Ladies, whether you call yourselves Christians, Messianic or Hebrew Roots – I’d like a moment of your time. Or, if you prefer to watch this in video, click here. I posted this a few days ago in response to some changes that God is working in my life – things that I want to share with you. The resulting fruit in my life has been amazing, but you would have to understand what life was like on the inside of me in order for me to explain the magnitude of what God is doing.
My name is Tyler Dawn Rosenquist, and I am a teacher of the Ancient Near Eastern and First Century context of Scripture – usually I come before you talking about that, but not today.
Ladies, we have an online witness problem that is bringing shame to our God and His Messiah Yeshua, more commonly known as Jesus. As any woman knows – it is women and not men who are the true civilizing influence of any society. Apart from the salvation of God through His Messiah, His commandments and the workings of the Holy Spirit in our lives, there is no greater civilizing force than women. What we allow to happen, will happen, whatever we participate in, will become the norm. Men throughout history have looked to the wisdom of women in order to know what limits they should place on themselves socially – we are their mothers and their wives, their sisters and the guardians over their sons and daughters. Men who make all the women in their home unhappy are not going to thrive.
But there is a problem, in our pursuit of unbiblical strength – in our relentless aggression, we have forgotten what it means to be truly strong women. We have forgotten how to control the public discourse through our steady wisdom. Instead, we have gone onto social media and have acted not like the best of men, but like the worst of them. Every day I see women aggressively arguing, picking fights, acting in a degrading and insulting manner not only towards other women but also towards men. I even see women standing by as others are brutalized right in front of them. Such things should not be.
Ladies, we have always held the moral high ground. We have historically set the tone of any conversation we were witness to –as long as we acted like ladies and demanded to be treated as such. A woman who acts wisely and demands dignity for both herself and others generally gets it – as long as many women stand together. We have the power to do something amazing – something that only the women in the Body of Messiah can do. We can diminish the shameful behavior going on in the online Body of believers, the behavior that doesn’t make either ourselves or the believing men look any different than the world we claim to be set apart from.
There are many wounded, hurting people on facebook – but where are the healers? They have been ejected from the building – the conversations over doctrine have become so insulting and so shameful that they are held at a distance.
Believing men who are not fully submitted to God are always going to behave as aggressively as we allow them to behave. If we behave badly, then they will behave worse. If we allow them to walk onto our social media walls and deprive others of their dignity, then they will never change. If we don’t act like strong, dignified women, then they will treat us exactly the way they think we deserve to be treated – and as we can see from what is going on online, in many cases that is very bad indeed.
Ladies, there are more female believers than male – especially online. We have the power to protect and elevate the online witness of our King, through changing our own behavior and changing what we will and will not tolerate. Right now it is very bad, as anyone can see.
To be a woman is to be strong – if anyone has seen me teaching online with my four male co-teachers, you know I am not some weakling. I am bold and I am strong – but my boldness and strength does not come through fruitless, divisive, insulting arguments. My dignity does not come from degrading others. My loudest witness comes from what I do and do not tolerate in myself and others. Years ago, when God started overhauling my character, I stopped picking fights, I stopped humiliating people online who I thought were wrong, I stopped tolerating bullying, manipulation and fighting on my social media page. I demanded to be treated with the same level of respect I was extending to others and adopted a zero tolerance policy towards divisive people and towards those who wanted to come on my page and slander others – especially those who would slander our Savior, or Christians, or Jews.
Ladies – we can’t lord authority over men, and we should not go after them on social media – I have seen women who go after men and they look like shrieking harpies. Truth is, we don’t have to. If we cut off access to our walls and groups to divisive men and women, if we refuse to tolerate their behavior, if we give them a warning or two and then deny them access to our walls – then wall by wall we will eliminate their outlets for bringing shame to our King.
I have seen it in the transformation of people on my own facebook wall – as we demand that people start maturing, they will and those who don’t can go and bring shame to God somewhere else. We need, with the unique social strength of woman, to change the online culture.
