I've decided that I need to start blogging again - I was really taken aback to discover that my last post on here was over a year old! So to begin with I'm going to post a few pieces I've written over the last year or so that never made it here.
First up, here's a piece that sadly never made it into print at all. I was asked to write the Foreword for this fabulous book, but it somehow ended up being missed out of the print edition. But here it is!
Women’s voices need and deserve to be heard. The ‘Women’s Voices’ conferences that Liz Shercliff has convened for the past ten years have been a shining example of how this can be done well, and the first ‘Out of the Shadows’ volume bottled some of that hard-earned wisdom. So it’s wonderful to welcome and commend this second volume, which focuses our attention on women in the Biblical narratives who have been hiding – or been hidden - even deeper in the shadows of the text, and of our Christian consciousness.
Many of the women in these pages have names that will be unfamiliar to all but the most avid Bible readers. Many are omitted from the lectionary altogether, or find themselves mentioned only in passing in stories which mainstream Christian preaching traditions have seen as men’s stories in which they are only walk-on characters. Others, though, are women whose stories are given significant air time in the Bible, whose words and actions form a substantial contribution to the overarching narrative and developing history of Israel, and yet who have been relegated to the margins in the choices that have been made over time about who is important, and which stories should be given precedence.
Many of these stories involve women whose moral or ethical status is ambiguous. There’s a theme that emerges throughout this book that these women are hard to categorise – heroine or villain? Victim or perpetrator? The old tropes of women being categorised as either Madonna or whore strongly persist in the discomfort that Shercliff and Bruce diagnose as we confront these ambiguities. One of the many often unnamed and unperceived aspects of male privilege is the much greater degree of freedom that society grants to men to be morally ambiguous. There is, therefore, a sense of daring courage in Bruce and Shercliff’s insistence on allowing these women to reclaim their audacious freedom to remain ambiguous. They don’t need to have their reputations whitewashed to deserve to have their voices heard.
That’s not the only uncomfortable truth that this book confronts. Many of these stories show women being used, abused, objectified, violated, bought and sold. There are stories of rape, of trauma, of women doing what they have to do to survive in a world where the odds are stacked against them. Perhaps part of the reason these stories are less well known is that we shy away from confronting the reality that these experiences all too often remain part of women’s lives today. In the specimen sermons offered here, Shercliff and Bruce model what it can look like to take these stories seriously as holding up a mirror to our own society. These aren’t just experiences that women had long ago ‘in Biblical times’ – here they are brought into stark dialogue with the realities of modern women’s experiences, through UN statistics, international reports, or the #Me Too movement. Whilst the need for careful handling and content warnings in discussing some of these topics is made clear, it is also made clear that to ignore these realities is to implicitly tell our congregations that they don’t matter. This book forces us to confront the realities of what it is to live in a world and a church shaped by generations of patriarchal rule, and offers us hope in the long-term task of resisting and seeking to reshape it.
In addition to all this, Out of the Shadows is also a practical handbook on the art and craft of preaching. Each sample sermon is followed by short, incisive notes on the rhetorical devices and techniques used by the preacher, which combine to give a masterclass in homiletical techniques. Reading this book will challenge and improve the reader’s preaching on any text, not just these women’s stories that this book brings out of the shadows. In these pages Bruce and Shercliff model for us how to interrogate a difficult text, bring it into dialogue with contemporary experience, and take a congregation from ‘you what?’ to ‘oh, wow!’.
