Tom Dahlman

We have read these words. We have heard them preached and even put them on t-shirts. We know that hospitality means welcoming the stranger and seeing in the unfamiliar face someone made in the image of God. We know it is a practice of faith in exactly the same sense that prayer, fasting, and giving to the poor are practices of faith. It requires effort, intention, and discipline. But we still battle fear.

Taken together, these losses produce a recognizable landscape: loneliness, anxiety, depression, addiction, and an aching restlessness that many people feel but struggle to explain. It’s tempting to treat those problems as purely psychological. If the problem lives inside us, then the solution must also live inside us. Better habits. More discipline. Greater resilience. Those are all good things. But a river doesn’t rebuild its own banks because one elk develops better grazing habits.

When it comes to women in ministry, there are hundreds of examples across Scripture of women leading, prophesying, teaching, and breaking cultural barriers in the name of God. Yet, again and again, parts of the church bypass all of that and land on the two New Testament passages that seem to restrict women — passages that, conveniently, happen to confirm what our culture already expected. This pattern itself is ancient.