Ministers who seek to be more effective in sharing God's Word with women face two types of challenge. First, they must understand, at least in part, the experience of women as women. Second, they must also understand that the women who listen are not simply generic "women." Each woman is an individual who may be a woman and a business executive, or a woman of color, or a single woman living at home and caring for aging parents, or a woman who is divorced and receiving public assistance. She may be a stay-at-home mother with five children. Women are never generic; they are individuals with gender in common but with enormous differences between them. For a preacher, therefore, these differences are as significant as gender in the way each woman will hear the message being preached.

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A third myth is that gender is the only factor that matters. Gender matters, but paying attention to gender does not automatically erase the other social factors that, in turn, impact the ways in which women hear a preacher's voice. As a case in point, suppose you are a young, white, unmarried male pastor of an affluent suburban church. A colleague is ill and has asked you to step in and speak to a MOPS13 group consisting of African American women from an inner-city church in an economically deprived neighborhood. The group includes single mothers receiving public assistance, grandmothers who are primary care givers of young grandchildren, and young married women working night shifts in order to stay home days with their children. Who is your audience? Women. But is gender the only factor you must consider in answering that question? What is the significance of ethnicity? Of economics? Of marital status? Of age? Of your ethnicity? Your economics?

Your marital status? Your age? Gender matters, but we are closer to the truth in almost every instance if in sharing good news from God, we act on the basis that gender is not the only thing that matters. Many times it may be the least relevant factor to be considered.

When researchers set up a study, they must identify and control all the variables they think might influence the results. For example, if a medical school wants to study the interaction of a particular drug with a specific disease, it is not enough simply to study the drug and the disease in a certain number of infected people. A host of other variables can skew the results of the study unless they are taken into consideration: the patient's age; other medications being used; family history; usual diet, sleep, work, and play habits; addictions; and on and on. Any one of these factors (and others) can mislead researchers if ignored and left out of the study. It is the same when we talk about gender differences. We must nuance carefully what we say about women and men in the pew. There are many variables at work in their lives. Often within-group differences are greater than between-group differences. This should caution us about assuming the myths that may lie behind the assertion that men are from Mars and women are from Venus.