it is not good for man to be alone

If you have been reading along these past couple of months, you know I have been wrestling with a doctrine that has thus far governed most of my life in some way: the doctrine of complementarianism (defined here, if you need a refresher). This struggle is coming to a head now as my church considers a new pastoral candidate who is, to put it plainly, a very hardcore complementarian. Here’s his complete “statement of belief” as it regards the roles of men and women:

I believe God has created men and women as equal in the image of God, thus they are equal of value and worth to God. Men and women also have equal access to the spiritual blessings found in Christ and are of equal value to the church. God, in creation, has designed men and women to fill and serve in distinct roles in the home and the church. Women are designed and ordained by God to follow and submit to the leadership of qualified men in the church, and her husband in the home as a willing helper. Men are designed and ordained by God to take on a leadership role in their family, being called as the head of their household to provide, protect, and lead their family. God has also called certain, qualified men to lead churches in the office of pastor/elder. God has reserved the office and function of pastors/elders to only men. The fall of humanity in sin introduced distortion to these God-given roles, as women became inclined to usurp male authority, and men abused their authority in leadership. Yet, through the redemption found in Christ, men should lead churches and their families with selfless, Christlike care and women should joyfully submit to the God-given authority in their home and the church, as both men and women seek to live under the supreme authority of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Ten years ago, this statement would not have raised a single red flag for me. I’d have agreed with every word of it and celebrated that our church was gaining someone who was clearly taking God’s commands seriously. I was ready and willing to be that “joyfully submissive” woman because that’s what I believed would make God happy—never stopping to question the logic, to test the facts, or to examine the fruit.

But when you have actually been forced to eat some of the fruit of hardcore complementarianism like this, as I since have, you do not soon forget the way your stomach roiled from its rot.

The taste of that rot is what initially sent me into the last half-decade of study—but it is no longer the only red flag I see. Yes, complementarianism’s produce has proved putrid in my life and in the lives of millions of other women (and men) left in its wake, but beyond that alone, I’ve found that this doctrine also crumbles when measured against the big picture of God’s Word or the good news of the Gospel.

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Our pastoral candidate’s above statement includes the following sentence: “God, in creation, has designed men and women to fill and serve in distinct roles in the home and the church.” But this statement cannot be corroborated by the creation accounts of Genesis 1 & 2, and in fact, Genesis indicates the exact opposite. Men and women are very clearly designed in creation as equals and co-rulers over Creation, and given the exact same vision to carry out:

Then God said, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.” So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Genesis 1:26-28

To get anything other than total equality of value, role, and design out of this passage, you must 1) read Genesis through the lens of Paul (which is a faulty hermeneutic—Paul was informed by Genesis, but Genesis was not informed by Paul) or 2) assume that Paul’s theology fundamentally contradicts the theology laid out in Genesis (which would throw into question the cohesion and inerrancy of the Bible). The only difference between the two created beings that Genesis offers is that one is male and one is female. All other perceived distinctions are inferences we make on the text through the lens of how we have interpreted later parts of the Bible or through the lens of our particular circumstances and culture.

As far as Genesis is concerned, all humans are designed to hold an identical role and fulfill an identical purpose: to image God, rule Creation, and multiply on the earth.

Could you say that they do so in different ways, because one is a male and one is a female? Of course—that’s why there are two of them, so that each can capture uniquely the male and female characteristics of God as they rule over and carry out His vision for Creation—together a complete picture. But these unique attributes do not inevitably lead to a difference or distinction in “roles” at home or in the church. The role is the same for them both: to image God.

It’s long been a flaw in our understanding of the sexes, I believe, to think of them as opposites. We are not opposites, we are counterparts. We aren’t made to oppose each other, but to correspond to one another. Therefore, it’s not necessary to put one in the place of perpetual leader and the other in the place of designated follower; the real vision is that of Ephesians 5:21: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.”

Notice what God said when He decided to create the woman:

Then the LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper corresponding to him.”

