What can we learn from the example of women leaders in the Bible? In this episode we speak with Carla Works, associate professor in New Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary, about leadership lessons from biblical women.

Transcript

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What can we learn from the example of women leaders in the Bible? In this episode we speak with Carla Works, associate professor in New Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary, about leadership lessons from biblical women.

Ann Michel: I’m Ann Michel host of this Leading Ideas Talks Podcast. And I’m really delighted to be talking today with Dr. Carla Works who’s an associate professor in New Testament here at Wesley Theological Seminary. And her area of interest is Paul’s letters. And she has a new book on Paul coming out. It’s entitled The Least of These: Paul and the Marginalized. I’m really pleased that Carla has agreed to chat with me today on the subject of women leaders in the Bible. So welcome Carla.

Carla Works: Thank you so much for having me.

Ann: Here at the Lewis Center we pay pretty close attention to the literature of church leadership. And it occurred to us recently that we have seen all kinds of books and article on leadership lessons from Moses, and David, and Nehemiah, and Paul, and Jesus. But it’s pretty rare to find people writing on the issue of leadership looking to women figures in the Bible for leadership lessons. So, I wanted to ask you, in your opinion, Is that oversight? Is that bias? Or is there really nothing that we can learn from women in the Bible?

Carla: If anything, it is oversight that is an ancient one considering that the Bible is formed and preserved in cultures that are patriarchal. And so, we do have actually a lot to learn in the Biblical texts about women and women in leadership. But we know very little about them. And so, we have to learn something about the culture in which these texts are written and preserved. We have to understand something about how women functioned in the early church before we can harvest those leadership insights. And that requires a lot of work on our part. And so, it may be easier to gravitate toward Jesus or Paul because we have so much information in the Biblical text about them.

Ann: Right. So, if you were thinking of the women characters in the Bible, is there one particular woman that you look to as an example of biblical leadership?

Carla: It’s an interesting question. I wouldn’t say that there is one that I look to so much for leadership. But there are a few that if I could go back and have a conversation with these women … The first one would actually be Phoebe. I’m a Paul scholar. And Phoebe — whom my students sometimes have heard of, and for the most part, haven’t — she is mentioned in Romans 16. And Paul gives her the letter that we call Romans. And she delivers that letter to all the churches in Rome. And as the deliverer of that letter she would have been the reader of the letter and the first interpreter of that letter. So, when you think about how important Romans is in many of our churches and especially our Protestant doctrine — oh, I would LOVE, LOVE, LOVE to talk to Phoebe and say, “What is it that Paul asked you to emphasize when you are reading this letter?” — which is quite a lengthy letter by first century standards.

And then another woman, whom we do not even know her name, but in Mark 14, there is a woman who anoints Jesus’s body — anoints his head in the Gospel of Mark. And in Mark 14, when the disciples get al