Dr. Jackie Roese

Dr. Kay Daigle

Dr. Jackie Roese joined Kay Daigle some time ago on video (before we started creating podcasts) to discuss Jackie’s call for a shift in working relationships between men and women in the church. If you are in any type of leadership–whether paid or unpaid–in a church, you should hear this conversation.

Jackie points out some of the walls that women often bump against when they attempt to get things done through men on church staffs. Thus we need a shift in working relationships between men and women in the church.

You can now access the videos of the other two conversations. The podcast episodes will drop on 6/3/26 and 6/17/26:

00:20 Introductions

Kay >> Hi. I’m Kay Daigle of Beyond Ordinary Women Ministries. I’d like to welcome you to our video series, It’s Time for a RelationSHIFT. And our guest is Dr. Jackie Roese. I have known Jackie since we were in D.T.S. together.

And I have been so looking forward to this conversation because this first video is going to be a conversation about It’s More Than Being Biblical. And when we talk about a shift in relationships, we’re talking about men and women in the church. With all that’s been going on in the last couple of years with #metoo and #churchtoo, and all of those things, there’s been a lot of conversation about men and women. And much of what I’ve heard, Jackie, is actually saying that it all has to do with our biblical view of women in the church.

And yet you’re saying it’s more than the theology of women in the church, that there’s more at stake here. So I’m very excited to hear what you have to say.

Jackie >> Great. Well, thank you for having me here. I’m glad to be here.

Yes. First, let me say it does have to do with the Bible. I’ve been with women who said, “Oh, we don’t need to work with 1 Timothy 2. We don’t need to figure out, you know, 1 Corinthians 11 or 14. We can just those are ancient texts. They don’t apply to us in the modern world.”

And so they just don’t even want to deal with them. And I’m like, no, no time out. We have got to go and dig and do hard work in the text. We’ve got to understand those biblical passages. So it is about the Bible, but it is actually about more than the Bible.

So what do I mean by that? We have men and women scholars who have in the conservative evangelical world who have studied these particular texts that seem to prohibit women from being fully inclusive in all different leadership roles in the church. And those men and women have landed on very different interpretations—same conservative evangelical faith, tradition, you know, orthodox theologians, and they disagree.

Kay >> They’re not, it’s not a liberal/conservative thing.

Jackie >> No, it is not someone way over here or someone way over here. I’m talking about people in your own circle. Theologians and scholars in your own circle disagree on the interpretation of those passages that seem to restrict women. So we have that, and we need to deal with that. That’s first and foremost.

But I’ve been a pastor for about 20 years and being a female pastor who happens to be gifted in preaching, I had to learn that it has to do with more than just what your stances on those particular passages.

Kay >> So we don’t want to scare off women from listening to us who might be more conservative than you and their perspective of those passages.

Jackie >> Absolutely.

Kay >> Because we’re not really talking about those passages. We’re talking about the things that are beyond those passages that affect men and women’s relationship in the church.

Jackie >> That’s exactly right. And those were the things I wasn’t aware of. See, I had been to seminary and I had been in the discussion about what does 1 Timothy think, say? And this is what this scholar says and this is what this scholar says. And I had all that. But what I didn’t know was when I actually went to work in a church as the Teaching Pastor to Women.

So I was serving women. I was bumping into walls all over the place that I couldn’t get my hands on of what am I experiencing and why. And it had nothing to do with 1 Timothy 2. And it had nothing to do with 1 Corinthians 14. And so I was like, well, there’s something here that’s beyond just where someone lands with the text.

Kay >> Right.

Jackie >> But I do want to say we need to do our work with the text.

Kay >> I totally agree.

Jackie >> Yeah, I’m not about blowing it off. Right? And so, yes, this is for women, regardless of where they stand on what women can and can’t do in the church. Regardless if you are a Women’s Minister or a women’s leader in any capacity in a conservative evangelical church, you’re going to hit up against walls that you can’t quite identify.

And they are there not because of Scripture. It’s helpful to know what they are and what you are up against and what is actually thus says the Lord and what is cultural and how do we tear down the cultural things that can allow us to serve better together as men and women.