Genesis 2:18 CSB

Much has been made of that word, “helper.” Whole books have been written using it to prove that women are “designed” (as the above complementarian statement claims) to follow and submit to male leadership. But we know Hebrew interpretation and translation better than this! A faithful understanding of the Hebrew word ezer recognizes that this term is used elsewhere in the Bible in two ways:

1. To describe military powers who sweep in as allies to help God’s people

2. To describe God Himself who intervenes to rescue His people in their time of need

Far from putting women into a position of divinely designed subjugation, this description elevates women to the role of godlike deliverer—one who is uniquely empowered to stand as an ally with those in need. And this isn’t about making dinner for your hardworking husband. When God says “It is not good for man to be alone,” He isn’t saying “Men are helpless and need wives”—He actually doesn’t even use the term for a man, but the term for mankind. It is not good for mankind to try to operate without the corresponding alliance of womankind, or for womankind to operate without the corresponding alliance of mankind.

Paul agrees:

However, in the Lord, neither is woman independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. For as the woman originates from the man, so also the man has his birth through the woman; and all things originate from God.

1 Corinthians 11:11-12

We need each other. Only together can we represent God appropriately. And yet the leadership structure of whole churches and denominations is built on a requirement of men operating without the corresponding alliance of women.

No wonder the fruit of this doctrine is not good.

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Another portion from this complementarian statement of belief that catches my attention is as follows: “The fall of humanity in sin introduced distortion to these God-given roles, as women became inclined to usurp male authority, and men abused their authority in leadership.” While I believe the intent with this statement is to introduce a better way through Christ, I can’t help but ask: Why are we, His Church, basing our doctrine on a reaction to the Fall rather than on the proactive building of the Kingdom?

The verse he’s referring to is Genesis 3:16:

To the woman He said,

“I will greatly multiply
Your pain in childbirth,
In pain you shall deliver children;
Yet your desire will be for your husband,
And he shall rule over you.”

In the deeply complementarian circles I come from, this verse was treated as a condemnation of women and a mandate for men. Something like, “Man, keep your woman in her place, or she will destroy you.” If you didn’t grow up in this kind of church culture (or if you did, but you’re not female), try to imagine for a moment what it would be like to have this verse spoken as truth against you. It breaks my heart to think of all the women who still, subconsciously, believe themselves to be innately dangerous and in need of pressing down to preserve the pride and position of men.

In my view, this verse is actually one of the most clarifying anti-complementarian passages in all of Scripture. It captures the new reality for women after sin distorts the scene, in which the ones who were supposed to co-rule Creation as equal counterparts with men become that which is ruled over instead. It’s not that men began to abuse their God-given authority, as the above statement claims; it’s that men began to claim rule and authority over women that God did not give them, and Woman would be left with an unmet longing for the proper position of dignity and equality she once held at Man’s side—a longing she would learn to weaponize against him.

But instead of setting their eyes on the Edenic vision and striving to replicate it, the complementarian church seems bent on reacting to the reality of the Fall—therefore, inadvertently, upholding it.

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The question I’d most like hardcore complementarians to answer is, what is the Good News for women?

When Jesus came, He opened His ministry with a quote from Isaiah:

“The Spirit of the LORD is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor.
He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are oppressed,
To proclaim the favorable year of the LORD.”

And He closed the book, gave it back to the attendant and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He began saying to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Luke 4:18-21

The “favorable year of the Lord,” or the “Year of Jubilee” as it was known in the Torah, is detailed in Leviticus 25. It came about after seven sets of seven years—every fiftieth year—and was marked by a complete rest for the land and its people, as well as a release of all debts and slaves. After 49 years of labor and toil, buying and selling, enslavement and indebtedness, God ordained a time for everything to be reset and made right once more.

You are to consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim freedom in the land for all its inhabitants. It will be your Jubilee, when each of you is to return to his property and each of you to his clan.

Leviticus 25:10

Jesus said that He came to bring the Jubilee. He came to proclaim freedom. He came to bring rest. He came to usher in the Kingdom.

And not just for heads of household, or for rulers, or for Pharisees, or for men. It was for everyone: Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female. Even those least valued or respected in society were invited to claim an equal share in this Good News. At long last, the Anointed One had come to reverse the effects of the Fall for good, to defeat the power of sin and death, and to make it possible for all humankind to share again in the vision of the Kingdom!

So why, oh why, are we trying so hard to keep this Christ-won reality from being true in our churches?

Why do we refuse to live fully by the truth that “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28)?

