Let's Not Forget About "Normal"

I attend National Community Church in Washington DC. The church is starting a series entitled "Battle of the Sexes" talking about sex and gender roles. My church is a little unique. They have some tremendously dedicated people working for them, and a commitment to reaching people for God "in the middle of the marketplace." What this looks like in practice is seven services in three locations, all Metro-accessible. Two of the services are on Saturday night at the Church-operated coffee house on Capitol Hill, Ebenezer's ("Coffee with a Cause"). So, I attended tonight's service not sure what to expect. Obviously, I've been thinking a lot about sex and gender roles recently, and I was someone wondering if I might come away a bit upset with something the pastor had to say tonight.

I knew ahead of time from checking the Pastor's latest blog post that the sermon would focus on Genesis 1:27 (copycat ;-) ). In a message designed to set the tone for the coming series, Pastor Mark scoped the issue pretty well. He acknowledge off the bat that there is a continuum when it relates to gender, but that he would be focusing mainly on norms and tendencies. With occasional strange facts from biology and neurology thrown in ("women have 40% more neurons in the corpus callosum than men"), the sermon enumerated a lot of the differences between men and women as a population. It ended with a call to be better men or women after God's own heart. It was a sermon for general consumption, so the statistical outliers like transgendered, hermaphrodites, etc. were ignored. That's okay by me. It was refreshing to be reminded of, and focus on the mean in the male bell curve and female bell curve.

Of course, it does leave me to wonder, will the church ever talk about the "outliers" if not forced to do so by circumstances? I understand it is a tricky thing to talk about, but I'm sure a much more sane conversation could be had in the absence of an immediate conflict. I agree that the church needs to talk about the differences between men and women. We don't talk about that enough, and it does matter. I guess I could say in general, The Church needs to spend more time talking about the issues it talks about least.

If you are interested in hearing the sermon, it should be made available in audio and video form later this week at the church's website.

I learned from taking Abnormal Psych that if you focus too much on abnormalities, everyone seems crazy. Of course, the same can be said of looking only at the statistically normal people. After all, statistically speaking, the average human being has one developed breast and one testicle.