“Women’s leadership and contributions to early Christianity can only become historically visible when we abandon our outdated patriarchal-androcentric model of early Christian beginnings.” [1]
In many quarters there is a fascination with the “early church”, the model of church that existed in the first century C.E., exhibiting a romantic naiveté in believing that it had some idyllic, unified conduct. It is apparent that certain particularities of the early church have been considered normative by churches old and new. The mega- or meta-church movement in the U.S. and elsewhere has drawn on the practice of home-churches, as reported in Paul’s letters and Acts, to develop massive organizations, built on cell- or small-group ministries, that have little or no resemblance to the early church. Pentecostal churches have strived to emulate the Apostles in becoming filled with the Holy Spirit after baptism, leading to the proliferation of the once peculiar “born again” phenomena. Perhaps the single particularity of the early church to have been most widely adopted as normative by a great many of the world’s churches is the exclusion of women from leadership roles and, in many churches, a discomfort with or outright denial of the status of women as being made in God’s image. Rather than resulting from a naïve understanding of the Christian church in the first century, which would lack any intent to degrade women, the view of many feminist theologians is that male hegemony is the consequence of deliberate efforts to institute and maintain patriarchal language and systems within the early church and beyond.
Rev Andy Little
MINISTRY FROM TWO POLES 
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