234 WHERE IS EVANGELICAL FEMINISM TAKING US?
With songs and prayers to “Mother God,” an auxiliary organization
of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship opened its annual meeting at the
CBF General Assembly Thursday with a clear message—the current
controversy is about more than women pastors. The annual Baptist
Women in Ministry breakfast was rife with stridently feminist God
language, culminating in a litany read by BWIM members about their
discomfort at calling God “Father,” “Lord,” and “King”.... The
group sang a hymn to “strong mother God”.... Feminist language
for God continued throughout the two-hour long business session and
worship service. BWIM treasurer Sally Burgess told the crowd... “I
believe God is good, and She knows what She’s doing”.... The CBF
exhibit hall bookstore displayed a new Methodist “gender inclusive”
hymnal... with a hymn written from the point of view of the earth
entitled, “I am your Mother”.... Preacher Elizabeth Clements read a
sermon about her spiritual experiences in the presence of starry skies,
winding rivers, and “trees older than Jesus.”^20Christians for Biblical Equality, the central advocacy group for
evangelical feminism and the focal point for egalitarians within the evan-
gelical world, promotes most of the evangelical feminist books that I
have critiqued within this book including those mentioned in this chap-
ter and the previous one. Therefore CBE is promoting most of the steps
toward liberalism that I have outlined above. They may not think they
are eroding the very foundations of evangelical Christianity, but in the
methods of interpretation that they allow and in the standards of evi-
dence that they accept, they are indeed contributing far more than they
can imagine toward a movement of their churches to liberalism within
a few short years.
What, then, is the doctrinal direction to which egalitarianism leads?
To an abolition of anything distinctively masculine. An androgynous
Adam. A Jesus whose manhood is not important—just his “humanity.”
A God who is both Father and Mother, and then a God who is Mother
but cannot be called Father.
This is the next stage in the advance of evangelical feminist ideas.
Evangelical feminists are revising our understanding of God our Father
(^20) “‘Mother God’ Worshipped at Group’s Gathering for CBF Annual Meeting,” Baptist Press
News, June 29, 2001 (www.bpnews.net).