REACHING ACROSS THE DIVIDE
This website, The Together Project, was born out of a passion to reach out across the divide between men and women. Not by about asserting the rights of women, nor of men, but by exploring how to relate and work together. How to develop shalom between genders.
Shalom, this Hebrew word for completeness, well-being, abundance, applies to all of life including between genders. In her book The Very Good Gospel, Lisa Sharon Harper describes how God’s “very good” creation is expressed in shalom. She says that when women hide who they are created to be, some of it still peeps through, and men react as if threatened. The shalom that was the Creator’s intention is sadly missing.
As an African American woman, Harper’s ancestors did not know shalom in the plantations of southern slavery. Nor did she know it herself when young and sexually abused. Nor later, when she was excluded from leadership in her church. But she strongly asserts the “very good gospel”, the good news of Jesus, is God’s way of restoring shalom. God can restore all relations: with our Creator, the world, and between men and women. Reconciliation—restoration, recovery—is God’s intention. No wonder we hunger for it.
Utopia
Being brothers and sisters in the church family, the “body” of Christ, is one New Testament picture we are given of shalom between genders. This ideal, this utopia, is important because utopias influence our decisions and actions now.
In my early years as a town planner, we spent much time debating the ideological merits of ideal plans for development of communities, plans whose wonders of perfection were unattainable. And because they were often unrealised, these utopias went out of fashion. The emphasis moved to the process of community development, not the ideal physical plan per se. By uncovering and reconciling conflicting community values, we planners then sought to express the ideal arrangements in physical and economic terms. But only as a second step. We knew that any process needed direction as well as movement. So before we could plan how to get there, we needed to imagine the ideal, the utopia.
There is an Australian TV series that cleverly makes fun of trying to realise a physical utopia, especially a government-sponsored one. In each episode, despite the good intentions of these hard-working public servants, their plans fail. The storyline usually presents the politicians as the wreckers of the process. And because everyone believes the ideals and policies are important, they feel cheated.
Utopias are important even when they are not realised. Because they express our highest aspirations. They affect how we live and what we work towards. Think of a doctor facing a crowded waiting room day after day but dreaming of a paradise free of needy people. Or an economist who envisions a financial market uncomplicated by the behaviour of consumers. Or the designer of a computer system who would rather not take into account the idiosyncrasies of the people who will use her program. Or the teacher whose love of his subject makes him long for receptive blank slates instead of the complicated young people who fill his classroom.
Many of us think our life and work would be straightforward if people did not get in the way! And families or churches could be perfect if there were no awkward individuals.
Sisters and Brothers with a Good Father
Christian Scriptures present us with pictures of potential shalom relationships. The Apostle Paul, for example, uses the social custom of adoption to reinforce the wonder of being loved and embraced by God as our Father. In this first century Greco/Roman practice, a father who did not have a satisfactory heir adopted a lower-born male. He treated him as a fully privileged biological son. And the son was expected to show his gratitude for the benefits received, by being obedient to the one who adopted him.
The adoption metaphor reminds us of the incredible invitation we receive to come close enough to call God by his intimate Aramaic family name, Abba, Father, just as Jesus did. This is the theme of my latest book, Home with the Good Father.
In addition, when we accept this invitation, we get a new set of relationships. We receive a family, brothers and sisters, a church community. In a society where loneliness is epidemic, such acceptance and friendship are so valuable. It is a privilege to be called to belong to each other, to live in love, honouring one another, and to join together in significant endeavours.
Of course, this is an ideal, a utopia. But if some past experience of hurt within a church has left its mark, God’s grace is wide enough to still make belonging possible. The “very good gospel” about Jesus can start us on a pathway to shalom, including shalom between genders. Because God-given shalom is a life enriching process, as well as an ideal.
Jennifer Turner
