#STRask - How Would You Respond to Someone Referring to God as “She” in Church?

Episode Date: December 16, 2024

Questions about how to respond to someone referring to God as “she” during a church service, how to handle the tension between respecting the authority of church leaders and keeping them accountable, and how to distinguish between wolves and misled lambs.   How would you respond to someone referring to God as “she” in a prayer during a church service and a leader telling people to use whichever pronoun they’re comfortable with? How do we handle the tension between respecting the authority of church leaders and keeping them accountable, and how do we tell the difference between misled lambs and wolves in disguise?

This is Stan Teresans, hashtag SDR Ask Podcast. I'm Amy Hall, and I'm here with Greg Kokel. And this morning, Greg, we're going to start with a question from Tiffany. Okay. How would you respond to someone referring to God as, quote, she in a prayer during a church service? And would you say anything to a leader who tells people before a worship song that they can, quote, use whichever pronoun you're comfortable with? Well, I guess there are two items here. One is the she regarding God. Is this a leader or is just someone in the church?

It says, well, she says, what would you say to a leader who tells people before a worship song they can use whichever one? I was thinking of the first one where the reference to God was she. In a prayer during a church service. So obviously somebody who's up there. What I was going to say is, if somebody says she in a church service in a prayer, I probably would not make a fuss. I have a real problem with that, but sometimes you have to judge in a circumstance whether it's worth making a fuss about or not. And if this was an isolated circumstance, I'd probably let it lie. I wouldn't certainly make a federal case out of it, an official complaint. Although I might ask the individual, why did you, in private, in a genial

manner, why did you refer to God as she when God refers to himself as a he, which is the key here? And I don't think anybody who's really thoughtful about this thinks that God is gendered. But if God chooses to call himself father and refer to himself as he, if that's the way God refers to himself, then we ought to refer to God the way he refers to himself as he, if that's the way God refers to himself, then we ought to refer to God the way he refers to himself, since he is the appropriate authority, all right? It's different when it's human beings, because human beings are gendered by nature, and then to use a pronoun that's inconsistent with their sex is basically living according to a lie and disregarding what God

has done. And this is especially critical in an environment, a cultural environment, where this is kind of a movement to disregard the way God has created things. So it's important that way. So I think I would not make a big fuss about it, but if I wanted to say something, I might want to say, why did you do that? If it's a one-off, especially, I might just let it go. If it happens on a more regular basis, I'm going to say, why do you keep doing that? Why is it that you use—because I am curious why that is,

because I am curious why that is, particularly when God doesn't do that to himself. And then the second thing has to do with the pastor who says you can use whatever genders you want regarding other people or regarding God. No, the leader tells people before a worship song. So it's in the context of the worship song that they will be singing. And genders applying to who? I assume to God. Okay, so now you have two incidents in the same church where you have one person doing basically what the leadership said it was okay for her to do, except she's doing it in a prayer,

and then people can do that. This represents, to me, significant confusion. And maybe confusion isn't even the right word, because I don't think the people—I would be surprised if people are genuinely confused about the appropriate way to address God biblically, given that God uses male pronouns to describe himself. I think this maybe reflects a churchwide, leadership-down point of view or understanding about the role of pronouns in conversation. And what they're doing is they're going along with the world's assessment of pronouns instead of going along with the biblical example of the use of pronouns. That's what it seems like to me. That, to me, is really serious.

Not that he, her, it's not like a huge sin to refer to God as him, but rather as her, or whatever you want to refer to God as. But that this is a statement coming from the leadership indicates a complicity or a bending to the will of the culture. Why would anybody recommend that? What is going on with the pastor to make this recommendation that, and by the way, it seems to me, given this recommendation, the woman who's praying then feels comfortable referring to God as a her. Why not refer to God as an it, if that makes you feel more comfortable? We have a fairly straightforward standard in Scripture, God's use of pronouns regarding himself. We should stick with that.

And people who choose not to stick with that, especially leadership who doesn't stick with it, encourages other people that they don't have to stick with it. What's motivating that? What's motivating that, as far as I can tell, is something that has to do with culture and kind of a going along with a narrative that is contrary to the truth of God, and not just contrary to the truth of God with regards to God's own self-reference

in gender, language, and also with human genders that God created in a certain way. Instead of going with that, we're going to go with the culture. Why? I think the key as to why comes at the end of this question when the leader said you can use whichever pronoun you are comfortable with. And I think the key thing is that people want a different God. They want a feminine God. They want, maybe they have been hurt by men, or maybe they desire more feminine qualities, or maybe they're just saying, well, look, God has some feminine qualities, so therefore it's okay to call him a she.

