Feminine God: A Conversation with Hannah Lamberth

Welcome to the Loved Called Gifted podcast.

This is your place to come for musings about spirituality, identity and purpose.

I'm your host, Catherine Cowell.


C: So I am once again in Hannah Lambert's recording shed.

H: You are, absolutely nice to see you.

C: Nice to see you too.
I noticed, we were chatting as we were climbing into the shed that you have a never-ending beer pot.

H: We do. It's an interesting problem to have.
I don't drink beer. My husband doesn't drink much beer.
And we keep having parties because we love parties.
And people bring beer and then don't drink all of the beer.
And so they leave the beer with us.
And then we think we'll have another party to get rid of the beer.
And then people bring more beer.

But yeah, so weekend parties.
So I'm feeling a little weary today. So it's been nice to have a chill day.
To sit down in the recording studio, drink some coffee and have some lovely chats is just what's needed.

C: And it's really, really good to see you again.

H: It's so nice to see you.

C: So you wanted to chat to me about one of the podcast episodes that I released recently.

H: You did. So you asked the question, is God feminine?
Which was really, really interesting to listen to and ponder.

I think if you have not listened to that podcast listeners, then it would probably be a good idea that you do before listening to this one. Although it will be, it will be fine, won't it?

C: I think yes. I think that we'll try and do this in a manner which means that it's entirely possible to listen to this one first. And then be enticed into going back and listening to the other one.

H: Absolutely.
You say in the podcast that you had a chat with a friend who asked the question, if we're all made in the image of God, then God must be as much male as female, which is a really interesting statement for especially someone like yourself and myself who's been knocking around church for a few decades now.

How did that question impact you?
Why did it leave such a mark on you?

C: Because it was simultaneously, obviously true, but also psychologically deeply, deeply uncomfortable.
And I kind of had this sense that my inner good Christian was running away screaming at the very thought that I might think that God was feminine as well as masculine. But at the same time thinking, yeah, that has to be true. If we are all made in the image of God, then it is not just men.
So it was a case of thinking that is true, but it's perturbing me.
And why is it perturbing me?
What is it? What is it culturally in me that makes that so uncomfortable?
And that made me think, okay, I need to think about this.

What was interesting to me was that I had seen the shack. If anybody's seen the shack, it has in it an image of God as male and female. So there's the Jesus character, the Holy Spirit character who is feminine, and then a mama character. So kind of God the Father played as a woman, but interestingly still called Papa.
And the moment that the main character kind of gets to the point where he can cope with it, God turns up as a father figure.

So I'd seen that and people said, oh, God's a black woman in the shack.
But it kind of somehow it was helpful at the time, but it didn't really root in me.
And I thought it was interesting that despite having had some kind of connection with that, it hadn't continued to sit with me.

H: And why do you think that was?

C: Because our view of God is so, so overwhelmingly masculine. And it's everywhere.
These days, having begun to think about this, I'm actually quite sensitive to the continual referring to God as He, because I think it's broader than that.
I went to an event that was for Christians to encourage them to think about fostering an adoption as a Christian organization called Home for Good.

And there were speakers.
And at the beginning of that, as there is in many, many things, there was a time of worship.
And I was stood there in an audience of 90% women, I would say.
And the song that was sung over and over again was the chorus, Good, Good Father.
And they were repeatedly singing, God's a good, good father.
Yes, you are. Yes, you are a good, good father.

And I stood there with all of these women thinking, but these are mothers.
How does this speak to women?
What is that saying to us about who we are as mothers?
If even in that context, where most of the people in the congregation are women, we're still talking about God as father exclusively.

H: Yeah.
I think I am probably further back on the journey of this.
And I think I have listened to your podcast and felt similarly to you with that level of this feels uncomfortable.
I loved at the beginning you talked about God being so transcendent.
So when he meets with Moses and says, I am who I am.
And that's easy because it's a non-gender kind of - very transcendent - that gender in that context isn't the issue because he's saying, I am God, which feels beyond pronouns, beyond gender, beyond all of that.

