Guest Dr. Joye Baker of Dallas Theological Seminary finds a mandate for training women in ministry in both the Old and New Testaments. She describes how she invests in women's spiritual growth at DTS and how important both genders are to the other in Christian ministry.

Links and resources mentioned
Dr. Baker's Entrust Equipping Leaders article https://www.entrust4.org/post/training-women-in-ministry-a-biblical-mandate

Dr. Baker's bio and other writing https://www.dts.edu/employee/joye-baker/

Entrust Equipping Women https://www.entrust4.org/equippingwomen

Transcript
| Speaker Name | Start Time | Text
| Todd (intro/outro) | 00;00;03;16 | It's time for another candid conversation on Entrust Equipping Leaders. Today we begin a four part series about equipping women in ministry. We won't get into egalitarian and complimentarian views, but simply about the hows, whys, benefits and cautions of training women in various aspects of Christian ministry. Today, Laurie Lind interviews Dr. Joye Baker of Dallas Theological Seminary and what she calls the biblical mandate for equipping women,
women's roles in Great Commission thing, how women lead and more.
| Laurie Lind | 00;00;40;00 | Well, welcome back to Equipping Christian Leaders. It's our regular podcast from Entrust, and the topic at hand is basically Why Train Women? And that's not meant as a condescending question at all. It's meant to try to explore the concept of equipping women to serve in ministry. So my guest today is a woman who is definitely serving in ministry, Dr. Joy Baker.
| Laurie Lind | 00;01;12;25 | Dr. Baker, welcome to Equipping Christian Leaders. And would you tell us about your kind of your credentials and what it is that you do at Dallas Theological Seminary?
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;01;22;28 | All right. I so appreciate and thank you for this time, Laurie, to be with you.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;01;26;23 | And I came to Dallas Seminary, in 1996, over 25 years ago. As a student, I got my M.S. degree, Masters in Christian Education, and then followed that up with a Doctor of Ministry.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;01;39;04 | Which then led me to join the faculty at Dallas Seminary. And I have been on the faculty for about 15 years. I am considered adjunct faculty and I'm also full time staff with Educational Ministries and Leadership Development departments.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;01;56;01 | So I did a lot of mentoring, advising primarily of our women students, some of our male students. But I meet with a lot of women students. I'm also on the staff of our Spirit Formation Small Groups program that our students are required to be in for two years. And so I mentor some of our women leaders in that program. And then I teach courses.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;02;04;26 | Of our Spirit Formation Small Groups program that our students are required to be in for two years. And so I mentor some of our women leaders in that program.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;02;20;01 | And then I teach courses on equipping women to minister to other women. I teach a masters course on how to lead small groups.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;02;25;21 | And then I teach also with Dr. Sue. Edwards on the Dr. Ministry and Dr. Dr. Educational Ministry courses in the summertime. I particularly teach a course on women and Christian leadership and one on caring for women in pain.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;02;35;22 | And one on caring for women in pain. And then I assist.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;02;38;26 | And then I assist Dr. Edwards in Women in Culture, Contemporary Culture, and then another one on the Role of Women in Ministry, History and Future.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;02;47;09 | So I kind of have my fingers in a number of different aspects of the seminary. And I really enjoy that, but my heartbeat is training and equipping women in ministry.
| Laurie Lind | 00;02;57;00 | Okay, that is quite a list of things you do, and I'm quite intrigued by a couple of those courses or programs that you're part of. What? Let's dove into those in a little bit, but first I'd like to reference the article that you wrote for the Equipping Christian Leaders blog for an interest about training women in ministry, which you called essentially a biblical mandate, which is really interesting to me.
| Laurie Lind | 00;03;21;07 | You said your thoughts immediately went to when asked the question, why train women? Why not train women? So what are some passages in the Bible that sort of inspire that, that thinking to you?
