on the death of pastor Andrew Stoecklein and of too many others like him

Four days ago, the pastor of Inland Hills Church of Chino, CA, Andrew Stoecklein, committed suicide. From what I’ve heard, about 400 pastors do this every year. That’s 400 too many.

I don’t think it happens because God doesn’t care/can’t help people with anxiety or depression. That would be an erroneous statement that flies in the face of not only the Bible, but of thousands of testimonies, including mine.

I think it happens, number one, because we have a real enemy that wants to destroy us! He wants us to believe his lies and to be held back by strongholds of fear, sadness, addiction and other bad things, and he goes about looking for opportunities to devour people!

The other reason I think it happens is because of the pedestal pastors can accidentally find themselves on. Pastors have so many expectations on them: they have to preach the word of God at all times, have their behavior in line at all times, be ready to provide a caring voice and hand for their flock at all times...it’s a stressful profession! And I think it is all too easy for pastors to fall into the trap that they must be perfect people and they must be able to carry all the people's burdens by themselves. And because they feel like they can’t express their struggles to anyone (or else they’ll lead the flock astray, oh no!) they struggle in isolation. And isolation is an ACTUAL tool of the devil. It amplifies your internal problems by a lot.

What can we do as normal churchgoing people? I think the main thing we can do is continually pray for our pastors. When I was struggling with anxiety and depression myself (mainly in college), what got me back from the brink was the constant prayer and support of my parents. They were not just feelings that came and went; they were spiritual strongholds sent by the devil to take me out. Spiritual strongholds require spiritual weapons, so prayer is the ideal weapon against these things. If you happen to know that your pastor is in a direct struggle with these things, pray that those strongholds would break in Jesus’ name. If you don’t think they’re struggling, pray that they will be able to continually cast their cares upon God and that the joy of the Lord would be their strength.

Another thing we can do is let our pastors be people once in a while. Many times pastors write of not having a vacation in 10 or more years because they’re always on duty. Even doctors don’t suffer that much! I am a big advocate of pastors getting annual vacations or sabbaticals or what not. We all need time to rest and recharge and to simply listen to what God is saying to us. Other than that, we should allow our pastors to be vulnerable with us when needed. The pastor isn’t just there to serve us; he or she is our supervisor, and we are all workers in the body of Christ. Therefore as church people we should be willing to (collectively) bear our pastors’ burdens as well. Again, prayer is key!

One thing that churches can do that lessens the burden on pastors is to have more than one good preacher or leader. My home church, Christian Life Center, and my current church, Hillsong LA, both have multiple main speakers, and this is very key! At CLC, when my pastors take their annual vacation to the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, the church isn’t left scrambling because we have other trained pastors and leaders who can take over for the week. These leaders can then help the pastor bear his or her burdens and make the work lighter.

All this is to say that as a church we all need to be on guard against depression and anxiety in our pastors and leaders. When you get the chance, do pray for pastor Stoecklein’s family and his church, and also for the other churches that have undoubtedly gone through the same thing this year.

The United States National Suicide Prevention Hotline can help in times of crisis if you call 1(800)-273-8255.

Controversial Bible Verses #2: On Women in Leadership

Disclaimer: I am not a seminarian, and I possess nothing approaching a degree in biblical interpretation. I am just a laywoman with a degree in economics who loves God and his Word. Also, I come from a Pentecostal/Charismatic background.

We pick up where I left off in the second half of 1 Timothy 2, a series of verses that at first seems designed to not let us women be great:

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

I hardly consider myself a feminist, and even I want to get up and picket at the last three verses. Women will be saved through childbearing? Are you kidding me!?