He's so great and big, but also then he is intimate with us and we need something to help with that. We need a way to speak to God and speak about God. And that requires a pronoun sometimes.

And I'm really comfortable with God being beyond gender and being all gender and all genders, you know, and, and being more than that.

But when it comes to saying God is a woman, it's that, that you kind of go, oh, that feels a bit weird.

C: When we're not saying God is a woman, we are saying God is feminine because we're not also, we're also not saying God is a man.

H: Yeah.

C: We can say that God is incarnate in Jesus, but we're not actually saying that God is a man.
My point would be, or one of my points would be that although we talk about God as being transcendent and beyond gender, because we have been so culturally conditioned to see God through masculine eyes, even when you're saying, well, I think God is beyond gender.
I suspect that God is beyond gender with a bit of a blokey feel.

H: Absolutely, Absolutely. Yeah, without a shadow of a doubt.

C: That's where I think it's important to begin to look at.
So how do we balance that out a bit?

H: Yeah.

C: What's been interesting to me is that it has been really difficult, despite all of the reading and the thinking, it's been really difficult for these things to kind of settle properly in me.

It's a bit like, if you imagine trying to make a path through sort of Virgin rainforest and you can machete your way through and begin to make room for that within yourself.
But then the moment I step back into Christian community of any kind, everybody and everything is referring to God in masculine terms.

Lord is a masculine term.
Father is masculine.
He is masculine.

There's quite a lot of our images and metaphors for God are sort of warlike, you know, mighty God, God's going to go and fight my battles for me, all that kind of thing.

So it's a bit like if you think about the fact that doctors can be men and women, but if you're picturing a doctor, what's your go-to?

H: Yeah.

C: And there's lots of things like that, isn't there?

H: Absolutely. I think you discussed in the podcast the names of God.
I've got them here.
So El-Roi, which is the God who sees, El-Emet, the God of truth, El-Tzaddik, is that how you say it? The God who is just or righteous. El-Olam, the everlasting God, and these are sort of very gender neutral terms.

And yet there are some that are more masculine and then some that are more feminine.
And I think the importance of seeing God as feminine enables us to view the character of God, who God is in a different way.

That is to say, God is both masculine and feminine.

C: And beyond.

H: And beyond.

C: Yeah. It's all of those things.
And it is that kind of balancing out our cultural heritage, I think.

H: In terms of cultural heritage, you mentioned in the podcast about, I guess, the sort of default masculine perspective, and then beginning to unlearn that and say that although that was the culture in which you grew up in and the environment in which you sort of have lived, that has potentially given you a distorted view of who God is.

Can you just give us a couple of examples of kind of what kind of culture that is and some of the specifics of that?

C: My first experience of church was within the local Anglican church. And that was all, all of the vicars were blokes.

H: Yeah.

C: We had one Deaconess. She was a bit eccentric. So she was the only kind of female that I'd seen. But she felt a bit of an aberration really because everybody else was blokes.

And then I found a personal faith in a new way through attending an evangelical charismatic church. They were very, very, very heavily male focused. So they definitely believed in male headship. They did not think that women should be at the front at all. They didn't think that any of the elders should be women. So the way that the church was organized was that there was the place where everybody sat and then there was a stage, which was about eight feet, I would say, above the floor of the church.
And there was a ring, a semicircle of male elders who would stand there and who would lead the service.

H: Gosh.

C: They preached a lot about marriage and men being in charge at home, you know, all, all of that stuff. So that was very, very male. They also wanted women to wear hats in church.
So that was really very masculine.

H: Okay.

C: And then when I went away to university, I went to places where there was more equality, but still most of the church leaders that I came into contact with were blokes.

In fact, I don't think, Oh, that's interesting.

So I'm part of a church now that has a woman who is the leader, but that is the first time that I have actually been part of a church which has a woman as a leader.

H: Okay.

C: So I led a little kind of Christian community churchy thing for a bit called Church Without Walls. So I was a woman, obviously, but a little tiny, little tiny thing. And I've known a few people, I've known a few women who are vicars and who've led churches, but for me, I hadn't been in a female led environment.

