Earlier this month, Mexico elected its first female president when Claudia Sheinbaum won 59.7 percent of the vote. The former mayor of Mexico City, Sheinbaum also previously served as an engineer and a university professor.
In recent years, Mexico has been hailed internationally as a model for female political leadership. In the Nineteen Nineties, the federal government introduced policies promoting female participation as political candidates. Currently, 13 of Mexico’s 32 states are governed by women; Ana Lilia Rivera serves as president of the senate, and Guadalupe Taddei Zavala leads the National Electoral Institute, which organizes the country’s elections.
As women have advanced politically in Mexico, have women gained similar ground throughout the church? CT asked 4 Mexican evangelical women to weigh in (responses have been edited for length and clarity):
Alejandra Ortiz, co-coordinator of the Logos and Cosmos Initiative in Latin America within the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES):
The Mexican church is very diverse in its political stances. Pastors and non secular leaders often campaign for evangelical candidates who promote pro-family values, while others encourage voting from a neoconservative perspective. In this election, no evangelical leaders or institutions formally supported any candidate.
In political campaigns, candidates often view women as objects or puppets, something easy to govern. In a way, this perception extends to the church as well. Women serve God actively but rarely occupy leadership positions in churches, as the brand new neoconservative wave seeks to further limit the spaces of influence for ladies. Those who’re aligned with this vision use biblical passages like Genesis 3 and passages of Paul’s letters to Timothy and the Corinthians to make arguments that confine a girl’s influence to their families and ladies’s ministry.
The social changes that led to a broader female leadership in society usually are not equally valued in church in the identical intensity. There isn’t any intention or plan to open more leadership spaces for ladies, and even reflection on practices that would extend women’s influence in leadership roles.
Sally Isáis, director of mission agency Misión Latinoamericana de México (Milamex):
Traditionally, the influence of ladies in Mexican society has been strong, however it often takes place behind the scenes. In recent years, women have increasingly served in public roles, especially as the federal government has passed stricter laws against sexual harassment and established quotas requiring a certain percentage of ladies particularly government positions.
Within the church, historically, Pentecostal denominations have had women leaders. For example, Graciela Esparza was national director of the Iglesia Mexicana del Evangelio de Cristo and Febe Flores led the Movimiento Iglesia Evangélica Pentecostés Independiente, although they’ve since passed, and each denominations are currently led by men.
In general, evangelicals remain divided on the difficulty of ladies’s ordination. Methodists, Lutherans, and Episcopalians ordain women as pastors, and neo-Pentecostals and charismatics have many strong female pastors. Many lead congregations, sometimes alongside their spouses and sometimes independently.
In contrast, some conservative churches hold theological positions that prevent women from preaching and holding official positions. Although they recognize women’s gifts and skills in certain areas (leading other women and kids, for instance), they don’t allow them to access higher positions.
At the identical time, in most churches, the vast majority of congregants are women, lots of whom lead quite a few ministries and teach the Bible. This is independent of the denomination’s theological stance.
Some assert that a girl’s leadership role doesn’t depend upon the presence or absence of a person. Others say that willing, committed, and integral men are conspicuously absent. Therefore, women have needed to step up. I feel that girls’s formal leadership roles throughout the church can grow. In fact, it’s a reality that without the leadership and work of ladies, the churches can be in trouble, since much of the work is on their shoulders.
Sandra Márquez Olvera, founding father of the Con-Ciencia y TeologÃa blog:
Claudia Sheinbaum’s victory within the Mexico presidential elections shows more dialogue is essential around gender and ladies’s leadership. Both topics proceed to be the middle of debate in lots of churches.
In the vast majority of denominations or confessions, women usually are not allowed to develop into pastors, but in some cases they usually are not even allowed to show or take part in the discipleship of the community. In the last two or three a long time, we now have had necessary changes in Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists and a few Pentecostal communities, which have allowed more room for ladies to exercise their gifts. But there continues to be no consensus about how women can proceed to make their way within the church within the face of a society that challenges this passivity with its first elected female president.
There are quite a few biblical stories of ladies that God used with their leadership, strength, courage and transcendence. Stories that we proceed to check though seldom casting our eyes on the role of ladies. We must talk more about this and discern what women are called to on this church and on this country.
I don’t know the way Sheinbaum will prove within the face of forces that don’t want change inside and outdoors the church, but we all know that that is a very important step. And I do know that God will accompany the nation with all that lies ahead.
Yani de Gutiérrez, copastor at Iglesia Bautista Horeb in Mexico City:
I’m witnessing the primary woman in Mexico elected as president of the nation and that a majority of the population expressed that they accept the leadership of a girl. Faced with this watershed moment, as a Mexican Christian, I’m reflecting and wondering if that very same approval of female leadership is present throughout the church.
Undoubtedly, the inherent design of every sex includes exclusive roles inside God’s plan, akin to pregnancy and childbirth, that are clearly the domain of ladies. However, in God’s vision, women were created for way more.
In God’s plan, the responsibility to rule and subdue creation shouldn’t be determined by sex or roles but is a task assigned to each. Over a century ago, many societies began to shift in favor of ladies’s rights. Today, women undertake responsibilities that were once unthinkable, akin to the presidency of a nation.
We acknowledge that, like all human endeavors, recent distortions of God’s design have emerged with feminist movements, akin to positions of hatred toward men, debauchery, and disdain for motherhood and marriage, often at high costs. Extreme feminism has fallen into traps equally contrary to God’s plan.
Nonetheless, we cannot deny that it is correct for ladies to have the chance to exercise the skills God has granted them. As a Christian and pastor of a neighborhood church, I feel that the election of a girl as president is an element of God’s plan.
This awakening can be evident in Christian churches. Yet, as an alternative of embodying God’s plan—recognizing that some women are specifically designed, endowed, and chosen by God to guide throughout the church—the church often exhibits resistance and dogmatism, misinterpreting God’s original design and limiting women’s ministry. While the world rapidly embraces extreme feminist changes, the church lags in recognizing God’s original plan.
