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With female roles changing rapidly in our society, we’ve seen a lot of molds broken by women. Have you been puzzled about whether Christian women should or should not be mold-breakers? I’m going to talk about some women in Scripture who broke the molds of their day.
We women are doing things never dreamed of by our grandmothers, and our lifestyles are changing in many respects. We can applaud some of these opportunities we have been given—and indeed have insisted on having—in the last five or six decades. But we can also see how we’ve thrown the baby out with the water all too often as we’ve pushed forward to plow new ground.
But mold-breaking, in and of itself, is not wrong. In fact, if we as Christians are not willing to break out of the “this is the way we’ve always done it” syndrome, we’ll lose our effectiveness as witnesses to a dying world. We need some mold-breaking Christians—yes, women—who are willing to be different in order to be what God wants them to be.
I want to briefly look at some women in the Bible who broke the molds in their days. In Luke 8 we see a group of them, who traveled with Jesus and the disciples from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news. There was Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; Joanna the wife of Cuza, the manager of Herod’s household; Susanna, and many others. These women were helping to support Jesus and the disciples out of their own means.
Here are some most unusual women. When travel was very difficult and dangerous and when women were expected to stay home, these women were traveling, following behind and supporting a group of men. Can you picture this group walking down the dirt road, Jesus and 12 men, followed by a large number of women? Not exactly traditional roles for women of their day.
Why did they do this? Were they trying to prove something, trying to enlarge their boundaries? What caused them to take these kinds of risks and play a different role than was expected of women in their day? I want to look at these women and see if we, as Christian women today, can learn something from them.