fruit from the secret place

I have something like 75 dahlia plants in my garden this year—the results of several hopeful midwinter tuber orders, plus my own efforts of digging, dividing, storing, replanting, and then overwintering my modest first-year setup. As we cross the threshold into the second half of October, every day that they’re still blooming is a cherished gift; a killing frost could be around any corner and the season will come to an abrupt end.

I’ve delighted in my dahlias these last few months, but to be honest, some of the plants have been a disappointment. They grew lush and leafy, but produced only one or two blooms all summer. In fact, one variety bloomed today for the very first time—and I had to check the tag on the stalk to even remember what I’d planted there. I had forgotten all about it since it blended in so completely with the foliage of the more prolific plants, overshadowed, losing out on the best sunlight to its neighbors.

I feel a bit like that dahlia.

I know that if I could just put out a flower, it would be beautiful—a gift from God to the world through my life. But somehow the conditions are never quite right, and camouflaging myself among the other greenery along the fringe is a lot easier than the amount of growing I’d need to do to reach my buds to the sun. Maybe it’s too late, anyway.

But do you know what happens when those lush leaves succumb to frost?

The invisible fruitfulness is revealed.

Underneath the soil, all summer long, even a flowerless plant (sometimes especially the flowerless plant) is busy replicating itself in the form of more tubers. These can be dug out, divided, stored carefully through the winter, and planted again in the spring—turning a single plant into anywhere from 5 to 20 more just like it. While my summer bouquets fill me with joy, garner lavish praise, and make all the work of growing and tending worthwhile, the real gold is only apparent to those who are willing to get down and mine it out.

It’s funny-looking gold—ugly brown roots, not unlike skinny sweet potatoes or a strange multi-legged sea creature. And it’s back-breaking labor—hours spent hunched over clumps of dirty tubers, looking for viable eyes and trying not to destroy any in the process of dividing them, mind going numb and hands cramping on the shears.

(Perhaps God feels the same when He’s trying to work with the fruit in my life. 🙃)

Suppose I never produce a “flower” with my life, yet still get the delight of growing in the presence of the Lord and abiding in His Temple? Suppose my purpose is to give life and love to my children—and suppose they get to bloom because of it? Perhaps my two daughters, whom I named “Bright and Beautiful” and “Flourishing in God’s Grace,” will get to flourish with bright, beautiful blossoms because I was faithful in the invisible things.

At any moment, a killing frost could turn all my discernible offerings into black slime. What’s left will be the work done in the secret place.

He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the LORD, “He is my refuge and my fortress; My God, in Him I will trust.”

Psalm 91:1-2 NKJV

toward God's heart, part 5

This post is part of a series in which I’m answering a question I’ve gotten a lot lately: “Why have you changed your views on complementarian roles?” For the introduction to this series, click here.

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The final turning point in my rejection of complementarian theology came a little over a year ago, when my sister and I attended the Hebrew Bible Conference at Multnomah University. We listened to some of the foremost Hebrew Bible scholars in the nation, from Dr. David Andrew Teeter of Harvard Divinity School to Dr. Tim Mackie of BibleProject to Dr. Carmen Joy Imes of Biola University. In addition, there were presentations from a dozen or more graduate students—both men and women.

Each talk was attended by an enthusiastic co-ed audience. Afterward, there was usually time for a short Q&A. It didn’t matter if the presenting scholar was a man or a woman: without exception, the room was spellbound, fascinated, thirsty for the revelation of the Scriptures. Men and women asked thoughtful questions of each speaker, whether male or female. Everyone learned. Everyone gained. Everyone was blessed.

It was the first time in my life I have seen the image of God working as it was intended—with both halves fully present and fully involved, neither one looking down on or trying to dominate the other. Each man who listened to a female speaker lost nothing by taking a learner’s posture and eagerly hearing what she would share. In fact, he—and everyone else—was made better for it.

Clearly, there is a more beautiful way available to us.

That’s why I called this series “Toward God’s Heart.” Even if you can make the most sophisticated argument that Paul’s intention with his letters was to limit the actions of women in churches for all times and all places, even if you can make the strongest case for how churches and families need this gender-based hierarchy to function, even if you believe this is best for men and women and children, I don’t know how you can argue that it’s drawing the Church or the world closer to alignment with the heart of God as revealed to us in the Scriptures in any practical way. I don’t know what specific, beautiful fruit you can point to that will back you up.

