Hello my friends!

As you know, I have been on family leave for the past few weeks, but I will be rejoining you next week! I'm very excited to rejoin the conversation with all of you!

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Today I'm so honored to share a piece from my friend Meghan Tschanz. Meghan is someone who is doing such important work and who I find myself learning from often. She shares more about the work she's doing below before her piece, so I'll let her take it from here!

Hello, Ben’s subscribers,

Ben reached out to me and asked that I write a post for his newsletter while he is on paternity leave (Congrats to Ben, Rebecca, and little Foster on their new addition). Of course, I said yes. Ben has been a great internet friend and ally to me over these last several years, and I am so proud of the work that he is doing!

A little about me: My name is Meghan Tschanz, and I am a former missionary who turned author (my book is Women Rising), podcaster ( Check out a podcast I did with Ben on Faith and Feminism), and MDIV student. I am currently in my third quarter at Iliff School of Theology and am pursuing ordination in the United Methodist Church. I’ve been married for seven years, and we have a one-and-a-half-year-old daughter who lights up our lives. I feel like the calling on my life is to fight for gender equity in the church, so that is what I spend most of my time talking, studying, and writing about.

Here are some of my favorite resources:

-A Year of Biblical Womanhood by Rachel Held Evans. This was the first book I read asking questions of the patriarchal teachings on the evangelical church and it changed my life. It is funny and challenging at the same time and I think you should read it.

-Malestrom: Manhood Swept into the Currents of a Changing World by Carolyn Custis James. This book challenges the “biblical” masculinity we’ve been taught about, it’s a must-read!

-Womanist Midrash by Dr. Wil Gafney. Incredible, Gafney employs a solid understanding of womanist and feminist approaches to biblical interpretation and the sociohistorical culture of the ancient Near East. First book that allowed me to ask questions of the Bible.

-The Thirst of God: Contemplating God’s Love with Three Women Mystics by Wendy Farley. I just read this for my women and spirituality course and loved it. If you are like me, you were led to believe that women had little to do with shaping the Church, and you would be wrong. This book explores three women mystics and the reform they sought to bring to the church.
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Christ Advocated for Women, We Should Do the Same.

I don’t remember the first time I felt “less-than” as a girl in the church. It just felt like some unspoken rule in the conservative evangelical church I grew up in. All the stories we heard about were men, all of the leaders in the church were men, and there was a not-so-subtle animosity when women were mentioned, women like Eve who led to the downfall of all humanity.

In my adolescence, I began to see contradictions between what my home Church taught me and what I read in the Bible. I asked questions like, “If women are supposed to be under the leadership of men at all times, what about Deborah, who led a nation?” and “Isn’t Vashti in the story of Esther doing right when she refuses to be objectified?”

But quickly, my questions were silenced, shamed even. I remember my bible study leader asking “Meghan are you even a Christian? You ask far too many questions.”

It was then that I learned that the Church wanted me to agree with and submit to everything I had been taught—that my questions were a form of rebellion in their eyes. So I tried to ask fewer questions, be less curious, and take things at face value.

As I grew older, this not-so-subtle animosity towards women grew. I began to be taught that women should be submissive and silent, followers and not leaders, and relegated to the home. As my body grew into womanhood, I was told it was dangerous to cover up. While the men in the church were to be in charge of everything else, I was taught that they weren’t entirely in control of their sexual urges, so I had to help them by covering up.

It didn’t help me, of course, when I was first sexually assaulted on a mission trip when I was 13. I thought it must have been my fault because my body made men do sinful things, so I didn’t tell anyone until over a decade later– when I began to see that my assault had less to do with how I was dressed and more to the fact that I had been born a girl.

A decade later, I was working in a very patriarchal area of Kenya as a missionary, and according to my upbringing, this system of male headship should have brought forth a thriving society. What I saw instead was that the strict patriarchal role of men being in charge and women being submissive-- actually came hand in hand with violence towards women. A week into my time there, a girl told me she was continually raped and beaten by her uncle. Girls were expected to go through a procedure known in most of the world as Female Genital Mutilation and were often denied an education because their place was “in the home.”