We are called in Gal 5:22-23 to good mature fruit – fruit that to the first century readers of Paul would have looked womanish and wimpy. God does not call us to weakness ladies, He calls us to strength. The Spirit empowers, and evidently the Spirit empowers us towards behavior that is less male than female.
Love – we must treat each other loyaly as covenant partners, laying down our lives for each other and refusing to tolerate anyone heaping up abuses on our social media pages
Joy – we must rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn, this has always been a great feminine strength
Peace – we cannot go around picking fights, and then go howling about being persecuted when someone hits us back
Patience – as mothers, we have had to learn that people need the time and space to grow and mature. We need to lovingly discipline others, with mercy and at the appropriate time – while still having a firm hand.
Kindness – we must be encouragers, giving dignity instead of stealing it away for ourselves
Goodness – we must never fail to be good examples
Faithfulness – we must be worthy of trust, we must be willing to admit fault and to apologize. If we have offended publicly, we must humble ourselves and apologize publicly
Gentleness – we must never think that we have license to exercise our flesh in insults and call it love or to turn our heads and allow anyone to be brutalized on our social media walls.
Self-Control – The game of correction police has got to end. If our whole days are spent looking for people to correct, then we are products of flesh and not re-creations of Spirit. It isn’t about us. In the same way, we have to stop promoting ourselves as bastions of perfection.
Ladies – we have control over our own walls, like we have control over what goes on in our own living rooms. There are far more of us ladies than are males. We have power – power over what kinds of teachers we allow to speak to us, power over the words that we speak and type, power to choose life over death, power over the way people are treated on our walls.
It’s time to act like ladies, and to demand – within our personal sphere of control – that people act like ladies and gentlemen. It’s time to remember that we are women, it’s time to show men what a Bride looks like. It’s time to refuse authority to anyone who would make our King look bad. No one does that on my wall, and I stay off of walls where people are allowed to act that way. Let’s starve them out, let’s model and demand better behavior – for the sake of our King and His hurting children, who need to lay down their burdens and be healed, but cannot find a safe place to do so.
Ladies, this can’t start with the men because this is not how they are powerful. There are too many people who are hurting from abusive fathers and abusive pastors. Let’s stop trying to be like men – it really isn’t a fruitful or worthy pursuit. We are called to this – it’s time for a revolution.
“Believing men who are not fully submitted to God are always going to behave as aggressively as we allow them to behave. If we behave badly, then they will behave worse. ”
I really resonate with what you have written, and this in particular.
I find this to be a principle that has operated in my own family, and has been destructive. Learning to respond differently, to maintain our dignity while responding to aggressive, angry, spiteful, shaming and/or mocking behaviors is critical. We must no longer lose ourselves – our own self control – in our actions. We are not made unclean by accusation or by violation. We are made unclean by our own mouths, our own indulgences.
THANK YOU! for the call to walk the higher road, and to -as Scripture says – separate from them.
When we first entered into Torah…we were sooooo excited to share with our Family and Friends all these “gems” we were discovering. However, we quickly realized that the social media platform was not the way to do it. I was horrified at how my Christian Family responded. However, when I went onto Hebrew Roots sites, I saw people responding to opposing points of view likewise…and we eventually got off of Social Media entirely in order to pursue more interpersonal relationships and share that way. Unfortunately, I believe it is a medium where it is far too easy for a bullying mentality. In a day and age where we no longer are “quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger”…it just may be time to get off these sites so that our Messiah’s name is not blasphemed further.
Amen, very well stated. Just finishing up a blog tonight on sacred name bullying. Glad you were able to get away, a wise decision.
Hi Tyler, just creeping through your old blogs. Do you still believe the same on this? I had done some research on ancient civilizations and there was evidence that, while men dominated the political sphere, women were the ones in control of the domestic sphere, and thus the political sphere…indirectly.
I found this comment to be true:
“As any woman knows – it is women and not men who are the true civilizing influence of any society”
Yet, for the life of me, I cannot wrap my head around the concept that many men (and women) believe when it comes to headship in the family:
Husband is head. Husband has the only power and influence.
