There are a handful of topics that can empty a room faster than almost anything else in evangelical Christianity, and the question of women in ministry is near the top of that list. It's become so charged, so politicized, and so tangled up in identity and tribe that a lot of people have simply stopped asking the actual question: what does the text say?

Dr. Lynn Cohick has spent decades trying to answer that question with rigor and integrity. A New Testament scholar who has studied women in the early church from the New Testament through the fifth century, she brings to this conversation something that is rarer than it should be: actual Greek, actual historical context, and actual humility about what the text does and doesn't clearly say.

In this episode, Dr. Cohick helps us work through the landscape carefully, starting with how Jesus related to women in a first-century Jewish and Greco-Roman world that was more complicated than we tend to assume, then moving through Paul's ministry team (Priscilla, Junia, Phoebe, Euodia, Syntyche) and what their roles actually tell us, before landing on the passages that have functioned for so many women as a closed door: 1 Timothy 2 and the question of women learning, teaching, and authority.

This is not a conversation about what your church should do. It is not a feminist manifesto. It is a conversation with a scholar who has paid a real personal cost to do this work, who loves Scripture enough to take its complexity seriously, and who believes that the woman in the confused, painful middle deserves better than a sound bite.

Dr. Lynn’s Website: https://www.lynncohick.com/
Dr. Lynn on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drlynncohick/
Dr. Lynn’s Leadership Community for Women: https://www.letherlead.com/
Dr. Lynn’s Podcast: https://www.letherlead.com/podcast
Dr. Lynn’s Books: https://www.lynncohick.com/
Resources to Read On This Perspective: https://tinyurl.com/2shrhu9k

Today, I'm sharing the eulogy I delivered at my Dad’s memorial service in February of 2018, but I’m also pausing to reflect on what those lessons look like seven years later, as I turn 50 years old.

My dad spent just shy of fifty years (the full span of my life) in full-time ministry. He was a man of unimpeachable integrity, contagious joy, and a gentleness that wasn't weakness but the result of a lifetime of submission to the Spirit. In this episode, I trace the direct lines from his life to mine through the second fence he taught me to build, the relational equity he modeled, the way he said hard things without ever making you doubt his love, and above all, the Gospel that was the center of everything he did and everything he was.

I also share something I've never said publicly outside of my eventual book… a moment early in his Parkinson's diagnosis that stopped me cold and has never left me.

This episode is for anyone whose father pointed them to Jesus. And for anyone who is still becoming who someone they loved taught them to be.

Shannon’s Website: https://www.shannonsuzannescott.com/
Shannon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shannonsscott/

We have a lot of feelings about our bodies. What we don't have (and what the church has largely failed to give us) is a theology of them.

Lisa Whittle has been a Bible teacher, bestselling author, and pastor's daughter her whole life. And even she admits she never thought to open Scripture and ask: what does God actually say about this from Genesis to Revelation, all the way through? It took a season of hearing women's stories, getting genuinely offended by the emptiness of the body-positivity movement, and a direct invitation from her publisher to finally take that deep dive. What she found changed her.

In this conversation, we explore why the church's silence on the body has been a teaching in itself, and not always a helpful one. We talk about Imago Dei and why knowing it intellectually isn't the same as living from it. We also unpack what "It is finished" means for the woman who still hates what she sees in the mirror, as well as for the woman who lives in chronic pain or disability and wonders if whole body theology is even available to her.

Spoiler: it is. Whole body theology leaves no body out.

We also go somewhere that doesn't get talked about enough… the particular weight that falls on women in ministry who step onto a platform and suddenly find themselves fighting a second invisible battle alongside the one they were actually called to fight.

This is a conversation that is equal parts honest, theological, and deeply freeing. Lisa's Bible study Body and Soul is linked in the show notes and it’s a MUST DO recommendation from me.

Lisa’s Website: https://www.lisawhittle.com/

Lisa on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lisawhittle/

Body & Soul Bible Study: https://tinyurl.com/mv6kbrjj
Lisa’s Books and Bible Studies: https://www.lisawhittle.com/books