Kay >> And that happens even to volunteers, women who come in and volunteer in the church or are like, I don’t seem to be getting anywhere.

Jackie >> Right. This is for any woman who is serving in ministry in any capacity, whether they get paid or not. Because you and I both know many, many women are serving like crazy in the churches and they aren’t getting paid. So we don’t want to just talk to people who are paid on staff.

Kay >> And that was most of my life. You know, I’ve spent most of my life volunteering in the church.

Jackie >> And you still encountered the very things I’d like to talk about.

Kay >> Absolutely.

Jackie >> Yes. So. So yes. So this is for any woman. And so one of the things that surprised me that was at play that I didn’t know was the issue of power. And I remember meeting with Dr. Scot McKnight and saying to him you know, I’m brand new on staff as this Teaching Pastor, which my role was just to teach women the Bible and to teach other women how to teach the Bible and just pastor women in our church.

It was an awesome position. I loved it. I went to him and I said, “What exactly am I experiencing here? Because there’s this really heightened tension around the issue of men and women. And I don’t understand what’s happening. You know, I wasn’t raised in the church, so I didn’t have a lot of background to all of this.”

And he said to me, “Oh, Jackie, it’s about power.”

And I remember in my young face looking at Dr. McKnight and thinking, “No, it’s not. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I didn’t say it because I knew he was way smarter than me. But years later, I kind of started to understand, “Oh, there is something about power at play here.”

So one of the things that was at play is that we tend to, as Christians, operate under an ethic of scarcity rather than multiplication.

And we see this in Matthew 20 with James and John, right? They want the left in the right-hand seat. And Jesus says to them, “My kingdom is not of this world. This is not going to look like they thought the people in power are going to be removed and I’m going to be in power.”

That’s what they thought.

And so we have this ethic of scarcity even within the church, which is if you go forward and you’re really successful then that means I have to go to the back of the line. Jesus, on the other hand, modeled an ethic of multiplication. He had no problem handing over his power. He didn’t become powerless or have to go to the back of the line to do so.

He hands you your power and you multiply and multiply and multiply.

And so I think power is at play, but the other thing that’s at play also and probably the biggest thing is that we have gender constructs at play. So we have an idea of what a godly woman looks like, right? She stays home, she’s married, she has children, she creates a hospitable house. She is sweet and charming and compassionate.

And then we have male constructs. And what we tell men is they’re to be independent and self-reliant and don’t lose, win, be successful. And if all else, do not be beaten by a girl. Right?

And then you have women who show up in the church, and they don’t fit that ideal. They might be assertive. And for a man, what that does is it creates a sense of insecurity and it can even threaten his masculinity. So an example of that that happened to me was I was in this Bible study, we had about a thousand women coming with people from all over the country asking us how we were doing, what we were doing.

And the men in our church asked if they could come to our Bible study. And I said, “No, you have the wrong hormones and all of that.”

And so they started going to the men’s minister and challenging him about the fact that our ministry was bigger and better than his, and he felt emasculated.

So our success made him less and that is not what we want here. We do not want to be in competition with each other. We want to be in collaboration. Ministry is not competition. It is collaboration.

And so I had to meet with him and say, hey, “I’m with you, brother. You do not need to fear me. I am your ally.”

So I think these are some of the things that are at play that actually you bump into these gender constructs, power situations, and you don’t even know that’s what you’re experiencing.

But if you do, it helps you go, Oh, this is what’s happening. This has nothing to do with 1 Timothy 2.

Kay >> Right. Absolutely.

Well, thank you, Jackie. That really helps us get a little bit behind the curtain. Because we don’t necessarily know what’s going on back there when we run into walls, when we run into disinterest, when we run into being ignored in some ways and our voice is not heard. And so I think that’s very helpful. In our next video, we’re going to talk about the fact that there’s more than just a sex narrative going on as well.

And so I hope you’ll join us. The third video will be about God’s dream team. So if you want to hear how the church should work, as men and women work together, you need to keep going with the other videos.

And if you want to read more about Jackie, her bio is on our website. And all the videos will be there on the resource page under general leadership as well. So thank you, Jackie, so much.

Jackie >> Thanks.