omen in the church w o ering t minist ministering to women ... · 1991 by a connecticut research...

Ministering to Women in the Church

Transcript - ML505 Ministering to Women in the Church © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 13 of 24ML505

Ministering to the Working Woman

Ministering to Women in the Church

This is lesson number 13: Ministering to the Working Woman. Questionnaires distributed in evangelical churches across our country disclosed that among married women in these churches 57 percent were homemakers and 43 percent of these homemakers were mothers who were working outside the home. There are several different categories of working women, as I mentioned earlier, and each group has special tensions, needs, and dynamics that surround their worlds. Our culture pictures the desirability of women finding fulfillment in life and, if honest with one’s self, that fulfillment cannot possibly be found in the home, according to today’s culture. For years, women have heard this message from school, media, and the feminists’ voice for equality. When women left the home, many at first tried to juggle home responsibilities as well as work responsibilities, finding much frustration with the added image requirements.

For the Christian women, another tension emerged—that of criticism from fellow Christians—hearing that a woman’s place was in the home. Some women pursue a career by choice, some seek work out of necessity to supplement the family income. Once in the workforce, many women have become disillusioned because of the tremendous pull between home and the world of work out there.

Whether we like it or not, we’re living in a very fast-changing society. We’re getting away from tradition in almost every sector of our lives, our home, society, and church. As Christians, we are constantly being challenged to assess what is of utmost importance to us, what our individual needs are, how we are to respond to this rapidly changing society, and just where our stand on biblical principles places us in all of the above areas.

In our present society, it is sometimes difficult to juggle all of the balls that have been thrown to us. The traditional home life consisting of a father, who is the sole bread winner, and the mother, who is totally dedicated to raising and nurturing the children and providing a pleasant environment for a husband to come home to—one of hot meals and warm support and appreciation for

Lucy Mabery-Foster, PhD Experience: Professor of Pastoral Ministries,

Dallas Theological Seminary (1990-2002)



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what he was doing for the family—is rapidly disappearing. As a matter of fact, this arrangement now makes up only 10 percent of families.

To a great extent, economics has dictated that the above picture has to be altered. Men often could not bring home enough money to meet all of the growing needs of their families, but also a deep longing in the hearts of many wives to find a fulfillment of their dreams which stretched beyond being at home. To some extent, I believe that this dissatisfaction at home came from many sources. Partly from society by saying that women were not reaching their potential, but also from husbands not honoring the tremendous roles of their wives, treating many of the traditional chores as menial and insignificant.

In addition, women began to discover that their spiritual gifts from God were not being fully utilized. The more we look at Scripture, the more we see how versatile women were in past centuries and how many hats they wore in society and in government, in church, and in their home. For a given period of time, women were forced to enter the workforce because the men were engaged in war, but as you know, when the men returned, many women didn’t want to return home. Society shouted that the workplace outside the home was the place to find significance. There is no doubt about it. The march of women into the workplace disrupted the family unit. With no support from companies or government, parents faced a simple but overwhelming question—who’s going to care for the kids?

One thing is certain today, women are a critical mass in the workforce. By the year 2000, almost half of the workforce will be female. And more than 80 percent of women age twenty-five to fifty-four will work. Most women with infants (53 percent) now work, up from 38 percent in 1980. Educated women are more likely to work. Sixty-eight percent of college grads work versus 32 percent without a high school degree.

Even with all of these statistics, there appears to be a glass ceiling which blocks US women from corporate heights. US News and World Report published an article in June, 1991, which defined this invisible glass ceiling as a subtle discrimination that limits women’s opportunities to participate in everything from overseas assignments to company-sponsored training programs. Misconceptions about what women want also hamper progress. At many of the companies who studied this issue, for example, men in positions of authority often assumed that a woman who had children wouldn’t be interested in a high-profile transfer or a change of assignment because of the longer hours the job would



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require.

