2014 ARP General Synod = Women’s Ministries President’s Speech
Thank you, Mr. Moderator, for the honor of addressing this 210th meeting of the General Synod.
Thank you delegates and friends for your warm welcome.
It is a pleasure to speak to you today about ARP Women’s Ministries. As your ministry, a
ministry of Synod, we are overseen by the Synod Executive Committee. We are a little different
in that we are not an agency. We do have a structured board and each presbytery has a
president or representative. Do you know the name of your presbytery’s president or
representative? If you don’t, the next edition of the ARP Magazine will help you find her. We
are an unfunded ministry, which must raise our own budget of about $105,000 per year. If we
are of value to the ARP, it might be good someday to be included in the ministries funded by the
Denominational Ministry Fund.
So, are we valuable to you and your churches? Our vision statement is simple: “ARP Women’s
Ministries is an organization which encourages and equips the community of ARP women to
work together for God’s glory and purpose.” That means that we exist to focus on two biblical
mandates.
The first is equipping. Certainly your women get fine teaching and preaching from your church
worship services and studies. But Paul, who was known as a fine preacher, also instructed
Titus, at Titus 2.3-5 to see to it that there were times where older women trained the younger
women. A good translation would be that he wanted the older women to help the younger
women have their minds right about how to be good wives, mothers, and Christian women in
the church.
One thing we do to help you is to work with CEM to suggest Reformed, theologically sound,
useful books for women to study. Are you familiar with this next year’s selections, Opening up
Titus by David Campbell, which is a study of the whole book of Titus, and A Woman's High Calling Ten Ways to Live Out God's Plan for Your Life, by Elizabeth George, which is a topical study of Titus
2:3-5? Would it be useful your women? What are they reading now? Make no mistake, your
women, whether organized or unorganized, are reading and studying something.
The General Synod Position Paper on Women in the Life of the Church did a great job of settling
issues of where women fit in church roles. The issue today is how they fit in their marriages and
families when the world around them cries out that they need neither! The world is not getting
better. We live in a world of political correctness. Male and female distinctives have been
sacrificed at the altar of androgyny. And, so has the God who created those distinctives.
Almost 20% of US adults and 30% of adults under 30 claim no religious affiliation. Your job as
overseers means fighting back. Where are your women going to be affirmed as wives, mothers,
and daughters? The world will not help you. We will. One woman reported to me that her
session didn’t want to have the women get together because it would just be a gossip session.
Sticking your head in the sand is not oversight. If you have two or more women in your church,
they will get together, and we are here to help you make that a productive time.
Gone are the days where a local church women’s ministry had to fit a particular pattern. How
you organize, structured or unstructured, is your business. Seeing to it that your women are
taught in accord with Titus 2 is also your business. Helping, if you would benefit from it, is our
business.
Providing support at the local level is just the first of our biblical foci. The second is connecting
our ARP women. We are connected in polity because we believe it is biblical. That includes the
women. General Synod Committees include representatives from ARP Women’s Ministries,
and the feedback I get is that they are valued highly by the Committees on which they serve.
We are pleased that God has placed us together as ARPs. Our churches are connected in
Presbyteries and General Synod. That connectedness is more than a meeting. It means we are
connected as churches. When your Presbyteries meet, you do more than decide issues. Your
times together provide encouragement and fellowship with likeminded men. They remind you
that the church is bigger than your local congregation. You work together to support
missionaries abroad and church planters here in North America. Women crave that same
fellowship and encouragement. So, we organize Presbytery wide get-togethers for just that
purpose. On the Synod level, we do the same. Did you know that through our Jubilee Birthday
Lady program we annually support two World Witness women missionaries at approximately
$37,000? Did you know that we minister to church planters’ wives at their annual retreat? On
the weekend before Family Bible Conference, which, incidentally, Women’s Ministries was
instrumental in founding, we hold an annual Women’s Meeting for women from throughout the
ARP. This year will be our 100th meeting! It’s a 100th Celebration!!! Here are the bookmarks that
were in your Synod packets. We maintain that if you have women in your church, you have a
women’s ministry. We want all ARP women to understand that if they are in an ARP church,
they are connected with sisters in all the other ARP churches—they are members of ARP
Women’s Ministries. To learn more about our roles, please stop by our booth at World Focus
later this week.
In 2007 my husband Bob was called as a Mission Developer in the Tennessee-Alabama
Presbytery. Only four people in our core group had any ARP background. Prior to becoming
organized in 2010, we worked hard to develop an appreciation for Presbyterian connectedness.
Bob took guys to Presbytery meetings. We hosted Presbytery at our church so that our people
could see what a connected church looks like. Bob has told me that getting our women involved
in Presbytery wide retreats and meetings is what really made the difference. Those women took
this connectional, covenantal understanding home and encouraged their husbands.
Look, these are tough times for all churches, and that is just as true for us in the ARP. We as
women are as concerned as you are. Consider your women, and their role in a connected body.
Consider all they do in your churches. Consider how they, your families, and your entire church
might benefit from your supporting them to be actively involved with women from other
churches through ARP Women’s Ministries. We need you, and for God’s glory, we think that
you need us.