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?

toward God's heart, part 3

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 second stage of change started when I became a parent, 3.5 years ago.

I remember one day, sitting at my dining room table with tears streaming down my face while my little toddler played on the floor just beyond, trying to explain to Sam how important it was to me that we make a firm commitment not to use physical punishment on our daughter. I knew he didn’t really understand, but I didn’t need him to understand; I needed him to give me his word. I needed to know my baby would be safe with him.

Thankfully, my husband is my partner, and we agreed this was too important to not both be on the same page before taking action. But I know of far too many Christian families, churches, and thought leaders by whose standards my insistence would be condemned as stubborn, disrespectful, and in jeopardy of costing us God’s blessing on our family.

A friend of mine made a point I had not yet been able to put into words: Christian complementarianism has stolen, or at least rendered impotent, the powerful maternal protector that naturally lives inside every woman. In these circles, protection is made out to be a male-only virtue: the pastor protects his flock, the father protects his family, the little boys protect the little girls.

We forget that the most terrifying mammals on earth are usually mothers with their young.

I don’t diminish that there is a masculine courage found within good men and boys that I do not have, and that I have benefitted from every single day of my life. It’s a type of protectiveness, yes, but that word doesn’t quite capture it. It’s that which animates Sam to work overtime shifts, add 700+ square feet onto our house, and build an investment portfolio. It’s a proactive campaign, an offensive strategy to protect us from potential threats, threats out there.

And, women, too, are natural protectors. We are ferocious defenders of those who are weak, vulnerable, or have no voice. Many times, it’s our children, but it can be any cause of justice. It’s what makes me weep at the dining room table over discipline strategies, create a clean and safe environment in my home, and write this series of posts that will be highly unpopular with a wide swath of fellow Christians, many of them my friends. While Sam is out on campaign to build our future, I’m guarding the walls of our present and taking up the cause of the wounded. I defend us against the threats in here.

I don’t mean to make a sweeping generalization that all men and all women naturally fall into these patterns. I’m just calling out that when women do defend their children, themselves, or others against the power wielded by those “in here”—in the family or the church—they are all too often told to be more submissive or stop causing trouble.

Personally, I was never one of those women who felt a strong calling to be a mom, but as soon as I had my first baby in my arms, I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that I had been not only called, but created and commanded to be this person’s mother—and to do so fully, without reservation or hesitation, in every sense of the word and whatever that might mean. And no matter who I would offend in the process.

The “family values” that are so important to conservative evangelicalism typically allow the mother to be a mother insofar as it encompasses handling night wakings and sickness, breastfeeding and weaning, diapering and potty training, groceries and meals, clothes shopping and laundry, toy storage and rotation, cleaning and decluttering, making appointments and keeping them, and at least starting the process of teaching basics like colors, shapes, and the ABCs. But when it comes to the big stuff—like finances, discipline, education, punishment, spirituality—the motherly instinct is so often asked to sit down and shut up, because the man of the house is the one with the direct line to God.

And thus we teach the next generation that boys’ voices matter and girls’ don’t. That men are more important to God than women and children. Is it any wonder that spiritual, emotional, verbal, physical, and sexual abuse run rampant in Christian circles—in the very places abuse should be the scarcest?

Neither Paul nor the Scriptures he cherished are on board with this line of thinking. In Genesis 1:28, when the human is created (in its male and female forms), God gives them both the following commission: “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.”

Men are called to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and rule over the nonhuman creatures. Women are called to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and rule over the nonhuman creatures. The roles are identical and interdependent—and neither one is asked to rule over the other.

And in 1 Timothy 5, when Paul is explaining to Timothy how to handle widows in the congregation, he says this about the younger women:

I desire therefore that the younger widows marry, bear children, rule the household, and give no occasion to the adversary for reviling.

1 Timothy 5:14

Most translations soften that verb, “rule,” to something like “keep” or “manage.” But the Greek word it comes from is οἰκοδεσπότης, which unequivocally means “head of household” or “master of the house.”

Paul did not reduce wives and mothers to mere housekeepers. They were the rulers over their households—by which Paul is not contradicting Genesis 1:28, but rather setting women in a societally shocking position of equal status with their husbands. Strong’s Concordance defines the term as “to be the head of (i.e. rule) a family—guide the house”; its root is used several times by Jesus in His parables about landowners, slaveholders, masters, etc.—men who were revered, and had the power to change lives by their actions. (Notably, it’s an even stronger word than the one used in 1 Timothy 3:4 to describe the qualifications of elders—“He must manage his own household well” as translated by the ESV—which rings more of oversight, influence, and example than actual rule.)