H: And so going from that being your sort of cultural standpoint to this journey of, I guess, discovery, and a lot of that will be unlearning.

What do you feel your impression of God?
How do you think that's begun to change or in the process of changing?

C: It is in the process because you can't unlearn millennia of cultural heritage and decades of personal experience kind of just like that.

I have had an increasing sense of the compassion of God and the gentleness of God.

And just a tangent for a moment, I don't think that there's necessarily particular characteristics that very closely line up with masculinity and femininity.
I think a lot of that is cultural.
But my point would be that almost whatever your culture is, you will attribute to God much more strongly those characteristics which are seen as masculine in your culture than you will with characteristics that are seen as feminine in your culture.

Whilst there are some general themes that I think run through most cultures, there are things that shift.

So for example, we would tend to see in our culture now, we would tend to see that close friendships are things that women are good at and blokes are a bit crap at.

Interestingly, if you go back to the 1700s, it was thought that men were good at forming really good close relationships and that women were a bit crap at it.

H: Fascinating.

C: Really fascinating, isn't it?
So that history of friendship has shifted.

So if you were seeing God as masculine then, then the image of God as friend would have been much easier to connect to than it perhaps is now because we see that as a feminine characteristic.
So there are differences there.

I think one of the things that's been really helpful to me as a woman is feeling much more clearly that I am created in God's image, as a woman.

If you go back through culture and look at the way that men and women are viewed, there has been this sense that women are sort of inferior versions of men.

And I hadn't really noticed, but I think I have in the past seen myself as a Christian as being a slightly inferior version of a bloke.

Not consciously.

And if you'd asked me that, I would have said, "No, no, no, no, absolutely not."
But because God is so often portrayed as blokey, as male, I kind of felt a bit othered.
And I feel that less now.

H: As you've been speaking, I've been thinking of, you know, you see man and Adam, which is man, isn't it? You know, as to be made in the image of God and woman to come along in a supportive role.
So absolutely affirmed within her role as caregiver and compassionate and, you know, but a supportive role.
But actually the shift from supportive role to actually being the image of God and who God is.
And it sounds glaringly obvious.
And it sounds like, well, of course you're made in the image of God.
And of course God is compassionate and giving, but actually the subtleties that you take on and you adopt because of the very masculine culture that, like you say, the millennia of men being the head of the church, the head of woman, and that sort of thing that we've grown up in and adopted.

I think the concept of God as feminine and us being made in his image and therefore reflecting absolutely who God is, it's so subtle, but it's hugely significant.
And the weight of that too.

C: The word that is translated as helper when Eve comes along is the same word that is elsewhere used for God as rescuer.

So we tend to see it as a subservient role, but that same piece of language is often used when they're talking about God as the helper of Israel.
And that's not subservient at all. Sort of the opposite.

And that's not to say that women should be in charge. I'm not saying that women should be in charge. I'm not saying that anybody should be in charge, but that that helper role is how it's sort of been translated.

H: Yeah.
And I think there's how the Bible is interpreted, how God is depicted, that subtle shift from a masculine emphasis to actually saying, no, there is that we also need to place on a feminine emphasis.

That's really critical in how we see God and see us in light of that.

C: Absolutely.
Talking about how we see God as feminine, one of the things I was very aware of when I was recording the last podcast is that within the limited space of time, it was easier and quicker to draw on the very, very obviously feminine things.

So the name El Shaddai, which means basically the Lord, the breasted one, reflecting on the fact that the Hebrew word for compassion comes from, has its root in the word for womb.

So those are very obviously feminine.

But as somebody who's never given birth or breastfed, I was a bit like, I'm not sure I want this all to be about wombs.

H: Yeah. Womb and breastfeeding.

C: But that's not the entirety of what it is to be feminine anyway.
Really interesting, I think, is the fact that the wisdom character in the book of Proverbs is feminine.

And there is a long tradition of wisdom as being a feminine characteristic of God.
And in fact, Paul talks about Christ being the wisdom of God.