It seems discouraging?
I suppose I need to research this concept of headship in greater detail; I’m sure I’m misunderstanding it. I’m not for being complementarian (but not hating on those who do, just have had a bad experience with it) and definitely agree that:
“Men who make all the women in their home unhappy are not going to thrive”
I wonder why it has been designed that way??
Also, do you have tangible examples of what it means to be mature, strong and dignified? I did not grow up with that example and want to make sure I know what it is so I can pass it on to my daughters.
Please allow me to glean from your experience.
When interacting with other believers, how should we approach divisive topics without being bossy or arrogant?
When interacting with other believers, how should we approach a difference of opinion without being discouraging or rude?
When interacting within our domestic sphere, how do we face mistreatment or poor character representation in a respectful and dignified way? Do you have examples?
I think that, if women were truly in charge of the poliical sphere (even indirectly) then thing would be a lot more different in this country. Truth is that, historically, women had their world and men had theirs and the opinions of women were not welcome in the male sphere. That’s how patriarchal culture works. And the funny thing is that now the secular world really gets how destructive what was and so do we before we become religious and then we read Paul’s letters and say, “Oh, it’s still supposed to be that way,” not recognizing how radically feminist both Paul and Jesus are compared to Moses and the patriarchs. We read descriptions of how things were and of how Paul had to deal with how things were, and mistake that as a commentary on how they were supposed to be.
Headship was how the ancient world worked. Now, if Paul were truly in support of traditional patriarchy, he would tell a woman not to convert unless her husband does. That Paul even approached women at all with the Gospel, and that Yeshua approached the woman at the well, was astoundingly un-patriarchal. It was a violation of some man’s perceived rights to contrl the observances and beliefs of the women in his circle. But Yeshua told us to “hate” our own families–meaning not truly hate, of course, but to ignore the whole system where others get to decide what everyone in their family believes. That was revolutionary.
So, headship was how things operated in the first century and Paul worked within that system. Although he was able to think beyond it in some ways, he wasn’t in others. Like Moses saying that if you beat your slave only near to death, you’re okay because, after all, he is your property. Neither Paul nor Yeshua would countenance such a thing because the trajectory of the Bible is toward the initial creation state. Men and women co-laboring with no ownership, headship or any other sort of hierarchy or oppression.
Yes, it is discouraging. And yes, it is designed that way (the men who make all the women unhappy are not going to thrive) but it is also designed that the men who make all the men in the home unhappy are also not going to thrive. Harmony is important. No one should ever lord authority over anyone else. Male or female. We were not created with that in mind.
In order to act mature, strong and dignified, we have to be aware of the audience and what can and cannot be reasonably fruitful. It isn’t easy. Do we or do we not answer a fool according to his folly? Scripture says both yes and no in Proverbs 26 because it all depends on the situation. Is it going to to any good to get into it with a stranger? 99% of the time, absolutely not. Is it going to do any good to get into it with someone we know? Depends on the person and we generally know beforehand what the response to interference is. As far as divisive topics, I don’t talk about them with strangers. I also don’t go onto their social media walls and confront them and even when they are clearly wrong. A cornered dog will always bite. But when I post about something potentiall divisive, I don’t just blurt it out. I make sure I present it respectfully, and unpack it fully. I leave as little room for people to take offense as possible while giving them enough information to chew on and digest.
If we cannot discuss different opinions without emotion, then we need to get out of the discussion until we can. Emotion clouds our judgment. The Civil Rights movement used to train young people to respond well to those who hated them. I wish we did the same nowadays. As for how to handle mistreatment or poor character representation in a respectful and dignified way, I am afraid I never handled that very well at all. I go all fight/flight. But there is a book I recommend called Changes that Heal by Hensy S Cloud. And his book on Boundaries. First, we have to get healthy enough to see what is really going on before we can even try to respond well. Praying for you, sis.