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Strictly speaking, this book is not about women, nor is it written exclusively for women. It is about the church and its mission to the world, with particular attention given to male-female relationships because I believe these relationships need to be mended in order to advance the gospel in the world today.

By “blessing the curse,” I am suggesting that the church needs to live within the framework of Christ’s redemptive work, which has overcome the curse, rather than interpreting the parameters of Genesis 3 (at least when women are concerned) as God’s commandment for the church.

This book was born out of my global work with women for the past twenty years, and so the examples of women reflect my own female world experience. The female perspective needs to be the starting point for this kind of investigation, since the problem of “the blessed” curse, so to speak, is not evident if we do not recognize the deep, ongoing pain of women and the ripples this pain creates for everyone else. Pain rarely goes away if it is not first diagnosed, a process that involves listening in order to identify symptoms and triggers. Only then can its root causes be addressed and mended.

Because this book has been triggered by my ministry to the global Baptist family, both the readership and scholarship is partial, though I hope it can be read and discussed more broadly. As this book has developed, I have come to see it as a map through a vast amount of learning, themes, and discussions that either have been put forward – or need to be – so that the place of women in church, family, and society can be aligned with God’s biblical vision of shalom. This book has been in the making for so long that the books and conversations that have shaped it have become so embedded within me that it is difficult to distinguish what is from me and what I have taken from them. Also, thoughts and conversations have a way of cross-pollinating, and their importance is rarely evident until later in life, when you reflect on them in relation to some new thoughts or authors. Moreover, while it may have followed proper form to reconstruct all these discussions and their various derivations, I felt it would have burdened the text. Whenever possible, I give these sources credit and note where they can be found.

Though this book has been growing with me for a long time, for many years I found it hard to write down anything about this subject, and I kept quiet because I doubted anyone would listen to me. I have come to realize that many women keep quiet, especially those who do not easily fit within society’s set roles. It took me many years to discover my voice in my own circumstances, living as a theologian in a small country with a shyly emerging community of theologians. Looking back, I can see that I have been an extremely slow learner, but small, tangible pieces of this book have been emerging for many years through papers and diary entries. Today, I know that I can be noisy, determined, and unbearable, and sometimes I over-communicate, but I have decided to accept these things as part of who I am on the way to God’s perfection.

I grew up as a Croatian in southern Germany in the 1970s, a mighty place and time for learning about liberation and feminism. I was raised in an ex-pat Baptist church that miraculously did not discriminate against women due to a godly pastor, Drago Šestak.

Growing up, I thought that women’s ministries were unnecessary in church. My mother piously dragged me to such meetings, and I could not relate to the constant whining about the hard life of women. While I had a strong urge for ministry, I never imagined nor wished to end up in women’s ministries. I have now been working as a professor for over thirty years, and I have rarely seen students who target working with women, as I think there is a stigma on women’s ministries among young women students. Working with lepers might have more appeal and be more appreciated! I still remember the looks of confusion and pity from some of my friends when I became the president of Baptist World Alliance (BWA) Women in 2015. Some were brave enough to comment, “Really, you accepted this? What for?” The undertone of the question was, “How desperate you must be!?”

My interest in the role of women in the church became a hot topic during my undergraduate years at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Osijek, Croatia. Despite the institution’s lip service to the equality of men and women in ministry, none of the women in my class preached in church for their homiletics class, even though it was required, whereas all the male students preached. At first, this seemed incidental, since the church could only accommodate a limited number of student preachers in one semester. However, as I continued to express what some might call “male gifts” in many Christian communities, I became aware that – consciously or unconsciously – gender selective forces were at work.

At first, I tried to combat these forces with more learning, assuming that I was not chosen because I was not good enough for the structures to recognize me. I know now this experience is typical for women in so-called “male” professions, for the structures continued to ignore me, and my increasing learning only deepened the abyss. If the structures were threatened by me when I was completing my bachelor’s degree, they were petrified after I completed my doctorate in biblical studies. This path of revelation was difficult and painful.

My master’s thesis, which was a reflection on the work of Antoinette Wire’s Corinthian Women Prophets,^[1] catapulted me into the challenges women face in the church and society, as I tried to make sense of Scripture, interpretation, and church practice, searching for my place in the church. Since that time, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her^[2] has been a constant and valuable companion in the way it opened my eyes to the role of concealed biblical women in the church. In my many years of Bible reading, I had never even noticed some of these female characters. I am glad that Fiorenza’s book is now published in my Croatia, where I hope it is being read.

In 1994, I was elected to the Croatian Baptist Women’s executive board, and four years later, I became its president. This ministry’s connections and relations to global communities through the European Baptist Women’s Union, the Commission on Women’s Concerns of the Protestant Evangelical Council of Croatia, and the World Evangelical Fellowship (WEF) helped me to see the depth of the problem faced by women in church and society.

My primary lens during this time was the violence against women in family contexts. No Place for Abuse by the sociologist Nancy Nason-Clark^[3] was prominent, and I continue to revisit her evaluations of abusive family structures and how they work. I have also profited greatly from a personal friendship with her and also Catherine Kroeger.

