Your Starting Point with Scripture
In many respects, unlocking your power as a woman in ministry means realizing your power as an interpreter of the Bible. “Wait a minute,” you say, “I’m no biblical scholar.” While that may be true (at least according to those persons whose vocation is to study the Bible and generate scholarship about the Bible), you are indeed an interpreter of the Bible. People assume that you have a knowledge of the Bible that they themselves do not have. You went to seminary or divinity school. You took Bible classes. You have skills in the area of biblical interpretation. You are, by the very nature of your role, an authority when it comes to the Bible. People will look to you for a range of reasons when it comes to their own relationship with the Bible. They will want the answers toward which you can point, although it will be up to you to note that the desire for answers from the Bible is itself a statement about the Bible. They will want to know where it says what. At the same time, even though they will not be able to articulate this truth, they want help in making sense of it. Biblical interpretation should be for them as much as it is for you. To interpret the Bible is to engage in activity that tries to make meaning, which is really how we go about life in general. We are text interpreters every day, constantly trying to make sense of what we read and what we hear. We do this interpretation from our multiple contexts that are as varied as our own persons.
A significant aspect of what it means to have power in ministry is to realize the power entrusted to you with this book we call the Holy Bible. How you engage the Bible, talk about the Bible, teach the Bible, and preach the Bible will communicate to those around you not only what the Bible means to you, but also what they think it should then mean for them. None of your statements about or references to the Bible are throwaway lines. Your relationship with the Bible is critical to your effectiveness in ministry.
We relinquish a considerable amount of our power in ministry when we forget this truth, when we then allow other sources to shape the biblical imagination of those we accompany in ministry. There is certainly no dearth of opinions about the Bible, nor is there a lack of very vocal Bible interpreters who know how to get heard. If you do not talk about the Bible and what you think about it, and if you do not help those to whom you minister to read it, then they will listen to others who do. They will go elsewhere for resources to assist them in understanding the Bible, and you might not like where they end up. Where you could have been offering ways of interpreting the Bible that are generative, you instead end up having to offer correctives and band-aid solutions that never stick as well.
As a result, one of the issues for women in ministry is presenting a posture with the Bible that may run counter to what people have encountered previously. In the end, your goal is not to convince or coerce but to invite conversation. It is to help people be better readers of the Bible. It is to affirm that questions and dialogue are essential to biblical interpretation. It is to insist that agreement is not necessary to living in community. It is to encourage their own abilities and intuitions as interpreters. If your starting point with the Bible and what it says about women is to tell others just how wrong they are, you are no different from those interpreters who have told them what the Bible has to say about women in ministry. Your starting point with scripture matters significantly.
