Here’s the passage in question for the fired female Sunday school teacher:

11 A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. 13For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. 15But women^[a] will be saved^[b] through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety. (NIV)

Oops. If the Watertown church mentioned in my last post has a board with more than 50 percent women, which it does, those women are “having authority” over the men of the congregation. I have no problem with that, but I think it’s worth noting in the context of this story.

Check out verse 13, too. Did anyone miss the part, a couple thousand pages back in the Bible, where it says we’re all deceived sinners? Shoot, if only Adam had not let Eve’s eyelash batting tempt him to sin, all of us modern day men could reign over women. Oops. Maybe let’s just let anyone, man or woman, teach if they’re qualified to teach on their spiritual and intellectual merits and leave the subjugating to someone else.

I’m a little late in responding to the national news story about the fired female Sunday school teacher. I think it’s worth risking untimeliness to weigh in because this story has been on my mind this week.

My first thought is that the uproar seems a little misguided. Why? Because the big deal made in the news coverage is about her gender, not that she was dumped after 54 years of teaching. In my opinion, that’s the real news here. It’s really wrong to “fire” someone, male or female, who has served that long in a volunteer capacity unless there’s some evidence of inappropriate behavior. (The church has been mum on that topic.)

Furthermore, the church board claims in its recent media statement that 55 percent of the board’s members and 87 percent of the church’s Sunday school teachers are women. If that’s true, then women are teaching men, unless only 13 percent of the church membership is male, so that’s not the real issue here, most likely.

Here’s the thing, though: There are plenty of churches in this country where women are made second-class citizens in terms of the spiritual leadership roles available to them. That, in my opinion, is what ought to be the news here.

I’ve attended several churches over the years with varying policies about women’s leadership roles. Two of the most inspiring and insightful spiritual role models I have known were women: one, a youth minister in a Baptist church I knew for several years; the other, an Episcopal priest I knew for about 20 minutes. Both were kind-hearted and encouraging people who were, if anyone is, looking to connect with God personally and share themselves with others.

I’ll say more about this in another post, but I consider the passage in question (1 Timothy 2:11-13) to be culturally outdated. I fully believe that it is totally fine for a woman to teach men and for a woman to serve as a minister or pastor.

I imagine I’ll deviate from these topics at random, but here are the categories of posts that I expect will matter most to me:

spirituality, especially knowing God and religion 

sports, especially football and hockey

community, how and why we relate to each other

current events, including national and Nashville news

pop culture, because my attention span is as short as yours

I’m sure more will emerge, but those are the ones I’ll start with.

I wanted a catchy name for my new blog. I’ve been blogging for about six months now via the Sylvan Park Neighborhood Association, but I figure it’s time to branch out on my own. Here I can hopefully rant much more freely.

I selected the name ‘robthink’ because I needed an umbrella for all the thoughts I expect to share here. Nothing in particular, other than the fact that these interests all appeal to me, seemed to connect them all. So I guess robthink is a clever way of saying “thoughts from Rob” or things I’m thinking about.

Groupthink, “the mode of thought whereby individuals intentionally conform to what they perceive to be the consensus of the group,” was my inspiration for the name.

Hopefully the nonconformist irony isn’t totally lost there. I’m just glad ‘robthink’ was still available as a name.