Today, three of every one hundred top executive jobs on average at the largest US companies are held by women. According to a study done by the University of California at Los Angeles Graduate School of Management, with fifty-six-million women in the workforce, overall women now earn just 72 cents for every dollar a man takes home, compared with 64 cents ten years ago. But that old myth that career achievement is a yardstick of life has disenchanted many women today. They are finding that the price is too high. A thirty-eight-year-old attorney from Chicago was torn between raising her four-year-old son herself and putting in the ten- to fifteen-hour day necessary to be judged a success in her profession. She gave up a lucrative, downtown law practice three years ago to open a small, suburban firm with two other lawyers. Her income is now less than a third of her previous salary in the high five figures. But she has the flexibility she craved and time to spend with her family. She said this, “I think a lot of us realized that we overemphasized the importance of career in achieving equality.”

Some women are going a step further and bailing out of the workforce all together. The percentage of women in the workforce ages twenty to forty-four dropped between June and December of 1991 from 74.5 percent to 74 percent, the largest decrease since the early sixties. Nearly 30 percent of working women polled in 1991 by a Connecticut research firm said that wanting to put more energy into being a good homemaker and mother was a reason to consider giving up work indefinitely, an 11 percent increase over the 1989 statistics and the highest such figure in twenty years. Also in a survey of one thousand career professionals, conducted by the executive recruiting firm Robert Half International, 82 percent of the women polled said that they would choose a career path with flexible full-time work hours and more family time but slower career advancement over one with flexible hours and faster advancement.

But to restore the family to the core of our lives, parents need help. Business and the government must do their part if they believe it is in society’s best interests to strengthen the family, but does our culture really believe that? The 1990s mark a new phase in family history— a turning point. People are finally beginning to revalue and again appreciate the importance of the family.

Patricia Aburdene and John Naisbitt, in their book Megatrends for Women, now state that there are some noticeable changes in the typical American family. The first noticeable change is that families are smaller. The second change is that more families are



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headed by single parents. In 1970, 40 percent of households were composed of married couples with children under eighteen. By 1990, that percentage fell to 26 percent because so many new single-parent households were formed. In 1990, there were 10 million single parents, up more than 40 percent since 1980. About 8,500,000 were single mothers. Women now head 29 percent of US households.

One child in four, including 60 percent of African-American children, is now raised by a single parent. That’s about sixteen million children. One of every five children lives in poverty. One-third of female-headed households are poor. In 1987, there were 2,600,000 women who had never married and were raising children under twenty-one. There has been a shift in our society from the consumerism vision of the good life to a realization that we need more time, not money.

A survey conducted by the Family Research Council in Washington, DC, found that 78 percent of adults said that they would prefer to work flexible hours even if it meant slower career advancement, so that they could spend more time with their families. The director of the Institute for American Values in New York said, “There’s a shift from being achievement oriented to finding your sense of identity and fulfillment in the family.”

Leisure time, not money, is becoming the status symbol of the nineties. Seventy percent of people from various income levels would sacrifice a day’s pay for an extra day off each week. The market research firm of Shulman and Clancy found 28 percent of working women in 1990 wanting to quit their jobs to put more energy into being mothers and homemakers, nearly double the 1981 number.

Parents need options in these days. Option one could be: “I’m out of here. I’m not going to be in the workforce.” If that’s an option, that’s great. Option number two is to have nannies. The International Nanny Association (called the INA) is a nonprofit organization based in Austin, Texas, and it estimates that there are seventy-five-thousand experienced nannies nationwide. This is becoming a real middle-class phenomenon. At Sacramento, California’s Nanny College, students take six months of classes in child development, infant and toddler health and safety, nutrition and CPR certification, among other courses. The students must also complete a supervised internship. The college graduates about two hundred students each year.

The third option that homes have is a home business. Either full- or part-time home-based businesses increased to 38,400,000 in



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1991. That’s up 12 percent from 1990, 42,700,000 in 1991. Of these, twelve million were self-employed homeworkers. Another 10,500,000 were moonlighters, or people who had several part-time jobs done at home. The number of self-employed women working full-time at home tripled between 1985 and 1991; that’s from 378,000 to 1,100,000.

