Fully Feminine Leadership

IN LIKE MANNER…THE WOMEN K AT H Y K H A N G

Fully Feminine Leadership

what would happen every month? She would want to go to war!”

I must confess that I’ve often wondered if my gifts, skills, and ambitions would have been better served in a man’s body. I see leaders all the time who are sort of like me, but they are sort of not Developing as a leader requires a pos- like me. They are men: a commanding ture of learning, but that posture has very voice, a strong physical presence, a swagoften been mostly figurative. Certainly ger of confidence. Other male leaders my body is engaged in the learning want to mentor them, and men and process, but it’s usually an internal women want to be led by them. I am a engagement. My mind is working. I am woman.The pitch of my voice is higher. sitting and maybe taking notes. I nod My presence can feel either invisible or my head in agreement or give a per- a threat. If I try to swagger it’s called a plexed look when the seminar speaker, strut. If I swagger too much while wearmy mentor, or the words in the book ing a skirt that is just a little too short or a little too tight, I might be called strike a chord, pull at my heart.

But what I have found lacking are something that rhymes with strut. Other resources and even physical space to develop and talk about the physical nature of leadership. Developing spiritually, mentally, and emotionally is critical to our development as leaders, but we are embodied souls. Even as my mind wanders, my body is still connected. I am still physically here even when mentally I check out.

So when we follow Jesus’ call to leadership, we must do it with our whole selves. But as a woman I often find that my body — with all its curves, cycles, nooks, and crannies — is a trap or even a male leaders often don’t want to menhindrance rather than a gift to leader- tor me, because I am a threat to their ship. I am eager to talk with and ask integrity. Some men — and some women questions of other women about how as well — refuse to be led by me.

In the past few years I have once to be comfortable and confident in our female bodies, about modesty, beauty, again needed to turn back to the femininity, strength, vanity, and self-respect. Scriptures and away from the culture I’m afraid that if we don’t have those (and maybe even from the church) to conversations we will continue to pas- find the stories and the affirmation of sively raise up generations of young women who do not forget or wish away women who believe they have equal their gender but walk into leadership footing in the world and even in the fully feminine. How odd it must have church but secretly despise and limit been for Martha and Mary, sisters who themselves and other women because (as far as we know) understood the cultural norms but lived just outside of what we are women.

Just the other day I overheard a young proper women aspired to. There is no woman talk about why she wouldn’t want mention of husbands or children, only a female president: “Could you imagine their brother and the house they opened

I must confess that I’ve often wondered if my gifts, skills, and ambitions would have been better served in a man’s body.

PRISM 2 0 1 0

6

to Jesus and his friends.

But before jumping to Jesus’ admonition of Martha, I need to step back and take in how beautiful Martha and Mary both are as women doing what our hearts long to do, what we are called to do.

Mary’s posture is not in defiance of her gender but in a deep understanding that her body does not keep her from being a disciple and leading by example.

She is not trying to be a man when she gathers herself at Jesus’ feet and soaks up his healing words; she is simply responding to his call with her whole being.

Martha’s actions and her request of Jesus to ask for Mary’s help do not indicate any resentment over being a woman or desire to shed her skin. She just can’t see past herself and the cultural limits that bound, and in some ways continue to bind, women from being disciples and leaders.They are women, and while Jesus’ words about Mary choosing the better thing and how that will not be taken away from her hold an important truth for both men and women, they possess a poignant significance for women like me who long to see examples of leadership that resonate with us and our femininity.

Jesus isn’t telling Martha to forget she is a woman or her cultural expectations.

Instead, he is lifting up Mary as an example, because she is a woman who brings all of herself — body, mind, and soul — to Jesus and assumes a posture of learning that neither defies nor denies who she is. N Kathy Khang is a regional multiethnic director for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, overseeing multiethnic training and ministry development. She is one of the authors of More Than Serving Tea:Asian American Women on Expectations, Relationships, Leadership and Faith (IVP, 2006), and continues to blog about life as a ChristianAsian-American-married-working-mother when really she should be sleeping.