But the problem is we cannot, we don't get to make God comfortable for us. That's not our call. We want to know the true God. We're not trying, if you are creating your own God that makes you comfortable, then you no longer have the true God. And what good is that God to you? I mean, to me, it is so disrespectful to God when you ignore the way that He reveals Himself to make Him into someone that's comfortable to you. I think it goes so deep into the question of what are you here to do?

Are you here to find the true God and to worship him? Or are you here to make yourself feel good and to do certain things that make you feel good or have certain ideas about God that make you comfortable? There's something deeply wrong with that. There's something at the core of what's happening in that church that I think has gone very wrong. They're not actually seeking the true God. Because if you're seeking the true God, you will worship him and you'll refer to him the way he referred to himself. Now, it could be they don't trust the Bible, that that's a revelation. Again, that's another really bad sign for the church. Either you don't think that God is a certain way, but that we can kind of craft our idea of God, or you think the Bible's not an accurate revelation of God.

Either way, there is a big problem with this church. Right, right. I was just thinking if there were—I mean, I don't pull rank around here, you know, and give orders and stuff like that. I mean, characteristically, but as president. But if I were to do that and give a directive and I feel strongly about this and I want this done. And somebody said to me, yes, ma'am. See, you can't see Amy's face, but she's grinning like it's holding back. That's like sounds so ridiculous because that would be an insult.

That would be an insult to my authority if somebody said that, even if they felt more comfortable doing that. God has identified himself with male pronouns. I think male pronouns communicate a peculiar kind of authority and strength, all right? People might disagree, whatever, but I think that's what it does. Somebody might be offended by that. Well, okay, then why? Because of toxic masculinity? Not all men are toxic. Not all masculinity is toxic. God's masculinity, the one he ascribes to himself, is not toxic. So why can't we just use the language that seems appropriate for God since he used it for himself, which I think does communicate a stronger sense of authority than mother, ma'am, her. Well, the fact is, even if we—and I think you're right about that— even if we had no idea of why God used male pronouns, now obviously he wanted to be personal, he didn't want to use it, so he had to use one or the other.

Even if we had no idea, we should trust that there's a reason, but I think the reason you've given is valid. I think God did want to communicate certain things about himself through using a masculine pronoun. And ironically, if people want to change the pronoun because they want to emphasize other aspects of God, hopefully I can explain what I'm saying here because this is going to be complicated. But if we were to continue to call God He, and we see all the wide aspects of who he is, that actually redeems masculinity. But if you deny it and you call him a she, now you've lost that ability to define what masculinity is. I mean, Jesus was gentle. Jesus was sacrificial. Jesus was a servant to others. All of these things help to find our masculinity. What if we started calling Jesus a she? Now we're saying a man can't

be those things, so we have to call him a she? It doesn't make any sense. Masculinity can embrace these other qualities, and God does that perfectly. So I think in every way, I think it's just a big mistake for anyone to do this. Is it Psalm 91 that talks about God covering us with his opinions? Now, those are feathers, and it's a picture of a hen spreading her wings over chicks to protect them. So you have a feminine reference to God's protection. I pray that for my family. I say, God, cover my family with your opinions. I'm totally comfortable with using a more feminized characterization that's biblical while still speaking to God as Father. There's no problem with that at all. So, it isn't as if I'm or classical Christians are uncomfortable with

the feminine. We just are speaking about God the way God speaks about Himself, and that's important, it strikes me. And if somebody is uncomfortable with that, the problem isn't with God. The problem may be with experience that people had, which we can be sympathetic to bad experiences, but we don't—or maybe a cultural influence, but that doesn't justify us changing the way we address God. Jesus says, pray this way, our Father. He doesn't say our Mother. So if we're speaking to her in a prayer, we can't exactly make reference to the Father. We can't be calling the Father a her. That makes no sense. We have to be referring to God the mother and then referring to him as her.

But Jesus said Father, not mother. So how are you going to mix them? Well, of course, you can mix the pronouns nowadays because of what people are doing with it. But this is all part of not just the confusion, but the sickness. The sickness of the way that people have approached this issue. And what's ironic is that usually somebody who is insisting on calling God mother is the same kind of person that would be very careful to use someone's preferred pronouns. Interesting. So maybe you could simply say, why won't you use God's preferred pronouns? Yeah, yeah. That's a good point.

