Cheryl

Hi Matt,

Thank you for coming to this blog. You are most certainly welcome here and your opposing viewpoint is welcome to be expressed. Don’t be surprised, though, if you find some well thought out challenges to your viewpoint expressed here as well. I believe that we can all learn from each other as long as we practice love and respect for another brother or sister in the Lord.

Regarding CBMW – yes I too would to know how they would respond. In my last email response from Chris Cowan (their email rep), he made it clear that it would be his last communication with me. I had been fairly persistent in asking for a response to the exegesis in my DVD. I do not know how many men in CBMW viewed WIM. I do know that the president saw it, although I suspect that he is the only one who watched it since he threw it in the garbage before he finished watching the entire series. That allows me to assume that he did not take the opportunity to pass it on to others. His only comments were that the quality of the DVDs themselves was poor. Well, honestly that really surprised me. I expected that they wouldn’t like the reasoning in the series as it isn’t complementarian, however to put down my video editing was a bit strange. The comments that I have received back regarding the video/editing/graphic quality of the DVDs has been a very high rating even from those who have not held an egalitarian view. So for me to get only a comment in passing about the quality of my editing work, seemed to me to be an attempt to just dismiss the whole project without having to put the effort in to deal with the content.

I highly doubt that you will get any kind of a response on WIM since CBMW reimbursed our ministry for the DVD set that they threw away, I would think that they would just like to wipe their hands off of any further responsibility. I was told that to continue to ask them to please provide a response or to pass me on to someone associated with them who would have the time to dialogue with me on women in ministry, Chris said smacked of an attitude of pride. That surprised me too. Maybe one can’t judge for themselves if one has pride or not, but people have generally said the opposite about me so it was a very surprising comment for me to read. If you do get an answer from CBMW, I would love to hear it. I am not about to contact them again since the personal attacks against me have dampened my desire to dialog with them.

Now to your question. I think the best way for me to answer is to put it into a blog article as many people don’t bother to read the comments on blogs. Give me a couple of days to get time to put together an article and I will tell you what I have learned about understanding Paul.

TL, lots of good points! I especially liked how you worded it this way “Paul was not a sloppy writer. He had specific points in mind in exactly that order.” The additional information that I will give in my next blog article will take off from that foundation in that I believe and teach that all scripture is God-breathed including the inspired words and the inspired grammar. My way of understanding Paul is probably nothing like you have ever read anywhere else (I am an out-of-the-box thinker whether that is a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen 🙂 ) but it is logical, biblical and helps people to learn how to make sense of the hard sayings of Paul. More later…..