Why would the freedom proclaimed by Jesus in Luke 4 extend to everyone except women? Why would women be the only ones required to stay in the same position the Fall had left them in? Why wouldn’t the Good News be good for everyone?

I believe it is. And I believe that trying to make complementarianism work within the framework of the true Gospel demands that we bend ourselves into theological pretzels that God does not endorse. I’m not throwing out Paul; I’m asking that we place Paul into the larger context of the Scriptures he knew, loved, and believed. I think he would be horrified by where so many churches have landed on this issue, and by how little headway has been made in the last 2,000 years.

It’s time to proclaim freedom in the land for all its inhabitants, women included. Ultimately, whether in families or in churches or in public spaces, the fact remains: it is not good for man to be alone.

what if you're wrong?

This is one of my favorite questions to ask myself. I’d probably ask it of others, too, if it didn’t sound quite so confrontational—that’s not the way I intend it, but we all hold our beliefs rather personally and it can be hard not to go directly on the defensive when they feel threatened or questioned.

Today, I’m examining a belief I held tightly for the first 20, maybe 24 years of my life—and have held a bit more loosely for the last half-decade or so, as real-life experiences and extensive study have required me to do so. Here it is:

Men and women have different but complementary roles and responsibilities in marriage, family life, and religious leadership.

This is the official Wikipedia definition of the term “complementarianism,” which is Christianese for patriarchalism. In complementarian theology, a selection of Pauline passages and Genesis 1-3 are used to justify the idea that men and women are equal, but women are both naturally created and divinely called to subjugate themselves to men, and men are both naturally created and divinely called to exercise authority over women. Some “softer” complementarians will say that they do not believe women in general must submit to men in general—only a wife to her husband—but that distinction is difficult to support practically, since the same will typically say that within the context of church, women as a group are still expected to submit to the general male leadership of the church, and under no circumstances should a woman be allowed to hold a position of authority over the men in the church.

In any case, complementarianism is the doctrine of gender roles I was taught from a young age all the way through my time in Bible school. It’s about then, suddenly armed with a far broader understanding of God’s Word than I’d ever had before, that this doctrine began to not sit well with me, but every time I was tempted to consider other views I got scared. What if they’re wrong?

It’s been a decade since then. I have more life experience, more church experience, and more importantly, a lot more Bible studying experience now. And slowly, the question bugging me has shifted from “What if they’re wrong?” to “What if I’m wrong?”

What if complementarian theology is wrong?

I’m not a historian, a Greek language scholar, or a PhD in Paul’s epistles. Plenty of incredible people are, and they have put a lot of work into this debate. Paul and Gender by Westfall, The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Barr, and On Purpose by Coleman are all good places to find Biblically-serious treatment of the topic if you are looking for further study.

I’m more interested, for the moment, in asking the uncomfortable questions that may help us examine the quality of the fruit this doctrine has been producing over time.

Let’s consider. If complementarian theology is right, then some of our biggest concerns for the Body of Christ should be:

• Ensuring that those who lead in the church are physically and spiritually qualified to do so.

• Ensuring that men never hear the Word of God preached or taught by a woman.

• Encouraging women to submit themselves to the authority of their husbands and the church.

• Encouraging and equipping men to lead their wives and the church.

If, on the other hand, Scripture favors equality between men and women as image bearers of God and co-rulers over Creation (as Genesis 1-2 and Galatians 3:28 would suggest), then the biggest concerns for the Body of Christ should be:

• Ensuring that those who lead in the church are spiritually qualified to do so.

• Encouraging all believers to submit to God.

• Equipping all believers to know, understand, and share the Word of God.

• Empowering families to reflect the selflessness of Christ in every role.

In the complementarian vision for the Church, men are up front, visible, leading the way for everyone else to follow Christ. Women are behind them, following and making sure the children don’t get left behind. Men who don’t enjoy the role of leader or don’t feel equipped to spiritually direct their homes are required to do it anyway, or at least made to feel sinful for not doing it; women who are gifted in leadership and spiritual shepherding are required to set those gifts aside, or at least relegate them to the nursery and the Pre-K class. What’s taught from the pulpit on Sunday mornings and in co-ed Bible studies throughout the week is reflective of what the male leadership of the church considers important. Topics deemed to be mostly of concern to women are left to the discretion of women-only Bible studies (although these, too, are subject to veto by the board of elders). In this way, the very structure of the church is designed to prevent anyone from questioning or reconsidering its rightness.

