• What kind of word from God do you think today's woman may be listening for?

• What kind of word from God do you think she might be hearing, regardless of what you are saying?

• What preoccupations does she have that you must break through?

• Does she differ from men in the audience in significant ways?

• If so, what are the implications for your preaching each week?

Caution: Myths Abound

What are little girls made of?

Of sugar and spice,

And everything nice,

That's what little girls are made of.

What are little boys made of?

Of snips and snails,

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And puppy dog tails,

That's what little boys are made of.

If we trust nursery rhymes for the truth about gender, we might arrive at the conclusion that males and females differ in their very essence. There is no overlap between "sugar and spice and everything nice" and "snips and snails and puppy dog tails." But we do not look to nursery rhymes to answer the question of what it means to be a man or a woman.

Yet even without the nursery rhymes, the moment the subject turns to possible differences between men and women, it is necessary to flag the potholes in the road before us. Gender differences provide fertile ground for the stuff of myths. The first gender myth is a two-headed Hydra.8 One head is the tendency to exaggerate the differences between men and women. The other head is the denial of any differences between men and women (beyond physiology). Both lead us away from the truth about gender as God's good gift to humanity. When differences are exaggerated, people are often reduced to sets of roles and are denied their full personhood. When differences are denied, God's purposes in creating humanity as male and female may be thwarted.

It is easy to exaggerate differences. For example, some writers draw up lists of characteristics for men and for women. When the categories in such lists are exaggerated to the point of being mutually exclusive, social scientists call this type-A error or alpha-bias. Type-A error strikes daily in many contexts. For example, on the nightly news a politician exaggerates the difference between the positions of two parties on a bill before Congress. During television commercials, a drug company exaggerates the benefits of its medication over those of competitors in the market. Advertising people constantly look for the real or imagined "edge" they can play up by exaggerating a product's difference from its competitors. Whether the players are politicians, drug manufacturers, or preachers also looking for the "edge" that will make a sermon memorable, a listener must be alert to the exaggeration of differences, simplified to the point of becoming simplistic — and untrue.

Any time a list sets up an extreme comparison, excluding groups of people from one or the other category, type-A error may be present. For example, a list that states that men are cognitive and women are emotional, or that men are active and women are passive is guilty of alpha-bias. Women as well as men may be cognitive, and men as well as women may be emotional. Women as well as men can be active, and men as well as women can be passive.