Blog — Women in the Bible

by Anna Grace Glaize

Dawn Hare

Dawn Hare is the General Secretary of the General Commission on the Status and Role of Women in the United Methodist Church. She’s also from Anna Grace’s hometown of Brewton, AL. This interview was conducted on October 8 via Zoom and edited for clarity and length.

AG: So Dawn, could you please tell me a little bit about your role with COSROW and what COSROW does for the Methodist church?

DAWN: Absolutely. Well, and let me just say, the first thing is that people use all kinds of acronyms in the United Methodist Church.

AG (laughing): I know!

DAWN: It’s part of who we are…But what it stands for is the General Commission on the Status and Role of Women. We are one of the 13 agencies of the United Methodist Church. Folks..in our particular area have a passion for ministry...And ours is directed to the equality of women in the United Methodist Church and, by model and example, in the “kin-dom” of God and in the world.

AG: So now our women in the Bible questions...Did you have a favorite woman in the Bible growing up?

DAWN: You know, I’ve thought about this before and you’re gonna be disappointed by my answer. No! And I thought about that hard, and I remember as a child—I mean a little child—the person in the Bible that I most wanted to be like was—

AG: Are you gonna say Jesus?!

DAWN [laughing]: No! I’m not...No, it was Solomon! I remember sitting on a pew in church...and praying, “Dear God, could you give me the gift of wisdom?” I thought wisdom was the ultimate gift when I was growing up, and I just wanted to be like Solomon…Now, what comes around is when you become General Secretary on the General Commission on the Status and Role of Women, and you start studying women in the Bible, and you start studying the feminine aspects of God, and you realize that wisdom—duh! [Wisdom is often personified as a woman in the Bible]...So maybe God was speaking to me as a small child, and I didn’t even know it. But anyway, that’s another story!

AG: That brings us to now. Is there now a biblical woman that you feel, if not your favorite, that you feel close to at the moment? Or you identify with?

DAWN: I think more of the qualities of people than the people. Just like I was drawn to wisdom and it happened to be embodied in Solomon, and Sophia [meaning ‘wisdom’ in Greek]...I tend to be drawn to women who show courage because that’s something I’m always checking about myself. Am I having the courage I need to have in this moment? Or am I backing away? And it’s, you know, the courage of announcing that He is risen, the courage of talking to Jesus at the well. I mean the courage it took to take on the system and say, “We want this land. It was our father’s!” I think it’s not so much the characters as the character of women in the Bible that I’ve been drawn to.

AG: That’s great. So now, maybe you’ve worked through this...but I still encounter it when I read the Bible... Is there a Bible story or passage that just annoys you or that you hate or just gets under your skin? ‘Cause even when I read the commentaries on those and I can try to put it in context, there are still times when I read something, and I just don’t like it. Don’t like it AT. ALL.

DAWN: Yeah, I think I just shared with you the one I don’t like! And that is the ultimate mansplaining. For Christ’s resurrection to be announced by a woman, and then for the men to go forth and take credit for knowing it and claiming it… I think that just continues to be annoying. I heard one time long ago that if we were really living and telling scripture, every Easter morning that there would be a clergywoman or a laywoman or some woman that would get up in the pulpit and would say the words “He is risen.” And I have to think what an incredibly powerful Easter around the world it would be if from every pulpit… if the word that Christ is risen was announced as it was first heard—from the voice of a woman.

AG: So I had a TA...she said that the short answer to “Is the Bible a misogynistic text?” was “No.”... But the slightly longer answer, and the more truthful answer, is “it’s complicated.” So as a modern woman yourself, and as a woman of faith—which I think maybe makes the stakes a little different—how do you navigate reading the Bible as an ancient text...and as a spiritual text?

DAWN: Wow. You know, I think you just have to read it in the spirit of Second City [an improvisational comedy troupe], which is “Yes, And.” And know that yes, there are some parts that are really misogynistic. But those don’t come from Jesus. Those tend to come from, if you just peel some layers off, they tend to come from probably whoever sat down and wrote it down or translated it or the culture of the time...You know, we led a training earlier this week, and a piece of that was implicit bias, and that we all have biases. All of us. Well, that goes for the people who actually wrote the Bible down, too.

AG: Love Second City. Always fun to give them a shout-out! So, finally, what lessons do you hope women today can take from the women in the Bible?

DAWN: Oh, I just think there’s so much richness to learn. To just reexplore things you think you know. You know, there was a saying when I was growing up that every time you opened the Bible and read a passage, you’d find something else or you’d explore something else. That is so much more true when you have a resource like Women in the Bible…I think, especially growing up in the South, sometimes there’s a feeling that you can’t question authority, or you can’t question the way something’s been taught to you. You can’t or a lightning bolt will come and get you. But my God is bigger than that. And it’s a wonderful thing to know that you can read a text, you can read it a different way, you can read it with one set of authorities, you can read it from a different set of authorities, and you can ask God some hard questions and try to seek the answer. Our faith’s strong enough to handle that. So I just think that Women in the Bible is a wonderful resource for the richness it offers us.

Anna Grace Glaize earned her Master of Divinity from Yale Divinity School and her Bachelor of Arts in English-Literature and Philosophy from Auburn University. Her interests include theology and popular culture, true crime podcasts, and food adventures.