Today we're pleased to share with you an audio essay written and read by Jen Oshman, entitled

Ten Reasons It's Good to Be a Girl.

Jen Oshman's new book is Cultural Counterfeits, Confronting Five Empty Promises of Our Age and How We Were Made for So Much More.

Ten Reasons Why It's good to be a girl by Jen Oshman.

When I looked around my church one recent Sunday,

I saw what the vast majority of churches bear witness to every week.

More women than men.

Actually, the Christian church has always been majority female. It's ironic because the secular world frames Christianity as sexist, when in fact,

Jesus and his church have always been unapologetically pro-female. The evangelical Protestant church in the United States is currently

55% female and 45% male. When I tell my friends these statistics and historical realities,

they are always shocked. There is a gnawing, often unspoken idea that boys have it better than girls. Granted, when it comes to

outward beauty and ability, hooking up abortion, gender and sexuality, and marriage and motherhood,

women and girls do face a unique set of cultural circumstances that our brothers do not face.

These disparities are not imagined. However, the inherent

dignity, the intrinsic value, and the worth of a woman are not less than a man's. We are wonderfully

made. Psalm 139. This is no attempt to trumpet girl power or to deny the immeasurable goodness of our brothers.

This is a heralding of what's true.

Girlhood is good.

This truth is worth examining and expressing because second wave feminism has declared that in order to be equal to men, women have to be the same as men.

Rather than rejoicing over the uniqueness of women, the male body and male roles were normed. That was a deadly miscalculation.

We in the church should be the loudest voice in our world to rehearse all the ways it's good to be a

girl. We know the God who made us,

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