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;03;35;15 | Well, I think the first and foremost one goes all the way back to Genesis. In the first chapter, verse 28, where God creates male and female. And besides being fruitful, multiply, it says they are to rule and reign together and have dominion over the earth.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;03;48;19 | And so from that and this was part of my dissertation that I worked on and women in leadership was that God has called women to be leaders, too. Now, in what context and what roles is is debatable and has different interpretations. But God has called us as women to.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;04;06;18 | Be leaders and whether certainly within our families and then in different aspects within the church. And so if women are going to be used by God, they need to be trained in how to effectively care for and lead other women and partner with their brothers in Christ.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;04;25;06 | And so I think that is key because we are huge influencers in the world, family, community, our work, ministry, and so we need women to be trained and how to do that effectively.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;04;40;03 | That's that's one verse, of course. We go into Titus 2:3-5 where Paul is establishing churches in Crete.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;04;50;21 | He initially specifically says to Titus, when you set up a local churches, not only do you identify older spiritual men to mentor other men, that says you identify older women who will teach and train women.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;05;08;02 | And so that word training is there, and even though the context is primarily talking about the family, that’s the context. Women were primarily living in and God is using them.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;05;17;12 | Not that he didn't use them in other ways too, even in biblical times, but now we know women have a lot of opportunities to be used by God. And so that training would go much farther than just the home.
| Laurie Lind | 00;05;31;15 | Does that word “trained" in Greek have certain nuances or you did mention the context is the family, but what else does that word train have as a meaning?
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;05;44;02 | Well, Paul kind of makes a distinction between teaching and training. So teaching, of course, is God's truth, and training is in life skills, you know, all the different skills that we need in order to live effectively in this world and be used by Christ.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;05;57;16 | So that's how those are the distinctions and it's made there in that verse also.
| Laurie Lind | 00;06;04;15 | And don't you say women need to be trained just as men? So in other words, some of these things don't just come naturally. We need some further understanding of how to do some of these leadership type things.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;06;19;13 | Oh, absolutely. And it's interesting, I do think, because that's in the whole area of mentoring and discipleship.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;06;26;08 | And I would say that way back, particularly in biblical times, a lot of that training did happen in the home. Little girls learn out of their mother.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;06;35;27 | They learned all kinds of training and how to be a good mother, a good wife, how to do things around the home, whatever it might be.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;06;42;18 | The sons were growing up under their fathers. They were learning skills too. Nowadays our family structure is so different then of course, obviously.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;06;51;29 | Sadly, a lot of women come out of very dysfunctional homes and homes where they're not loved well, they're not cared for well. And they're not they're not taught, you know, the opportunities they have, the ways to best engage life and be used by God and so in that sense, and this is where I think the church and the larger church of Christ.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;07;13;16 | The body of Christ, those older men and women need to be passing on to younger men and women. You know, what is the effective way that God wants to use you in the gifts that he's given you.
| Laurie Lind | 00;07;26;23 | In the context of the home, and then also in the context of the local church or or ministry, parish, church, all of those things. Would that all be somehow implied in that Titus two mandate, or are there other scriptures that also bring that forward the necessary outside, beyond the home?
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;07;48;10 | Well, I would say it's implied in that way, and then there are other Scriptures. I think honestly, if we go back to Genesis and we believe women are called to be leaders to than anything you see in Scripture that talks about leadership skills.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;07;51;23 | And then there are other scriptures.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;08;03;20 | So even if they’re in the context, say, for instance, in 1st Peter five, we're talking about elders and being shepherds of the flock they’ve been entrusted to. Well women are entrusted with shepherding other women.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;08;18;27 | And so all of those qualities of leadership that Paul talks about in the New Testament, I think can very easily apply to women. And all of those characteristics are needed by us as well as men to carry out God’s plan for using us in the lives of other people.
| Laurie Lind | 00;08;38;18 | You said at one point in your article that you said it became clear to me that women have great potential to contribute in significant ways to God's mission to reach the world for Christ. Great statement. Do you see some certain ways in which women are uniquely called to serve in great commission things?
