The movie Legal Eagles features a scene in which two lawyers (a man and a woman) organize some shipping invoices. One of them put the invoices in piles according to the size of the shipment; the other organized the invoices according to the shipment's destination. They keep redoing each other's stacks to make the division more "logical."

In my experience, that's too typical! What seems logical to women seems illogical to men. What seems to be a natural and effective way of organizing work to a man looks confused and haphazard to a woman.

I've especially noticed that in the church, the differences between men and women sometimes clash and hinder us from fulfilling Christ's work. Only when I began to recognize and appreciate these differences did I see how men and women could, instead, become effective partners in ministry.

What follows are generalizations, I admit. Each of us possesses both masculine and feminine characteristics, and nothing is true for all men or all women. Yet in my ministry, ...