These verses are far harder to interpret than the ones about modesty that I spoke of in my last post. Clothes are one thing; gender roles are quite another. On the one hand, as Christians we are supposed to live by God's Word at all times, and this is part of God's Word. On the other hand, these verses not only go against the currents of the modern age, they go against examples we see in our own Christian circles. Do we repudiate teachers and preachers such as Beth Moore, Joyce Meyer, and Christine Caine simply because they are women who (likely) teach men? Even if they preach as biblically as the men do, do we call them heretical simply because they are women? Were they not called by God, but instead hallucinating? What do we do?

We look for context, that's what we do.

The Bible is God's Word. As 2 Timothy 3:16 says, everything within it is inspired and should be used for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in godly living. But it is also a book and a collection of letters--letters that were not originally divided into chapters and verses. The chapters and verses were added later so that people wouldn't have to sift through 1,400 pages of material backwards and forwards whenever they wanted to find a specific point. Therefore, whenever we find a verse in the Bible, it is entirely reasonable to look at the context and look for other verses that talk about the same theme as the verse we've cited.

The most famous cross-reference for these verses here is 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, which says just about the exact same thing:

As in all the churches of the saints, 34 the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. 35 If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.

The two verses don't contradict each other in any way; therefore, it appears that the debate is settled. But, if we look just three chapters earlier in 1 Corinthians 11, we find a contradiction:

 4 Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head, 5 but every wife[c] who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head...

Here, Paul seems to allow women in the church to both pray and prophesy. Both of those, especially prophecy, require speaking. If a woman is supposed to be completely silent in church, then why is she allowed to prophesy? Why, then, are there people such as Philip's four unmarried prophet daughters in the Bible (Acts 21:9)? The most simple answer is that praying and prophesying are different from just speaking. The Greek word for "speak" in 1 Corinthians 14:34 is laleo. One of the meanings of laleo is "to use words in order to declare one's mind and disclose one's thoughts" (Strong's Lexicon). Imagine for a second that you are in church, and the person preaching is speaking straight fire. (If you happen to not be a churchgoer and are reading this, imagine yourself to be at a really cool TED talk.) You're sitting there, listening and gleaning from this person, when someone decides that it is the right time to stand up in the middle of the service and interrupt the speaker to declare their mind and expose their thoughts. Even if their thoughts are somewhat relevant, they are still expressing them at a very improper time. The people there do not need to hear the interrupter's opinion, and they probably don't want to hear that person at any time since they were super rude. Now say that multiple people do this multiple times, at the same time. Before you know it, you don't know what anyone is saying anymore.

Apparently this was the situation with the church in Corinth, the recipients of the two letters to the Corinthians. 1 Corinthians, in particular, sounds like an incriminating letter from your dad who has just found out all of your dirty secrets. The Corinthian church had plenty of potential, and they were especially talented as far as spiritual gifts. They prophesied and spoke in tongues more than any church that Paul writes to. However, they had let the spiritual gifts become the centerpiece instead of the more important Christian values such as love, faith and hope. And they were very out of order. Much of the letter, including chapters 11 and 14, is Paul telling them how to do church. Communion is not a time to get drunk! Don't just yell out in tongues without any interpretation! No, you CAN'T have five people prophesy at the same time! Stop tolerating incest! (I kid you not. Read the book!) Much of the book of 1 Corinthians carries the tone of a person who is trying to establish order. In an orderly church setting, it is good for women (and men, honestly) to learn in quietness, as Paul puts it, and then discuss their questions in a more open setting, like at home or in a small group. Indeed, the word for "quietness" in 1 Timothy 2:11 is hesychia, which describes a person who does their own work and "does not meddle with the affairs of others". The silence demanded, then, is not a complete silence, but one that keeps everything within reasonable order.

This silence is apparently allowed to be broken when praying or prophesying, and I hardly need a lexicon to make a suggestion as to why. Prophecy is when someone gets a message from God by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Regardless of whether the someone is male or female, he or she is inspired by God with a message for the congregation, and should be allowed to speak out. Praying, similarly, is communicating with God. In a congregational setting, when the prayer is not just one person's opinion but that of the entire congregation, it makes no sense that only men should be allowed to pray to God. The only mediator for God, male or female, is Jesus Christ. Anyone can pray to him if he or she pleases.