Complementarianism suggests that husbands are the divinely chosen heads of household, that their leadership and wisdom should supersede their wife’s in everything—that she should get smaller so he can be big. But two people can be big at once, and when they’re on the same side, so much the better! God, not man, is our Leader and our Wisdom. We can follow Him together.

We may know God only as our Heavenly Father, but He repeatedly uses maternal metaphors to describe His relentless love for and fierce protection of His children throughout Scripture. He included women as His image-bearers for a reason; He put ferocious motherly reflexes inside of women for a reason. He wants us to use them for the pursuit of kingdom justice, not bury them to shore up the male ego or our modern stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. We imitate Him when we defend our children, guide our homes, and advocate for the powerless, no matter who we offend in the process.

Learn to do good; seek justice, rebuke the oppressor, obtain justice for the orphan, plead for the widow’s case.

Isaiah 1:17

toward God's heart, part 2

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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I went to Bible school at 18 years old, while in the middle of a very serious long-distance relationship (“courtship,” a la I Kissed Dating Goodbye) with my now-husband, Sam. As soon as I graduated, we started talking about getting married. Within three months we were engaged, and sitting in my pastor’s office on a regular basis to talk about what we had learned in Love & Respect and its accompanying workbook that week.

I was young. I was a sponge. I was terrified of getting married, and I desperately wanted God’s approval so that my marriage would go well. The only people speaking into my life at that time, whether personally or through books or some other means, were complementarians, and they all said the key to making a marriage work was to follow this doctrine.

So Sam and I dove all in, devouring Christian marriage book after Christian marriage book. To me, they all seemed to say the same kinds of things: Having a disagreement? Defer to your husband. Feeling hurt? Pray that you will stop needing so much from your husband. Unloved? Probably because you’re not being respectful enough of your husband.

It wasn’t until almost half a decade into our marriage that I finally gave myself permission to rethink the complementarian indoctrination I had received from those books. That’s when I first began to realize that none of it made intellectual sense.

Separate but equal

“Women are equal in value with men, but separate in role”—the most popular talking point among defenders of complementarianism—does not hold up against basic critical scrutiny. When the husband holds the “tiebreaking vote” in the marriage, for example, the basic fact is that he has two votes and his wife has one. Correct me if I’m wrong, but 2 ≠ 1. The entire idea of a tiebreaking vote and the obsession with creating a leader-follower dynamic in marriage is predicated on the assumption that two people cannot work together unless one of them has some kind of “final say” over the other. Not only is that claim unsupported by reality (Where else do we insist that two people cannot work together as equal teammates? That one of them has to be “in charge” or they can’t succeed?), Genesis 3:16 makes it clear that such dynamics are a product of sin, not part of God’s good design.

(I’m all too aware that some complementarians consider Genesis 3:16 prescriptive, rather than a description of the catastrophic effects of the fall. Just last week I had the misfortune of coming across a man ranting about his “God-given right” to rule over his wife, citing this verse. I have to wonder if he also believes that it’s sinful for a woman to opt for an epidural during childbirth, or to take ibuprofen for menstrual cramps? Is a man allowed to use a lawnmower or weedkiller to take care of his yard, or must everything be done by hand in order to “obey” Genesis 3:17-19? Where in the Gospels do we see Jesus throw a fit about His God-given right to rule—a right He actually had, unlike this man, but relinquished out of love?)

Furthermore, if we were truly “separate but equal” in the church, then there would be limitations placed on men, too, preventing them from exercising some gifts they are otherwise perfectly capable of using solely because they are men. But such limitations apply only to women, and only because we are women—resulting in anything but equality.

Until 1920, all women were banned from voting in the United States (and many women, primarily non-white women, continued to be banned long after). Are we supposed to believe they were still equals in that time—that they simply had a “separate role,” a non-voting role, from the male citizenship? Were black people really equals under the Jim Crow laws, which supposedly offered “separate but equal” accommodations to both white and black people but notoriously led to better experiences for whites than blacks (and allowed for many convenient loopholes to prevent black people from fully engaging as American citizens)?

The complementarian response would be, “They’re equal in value! They are spiritually equal!” Duh. But practically, what does that matter, if it doesn’t change the way you treat them? God already knows that women, people of color, and every other subset of humanity have equal worth as His image bearers. We are the ones who prove by our actions that we don’t agree.

