All right, the title of the message this morning is Equality and Distinction. Can men and women be equal and yet have different roles? And the answer to this question for most of church history has been yes. But the past 30 or 40 years has seen a battle.
for the minds of women in the church. And a battle for the minds of churchgoers in general. I remember Back in I think it was '93, I went to a missions conference. I was trying to figure out, still figuring out what the Lord wanted to do with me and I went to a missions conference back in Illinois called Urbana.
Has anybody ever heard of Urbana? And I didn't know a whole lot about this missions conference back then, but I was aware in '93 that there were issues on the subject of men and women in the family and in the church going on in liberal churches. I knew that there were liberal denominations that were ordaining women to the pastorate and arguing for more of an egalitarian view of marriage and so on. but Urbana, as far as I knew, was a conservative evangelical, missions conference, and as a young man, I was in for quite a surprise when I showed up to this missions conference that was sending evangelical missionaries all over the world.
at Urbana, in the opening ceremonies, there was a woman pastor that came up and exhorted. the whole group and, and it opened in prayer. We were all given a gender neutral translation of the Bible, the new revised Standard Version. we were all exposed to gender neutral worship, singing a song like He has shown you, oh people, instead of he has shown thee, oh man....