Fast forward a couple thousand years to our cultural context, where women are just as educated as men are and the head coverings mentioned in 1 Corinthians 11 mean far less than they used to. In an orderly church setting, where people do not interrupt each other in order to express their opinions and one person talks at a time, does it not make sense that a woman who is under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit should be allowed to say what the Holy Spirit tells her to say? Some may disagree with me, but I think it makes perfect sense.

There are many women in the New Testament who are important enough to mention. Priscilla was one half of a great teaching team along with her husband Aquila. The end of Romans mentions a woman named Junia as being "outstanding among the apostles", and another lady, Phoebe, is mentioned as a deacon (Greek: "diakonos"). In fact, Romans 16 mentions plenty of women: Mary, Tryphena, Tryphosa, and Persis are just four women who have "worked very hard in the Lord", as Paul says. The second of John's letters is written to a "chosen lady" and her children, and at the end of that letter, he says that the lady's sister and her children greet her. It is entirely possible that these two unnamed women served as pastors of churches.

From the time Jesus resurrected from the dead and appointed a woman, Mary Magdalene, to be the first witness of his resurrection, there has always been a very significant and powerful role for women in the Gospel story, and this is only likely to continue throughout time.

Scripture quotations are from the New International Version (NIV), via BibleGateway.
Greek words are taken from Strong's Lexicon via the Blue Letter Bible, at blueletterbible.org.

Controversial Bible Verses #1: On Modesty

Disclaimer: I am not a seminarian, and I possess nothing approaching a degree in biblical interpretation. I am just a laywoman with a degree in economics that loves God and his Word. 

I'm blessed to have been reading the Bible for a number of years now, and I have of course come upon some of its more controversial verses multiple times. The whole second half of 1 Timothy 2 most certainly falls into this category. It tells women in the Ephesian church how to dress and how to act--and the instructions are not exactly compatible to today's modern woman.

The controversy starts in verse 9-10, the famous verses about modesty:

9 I also want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, 10 but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God. (1 Timothy 2:9-10 NIV, emphasis mine)

Ahhh, modesty. For five decades now, women's fashion has been raging against this concept. First, the miniskirt came in around the '60s, taking hemlines to where they'd never been before. Then came crop tops, especially in the '90s, and the midriff was exposed for the first time. The early 2000s brought in bralettes as tops and low-rise jeans. Today, all of these trends have combined to make war against the concept of modesty as we know it.


From left to right: Girls in "New Look" dresses from Seventeen from March 1968; an ad in Seventeen, April 1992; Paris Hilton in 2001. The first two are taken from justseventeen on Tumblr, and the picture of Paris Hilton is from Popsugar.

With this battle comes questions: how sexy, exactly, is a little bit of midriff? Is it bad if the midriff is a little sexy? Is modesty repressive to today's working woman? What exactly is or is not modest, anyway?

Much of the battle comes back to this question: what is modesty?

In the 2010s Western cultural context, modesty as we know it largely refers to a movement in fashion. Modest women repudiate the trends that I mentioned above. Their skirts and pants don't go an inch above the knee; their tops are never cropped, and are usually high-cut enough to cover any sort of cleavage. Many times, modest women account for factors that "less modest" women wouldn't even think about, like covering their shoulders or hiding their curves. The reasons to adhere to this movement vary, but for the most part, they're religious. Muslim women are the most consistent adherents of this movement, often adding hijabs to their modest ensembles. Where the movement has become most famous and most controversial is among Christian women; the ones who do adhere to this seemingly stringent dress code often cite the verses above.


Modest fashion of the 2010s. Honestly, all of these outfits are really cute IMO. Credits go to Pinterest.