The fourth option that families have today is telecommuting: a company-employed person who works part- or full-time at home during normal business hours. Telecommuters grew 38 percent to the number of 5,500,000 between 1990 and 1991. Companies from Sears Roebuck to Pacific Bell, New York Life, John Hancock Insurance Company, JCPenney, and IBM employ telecommuters who work two or more days at home. In 1991, Link Resources counted 44,700,000 home workers, people who do some, but not all, work at home. That’s up from 34,300,000 in 1990 and twenty million in 1985.

Today, 36 percent of the labor force works at home. By the year 2000, it could be well over half. I want to ask, what are we doing as Christian women in leadership to possibly fit into the lives of these types of mothers who are working at home? How are we working into their schedules so that we can train them to walk closer with our Lord?

Companies that are friendly to families are greatly needed. New York Families and Work Institute analyze that work schedules, leaves, financial assistance, corporate giving, community service, and independent care in 188 corporations were overwhelming results. The four most family-friendly companies recognized for enduring commitment to the subject of work and family life were: number one was IBM; number two was Johnson & Johnson; number three was Aetna Life and Casualty Company; number four was Corning Inc. Each of these companies packaged an innovative array of strategies to address childcare, eldercare, health and wellness, and time off for their employees.

A decade ago, family-friendly programs did not even exist. Now all large employers offer some benefits such as maternity leave, yet nearly half still view work-family concerns as women issues and not a family issue. IBM spent $22 million by the mid-nineties on childcare and another $3 million on eldercare. It offers up to three years of parental leave approved on a case- by-case basis. In Dallas-Fort Worth, IBM teamed up with Travelers Insurance on a $375,000 program to recruit and train daycare providers and to fund efforts for daycare centers to gain accreditation. Johnson & Johnson, in 1989, changed the company credo, added twelve new family work policies and officially stated, “We must be mindful of



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ways to help our employees fulfill their family responsibilities.”

When we look at women at work, how can our society provide them with opportunity, leadership, and balance? The next great challenge for millions of women is maintaining success while restructuring their lifestyles for greater balance. What are the ten best career jobs for women according to National Analysts? The number one job is your dream job. Don’t get too carried away with what society needs. What about your needs, your talents, and your desires for creative self-expression? People who love their work have a better chance at success and sometimes your dream job could be something that could be worked out of your home so that you could balance that with your responsibilities at home as well.

The second job that is the best is CEO or entrepreneur. There are two ways to sit in the CEO’s chair for a woman. The first route is the corporate route. Draw up a five- to ten-year plan to gather together the skills for the top executive job you hope to land in by the year 2003. The second way is the entrepreneurial approach: start your own business now and you can sit in that seat immediately. The Small Business Administration (called the SBA) will own nearly 40 percent (others say half) of small businesses by the year 2000. 1992 was the crossover year when women owned businesses, employed more people than the Fortune 500. According to research, California, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are the best ten states for women-owned businesses.

Why do women win? Women are cautious, strategic risk-takers whose resourcefulness and resolve increase as circumstances become more difficult. Women admit that they need help and surround themselves with good people. That’s how they win in business.

Special care is also important. A woman named Jean Griswold is founder and CEO for Special Care, a Philadelphia-based provider of homecare to the elderly, handicapped, and children with seventeen franchises in eight states. Griswold, who is confined to a wheelchair herself because of multiple sclerosis, shows how a disabling disease is no match for a determined entrepreneur. The wife of a minister, she saw firsthand how much elderly people need companions. Visiting nurses can stay only a few hours, but Special Care’s more than three thousand nurse’s aides help with baths, shopping, and companionship and can serve around the clock. She started this business on her own, and she has carried it through.



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The third type of business is health care. Any look at the boom industries of the nineties must begin with health care. It’s an $8 billion a year business that will soon reach a trillion dollars a year. From technician to physician, from unskilled worker to PhD, researcher to administrator and marketing wiz, there are a lot of opportunities in health care. There were 8,400,000 health care workers in 1990. In 1990 alone, medical employment grew 7.7 percent, the largest for any major job category. The bureau of labor statistics says that six out of the ten fastest-growing occupations from 1990 to the year 2005 will be in health care, home health aides, personal and homecare aides, physical therapists, medical assistants, radiological technicians, and medical secretaries.

