“Girls can’t be drummers.”  My 3-year-old daughter.

“I had no idea I could be a youth pastor.”  A female high school student.

These two statements have had a profound impact on my pursuit of gender equality.  Let me start with my daughter.

She and I love to watch music videos together and one morning, we were watching a band with a girl drummer.  With the certainty of a toddler, she uttered the statement above that broke my heart a little bit.

She wasn’t sad; she wasn’t feeling excluded.  This was just the simple reality for her because she had never seen a woman drummer before.  Of course, girls can’t be drummers!

The situation was remarkably similar for that female high school student.   Every winter, we hosted a winter retreat for middle school and high school students.  Every year, we invited a local pastor or youth pastor to be our speaker for the weekend.  And every year, that pastor was a man.

I realized what we had been unintentionally communicating to our students by this choice: girls can’t be pastors.  So I decided it was time to invite a female pastor to be our speaker.