My work within World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) was also blessed by the amazing book Gender or Giftedness by Lynn Smith, a Canadian Baptist, which has now been translated into many languages. In 1997, the Commission on Women’s Concerns of the Women’s Evangelical Fellowship (WEF, which later became the WEA) distributed the first printing of this booklet in Abbotsford, Canada, to help identify the place of women in the church. Lynn helped me to see that the church views women from the perspective of the structures of sin – what she calls the “paradigm of the Fall”^[4] as opposed to the “paradigm of Redemption in Christ.” This booklet is a forgotten milestone in WEA’s dealings with women, but its undercurrents can be seen in more recent documents (e.g. the 2010 Cape Town Commitment). Unfortunately, these documents have been gravely challenged (though not referenced directly) by some prominent conservative American evangelicals, who consistently shame and defame Christian women and their ministry across the globe.

I devoted the first decade of the twenty-first century to a serious study of Pauline theology at the London School of Theology. I tried hard to keep away from the subject of women, having been warned, “As a scholar, you will be considered less serious if you deal with women’s issues.” Instead, I dealt with Paul’s global mission strategy in Romans, because I was more interested in the Great Commandment than the issue of women, but I was still drawn to try to understand the undercurrents of Paul’s thinking about women.

This period of study was characterized by many authors who helped to shape Paul in my mind, particularly N. T. Wright, who helped me navigate the immense and diverse understandings of Paul in a paradigm-changing environment. As I learned what Jesus meant for Paul, I began to identify and expose legalistic readings behind every women’s issue in Paul’s writing. For instance, it is impossible to reconcile Paul’s theology of grace with the thought there is a separate way of salvation for women (e.g. through childbearing) or that women have a different head than Christ alone. Texts that seem to suggest otherwise must be understood within the context of the occasion and concrete social setting of Paul’s writing. For Paul, the question is always about how to live out the freedom of the gospel in patriarchal settings and circumstances – that is, how to live in the suffering of the present day (Rom 8:18) in order to influence and change it towards the biblical ideal. I am still learning what Paul’s being “in Christ” means for everyday living in the church and in the world.

During that time, I also learned about the difference between soma (body) and sarks (flesh) in Paul’s theology. Knowing the relationship between these words solved for me the larger theological grid in Pauline theology. For instance, the idea of coming together in Christ in the Eucharist (1 Cor 11) is central to his theology, for in Christ we understand who we are, and we can live out our unity in diversity as the church and also as women and men, different but equal parts who are fuelled by the Spirit of God. This is God’s will for the salvation of the whole world. The body is incomplete and nonfunctional if its parts only function as each one according to its own capacity, instead of functioning together. This concept has been misrepresented and described as “complementarian,” which is misleading and has come to be used for a perspective that blesses hierarchical structures of men ruling over women as God-given. God’s gifting far transcends the biological and hierarchical agenda of such a short-sighted worldview, which will hopefully become evident in this book.

Because I live in a small country that has been torn apart by big interests, I have also been swirled into the problems of global sustainability and have come to believe that our problems are not external (in the systems of the world), but rather internal. Systems rarely matter if there are people with a caring heart inside of them. The opposite is also true: the best system counts for nothing if the people within it are consumed by evil. Any good thing will immediately become corrupt when it is touched by selfish human interest or driven by insignificant goals. All this points to both the hopefulness and tragedy of the equation.

My theoretical learning on this matter finally came together through a course called “How to Change the World” by Michael Roth of the Wesleyan University, which I took in preparation for my global leadership role as the president of the BWA Women. This course revealed research that located women at the core of global change and connected many puzzle pieces, forming a picture of the kingdom of God as lived out in the church as part of the good news for the world. Change is possible – and if you want to change the world, you have to get women involved in more than motherhood! My sporadic interests in global change, missions, biblical research, and women in leadership all came together, disclosing a most amazing course of thought and action. All this made God unthinkably great and exciting – and also made God’s mercy an overwhelmingly beautiful future vision for the glory of the children of God. This vision came as an incredibly sweet word of hope in a dark place.

My recent study focuses on Romans 8, a chapter that conveys an optimism and hope that keeps me going. For the past couple years, I have followed the work of the Consultation on the Status of Women of the UN. My own work as the president of BWA Women globally has underlined what I have learned from professor Duchrow of Heidelberg: the Bible is a script for living a free life in places where the structures of sin enslave, buy, sell, and kill people for profit. From that perspective, there is nothing “free” in a “complementarian” perspective about men and women. Any perspective that functions on the premise, “I am born as your leader, and you are born as my follower,” does not reflect the “freedom of God’s children” that all creation yearns to see. Rather, such a view is strictly opposed to Jesus’s teaching about power, which is that it must grow from below through service, and nobody is entitled to it because of colour or genitalia.

Finally, the greatest contributors to this book are the women and men with whom I worked in the context of my global family of Baptists. Their stories and insights into the Bible have made the theories come alive, sometimes providing a decisive piece of information that helped complete the picture. In Lusaka, for instance, a brother (whose name I did not hear and could not track down), said (roughly quoted), “I am encouraged when I see women come together like this. I see Genesis saying, ‘You, sisters, are the first line of defence against the devil and I am glad you are standing firm in the battle!’ ” This statement prompted further questions about why women are the ones who have to start the change.

It has been a massive undertaking to pull together so many years of learning into a single book that will be read by a diverse and global audience. My hope is that this book will be scholarly enough for theologians, but also readable for the broader public, especially millennials and the generation Y. While I am not at all sure that I have succeeded, I am encouraged by the positive feedback that I have received when I have shyly mentioned this book in the course of my travels to diverse continents.