And there's quite a long tradition of seeing Christ as being the personification of this feminine wisdom character who turns up in Proverbs.

And actually, if you think about what women bring to the world, often it is wisdom.
But the wisdom character is involved in the creation of the world.

So that rather excitingly kind of puts a feminine spin on science and physics and astrophysics and all of that stuff.

H: Yeah, I think you should write a book on it.
Anyone else? I think, "yes, we do." That's everyone.
That's everyone listening to the podcast agreeing that there's loads to be explored.

Something we were chatting about over a coffee before we started recording was the idea of spiritual milk in Hebrews.
Can you just share a bit more on that?

C: So there is the idea of us as new Christians learning and growing as Christians and that that kind of learning and growth is very strongly connected with this metaphor of spiritual milk, which obviously comes from breasts, which takes us back to God as El Shaddai, the Lord, the Breasted One.

So that has around it this very rich imagery of us gaining nourishment in the context of a really close bonded loving relationship with the divine.

I am very conscious that in the church circles that I was part of in my 20s, the idea was very much that you needed to not be needing sort of simple teaching, but that you ought to be able to move on to more advanced stuff, that you needed to read your Bible more so that you were kind of more learned.

But it had just never occurred to me that the way that you would get spiritual milk would be by breastfeeding, which is a very powerful feminine metaphor for the divine. I mean it's not subtle.

But it speaks a lot of that kind of real nurturing closeness and comfort.
So sometimes you see a toddler, don't you, who is very comfortable to just go and get milk when they need it.

H: With all their teeth, I mean.

C: Yes, yeah.

H: Yeah, absolutely.

C: But that becomes a kind of a place of coming back to that real intimacy.
It's safe.
That intimate space is really safe.

And the legacy of that really close bonded relationship, where it's absolutely safe to go back to the divine for more spiritual milk, that provides a basis of God being the safest person.

Which is very contrasted to me to the image that I ended up acquiring of God really as schoolmaster, teacher, probably a bit stern, telling us stuff.

I didn't have this image of being closely bonded to God.
Interestingly, when I thought about spiritual milk, my image in my head was of bottle feeding.

H: Oh, interesting.

C: And I hadn't noticed that at all.
But it was sort of like the spiritual milk is a kind of a product that's passed on, that you can get it out of the rack.

And as I was beginning this journey, I was sort of thinking, but in the time that the New Testament writers were writing this, there was not formula milk. Like all of the milk was from the breast.
If you were going to have spiritual milk, that's where you get it.

And the fact that that feels so, so alien and odd and weird, I think speaks a lot about the way that we have interpreted God over centuries.

H: And I think also, I have heard that is quite a negative thing, that actually the milk, you know, like, oh, you don't want to be on milk anymore.
You want to be on solids.
The milk is quite negative.
But actually, milk for a baby is never a negative thing.
It's full nourishment, it's full intimacy and closeness.
And it's a thing of absolute beauty.

And I think also we need to be careful that we don't just see God in that feminine way for early years. God isn't just feminine in her character, his character.

I mean, what pronouns do you use? That's even in my head.
It's like, how do we talk about this?

C: It's really interesting because we're talking about this and you've stuck with he all the way through.

H: Yeah, I know. I have.
I'm really aware of that. And I think to call God her, it makes me kind of go, oh.
Yeah, it's a bit scary.

C: I'm very aware of how that comes across to other people.
So I am tending to just avoid all pronouns.

But going back to the milk, what's really fascinating is that breast milk is different at different stages of development.
So you get the colostrum and the odd don't you, the first stuff.
And that's what the baby needs to begin with.
And then it changes.

And through that kind of period of infancy, the constitution of breast milk changes.
It's not the same.

And there is a gradual move away from that.

But because of that period of feeding, in a good mother child relationship, there is a deep bond, which means that you might not need the spiritual milk, but you do know where to get that motherly comfort.

H: Yeah, absolutely.

