Summoned: Stepping Up to Live and Lead With Jesusናሙና

Teaming Up With Women

If we’re committed to living and leading with Jesus, we need to be serious about honoring, supporting and empowering the women in our lives. It’s time to see, name, create space for and call forth their dignity, capacity and destiny as our fellow image-bearers and culture-creators.

How do we do that? We start by anchoring our view of women in Genesis 1 and Acts 2. According to the creation account of Genesis 1:26-28, male and female were created in the image of God. That’s a high view of male and female. Each gender bears the image of God. Together we bear that image more fully. Part of the expression of the image of the Three in One who work together (“Let us make . . . ,” v. 26) is that the man and woman work together to fulfill the cultural mandate. Together they are fruitful and steward God’s good creation. As Old Testament scholar Ellen F. Davis puts it: “God’s dream for the human is that woman and man should be equal and complementary, for they are equally created as ‘the image of God’ (Genesis 1:27).”

Roll the tape forward to the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2). The Spirit had been poured out on 120 followers of Jesus. They were out in the streets, declaring the wonders of God in languages they hadn’t learned to speak. What was that all about? According to Peter’s explanation, it was the fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy: “And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. . . . Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days” (Joel 2:28-29).

Joel envisioned a time when the Spirit would be given to all God’s people, regardless of age or gender. That day arrived, explained Peter, on the Day of Pentecost. He pointed to Jesus as the source of that great outpouring (Acts 2:33), an outpouring that would enable men and women to work side by side in the “last days” (the era inaugurated when Jesus poured out the Spirit and in which we now live).