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;08;58;22 | Well, I particularly think they're called to reach other women in the world. I think there's unique ways we've been designed by God and needs that we have the other women can best mate. It doesn't mean that as women we can't grow under the leadership and teaching of men. But I think that is particularly a call that we have.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;09;17;15 | That's why I call, you know, the tide as a mandate. I mean, this is the clear responsibility that women have to pour into the lives of other women that, like I say, they can also learn from men that.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;09;30;21 | There are certain needs and ways in which we can best equip one another as females so that particularly.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;09;38;21 | But then I think to just I think women have been designed very uniquely by God. And so as they partner with brothers in Christ they bring something often different, a different perspective, a different insight into the great commission that I think can be very valuable the same way within a church ministry.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;09;57;21 | I think your healthiest churches have women on their staff that are working alongside brothers in Christ to really best…kind of like a family.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;10;06;29 | I remember one time, I don't know if you are familiar with Vicki Kraft. She was a pioneer in women’s ministry. She’s with the Lord now.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;10;18;16 | She was a grad from DTS, and one of the first women who were on staff in a paid position in a church.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;10;27;12 | And she says a church without a women’s minister is like a family, without a home, without a mother. And that that just like a family ideally needs a mother and a father. I know there's unique circumstances there that we don't want to dismiss for sure.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;10;49;19 | But a church is the family of God. It's a local body of believers. And so there are places and ways in which women contribute uniquely that I think make for a healthier church, will make for a healthier body of Christ as we equip women to be able to use their gifts.
| Laurie Lind | 00;11;07;29 | And Dallas, tell us more about these courses that you you're involved in a course that's about equipping women where you teach. Of course. Tell us, what is that all about? What happens in that course?
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;11;19;01 | Well, on the master's level, and I teach this course with Dr. Sue Edwards, we teach a course on effective ministry with women. So that’s all different areas of needs of women and how to most effectively meet this needs and minister to them.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;11;35;12 | So that course covers many, many different topics. On how women learn, how they lead, how they through conflict, how they are to work alongside of men, small group ministry, leading Bible studies.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;11;53;07 | Just quite a bit of different topics that we go over in that course. I assist Dr. Edwards in a course called Women Teaching Women, and that’s patterned after our preaching courses, which our women can take the preaching courses, particularly if they are in our Master of Theology, but we have a lot of male students.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;12;10;18 | Women who are in our master's program also need to know how to teach the Bible because they’re going to be teaching it.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;12;16;26 | So that's a course on how to read and interpret the Scripture and put it into messages where they will be able to teach because they're going to be asked to teach God's word when they leave Dallas Seminary.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;12;29;29 | So those classes particularly and then of course, on the doctoral level I do teach a course on women and Christian leadership. So that's a whole course on how women lead and how to effectively do that. And then I also teach one on caring for women in pain.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;12;46;26 | And that course is about what all the emotional issues that women face and how can we be equipped as lay leaders. We're not professional counselors, but there is a lot of ways in which God uses women to counsel other women. And how can we best do that even if we don't have that advanced training in mind?
| Laurie Lind | 00;13;04;21 | That's very practical. The course you mentioned just previous to that, how women lead is interesting to me. What are some elements of that course? In other words, how do you see how do women lead?
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;13;19;23 | Well, I tell you, in my dissertation work, because my dissertation was based on a survey I sent out to a thousand women alumni from vets asking them what are their leadership challenges and how can we best equip our women who are, you know, training at DTS.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;13;36;24 | And so part of my research was looking into the different ways that meant and women lead because there’s a lot of research out there, both secular and in the Christian world.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;13;47;00 | That that God has designed women differently. And and now when I say that all women are the same, not all men are the same. So I don't want to make that generality at all. But a lot of a lot of medical research now has shown that our brains are designed differently, that God designed our brains differently.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;14;06;21 | As women and men, and that women as leaders, they tend to be very collaborative, and they tend to be very precious, or they like to discuss things and talk about thing.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;14;19;13 | Whereas, say, in contrast to men, they're very goal oriented, very task, and women are extremely relational. Relationships are very important.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;14;26;06 | I'm not saying men are not relational, but it's a very high priority for a lot of women. And so when you are in leadership, you will often see women wanting to connect with other women and build those relationships in the context of their leadership.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;14;39;05 | Relationships in the context of their leadership. So it's going to become more than just a task that we're all doing together, but also being sensitive to that, the value that women have of relating with other women, if that makes sense.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;14;56;05 | So those are a few of the different ways, although obviously we have some women that are very task oriented. We have some men that are very relational. So God is very creative in that way.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;15;06;07 | But if you look at women as a whole, I sometimes give the example. If you went to a big conference that was all women, and then you went to a big conference that was all men, you would find that those would be designed somewhat differently if you were in a big group, you know, you're going to have uniquely different women in those two audiences and uniquely different men.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;15;29;26 | So that's that's why we want to talk about that. And so I feel like God has designed us of men and women to complement each other, you know, to really to fill in the gaps in the ways. And that's why I think God design is-
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;15;44;25 | For us to partner together to best effectively and most effectively, you know, fulfill the great commission and impact this world for Christ.