But is this the Messianic vision for the Church?

Jesus’s ministry on earth began with a declaration that the Kingdom of Heaven had drawn near. That kingdom began in a paradise called Eden, but humans lost access to its threshold when they disobeyed God’s command—and part of that tragedy was a destruction of the oneness between male and female (see Genesis 3:16). The Kingdom vision of man and woman as two halves of God’s image, ruling together over His Creation, was lost to the suffocating grasp of sin and death, leaving gender hierarchy in its place.

But if Jesus’s death and resurrection defeated sin and death, and if following Him means joining Him in taking back every lost inch of territory for the Kingdom of Heaven, why would we choose to remain in our fallen and divided state as men and women? How can the Church, which is Christ’s Body, animate His heart for the New Creation when we are still clinging so hard to the old?

What if, in the Messianic vision for the Church, men and women are side-by-side, each using their gifts to build up the others, with all eyes set on the selfless example of Christ? There are men teaching and preaching and leading, but there are also men serving invisibly behind the scenes to protect the vulnerable and care for the children; there are women faithfully raising their families and staffing the nursery, but there are also women speaking the truth of God’s Word with strength, clarity, and conviction. Men are educated and enriched by the perspectives brought to them by these women, and the women’s entire experience of life in Christ is finally made abundant when they are set free from the demands of the Pharisees.

What if that is what we are missing when we subscribe to complementarian theology? What if we have tied half the church behind Christ’s back with our gender doctrine? And what if we are wrong?

I struggle to imagine a ministry or aspect of Christian life that would not be enriched if both men and women were equally interested, involved, and obedient in it. But I can clearly see that many ministries and aspects of Christian life are suffering from being lopsided in one direction or the other. Surely a family where both parents exemplify spiritual leadership and mutual respect for one another is better off than a family where that entire responsibility falls to the father? Surely a children’s ministry where both men and women feed into kids’ lives is better off than one where the children are only treated as valuable by women? Surely pastoral counseling for a couple in a broken marriage will be far more effective when a woman’s voice is present, too?

There’s a phrase we all like to pull out when we imagine meeting Jesus face-to-face. “Well done, good and faithful servant.” It comes from the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:14-30—when the master praises his servants for stewarding his resources well in his absence, and even increasing their value. But he says something very different to the servant who, out of fear, buries his master’s money uselessly in the dirt.

What if Christ’s servants and earthly representatives have buried half the wealth of the church under a fallen idea of what it means to be a man or a woman? What will be said to us when King Jesus returns in glory?

We aren’t all called or gifted to be teachers and preachers and leaders. But some of us are. And some of us are women.

We have tried to fit these callings and giftings into the complementarian framework for decades now. And the Church and its testimony are suffering for it. The tree is bearing rotten fruit. It’s time to ask the hard questions.

What if we’ve been wrong?

half the church

I typically read only a handful of books each year. I prefer to take in information through podcasts, because I find that I learn and retain best when I am listening to something while I work with my hands. But invariably, the podcasts I listen to will give recommended reading that deep-dives into what they’re discussing, and so I frequently end up with more books in my library queue than I will ever realistically read.

One of this year’s handful that caught my interest was Carolyn Custis James’s Half the Church: Recapturing God’s Global Vision for Women. I finished it this week, and found its message to be all too relevant in light of the shaking the American church is currently experiencing and the resistance that shaking has met in some quarters.

In the first chapter, James shares how another book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, forced her to see beyond her own experience and realize “the world’s dark and largely forgotten underbelly where the misery and abuse of women and girls break the scales of human suffering.” Half the Sky became the jumping-off point from which she began to write Half the Church.

“Women comprise at least half the world, and usually more than half the church, but so often Christian teaching to women either fails to move beyond a discussion of roles or assumes a particular economic situation or stage of life. This all but shuts women out from contributing to God’s kingdom as they were designed to do. Furthermore, the plight of women in the Majority World demands a Christian response, a holistic embrace of all that God calls women and men to be in His world.”