All right. Well, in light of that question, let's go on to a question from Ethan. How do we handle the tension between, quote, respecting God-placed authority and, quote, calling to accountability? How do we know the difference between misled lambs and wolves in disguise? So, two questions here. When you're dealing with leaders, how do you handle the tension between respecting their authority and calling them to accountability, and how do you tell the difference between lambs and wolves? Yeah, let's just take the first one. I've talked about this before, and I've suggested a certain method.

It was one that I used when I was under authority in a pastoral staff, and I disagreed with decisions that were made by the person I was under in authority, head pastor of this particular case. He was my boss. And the issue is here, how do you correct and respect at the same time? And the answer is, you go to the person who is ahead of you or above you in authority with your hat in your hand, so to speak. This is your attitude, okay? And it's an attitude of meekness and humility. And then I recommend that you request the opportunity to share something with the pastor. You know, in military, they say, can I speak freely?

You know, you have a respectful relationship where a private is talking to his commander. Permission to speak freely, sir. Because they know they can't say whatever they want, whenever they want, because there's a relationship there. But when you ask permission to speak freely, and he gives permission, now you have the permission from the superior to share your mind as it is. And still, when that's done, you've got to be respectful how you say it, but you now have the freedom to say what you need to say. And in the same way, you're essentially asking the pastor, the person over you, permission to speak freely. Can I share some things with you? Would you mind?

Okay. And usually when you say something like that to somebody and you're asking permission, they realize they're not going to get a compliment because you don't need permission for that. And so then they say yes. And then what you do is you share your perspective. And characteristically in relational counseling, the recommendation is to use I language, not you language. Your really harsh is your language. I language would be when you say the things like you said, it comes across to me as really harsh, okay? You're still identifying your sense of things, the harshness of the communication, but you are not putting it on the other person. You are identifying it as something

that you're observing and seeing from yourself, okay? It seems to me along those lines, something like that. So as much as possible, put it in you language rather than them language so it doesn't sound like an accusation. So then you speak your mind and share your ideas and lay it out, and then that person might give a response. What I have also put is said in the past and I even use this now in talking with other people that I don't have authority over

but I said look you don't answer to me but this is something for you to think about for yourself and I say this is the same thing to the pastor I'm not the pastor you are but it's my job to share with you what I see and what I think about these things and so I'm offering that to you

and now I'm going to leave it up to you to decide what you think is best before the Lord. And I think this requires a little bit of wisdom about how important certain things are. I mean, some things are more important than others. Some things you can let go. immorality on the part of the pastor or some kind of theological point that's serious, then I think it does need to be addressed. So would you use the Matthew 18 way of doing this, Greg, or how would you go about just by yourself? Well, I'm presuming that what's being addressed here is not a kind of significant immorality that invites some level of church discipline. I'm thinking more of, you know, sometimes it's just bedside manner, you know, so to speak. It's

the way that you seem to come across or the way you talk to the other person, you know, that person had their feelings hurt. I don't know if you were aware of that. You probably weren't. But I noticed this pattern a number of times, and I wanted to bring it up to have you think about it. Okay, so that would be, I'm role-playing, obviously, the kind of conversation that I might have. So notice that it's a willingness to address something that probably is best addressed. And there's a lot of times people in leadership are not addressed at all because people are afraid of them and they don't want to say anything that's going to put them off. But then this individual doesn't have the advantage of feedback from the team, so to speak,

that could help them to be the better kind of person that they probably want to be anyway. Now, the manner that I've described here is a way of communicating the information in a way that's the least likely to get a rise out of them in the way you communicate and most likely to get a listening ear and is also a way of doing something and they still respond poorly, then it's likely this is a character issue. This is a low ego strength. A lot of times people are defensive and prideful in the way they act because their ego strength is actually weak. And so they can't take the feedback. They've got to defend themselves. And they said, well, I did it for this reason or that reason or the other reason. They give all these reasons. And when people give all these reasons, it's not illicit. It's not

inappropriate. But a lot of times it's a cover for staying the way you are. I'm justified in what I did. Okay. Now, my response to that as a leader, having been on the leader side of that kind of interaction before, quite a number of times, actually, over the years, is if one person is giving me the feedback and I don't agree with it, I'm going to go to other people who have visibility of that action, activity, behavior, and see if they have the same sense that this initial person had. Because I don't trust my own judgment. I mean, I might think, well, wait a minute, I don't think I responded that way. I don't think that's an accurate assessment. So I'm going to go to other people. If it turns out you have a lot of people giving you the same kind of feedback that you don't agree with, it's likely that they're onto something that you're in denial of.