| Laurie Lind | 00;15;54;18 | So the courses you're teaching, those you've described, are they coed classes?
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;16;01;26 | My small groups course is, our Effective Ministry to Women course is also open to men.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;16;06;25 | And we've had a few take it not too many but we have a few that know that they're going to work with women a lot, and they want to learn about them.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;16;17;16 | Our women teaching women course has been just for women because there’s plenty of option and different classes for men to take.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;16;23;05 | And then on the on the doctoral level those are primarily for women, mainly because we have other leadership courses that suit the men and equip the men.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;16;35;05 | You know, more specifically and my caring for women and paying class is a very personal class where it’s not just learning about how to care for women.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;16;45;21 | But they also have to look at their own stories and how God has worked in their lives and the pain that God has allowed them to experience and how He wants to heal and transform and use that as a gift of hope to other women. And so I've been pretty careful.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;17;04;12 | Feel like there needs to be one where we're just women because there are certain conversations that are better and more appropriate with the same sex, same gender.
| Laurie Lind | 00;17;14;29 | When you have a classroom, that's all women or a coed classroom. What dynamic differences do you notice, if any?
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;17;25;28 | Yeah, there are some. It's interesting because obviously our women at the seminary are in a lot of classes with our men.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;17;31;15 | Primarily they are. And women tend not all women, but when they get in a coed group, they tend to be quieter. And sometimes it's because the men are sort of, you know, kind of taking over the conversation at times. But when you get them in a group, that's all women, they're all open and much freer to talk and interact.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;17;54;15 | So I we see a very big difference because we have the women, we, you know, we teach some classes that are coed. We'll have the same women in an all female class totally different dynamic. They're all talking, they're all entered, you know, engaging. And then at times we’re able to enter into some conversations and topics that are really more appropriate in a same sex conversation, particularly in the area of sexuality.
| Laurie Lind | 00;18;27;21 | In interest. We have a whole branch that's women equipping women in ministry. And often those modules are all just women. And some of them, though, have become coed. And then we do just men with men as well. And the women have noticed it's the dynamic just changes when it's a mixed group. That's how the women talk or how much they share from their hearts.
| Laurie Lind | 00;18;51;16 | There's a little bit of holding back then when it's just all the women together.
| Dr. Joye Baker | 00;18;56;21 | And I think the men hold back. I think there's yeah, in fact, they may hold back more when there’s women around and they still have a hard time when they're just men. They're just because it's hard for men sometimes to be open and transparent. And not all men, but a lot of women. Men. And so I think when women are present because, you know, they're very sensitive to coming across as having it together, being strong and those kinds of things. So I think it benefits both sides.
| Laurie Lind | 00;19;24;19 | We'll end on that interesting thought with Dr. Joye Baker from Dallas Theological Seminary about groups having quite a different dynamic when they are of one gender or mixed gender groups. What's been your experience with that? We'll visit with Dr. Baker again next time. Thank you so much for joining me. Laurie Lind, on Entrust Equipping Leaders.
| Todd (intro/outro) | 00;19;49;08 | On our next episode, Dr. Baker will describe mentoring and training women in Russia, a very patriarchal church culture, helping pastors see the value of equipping women to serve with them, not in opposition to them in the context of the local church. Thank you for listening to Entrust Equipping Leaders. Please take a moment to subscribe to this podcast. Share it with someone else who might find it helpful.
| Todd (intro/outro) | 00;20;14;16 | And finally, we'd love for you to give us a review. We pray this podcast finds its way to people like you leaders, trainers of leaders, growing disciples of Christ who desire to equip next generations of leaders in the local church.