Alan F. Johnson Quotes & Sayings

I felt responsible to use my gifts, but in future churches, that pointed in the direction of children's or music ministry. But, like many women in the church whom I knew, I felt neither a call nor a predisposition to children or song. — Alan F. Johnson

men have never seemed to object to women going off to difficult missionary assignments in the far corners of the earth. The matter of women preachers became a problem only when women wanted to be pastors back home, in the sometimes affluent neighborhoods that typically had churches pastored by men. — Alan F. Johnson

As full and equal partners Adam and Eve were responsible to tend the garden, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, to subdue the earth, and to rule over the creatures. In other words, together they were given stewardship of the earth because they were equals. — Alan F. Johnson

How I changed my mind about women in leadership came through the gradual piling up of anomalies against a powerful but unsustainable paradigm. — Alan F. Johnson

Luther could say, 'It is not a bad, but a very good sign if the opposite of what we pray for appears to happen. Just as it is not a good sign if our prayers eventuate in the fulfillment of all we ask for. If everything were to go the way I want it, I would end up in that kind of false security which is really an instrument of the divine judgment. — Alan F. Johnson

In the history of the United States, we find that women were regularly preachers on the American frontier. Ironically, Baptists, who in some fundamentalist churches now bar women ministers, had more female preachers than any other denomination. Women pastored almost half of all Baptist churches in the state of Maine in the mid-nineteenth century. This was also the case in almost half of the Baptist churches in Michigan and Wisconsin. — Alan F. Johnson

she was given a dying Sunday evening women's class in a megachurch. The class began to grow rapidly. The women then began to bring their husbands, who gladly listened to Mom teach until the pastor stepped in to stop it! — Alan F. Johnson

Was Eve's sin so much greater and more unforgivable than Adam's that the entire female gender must forever be treated with suspicion and controlling measures? — Alan F. Johnson

Instead of worrying about hypothetical slippages awaiting egalitarian believers, like sliding into secular feminism, theological liberalism, or homosexuality, they would do better to deal with brutal violations of their "family values" that are actually happening today within their hierarchy-driven allegedly Christian homes. — Alan F. Johnson

It is not the rights of women to occupy "official" ministerial roles, nor their equality to men in those roles, that set the terms of their service to God and their neighbors. It is their obligations that do so - obligations that derive from their human abilities empowered by divine gifting. — Alan F. Johnson

The evangelical position, represented by the personal stories in this book, including my own, understands that a fully authoritative Bible supports the freedom of women under Christ without male supervision to follow their God-given callings and special gifts of the Spirit, including full leadership ministries. This view can be called the "inclusive" view of ministry — Alan F. Johnson