And that's going to be up to the integrity of the leader to address that. And a lot of times the Holy Spirit is pouring on some heat, you know, to create some change in the leader's attitude or behavior. And when I say leader, it's not just church leader. It could be dad, that leadership, or mom, or a leader at work, your boss, or someone like that. So a healthy person with a healthy ego is going to be willing to engage these kinds of challenges and to field them and give them a fair assessment. And our job, when we're doing that with someone else, is to try to take as many negatives, unnecessary negatives, away from the interaction that might have caused a negative reaction. If we're barking at somebody, well, they could be reacting to our tone and everything. But if we come in, you know, humble hat in our hand, the way I described, it is less likely they're going to react to the bad posture that we have when we're talking.

And then their reaction is going to be regarding the issue itself. I just want to address the second part of this, and then you can give your thoughts on it, too. But the question about how do we know the difference between misled lambs and wolves in disguise, obviously here we're talking about theology, if they're misled lambs or wolves in disguise, because there certainly are people who are working in a church to change the theology through kind of underhanded means. Sometimes it's the pastor, sometimes it's somebody who's in the congregation, where the pastor will have a certain view that he's not being open about, but he's kind of working the congregation in that direction towards this other idea. Now, I would say you can't always know the difference, except that if someone is starting to move the congregation into bad theology, it doesn't really matter if he's a misled lamb or a wolf. You need to address that. I think one way you can tell is when you do address it and you say, well, let's look at what the Bible says about that. If he's not holding the Bible as his authority and he's not really interested in correcting his theology according to the Bible, or he's not really interested in kind of examining what it says, then that's a sign that I think he's

got some other agenda in mind, and he's working towards that. But I just don't think we can always tell. It just has to be addressed if he's moving the theology in the wrong direction. Yeah, that's a good point. Keep in mind the metaphor comes at least in one place from the Sermon on the Mount. This is Jesus, Matthew 7, Matthew 8, somewhere in there. And according to the way he's characterizing it, a lamb is a believer, and a wolf is not. A wolf is not. They're there to destroy the flock with false teaching, etc., etc., but they are not regenerate. In fact, the way Jesus characterizes at the end, he says, depart from me, I never knew you, something to that effect. So, if we have somebody

we're dealing with that is going south in some way, we can ask the self the question, do I have good reason to believe that this person knows the Lord, is actually regenerate? And if that's the case, and they're mistaken, then they're a misled lamb. If, however, there are evidences that this person is not a believer, is not according to the spirit, as Paul puts it in Romans 8, but according to the flesh. Then, even though they look like us, of course, that's the difference between an outsider who's hostile to Christianity and a wolf within the church is wolves look like lambs. They are wolves in sheep's clothing. So there's certainly things about them that are sheepish, if you will. I think about Matthew Shepard, for example, with the Reformation Project. Matthew Vines.

Reformation Project. Matthew Vines. I'm sorry, Matthew Vines. Thank you for that. Matthew Vines and the Reformation Project, and here he's trying to import gay theology into the church, but all the other things he says he believes seem to be completely orthodox. And if you went to his church where he's worshiping, he'd look like everybody else. But it turns out there is an iniquity that he is encouraging in the church, which is what Jesus talks about as part of his condemnation there in the Sermon on the Mount. You who promote iniquity. So, wolves are going to look a lot like a believer, but they're going to have elements in there that are utterly destructive to virtuous behavior and sound doctrine. And so, sometimes if you say, well, I think this person loves the Lord, everything I know about it, but he's got some heterodox teaching, it's probably someone who is a misled lamb. But if you have somebody that's driving the church in a deeply false, injurious direction, that, I think, would probably be a wolf. And incidentally, a pastor who is trying to manage the pronouns the

way is described in this question, that could easily be a misled lamb, confused lamb. And nobody's told him, you know, this is a worldly way you're encouraging in the church, in contrast to the way God himself wants us to address these things. And if they say, well, that hurts people's feelings, I said, do you think God knows that? Sure. But God did not compensate for our feelings when this issue of truth is at stake. Well, thank you, Greg. I think we're out of time.

We're way over time. But we really appreciate your questions, Tiffany and Ethan. So if you have a question, please send it on X with the hashtag STRask, or you can go to our website at str.org. This is Amy Hall and Greg Kokel for Stand to Reason.