Like many concepts within Christianity, this concept of modesty has become a debate. On one side, adherents of modest fashion cite these verses (which are very much biblical). They have also said that because men are created as more "physical" beings than women, that Christian women need to dress in a way that doesn't lead Christian men into temptation. The Bible does certainly warn against leading other believers into temptation (Mark 9:42 is an obvious example), but this assumption about men is not obviously cited in the Bible, and at any rate, the Bible tells men and women to "flee from sexual temptation" (1 Corinthians 6:18).

The revival of feminism in the second half of the 2010s has brought modesty into a war like almost never before. Feminism, by definition, takes the woman's side in every conflict. It says that women should not have to cater to men in any way. The notion of women having to dress a certain way to curb man's primitive tendencies is absolutely repulsive to the feminist's perspective. Women on this side of the conflict say that if men and women are to flee from sexual temptation, that it is not the woman's job to help/repudiate a man who is loath to get running. They cite the very real examples of women who despite being dressed in somewhat "modest" clothing, became victims of rape and other sexual crimes. These examples lead these women to say that modesty is a failed system, and yet another example of the repression of women throughout the centuries. The feminists of the 2010s are not the bra-burners of the 1970s, but they do take pleasure in showing off their bodies, proclaiming that to be sexy is to be confident and modern in this age.

As always, in a debate, there are people who find themselves in the middle. Here we find the Christian women who want to honor God with their clothing choices as modest women say they should, but they also want to be confident and modern. These are the women who find themselves wondering what is modest and what is not many, many times. After all, the verses don't exactly tell us how long our skirts should be, or whether we should even be wearing skirts, for that matter. They mention nothing about whether tops should be cropped or not. They instead mention "braided hair" (KJV), gold, pearls and "costly clothing". In fact, on another glance, we can't even be certain that 1 Timothy 2:9-10 says much about clothing at all.

9 I also want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, 10 but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God. 

So what is modesty, then? The original Greek word used here for "modestly" is "kosmios". Strong's Lexicon defines this word as "orderly, i.e. decorous--of good behavior, modest". Thayer's Lexicon adds "well-arranged" and "seemly". The word "kosmios" is a derivative of the word "kosmos"--as in the English word, cosmos. It speaks of a harmonious arrangement of things, such as the stars, which occupy their precise positions in the universe. Overall, the word "kosmios" seems to denote order. Interpreted this way, Paul wants the women to dress in an orderly fashion. Seen this way, the words "decency" and "propriety" thrown in right after this word make complete sense. It appears, then, that the issue of "modesty" actually has very little to do with how much skin you show.

The rest of these verses confirm this notion. Paul cites "elaborate hairstyles", gold, pearls and "costly clothes" as things that women should shy away from. In the Roman times in which Paul lived, fashionable women would wear elaborate braided hairstyles that immediately drew attention. Gold, pearls and costly clothes, as in our times, drew plenty of attention as well. Paul charges that Christian women should not draw attention because of their clothes, but because of their good deeds. Christian women, in this case, should be known more for what they do and who they are than what they look like.

In his first letter, Peter repeats this sentiment, but uses slightly different words:

3 Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes. 4 Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight. (1 Peter 3:3-4 NIV)

In modesty talks when I was younger, people would always say that "modesty, at its core, is an issue of the heart". I had no idea what that really meant until I studied these verses. In the end, modesty has little to do with how short your skirt is, and it has absolutely nothing to do with men. It instead is an issue of what you want people to know you for. Do you want people to remember you for the amount of body you showed in that dress, or for the lives that you impacted with your good works? Do you want to promote your own brand, or do you want to promote God's kingdom? These questions (especially the second one) should guide not only how Christian women dress, but how they act and who they are.

The essence of modesty is this: wherever you are and whatever you do, you show the light of Christ to others.

You can read part 2 of this series here.


Scripture quotations are from the New International Version via BibleGateway.
Strong's Lexicon and Thayer's Lexicon are from blueletterbible.org.