The need for nurses is awesome. The United States needs 767,000 more nurses by the year 2005. By the year 2005, the number of registered nurses (the RNs) will reach 2,500,000; and that’s up from 1,700,000 in 1990—a 44 percent increase. Most newly licensed nurses (80 percent) describe themselves as satisfied with their jobs, reports the National League of Nurses. The nursing shortage boosted average salaries for staff nurses to $34,500 in 1991, but average obscures the fact that many senior nurses, administrators, and professors earn a whole lot more than that. Top RNs in major cities earn $50,000–65,000 a year reports the American Journal of Nursing. A nurse anesthetist can earn $100,000 a year, says Working Woman. Nursing professors earn in the mid-sixties, says the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. But a nursing professor with a doctorate at a top private college can earn more than $100,000. Nursing directors average $62,300. With incomes like that, it is no wonder that nursing would be ranked the eighth best-paying profession for women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

What is shocking is the job at number nine: physician. The nurses earned seven dollars a week more than the doctors. In 1991, women nurses earned more money than non-entrepreneurial female physicians. Job satisfaction among nurses has grown after hospitals restructured their tasks. Primary care nurses are responsible for twenty-four-hour planning for a patient, just as physicians are. They follow patients from admission to discharge, working with the physicians. At Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, nursing vice president nurse and chief Joyce Clifford has equal rank with the hospital’s chief of medicine. Nurse practitioners, who are registered nurses with advanced education and clinical training in a specialty area, can be found in all fifty states. The American Academy of Nurse Practitioners in Washington, DC, estimates that about 30,000 of them in the United States are actively working. The need for more than seven hundred thousand nurses this decade and beyond to 2005 means more prestigious



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jobs too.

The fourth type of job available to women is in finance. Finance is one of the best places for women. More than half of the US accountants are women. A business week survey of male and female MBAs from the top-twenty business schools showed the narrowest wage gap was in finance. There women earned only 3.3 percent less than men.

The fifth type of job available for women is traditional jobs that are revisited—old values with a new respect. Time was, a sharp career woman could choose to be a nurse, a secretary, or a teacher, period. That was it. But when millions of women broke into business in the professions, the demand for competent people in traditional female jobs increased. So did wages and status. In other words, nursing, we’ve discussed; teaching is another area. The United States Department of Education’s Vance Grant says, “The US will need two hundred thousand new public school teachers a year now and for the next several years.” That’s two hundred thousand new public school teachers per year. By the year 2000, the United States will need two million new teachers. The US will also need a lot more college teachers. One-third of all tenured professors will retire by the year 2000.

In Rochester, New York, career and teaching program mentors and lead teachers can earn close to $70,000 a year. Teachers with master’s degrees and several years of experience average $48,600 a year in 1992 while some are earning in the sixties and high-fifties. In 1991, starting teachers earned $28,935; it was a 50 percent increase just since 1987; and as high as $30,000 in Alaska. The average US teacher’s salary in the 1990 and 91 census school year was $32,880; starting salaries averaged $21,500, according to the American Federation of Teachers. The American Federation of Teachers say that teachers earn the highest average salaries in Alaska and Connecticut, that’s $43,000 plus. In New York, they earn $42,000 plus. In Washington, DC, and California, they earn $39,000 plus. In Alaska, starting teachers average nearly $30,000. In New York, Connecticut, California, and New Jersey, they start at around $25,000. In 1992, for the first time, US high school principals averaged more than $60,000, averaging $61,700 a year.

Secretaries is another branch of the old traditional jobs that women had that is changing. The United States needs 250,000 new secretaries by the year 2005. In addition, we need 158,000 and 133,000 legal secretaries. For the young woman who does not want to attend college, but is willing to go to a one- to two-year training course, being a secretary could have great appeal. In New York City, a top secretary earns $75,000. The problem with



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being a secretary is the lack of respect and prestige. No wonder 62 percent of secretaries, surveyed in 1991, wanted a different job title; and 52 percent preferred administrative assistant, according to Professional Secretaries International.