We know that the divorce rates and domestic abuse rates in Christian families are both roughly the same as they are in non-Christian households, and that, horrifyingly, abused Christian wives are likely to stay in their marriage an average of 3.5 years longer than others. If we were really building better or more stable families overall, I think we’d see the evidence in the numbers.

We also know that, while being involved in a religious community is scientifically associated with health benefits, those benefits don’t extend to women who are involved in religious systems that are set up to disempower them, such as complementarian churches. That is, women in sexist churches remain at the same baseline of health as women who don’t go to church at all, while women in egalitarian congregations actually enjoy the health benefits of being in a religious community.

From where I sit, there are three possible explanations for the alarming lack of good fruit (and abundance of bad) yielded by complementarian theology:

1. God is stupid, and didn’t know what kind of mess He was making when He designed gender hierarchy to be the way churches and marriages operate.

2. God doesn’t actually care, and is fine with women being collateral damage (or at least being forgotten) if it means His design for the sexes stays in place.

3. God loves and treasures all of His image-bearers, male and female, and His true design is for us to love one another in the same way, patriarchy be damned.

The first leaves me wondering who would worship a God who is both sovereign and stupid. The second leaves me wondering why Jesus bothered to rebuke the Pharisees if God is actually fine with valuing rules and regulations above human beings.

The third leaves me grieved that this is not how more of us know our God.

toward God's heart, part 4

This post is part of a series in which I’m answering a question I’ve gotten a lot lately: “Why have you changed your views on complementarian roles?” For the introduction to this series, click here.

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For some reason, my husband and I were talking about childbirth one evening recently. I was telling him about some moms I know who experienced tearing so severe while giving birth that they needed reconstructive surgery months later, and how thankful I am to have only had a first-degree tear with both of my babies—even though that alone was nearly unbearable pain on top of the agony of labor itself.

“Maybe doctors should just do a little relief cut before the baby comes out,” he said.

I nearly burst out laughing with comic disbelief. “They already do that,” I responded. “It’s called an episiotomy, and it’s a barbaric practice invented by some doctor hundreds of years ago that, unfortunately, is still used to this day.”

“Oh,” he said, somewhat sheepishly. “Well, it works in carpentry.”

And that is why we need women in medicine.

What began as noticing the intellectual contradictions of complementarianism, and progressed into questioning the way that doctrine requires the shrinking and weakening of the fierce female image-bearer in order to work, is now a journey of asking one simple question:

What is the good, beautiful fruit of complementarianism, specifically for women?

If complementarian theology is God’s design for marriage and church, then it must be good. And if it is good, then it must be good for women, as well as for men and children and whole congregations.

I’ve written a little before about the responses I’ve gotten when asking this question of complementarians. They point to more stable families, stronger leadership by the husband, better-raised children. And even if all of those were true (which my experience, as well as the data, indicate they are not), there is still no specifically good fruit for women. There is apparent goodness for families; apparent goodness for husbands; apparent goodness for children. You could argue that all of those things indirectly benefit women, but none of those fruits are goodness for women.

Some will say that complementarianism gives women the opportunity to be uniquely protected and cherished by strong men, but both of those things can exist (and flourish, I would argue) outside of a hierarchical relationship. Authority, power, rule—whatever you want to call it, it is completely unnecessary for husbands to have that in order to treasure their wives. Hierarchy between men and women likewise has no bearing on whether women can be safe and supported in the church (except perhaps a negative bearing). There is still no beautiful, specific fruit for women because of complementarian theology.

Did God just forget about women when He designed things to work this way? Or has the Christian church flippantly abandoned women in the ungodly pursuit of power and control?

The fruit I’ve tasted in marriage

I began my story by taking you back to my not-even-20-year-old self, on the cusp of getting married, and terrified.

Already, you may see hints of the fruit that complementarianism has borne in my life. The day we got engaged, my husband-to-be was on cloud nine, immediately calling his grandparents to tell them the news. And I? I wanted to run away and hide.

It wasn’t exactly that I wasn’t excited, but let me put it like this: I was far more scared than excited. Everything I knew about marriage meant that I was signing my life away to a glorified slave-master, and if I was lucky (and very, very respectful), he might love me along the way.

