I didn t want to acknowledge that my freedom was meaningless if it caused pain to another person. I finally understood that even if I could get this one person to agree with me, there were countless others, both within Seekers and in the wider world, for whom the word God always takes the pronoun he. And so the next week, we wrestled with the concepts that Proctor-Smith had laid out. Non-sexist language was easy to understand. The problem is that our very thought-patterns are gendered, and while we may have no trouble thinking of a mystery or a loom as an it, when we begin to think of teacher or lover or maker, the default position too often is male.
Inclusive language takes a different approach.
Inclusive language adds mother to every father reference, sister to every brother , and women to every men. It says that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is also the God of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, that the people are not synonymous with the men. Inclusive language goes a long way towards healing the wounds caused by making half the human race invisible in worship. It allows us to pay attention to the women in scripture in a new way, and encourages us to remember that women and girls have always been part of the worshipping assembly. But our thinking about the dualism of gender is not symmetrical.