My husband and I first came upon The Bridge on New Year's Day, 2006. Within a few months we knew it was a faith community we were meant to sink our hearts into.

At that time The Bridge was meeting at the Missisissippi Ballroom in north Portland. The space was basically one big room, like a dance hall, and it was rented for a few hours each Sunday. Chairs had to be hauled in every week. Everything had to be tidied up, and there was absolutely no creative space for kids.

But it worked, The Bridge, a community filled with creative, can-do people, made it work.

Alas, we were soon told that we worshipped Jesus too loud and would have to move on. We were given two weeks notice. When Deborah Loyd, one of the founding pastors, made this announcement, there was a resounding chorus of whooping and yelping. Apparently, creative can-do types like challenges.

A small church on the north/northeast boundary of the city were willing to rent to us. They had outgrown their building and were meeting elsewhere. And so, since the summer of 2007 we have been making do in a rented church for four hours each Sunday. We have been so grateful for the Sunday school space where our kids have been able to have Bridge Kids. We are especially thankful for the kitchen space which has allowed Food Church to flourish and be a weekly blessing to many households in the area. Each week there are dozens of people who do not attend The Bridge, but who happily line up at 1pm to get free groceries. It really has been a great space that allows us to do this.

But four hours a week is kind of stifling. We need a place to spread our wings a bit and fly a bit higher in serving each other and especially the community around us.

It is an interesting dilemma, a small church with small pockets but a big heart. And, I must remind myself, a Big God.

The Bridge has provided spiritual shelter for many displaced people for over eleven years. It has been a true post-modern faith community that set aside beliefism and scripturizing in favor of radical acceptance and scandalous grace. Indeed, The Bridge is so much the church of "come as you really are" that there are rumors around the city that we are too loose. Too rowdy. Too unstructured.

These rumors are somewhat deserved. But in all of that we are also known for a transparency and honesty that is both startling as it is refreshing. There is no such thing as putting on a Sunday face at The Bridge. Who you are on Monday is who we want to know on Sunday, and every other day of the week. This insistence with authenticity is sometimes misinterpreted as being loose with the gospel. I would say it's the opposite. Jesus caused more than one uproar with his determination to connect to people right where they were. No expectations...

Paul Young of The Shack fame, said this:

When you live without expectations everything becomes a gift and every moment an adventure.

Totally. I wonder if part of the Put-on-your-Sunday-face thing is the tyranny of expectations within ourselves (and others?) to be a certain way...I don't know...but what I do know is that The Bridge is the first faith community in my entire life where I can be my broken, effed-up messed up self and still be loved without an expectation that I must change.

So we need a home, a place where we can experience the collective beauty of acceptance and celebration of one another amidst the Spirit of Jesus, and also where we can Be the Love of Jesus for others around the city. For a church with a small bank account, this is a big dream. I have no expectations of how it will happen. Or when. I'll leave that to God. We'll do the possible - looking around, advertising, save up every little bit of money that we can, fundraise, etc... and trust our Father in heaven to do for us what we can't do for ourselves. It is for sure an adventure of the best kind: Shared.

Who are these elders?

The elders are an independant group eminent global leaders brought together by South Africa's Nelson Mandela. Members of this group include Desmond Tutu, Kafin Anan, Aung San Suu Kye, and our very own former President Jimmy Carter.

A recent article featured at The Elders website by Mr Carter has him stating, "The words of God do not justify cruelty to women."

This statement was made in their most recent initiative:

Religious values and teachings, along with traditional customs, have provided comfort to hundreds of millions of people, stability for societies and have been a major force for good in our world and in our history.Sadly, they have also been used throughout the centuries to justify and entrench inequality and discrimination against women and girls. These teachings and practices have been abused by men to give them power over the female members of their families and women across their communities.

The initiative also convered the issues of violence, property rights, financial power, and other critical areas for women and girls around the world, particularly in developing countries. But it had a special emphasis with it's plea to religious traditions around the world to end discrimination and cruelty to women.

At first glance this might sound less urgent than sex trafficking. Women not being allowed to lead as pastors or seen as subserviant to their husbands is surely less of a social crisis than women forced into prostitution. And yet, it is not that far apart.

Today in America, a so-called superpower among the nations of the earth, there still exists with very little resistance a disparity of equity among the genders in the very place that is meant to be the most level playing field around - the church.

There are many women who suffer quietly with a sense of disquietude as they believe that they are meant to serve their men and no more. It is one thing for a woman to happily choose to do this for she finds great satisfaction in doing so. It is entirely another when that woman has been theologically conditioned to believe that it is God's design for her to be subserviant with men and not stand shoulder to shoulder among them in matters of civic, spiritual or domestic leadership.

I met a woman a few months ago who told me that she and her family were part of a church that taught it's members that God created women to be helpers for men. That's why women exist. This created an atmosphere of devaluing of this woman's personhood. She began to acutely feel the tension between what she had been taught as God's divine order, and what her soul knew was happening: she was suffocating. All in the name of Jesus, she was slowly being strangled and felt certain that if she did not escape the grip of it would break her neck.

Her family finally exited and she is recovering. Her marriage is recovering. There is a new liberation in her outlook about herself and her world. She no longer accepts that the word of God promotes unjust relationships between the sexes just because of one chromosome.

There are many invisible women suffering quietly as this woman was. When theology cages a person in, when there is a belief about one's limitability rooted in one's concept of God, then there will exist a breeding ground for abuse and exploitation.

The Elders, in my opinion, are issueing a prophetic-like call to repentance to the leaders of the communities of God-followers around the globe. The hour has become late, and even in the wealthiest of nations and the most affluent and educated of religious institutions, there remains firmly entrenched the idea that men lead, women follow. It's our role, the perpetual role of women eveyrwhere to be happy helpers to our manly men.

What do you think? Is it overstated that women in Christian traditions are treated less than just? Have you experienced injustice because of your gender? Or do you see it differently? What have been the experiences that have shaped your theology about the genders?