- Half the Church (back cover)

One of the first things I discovered when I opened the book and began to read was how much I, too, needed to look beyond my own experiences and realize that questions like “Should women take part in church leadership?” or “Is the wife staying home while the husband works the most Biblical family structure?” are the least of concerns for most women, including most Christian women, across the globe. Half the Church delivers a gracious rebuke to these petty debates (and the infighting they tend to create) that the Western Church desperately needs right now. To speak from my own experience, we have become like the Pharisees - so concerned with the details, obsessing over the interpretations of incredibly difficult passages and upholding centuries of tradition rooted more in culture than in Bible, that we can no longer see the real needs in front of us. Men and women, pastors and laypeople, liberal denominations and conservative denominations entrench ever deeper into their separate roles and rules so that the Church never actually unites to get Kingdom work done.

Image Bearers and Ezer-Warriors

Half the Church calls us all out of our safe, narrow thinking and invites us to explore ideas that may make us uncomfortable. For example, what does it mean for the Church and the world that women are bearers of God’s image and called into all the responsibilities that entails? Genesis 1:26-27 declares that God created all mankind, male and female, in His image and with the calling to “rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth.” It was never in God’s design for male and female to engage in a power struggle over which gender should “Biblically” rule the other, nor was any such struggle predicted or hinted at until after the Fall of Man (Genesis 3:16). Both men and women were created according to the likeness of God and with the inherent calling to rule together, on the same team with one another and with God. This is the dynamic that God blessed and called “very good” (Genesis 1:28, 31).

James also dives deep into the Genesis term ezer-kenegdo, which our Bibles have traditionally translated “helpmeet” or “helper.” The use of these terms, she posits, “has led to the belief that God gave primary roles and responsibilities to men, and secondary, supporting roles to women.” This has been a comfortable belief for many people and in many churches for generations. It keeps the peace and prevents women from trying to overstep their role or getting in the way of men’s ministries. What is much less comfortable is what James uncovers about the uses of the term ezer in the rest of Scripture: nineteen out of its twenty-one uses (in fact, every use that does not refer directly to the woman) are used in the context of military aid or rescue. And in sixteen of those nineteen uses, the warrior-rescuer referred to is God Himself.

This revelation about the word ezer completely shifted my mental image of Genesis 2:18. “I will make him a helper suitable for him” always made me imagine Eve as rather childish, like a toddler “helping” unload the dishwasher - the kind of help that is a nice gesture, but probably could have been accomplished more efficiently without her. It is uncomfortable, in the best kind of way, to have this tame picture replaced by Eve as a warrior doing battle for God’s kingdom alongside Adam - a truly indispensable partner that he is “not good” without.

A Global Vision

One of the things I most appreciated about Carolyn Custis James’s approach to this topic was that she never tried to convince me to become a complementarian or an egalitarian; she never took a stand on whether women should or shouldn’t be pastors. She never spoke down to men or deepened the gender divide. What she did instead was return again and again the the Word of God, to His clear design for women from the beginning and to the example of Jesus as the ultimate equalizer of the genders. She emphasized the glorious vision of what God intended when He put men and women in alliance with one another, and how the dissolution of that alliance breaks God’s heart. Throughout the book, she sets the small-minded Pharisaical debating aside and calls us, instead, to expand our view of the world and reconsider the traditional (often subconscious) beliefs that keep our focus on ourselves instead of on the work God wants to do.

Half the Church is a necessary reminder that women have a vital part to play in God’s story, and it is a part that both precedes and outlasts temporary seasons of our lives like wifehood and motherhood. It is a part that expands well outside the prosperous Western world and reaches into dark, difficult places where the oppression of women far exceeds not being allowed on the elder board. It is a part so important that if we fail to play it, the image of God shatters and His testimony to the world is rendered ineffective and incomplete.

James closes by reminding us of Jesus’ last prayer before He went to the cross: “[I ask] that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent me. . . . that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me” (John 17:21, 23b).

Our effective witness of the Gospel hinges on this. So what will it be: Continue to busy ourselves with sorting people into their appropriate boxes and categories and roles so we don’t have to notice the bleeding Samaritan in the ditch, or set our eyes on Jesus and get to work, even if He leads us across the lines into spaces and relationships that discomfort us? Men, how will you encourage your sisters to take up arms as warriors in the battle and rule as co-regents of the earth? Women, even if that encouragement never comes, are you willing to obey God rather than men?