Last week, Time Magazine’s cover story was The New Sheriffs of Wall Street. Interestingly, following the wild west financial gambling of the last couple years, the new sheriffs are women.

This isn’t the first time that someone has noted that “the financial wreckage littering our world is the creation, almost exclusively, of men, not women.” The New York Times wrote about it more than a year ago. And The Washington Post wrote about it. And then I wrote about them writing about it.

And yet, “to this day, each of the large banks, from Citigroup to Goldman Sachs, employs fewer than a handful of women in senior positions, and only 3% of Fortune 500 companies have a woman as CEO.” (The same is probably true of evangelical megachurches.) The point is, it doesn’t matter if they won’t hire us help them make better decisions, though making better decisions would of course seem wise. (Wisdom apparently not being a requirement to be one of the boys.) Because if they can’t be changed from the inside, the new sheriffs are going to see that they’re changed from the outside.

Frankly, it’s what women do. We’re good at finding another way to get things done. At getting around obstacles. And goodness knows we’re good at cleaning up other people’s messes.

A hundred years ago it was said that women “civilized” men. The idea that women counterbalance men certainly appears relevant in the wreckage of The Great Recession. This counterbalancing is equally applicable to church leadership. Churches are also facing financial crisis in this recession, and we’d do well to consider that – much like Wall Street – the financial decisions have primarily been made by men.

As “the sheriffs” noted:

Women are frequently right about unforeseen outcomes, but nobody listens.

When we ask questions or push back we’re seen as “difficult.”

Voicing opinions, suggesting improvements, and catching oversights only reveals our “audacity.”

And yet, it’s an audacity divinely inspired when God appointed men and women to rule over everything on the earth, together (Genesis 1:26, 28). God said it’s not good for man to be alone. World events continue to reveal why that’s true.