C: There's that beautiful psalm, isn't there, where David says, I have stilled and quietened my soul like a weaned child within me, like a weaned child with its mother.

And so that sense of this is a place of safety and peace.
And I might not need the boob for milk anymore, but this is a place where I feel safe.

H: Yeah, absolutely.
And I think my husband always jokes, I don't know if I should share this, but he's like the baby whisperer.
He can take any baby and he says, it's my moobs.
It's the man boobs.

And if you've got that kind of, you know, that warmth and that place of softness and comfort, it's such a safe place to be, isn't it?

You know, it's drawing close to one another and comfort.

And I think my 10 year old who still, I mean, she's super tactile and loves to snuggle, you know, and she just comes in close and it is that warmth and that closeness.

C: And you don't get that with a distant father figure.

H: No, you don't. No, with that head, you know, I'm not doing that with my head teacher at school. I'm just not going in for a snuggle.

But yeah, no, it is that depiction of, you know, that mother and child picture of God.

C: I wonder whether one of the reasons that Jesus speaks so often of God as Abba, which is sort of like daddy, was to take the distance of the fatherliness of God, that kind of distant fatherly figure and bring that into a place of intimacy too.

So you can then have the Abba daddy, who is safe, and you have a different kind of relationship with your dad than you do with your mum.
But both have that element of kind of softness and comfort and approachability, actually.

H: Absolutely.
One of the other things that you talked of was El Rakhm, God of compassion, originates from the word womb.
And the womb is a very, almost a one sided place of sustenance.

So the baby in the womb does nothing.
It just bobs around, you know, being fed, being given sustenance, being given life, it does nothing to put itself in the womb.
It does nothing to earn its nourishment and its sustenance in order to grow and develop.

And I think just that compassion meaning, come inside, do nothing but receive from me.

We've recorded another podcast talking about sort of God's invitation to rest and not to have to do anything and not to have to strive anything.

And that was quite a powerful image for me, listening to that as God having that womb-like relationship with us is absolutely beautiful.

I guess it's hard not to sort of imagine God as a man with a womb.

Which, you know, it sounds a bit mad, doesn't it?
But I think there is that automatic default of Father God, masculine God and attaching on feminine characteristics onto a masculine God.

And it's a wild head fry.

C: I think it's really helpful to notice that we do that.
Because once you've noticed it, you can begin to sort of challenge it.
It's like the other not gendered names for God that we spoke about.

So Elroy, the God who sees.
And it's interesting, I think, to just in contemplation play with the idea of how does it feel if the God who sees is masculine?

Okay, now if I internally flip that and think about the God who sees as being feminine, what does that change?

What does that add to the picture?
And women can be really good at spotting things.

This is a bit stereotyped, but I don't think it's unhelpful.
Often it's the women in the room who notice the emotional mood changes or notice that somebody needs something.

The God who sees or in the way of all the Facebook meme-y things, it's the woman who notices where the ketchup is in the cupboard.

But there is a depth of seeing that I think women can be quite good at.
But there is a softness about it, I think.

H: You know, I think maybe some people listening will think, well, you know, God is feminine, God is masculine. What does it really matter?
Either way, what do you think some of the implications are of having a view of God as feminine as well as masculine?

Might be a bit of a huge question.

C: Yeah, I think it is quite a huge question.
I think it's more rounded.
I think it gives us a broader view.
It helps us to see God as a God of love in deeper ways.

Because there is no doubt about it, a woman's love for her child has a particular character about it.

You know, it is often women who stick around. When marriages break up, it's usually the woman who sticks around with the kids. Sometimes it's the man, but usually it's the woman.

If you're thinking about who is going to keep going, even when it's tough, it's usually the women.

We also know that if we want a country to progress, then we want to educate the women. Because there is this kind of holding the fabric together.
And traditionally, there's quite a big association of the feminine with creation, Mother Earth, that sort of thing.

Where I find that image helpful is that it has that sense of God nurturing and growing all things in a sense.

For me, there is something about the feminine which has a better connection to seeing God in nature and sensing God's love and embrace through the natural world around us.