Love and respect

The common complementarian interpretation of Ephesians 5 doesn’t hold up to the actual content of the Scriptures, either. When the wife’s level of respect influences (even determines) the husband’s ability to give her his love (which is what too many pastors, Biblical counselors, and Christian marriage resources either state or imply), he’s not loving her as Christ loved the church, unconditionally, and long before she ever loved Him. He is loving her the same way any selfish pagan would love someone: in direct proportion to getting what he wants from her.

Did Christ come to usher in the new kingdom, or merely to set up His throne in the failed state of the old?

Not to mention that the Bible never instructs a husband to lead his wife, as complementarianism does ad nauseam; the command is to love her in the same way that Christ loved the church, which I’ve written more about here. The Bible also never pits men and women against one another as opposites, the way complementarianism does (in a practical sense—I realize that they do not say this in so many words, and in fact would claim the reverse, but that just doesn’t hold up in real life). Instead, God’s Word holds men and women up as “suitable partners,” a matched set, an equal pair—completely interdependent.

This is why Adam says, “This at last is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23) and why Paul tells husbands to “love their wives as their own bodies” (Ephesians 5:28). They are the same creature—both humans, both images of God, exact equals. It’s fairly depressing that such a statement has ever been revolutionary, but even more so that we still have to say it today.

And along the same lines, how can we treat love and respect as opposites? Show me the man who can feel respected when he is being unloved! Show me the woman who can feel loved when she’s being disrespected!

But we are expected to accept that a woman must tolerate disrespectful treatment from her husband in the name of “respecting” him, and assume that he is “loving” her even when he clearly isn’t. It’s as if all the hallmarks of a sound Christian-to-Christian relationship—accountability, discipleship, submission, selflessness, correction, exhortation—can suddenly only work in one direction once the two Christians are married to each other, while obvious biblical vices, such as ego, greed, and selfish ambition, are transformed into virtues when they characterize a husband.

Exegesis and ministry

These are just the surface-level logical contradictions. Once I started diving into the exegesis of Paul’s letters, it got even worse: Men we respect as theologians have completely rejected simple rules of hermeneutics—like the fact that Paul’s writings grow out of his deep roots in the Tanakh and not the other way around; or like the principle of using clear texts to illuminate less-clear texts—in favor of their pre-determined view. They cannot muster even the basic scholarly humility to acknowledge that, although the dehumanization of women is as old as Genesis (and rampant among the church fathers as well as the secular world), the modern doctrine of complementarianism is built on a shaky foundation of comparatively recent and highly Westernized interpretations of Paul’s most difficult-to-understand passages. Instead, they’ve gone so far as to enshrine their debatable position into the English Standard Version translation of the Bible, making it harder and harder for regular, thoughtful Christians to come to informed conclusions on this matter.

To their credit, many complementarians do strive to find the heart behind Paul’s seemingly-patriarchal stance, pulling from chapters like 1 Corinthians 11 and 14 to remind us that the goal was to create an orderly church gathering, not to suppress women or treat them as less. But to believe that this principle should be applied the same way today as it was in Paul’s time requires you to also believe that women, not disorder, are the real problem—that we are uniquely foolish, gullible, distracting, or dangerous. That when we take up space and have a say, we make things worse by default. “It is not good for the man to be alone” becomes “It is not good for the woman to be involved, because she only complicates things for the man.”

If you can teach one half of the room that they can’t be trusted (and can’t even trust themselves), and that their simply existing fully in the corporate assembly would be “disorderly,” it’s not hard to keep them under control. It’s the easy way out for church leaders who don’t want, or have never learned how, to treat women as human beings.

I could keep going, but I’ll just raise one more point: Every church I’ve ever been part of has been totally fine with women going into the mission field. Indeed, many godly women I know have done so, and why not? Their gifts that are disdained by the American church are often welcomed in foreign places. But what makes being a missionary fundamentally different from teaching the truth in other settings? The Great Commission is to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you”—and what do our churches exist to do, if not make disciples, baptize, and teach? If we are happy to send women to Africa or Asia, why are they not good enough for America?

And unfortunately, along with our missionaries and our Good News, we export our flawed understanding of gender roles as well—and it is stunting the growth of the church worldwide. May God forgive us.

Over the last 5+ years of life, study, and reflection, I’ve found that my brain simply cannot do these kinds of logical gymnastics.

I’m not saying there are no intellectually honest people who have arrived at different conclusions on these issues than I have. I know there are; I know some of them. And, as I would hope from any healthy conversation, they could raise some potentially colorable rebuttals to my points. But to claim that there is just one “plain reading” of Scripture—as far too many complementarians do—that clearly disqualifies women from being true equals in marriage and in church, while also claiming that somehow women are still in fact equal, is neither intellectual nor honest.