The sixth type of job available to women is the high-tech science field. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1991, figures show two of the very best paying job categories for women: computer science and engineer. Women do not hold the top jobs, but they are earning a respectable income in high tech. The US will need some 366,000 new systems analysts and computer scientists by the year 2005. That’s about 79 percent more than in 1990. Of the fast- growing careers, this is probably the best paying. The US will also need more than 300,000 computer programmers.

Another area of interest for women is food. Millions of women put dinner on the table every night, but until recently, the world’s top chefs were all men. Before 1970, the Culinary Institute of America, Hyde Park, New York, did not admit women. It sounds like a lot of our Christian schools, doesn’t it? Today, women make up about 20 percent of students.

Another job open to women is the professions of law and medicine. Women earn 40 percent of law degrees and one-third of MD degrees. Women make up 50 percent of new primary care physicians in specialties like family practice with whom people have the most direct contact. The AMA counts 104,000 female physicians. We know that in this field, earnings continue to be relatively high. Health care is one of a handful of top-growth areas. Growth specialists have emerged within medicine that will be particularly attractive to women, especially adult women’s medicine.

The ninth type of job open to women is the male-dominated occupations—professional firefighters, air pilots and navigators, law enforcement officers, sports reporters and broadcasters, construction industry. You’ll notice that women are not seen in this particular group very often. Those are still definitely male-dominated occupations.

In the tenth and final one are the arts and media. As Christians, we must really undergird our desires for anything that we do with the Word of God. In looking at all of these available types of jobs open for women, as Christian leaders we are going to be directing the women under our care into different fields and to help them understand some of the problems that are involved in all of them. Whether it is being in the field of health care, whether it is being in the field of your own job at home, some type of entrepreneurial



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job, something in nursing or teaching, or even some of the jobs that are not specifically open to women, we need to encourage our women to balance all of these with desires that they have to look at the Word of God. So often we come into a situation with our preconceived ideas of what is right for us as well as for others. If others don’t fit within our context of accessible lifestyles, then we tend to separate ourselves from them, criticizing their choices. Women in our churches who choose some of the jobs that I’ve mentioned that we feel uncomfortable with—sometimes we become very critical.

The body of Christ is made up of a very diversified group of individuals with differing needs and responsibilities. We’re quick to judge others much more than we’re willing to judge ourselves. To work or not to work for a woman is a major question for many Christian families. There are not so many easy cut-and-dry answers, however, but we tend to want to make them real cut-and-dry. Each family must decide within his own circle what is important for them and how they can best go about achieving these goals. Just what are the hot jobs for women in the latter part of this century and beyond, according to Megatrends for Women, as I mentioned before, were the ten jobs I just listed. There is no way of getting around it. Women who are juggling both home management and outside work are working an average of fifteen hours more per week, because of household chores, than men do. Women who have chosen full-time careers outside the home are constantly measuring themselves against corporate men in their fifties who enjoy the support of at-home wives.

I noticed this reversal of support even here at seminary. I can remember, so often, thinking around the Thanksgiving vacation time. The school always lets us out the day before Thanksgiving, and that’s it. I know some of my professors would laugh and say, “Why do we need Wednesday off before Thanksgiving? Why don’t we just have Thanksgiving?” And I thought, well, as a mother who’s also in school, I had to go home and cook Thanksgiving dinner, and it certainly took me all of Wednesday to do that preparation. How are we as women, who are working in the workforce, supporting those who are also wanting to be there as Christians?

By now, ten to twenty years into their careers, most women and many like-minded men find the rat race wearing pretty thin. They want successful careers and personal lives too. Leisure time, not money, is becoming the status symbol, as I mentioned before. Research has determined that women leaders are better at balancing than their male counterparts are. Women do not identify exclusively with their careers, as most men traditionally do. Female leaders take time out for recreation, attending plays and



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movies, looking at and collecting art, reading inspiring literature, and gardening. Because of this trait, churches have a tremendous opportunity to feed into the lives of its businesswomen. Any kind of program geared to meet the needs of the working woman has to be adaptable to their work schedules.