That might be a new thought for some people.

And it's a bit kind of vague and out there, but I found it quite helpful.

H: Going back to your podcast, you talk about Ruach, which is the spirit and the idea of the spirit breath and hovering and where it says in Genesis, the spirit hovered over the earth and that being a feminine root word.

And that power and creativity, even at the very beginning of time, there was this feminine creativity and this hovering and spirit.

And yeah, I think that is powerful imagery for us to hold in maybe a different way for some people.

C: Yeah, it feels more nurturing to me.
If I think of God as a creator, as a masculine God, it's much more kind of God in his workshop creating the things.
Whereas a feminine creative God feels much more like God giving birth to, nurturing, caring for, rather than knocking something together in his workshop.

It just has a different feel to it.

And it's nice to be able to add that into our understanding and our spirituality and our perspective.

H: I think also, when you think of the way that a woman creates life, it's through childbirth, which is anything but gentle and sort of, you know, I mean, it's all of it, isn't it?
It's emotion, but it's bloody and guttural and powerful and wild childbirth.

C: Yeah. I'm very, is sensual the right word?

H: Yeah, no, I think it is. Yeah. I think, you know, not, yeah, I think that is the right word if not taken out of context.

C: Yeah. Very, very physical.
And quite often our theology and our thinking is quite in the mind.
Whereas getting to grips with God, God choosing to use the metaphors of breastfeeding mother and the spirit giving birth.

Jesus talks about us being born again.
And I have to confess that it's only relatively recently that I've spotted that you don't get born unless there is a woman.

H: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. That'll preach.

C: But that moves it from being this kind of abstract thing to being something that is physical.
Women's bodies have been seen as being a bit shameful and a bit not really very spiritual.
You know, menstruating is a bit messy.
Giving birth is quite messy.
We don't really want women breastfeeding in church.
You know, people have conversations about that, don't they?

And yet God is saying, this is a really good picture of how I am with you.

H: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
This transformation, the baby comes out and cries.
And the next thing to do is to feed if it all goes well and as planned.
But ultimately, within the first few hours of birth, that baby needs to be fed.

There is that beautiful link between when we come to faith and we are born again, and we know Jesus, there is this, this, and I know you mentioned anything that actually for some people, it's a slower progression. And it's a it's a it's not necessarily that instant thing.
But actually slow or fast, the process is the same as it is coming into a place of transformation, starting a new life and feeding on the breast of God, that spiritual milk, which is, yeah, food for thought.

C: It really is. It really is.
I hope that it would help us to be more comfortable in our own female bodies.
This is the metaphor that God chooses to use to describe who she is.

H: Yeah.
And I'm made in his image.
And so all of the lumps and the bumps and the menstruating and the woman-ness and the wisdom and the eyes that see all of that is a reflection of who God is.

C: Yes, yeah.

H: Being made in the image of God is a responsibility, isn't it?
And to hold it with admiration of, I reflect who God is.

C: Yeah.

H: Like, whoa.

C: It also gives us the opportunity to more consciously see the image of God in other women.
You know, as you watch somebody just going about her daily life being who she is thinking, actually, God is made manifest through this woman in front of me.

H: Absolutely.
To see women through different eyes.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's powerful.
It's really powerful.

What do you think the implications for church communities are?
Like, how do we go from this little conversation in a, you know, and there's lots of people before us that have been breaking ground on this and thinking about this in different ways.

But what would the implications be if the institution of church can grasp God as feminine?

C: Yeah, I don't think it's going to do it anytime soon.
I mentioned that I'm now part of a church that is led by a woman.

And I actually did a podcast with her.
She's called Felicia.
And that has been really interesting to watch.

So we're a fairly new church plant.
And the history behind that is that Felicia has had a group of women who used to come to her house for kind of Bible study and coffee mornings and things for many, many years.

But it's a very close knit group of friends, basically, women journeying together.
And when Felicia knew that God was calling it a plant church, that was sort of the core.
And I've never been in a place where that is the case.