With so many stories of violence, I began to wonder if the strict patriarchy so idealized in my Christian community-- was actually harming women in Kenya. I brought this to the leaders in my missionary organization and I was told that patriarchy didn’t cause the violence, it was just that people were doing patriarchy wrong. When done correctly, people would thrive. I secretly wondered how any human under the command and domination of another could ever fully thrive.

Later, this theory was confirmed while working with trafficked women in the Philippines: I had a man tell me that he came to purchase sexually exploited women because “women here are raised right. They know how to respect men.” It was in the middle of a tirade about women’s proper place (under a man) and a man’s need for respect.

As he spoke, it just sounded so familiar. The words were the same, but the setting was so incredibly different that I couldn’t place where I had speeches like his. Then it hit me—he sounded just like the pastors I had grown up with: men who espoused the idea that women were there to respect and serve men and meet their sexual desires. Evangelical authors like Emerson Eggerichs of “Love and Respect” and countless others echoed this sentiment in marriage books.

So many of my teachings in evangelical culture seemed to communicate to me that women did not exist as an entity unto their own. They were there for men. It lent itself to enormous power differentials, and as I had begun to witness, the result primed the ground for abuse.

​A study done in 2015 by the University of South Carolina showed that fundamental religion with male headship is actually a risk factor in intimate partner violence. Psychoanalyst Lyn Yonack says in an article for Psychology Today that sexual violence is actually about a perpetrator’s need for dominance and control-- not sexual urges.

It’s no secret that the Church at large has struggled with stories of sexual abuse and assault-- it seems that every few months we hear the story of another story of women coming forward about the abuse they survived from powerful men in the church.

Perhaps it is the Church’s reluctance to talk about the harmful effects of things like patriarchy and racism that makes us so susceptible to it.

If we go to scripture, we see that the Bible does not hide from hard subjects-- we do. The Bible talks openly about the devastating effects of patriarchy on women. Bathsheba was raped and her husband was murdered. Hagar was raped by her master’s husband. Abraham gave his wife as a sex slave to Pharaoh to protect himself. In Judges 19, a woman is raped to death, her body dismembered and sent to the tribes of Israel.

The problem is we’ve been taught to gloss over these texts, not ask questions, and believe whatever our pastor says about them. But I believe glossing over the devastation women live through in these texts is to do a disservice to our faith. Those stories are told in the context of fallen humanity, and I believe they set the backdrop for why leadership like Christ’s is so needed.

In the Old Testament, we hear story after story of men pursuing more power, wealth, and prestige. Then Christ emerges as a man who sought not to acquire power but to give it away. He came to serve and not be served, welcomed women into his ranks, and broke long-held religious patriarchal norms.

We see Jesus completely dismiss patriarchal gender roles in the story of Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38-42). While Martha is doing what a “good” woman should, preparing the home with domestic tasks, Mary chooses instead to sit at the feet of Jesus. This is doubly offensive: not only is Mary neglecting her patriarchal role to care for the home; she is sitting at the feet of a rabbi, which in that culture meant you wanted to train to become a rabbi yourself. Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus breaks with the strict cultural roles that kept women in the home and prevented them from learning and teaching.

Martha might be offended by Mary’s act of rebellion and says to Jesus, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

Jesus responds, “Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

In that one sentence, Jesus encourages and praises Mary for breaking the rules. This is truly revolutionary, revealing what Jesus thought of the “gender roles” of the time.

So when I began advocating for feminism and women’s rights, I did it because I saw Christ do it first. But I found quickly that it came with a high cost: dear friends told me they couldn’t be associated with me, family members questioned my salvation, countless Christian men sent me abusive emails and comments telling me that I was going to hell and that I deserved violence. The Church had taught them that I could not be a Christ-follower and a feminist.

But perhaps if we had a culture that welcomed questions, that interrogated patriarchal teachings, that allowed civil discourse on new ideas-- I would not need to speak so loudly.

I speak up because girls and women are still being bought and sold. Because women are still being beaten by their husbands. Because women are not safe to go on a jog by themselves. Because our healthcare system is failing us. Because around the world girls are still denied an education. Because we live in a society where 1 in 3 women is assaulted. I speak up because I ultimately I believe it’s what Christ would do-- and we should live by his example.

Now I want to hear from you!

I so appreciate Meghan sharing not only her personal story, but her insight as well. I always gain new insight when I read her work. Did you find what Meghan shared here today helpful? If so, please follow her on social media and let her know!