In past years, I’ve taught a class for businesswomen in my church from 7:00 to 7:50 a.m. once a week. It was structured after the businessmen’s program, planned out by the creative leadership ministry team of Randy Frazee and Bill Donahue. The program starts with each woman creating a personal life vision. This vision consisted of specific individual visions for character development, marriage, children, church, work, personal life, location (where you’re going to live), other relationships and responsibilities, and time and money. Each week, as the women work on a specific vision, they share what they have come up with with the group. For some areas that are not applicable, a woman would still have a vision for the future, whether it be as a single or a married woman, with or without children. In breaking down these areas, we can have access to numerous character studies or personality profiles.

One of the most accessible is called the Performax, which helps a person discover personality traits—I use this often in my classes with women, and men as well—and different perspectives. It helps you understand what your own personality traits are. It helps you see what you have to work with. After the women took this particular test, which is self-scoring, they were able to list areas of strengths and weaknesses. Then the goal was set for each woman to write a plan for each area of character weakness, explaining why this is a problem area for them. They were to locate a passage of Scripture to encourage them to improve in this area. So you can see that this helped them at home to work through some of these issues. Finally, they were to write out a plan for practical, specific, and measurable steps for improving in this area. Then when we got together each week, we would go over each other’s lists, help encourage one another, and help see how their particular issues, perhaps, coincided with our own.

In the area of marriage, each woman was to read Ephesians 5:18–33. They were to read Colossians 3:18–19. And they were to read 1 Peter 3:1–12 and 1 Timothy 5:8. They were to ask themselves what vision God has for their marriage. Each woman was to interview an admired married couple. That got to be really interesting when these working women would go out and interview married couples, but they kind of wanted to see what worked for those couples. They kind of wanted to see what their priorities were and how they saw life and how they saw themselves working into the plan of God. They would ask them what they believed to be really



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important to each one of them and to them as a couple. They were to record then and share their findings with the whole group.

In the vision for children, the women were to read Deuteronomy 6:1–25, Proverbs 22:6 (which I’m sure we all know), Ephesians 6:1–4, and Colossians 3:20–21. They were to describe what vision God has for their own children. Next they were to interview parents they admired and record and share what they discovered. Finally, they were to write a vision statement for their children. Now this is done better with their mates, because they can sit down and work through, you know, what would we like to see developed in our children, not what kind of job we want them to have, but our vision for them as far as their walk with the Lord is concerned; as far as their choosing a mate would be concernd.

In the vision for one’s church, the women were to determine their specific areas of giftedness and they were to see if they could possibly fit into the schedule some area of outreach. I always encourage these working women to plug into the church in some way, whether it was baking cookies for Vacation Bible School or teaching a Sunday school class or participating in some kind of a behind the scenes program so that they could feel an active part of the body of Christ. So often working women are so stretched between home and work that they see that church cannot be an option for them as far as any work or outreach.

In the vision for work, the women were encouraged to always remember that their place of work was an opportunity to model the person of Christ to fellow workers. They should remember that most believers work to support a chosen lifestyle. They were cautioned to be careful to not justify a job because they needed to support their family’s needs, which were in reality not needs but lifestyle choices. I tried to help the women understand that they needed to know themselves. Why were they working? Do they want a better lifestyle? Do they want something more than they needed? Or did they just want the accolades they got at work? Sometimes women get more strokes at work than they do at home.

In one’s vision for personal life, it should include such things as reading plan, nutrition, health, and exercise. “My goodness,” so many of the women said, “you have got to be kidding. How could we possibly exercise with the schedule we’ve got?” It’s one of those things that you can almost not exercise. You cannot give that up in order to carry out the type of rigorous plan that you have in your life: devotions, evaluation, meditation; in the areas of grooming, dress, and hygiene; in the areas of hobbies and leisure time and personal relationship with God. When these women were working on their vision for their personal life, it



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had to be very in-depth. They had to include all of the things that encompass them personally, certainly surrounded by their personal relationship with God. This is only a partial list. Since this was to be a personal vision, the women were encouraged to include only what was really important to them. If grooming and dress and hygiene were not important, then they would put that out of their own vision. And yet I encouraged the women to look at all of these areas to see if they were going to be imaging the person of Christ in whatever sphere.