She has a particular anointing as a mother. So she's got six kids, four birth children, two adopted children. But she does what she does from that perspective of motherhood.
And so relationship and family is absolutely core to the community of the church.

And that's had a very different feel to it to other places that I've been, which is interesting.
There is a kind of a sisterhood kinship type of thing amongst women.

Women tend to be a bit less hierarchical, I think, tend to be a bit more cooperative in the way that they lead, in the way that they do things.

I think there would be really subtle shifts.
So I've been to a lot of churches that even the decor and the feel of them is quite masculine.
And they might let the women in to do the flowers, but the whole feel of the place is quite blokey.

Used to be part of a Pentecostal church that really was the decor was kind of bachelor pad, sort of neat, but blokes flat kind of thing.

H: Black, white and grey.

C: Yeah, absolutely.
And then somebody changed the chairs and I think they might have gone from dark blue to sort of burgundy. But I mean, that's still kind of quite, quite sort of blokey.

But that is something which I think you see in the whole of society, that quite a lot of spaces are quite blokey. But even the way that women in positions of authority dress like the Chancellor is not likely to turn up at the dispatch box in a yellow frock.

So I think we're very used to defaulting to things that feel quite masculine.

I think it would be interesting if there was a shift towards the feminine.

Some of those things I've been talking about are kind of quite external in some ways and some of them are more about culture.

H: I guess the early church fathers and mothers and it's overwhelmingly fathers, there are some mothers but yeah, a lot of our history, the history of the church and Christianity is quite male dominated.

I think what I love about this image of God as feminine is that it doesn't say that God is not also masculine.

It's collaborative, isn't it?

It's both and it's both.

But also there's non gender specific where there's plenty of things that God's like, this is not about me as masculine or feminine.

This is about me as God.

Let's reflect the God who is, who he is.
Let's be a good reflection of that.
Let's not try and pigeon hole him into one thing or the other.
But let's be a really good collaborative reflection in an image that he has made us, which is his image.
Let's collaborate and do that well.

It's confronting and helpful to be challenged with the question, is God feminine?

C: Yeah, I think we're a long way from that seeping into our Christian church culture.

I still find that if I go to a worship service, I might be going in with some helpful images of God as feminine. But by the time I come out, I need to kind of pick them up again because it sort of disappeared.

And I'm very conscious when I'm with other people that if I pray to God or talk of God as she as well as he, then a lot of people will find that uncomfortable.

H: And distracting.

C: Yes. And I think it's the distracting, which means that I don't tend to do it that much.
But I find it very hard these days to pray just to Father God. It really is in me to want to pray to our mother Father God.
And I kind of do both, partly because if I'm with other people, then I just know it'll freak them out even more if I just talk about Mother God.

H: Yeah, absolutely.
But yeah, it wouldn't freak any of us out to just talk about Father God.
Because that's so deeply ingrained within us and so comfortable for us.

I mean, I think it's unlikely that one podcast or one book is going to, for me, listening to your podcast, and I am not new to the idea of women in leadership.

And that is very comfortable for me of like, why do I believe so strongly that we should have women in leadership and understand the context of women in the Old Testament through a different perspective.

And some of my theology study has been hugely helpful in me processing that and navigating that and looking at like, okay, the way that Jesus dealt with women in the Bible is so utterly radical, and has real implications for us.

But this idea of God is both masculine and feminine, and that changes the way that we view God and we see God and we speak about God and we speak to God.

This has definitely given me a lot of food for thought.

And just beginning a bit of an exploration of like, Lord, show me more of who you are, where before there's been parts of you that have been hidden.
Please unlock that within me and show me more of who you are and help me to lead others to know who you are better.

It's beautiful.

So thank you for recording that podcast.

I think you have obviously been thinking about this for a long time.

And in a, I think it was about 33 minutes, your podcast have done a wonderful summary of the thinking that you've done that has definitely set me on a journey of exploration and discovery and I'm sure will have taken others with me.

So thank you.

C: Thank you.

Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Loved Called Gifted podcast.

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Thank you for listening.