oh they tell me of a land far away

It takes almost fourteen hours to drive from Nashville to Austin. When I was in college, the 12-hour drive to Waco was a one-day trip with three stops, and I kindof enjoyed it. As I've gotten a little older and wiser, well, let's just say the trip has lost its charm. I almost never do it in one shot anymore, but last Sunday I left my parents' house before 8 to try to make it in one day.

Around hour 10 of the drive, you hit Dallas. Luckily it was Sunday, so there wasn't much traffic, but the sun was getting a little lower in the sky and I was getting sleepy. Plus Dallas just makes me nervous. (I don't know. Something about all that sprawl and big hair. I'm much more comfortable in Fort Worth.) So I hit "scan" on the radio, hoping to find something interesting, and happened to catch the very beginning of the evening service at a Very Large Baptist Megachurch in Dallas. I won't say the church's name, but suffice it to say that it is a bastion of fundamentalism, and was one of the first megachurches. My friends who grew up in this church range from having been scarred forever and made agnostic by their experiences at the church's Christian school to being full-fledged fundamentalist ministers-in-training themselves. They broadcast their services on 100,000 watts of power, which meant that I could listen to the service all the way to Waco.

Now. Normally I would roll my eyes, groan at the bad theology and and flip the station. But I was really sleepy at that point and figured that the service and/or sermon would make me angry enough to stay awake.

It didn't make me angry. It was a typical Sunday-night service at a very large church, a lot like the ones I grew up attending. The slightly off-key youth choir led the music, the congregation sang contemporary songs and a couple of hymns, and the pastoral search committee made an announcement. The minister of music talked about Israel and I thought he was going to say something about the rapture, but he didn't, and the choir sang a song about praying for the peace of Jerusalem. The sermon was delivered by a professor from a local seminary, and it was actually interesting - the preacher spoke about the problems that occur when a church gets concerned about its growth more than about its mission. It's a theme that I would like to hear talked about in my church, actually.

But something about the service made me sad, and somewhere around Hillsboro I realized what it was. Every voice you heard on the radio, through an hour and half of worship, announcements, and preaching, was the voice of a man. Not a single woman spoke from the platform. And it made me sad, because they miss so much by shutting out women's voices from pastoral positions.

I know the fight over women in ministry is mostly over in Baptist life. If you believe women should be ordained you go to a moderate or progressive church, and if you don't you go to a conservative church. And it's not my intention to enter that fight here (if you want to read a good discussion of the issue, check out Amy Butler's posts (one and two) on the topic from a couple of weeks ago.). Those questions were answered for me a long time ago when I was a freshman at Baylor and heard Barbara Brown Taylor preach in chapel and thought, "This doesn't seem nearly as bad as they told me it would be." My belief that God calls women to preach is reaffirmed every time I hear someone like Julie Pennington-Russell, my sister's pastor, preach, because it's so obvious that this is the work God has called her to do, and for her to settle for another job would be a sinful waste of her God-given talents.

But I've been thinking a lot lately about the image of God. The Intrepid Lobbyist and I had a long talk a few weeks ago about what it means to know that every person on earth is created in God's image. "It means you treat people with dignity," she said, and I couldn't agree more. The reason that we are not supposed to judge people on their wealth or their productivity or their looks is that each person has an inherent dignity. That dignity comes from being created in the imago dei. And so that means we have to treat other people as such. We can't ignore suffering, poverty, and disease. We have to ignore skin color, economic status, and language if and when those things are barriers to loving others as we are called to do.

Those things are important. But what's been on my mind lately is the reverse, that is, what the great mass of humanity tells us about the God in whose image it is created. Gender, race, culture - these things have something to tell us about the nature of God. I don't think this is so hard for most people to accept.

The trouble comes with messy decisions about people who don't quite fit our pre-conceived notions of how God works, who God calls, and what God is like. What do we do with women? Do we say that they are created in God's image, but not called to certain tasks, as the fundamentalists do? What do we do with people who are poor? Do we blame their poverty on their sins, or do we recognize their suffering as telling us something about a God who knows what it is to suffer? What do we do with members of our churches who are gay? This might be why so many evangelicals are obsessed with seeing homosexuality as a sinful choice. If you believe that someone is gay not by choice but by genetics, you might have to accept that that tells us something about the nature of God. And that's really uncomfortable for many Christians.

I don't know. I don't think there are easy answers to any of these questions. But I'm convinced that we are forever limiting God to fit our own image. We're not comfortable with a God who lets things be messier than the limited scope of our understanding. We like to know who's in and who's out. It's a lot easier to have a handy set of rules than it is to enter a process of careful discernment. It's a lot easier to label someone else a heathen than it is to think about what another culture has to show us about redemption.

One of the ministers at my church likes to say that each individual in worship on any given Sunday makes a huge difference in how we experience God. His point is that we don't know God fully, and that every person who becomes a part of our community lets us know God a little more. Which is, after all, the point.

Maybe that's why I chose to listen to 90 minutes of fundamentalism at the end of a long drive last Sunday. Because as much as I am angered by the SBC's theology and saddened by their relegation of women to secondary roles, their insistence on orthodoxy, morality, and clarity might have something to teach me about who God is and what God calls us to do. It might even be enough to keep me awake, thinking about what being created in God's image means for me. That's going to take a lot more than fourteen hours to figure out.