asset or a huge liability? - I doubt it!

This kind of view needs to be continually challenged. (I'm disappointed to see Terry and Wendy spending time with that extremist Mark Driscoll, whose views I find so offensive and going beyond anything resembling traditional Christianity.)  This kind of view is damaging to all those faithful and excellent women in ministry and leadership and members of churches. It is the New Frontiers view of gender and women that is undermining.

Some interesting and important work of gender within New Frontiers has been done by Kristin Aune, which sadly is only available so far in a few journal articles and book chapters:

- 'Marriage in a British Evangelical Congregation: Practising Post-feminist Partnership?', The Sociological Review 54.4 (2006) 638-657
- 'Evangelical Christianity and Women's Changing Lives', European Journal of Women's Studies 15.3 (2008) 277-294
-'Singleness and secularization: British evangelical women and church (dis)affiliation' in Kristin Aune, Sonya Sharma and Giselle Vincett (eds) Women and Religion in the West: Challenging Secularization, (Ashgate, 2008)
- 'Making men men: Masculinity and British Evangelical Identity' in Mark Smith (ed.) British Evangelical Identities: Past and Present (Paternoster, 2008)

Comments

[Jonathan Meek]

So what did you think of the book itself?