By the grace of God, I now have a marriage that is marked by equality and mutuality, not hierarchy or misuse of power. But when I say that’s by the grace of God, I mean it. It would have been so easy for me, young and naive and strongly believing in the importance of male headship, to fall prey to an abuser. How would I have known the difference between “good” hierarchy and narcissism, manipulation, or abuse? Millions of women don’t, and spend decades reading all the Christian marriage books and praying fervently for the Holy Spirit to show them where they’re messing up so that their marriage can be healed, never realizing that they are not the problem.

I can’t tell you how many times in the first few years of marriage I desperately Google searched, journaled, or prayed, “Why doesn’t my husband love me?” No matter what I did, no matter how good of a wife I tried to be, there was a massive emotional disconnect that bled into every area of our relationship. We didn’t have healthy disagreements; we fought. We didn’t communicate our needs; we berated each other for not doing the right things. We didn’t serve each other joyfully; we acted out of codependency or manipulation instead.

All that time, we were fully bought into the Love & Respect model: If you’re not getting what you want from your husband, you must be being disrespectful. If your wife is driving you crazy, you must not be loving her well enough. Already so young, immature, and insecure, I was constantly trying to smash myself down into a smaller, more submissive and selfless person so that he’d love me, because in my mind everything hinged on our love and respect dynamic. Everything was transactional. We put enormous pressure on ourselves and each other to do things “right” so that we’d be happy—and we just made our marriage miserable.

When we finally threw in the towel on this toxic theology and started setting boundaries, communicating our needs and wants like mature adults, and apologizing when we were genuinely behaving selfishly, marriage stopped being a constant struggle. Funny how that works: When we stopped treating each other like opponents, our marriage was no longer a war. When we started seeing each other as teammates, we became a team.

It’s impossible to overstate how dramatically different my life is now, 10 years into marriage, than it was even five years ago. My husband and I have flourished both separately and together. No longer under constant pressure to be some kind of ideal Christian-husband-leader, Sam has come into his own as the kind of example God made him to be, humbling me often with how measured and circumspect he is when drawing conclusions, with how patient and gentle he is when our daughter is having a tantrum, with how persistent and dedicated he is to the things that are important to him. And I, no longer under constant pressure to be a small-silent-submissive wife whose life revolves like a satellite around her husband, have begun to hear and know and show strength in the voice God gave me for the first time.

All this good fruit I credit in large part to our escape from the deception of complementarianism into the freedom of God’s Edenic design.

The fruit I’ve tasted in church

Complementarian indoctrination starts young. When only men have a voice in church services, little girls notice (just ask my 3-year-old, “Do boys or girls teach at church?”). And I know that it doesn’t matter what you tell a little girl about her value or her role. What she will believe is what you show her. I can tell my daughters all day that God loves them and treasures them, and that they are just as important and valuable as anyone else, but when week after week they see God’s Word given only through men, preaching its contents as if they’re only about men, they will have a hard time believing He wouldn’t value them at least a little more if they were boys. After all, He does His “big” work through and for boys.

I know because I have a little girl (two of them, actually), and because I was a little girl.

We need women in church leadership, shepherding, and Bible teaching for the same reason we need women in medicine: Because men, while they can be highly skilled at all of the above, will always (obviously) come to everything from their perspective as men. That’s how you get Sir Fielding Ould slicing open a woman’s perineal flesh during childbirth in the year 1742.

It’s also how you end up with pastors telling the wives of abusers and sex addicts that “God hates divorce,” instead of “God hates the way your husband has abused and betrayed you.” Or how you get 1 Corinthians 7:3-5 preached at wives to convict them of declining to have sex with their husbands, but not preached at husbands to convict them of coercing their wives into sex. Or how you turn Ephesians 5:22-33, a passage that is all about unity, into a passage about hierarchy.

It’s how you set up 50% of the church to dismiss the voice of the Holy Spirit and to unquestioningly accept everything that’s taught from the pulpit, even if it disproportionately burdens them, blames them, or silences them. Even if it keeps them enslaved when the Spirit of God offers freedom.

“But we have women’s ministry leaders,” they protest. Yes, we have women who are allowed to lead ladies’ Bible studies and host tea. But who is in the room with the elders to advocate for the female half of the congregation? Who is sitting across from the victim who desperately needs to leave her husband? Who is teaching the congregation about the world-shifting work God accomplished through Jochebed, Zipporah, Rahab, Deborah, Abigail—and all the other women in the Bible who rightly said “No!” to male authority and “Yes!” to God’s authority?

Would the person who can tell me what good, beautiful, real fruit the complementarian power structure in church yields specifically for women please stand up?