One’s location might possibly be determined by your culture or your history. If you’re looking at your vision for where you’re going to live, it might be determined by your family background. It might be determined by your family roots and togetherness that you have. If you have a very close-knit extended family, you might want to choose a career that’s close by. If you have your vision for your location, it will be colored by a lot of these things. Certain kinds of house or property. If you like living out in the country, then you might have to choose a job that would be accessible to that. Education for your children. Sometimes women will choose jobs around a particular school so that their children can attend that school. A good church to attend. I know a lot of people will buy or rent a home or a place to live near a good church. Also, their work. The environment that they want to live in. All of these are areas that they begin to consider as they’re looking at where they want to live their lives. Once these items are ranked according to importance, then a calculated decision can be made. But a lot of people are confused because they just go at it so spasmodically.

What kind of other relationships do these women want to have? They could discuss among the group what qualities were important in seeking out lasting friends and what kind of responsibilities they would have to these outside relationships. Time and money was another area of vision that the women were encouraged to work on. These are always two of the more difficult things to establish a vision for and to follow that vision. Our time seems to get so swept up with the urgent. You have all heard the book entitled The Tyranny of the Urgent, that things that yell the loudest usually get more attention.

The women were encouraged to determine their giving practices, their time management, their savings, their children’s education, their protection, their budgets, their debts, and vacations and hobbies. All of these things must be thought through and prioritized if you’re really going to use your money and your time wisely.

After the life visions were well established, the women were then



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ready to begin a study of major Bible doctrines. They started with the Trinity, the deity of Christ, the inspiration of Scriptures, law and grace, and many other subjects. The goal of these studies was to give the woman knowledge in every major doctrine so that she would develop confidence in the workplace to express her beliefs. These doctrines were accompanied with Bible verses for support. Once I was invited to watch a panel of businesspeople question several people who had completed the whole series, and I was greatly impressed with the poise with which these people were able to answer questions thrown at them like fellow businesspeople would do.

I was especially impressed with a surgeon who attended the session in his green scrub suit because he had just finished surgery. He had in the scrub suit pocket, a small group of laminated cards he had made for himself with key verses and doctrines on them. He said he came prepared. He would review them at stoplights and other available times that he found. When people out in the workforce would ask him a question, he could remember to come up with a very succinct answer that was appropriate to the situation.

The women in the morning group grew very close together, and they developed a bond that lasted for years. Too often we overlook the businesswomen because of the difficult times involved and our personal impression of their assumed lack of interest. I’ve heard many leaders in churches say, “Oh, the businesswomen are out there doing their own thing, and we can’t minister to them.” That’s not true. They have such a need; and many of them, if given the opportunity, will get into a program that you provide for them in your churches. Sometimes their perceived aloofness comes as a protection against what they perceive from other Christians as a rejection of what they do. I constantly point women to Proverbs 31 which says,

An excellent wife, who can find? For her worth is far above jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain. She does him good and not evil all the days of her life. She looks for wool and flax and works with her hands in delight. She is like merchant ships; she brings her food from afar. She rises also while it is still night and gives food to her household and portions to her maidens. She considers a field and buys it; from her earnings, she plants a vineyard.

In the whole chapter, the verses go on to say,

Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she smiles at the future. She opens her mouth in wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue. She looks well to the ways of her household,


Christ-Centered Learning — Anytime, Anywhere

15 of 15

Ministering to the Working WomanLesson 13 of 24

and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children rise up and bless her; her husband also, and he praises her saying, “Many daughters have done nobly, but you excel them all.” Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised. Give her the product of her hands, and let her work praise her in the gates.

omen in the church w o ering t minist ministering to women ... · 1991 by a connecticut research...

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