| In those Lutheran elementary schools in which we anticipate that the faculty will consist of both men and women, we generally have male principals if the office involves responsibility for supervision and direction. We also have many service groups and organizations especially for women. These groups regularly work cooperatively with other organizations of the church, either by providing services for them or working under their directions. The leaders of these groups work with pastoral advisors and other men, both helping them and receiving help from them. Such groups regularly hire both men and women to perform various services for the group. Your child-care program seems to fall between these two examples. It is not specifically a women's organization, but it was set up with the anticipation that its core staff would consist of women. There is certainly no reason the day-care should not work cooperatively with the pastor and other workers of the congregation. If it runs under a separate budget, it certainly can enter business arrangements to obtain the goods and services it needs. If a man "off the street" wants to be hired in what amounts to a secular employment arrangement, it may not even be legally possible to discriminate against him. This is a legal question to be investigated. We do not have to change the nature of one of our organizations because men want to participate. For example, we do not change the nature of women's society meetings because there are some occasions when husbands participate incidentally. If some specific situations arise which some might think are "a little sticky," the best approach is to have all the parties sit down, probably with the pastor, since he has overall responsibility for the congregation, and discuss how this situation fits in with our principles and with what we intend the group to be. If the group has been set up to be a "women's group" and a man wants to be involved, the need to accommodate rests on him, not on the group.
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