Episode 27 - Male Headship 101

Are you familiar with the doctrine of male headship? That system that prioritizes the leadership, voice, and decision-making of men in homes and churches? Join Anni and friends Dawn and Leah for a critical look at what this doctrine means, what it costs, and what we should do about it.

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Transcript

Welcome to season two of Barely Christian Fully Christian.

I'm your host, Anni Ponder, and I'm so glad you've stopped by for the conversation about loving Jesus, being repulsed by the un-Christ likeness of so much of what the world sees from Christianity, and my personal favorite, honoring the Holy Spirit as the Divine Mother, or as I call her, Mama God.

Whether you've grown up in Christianity or found your way into it at some point in your adult life, or you're just sort of adjacent to it and know about it a little bit, I'm pretty certain you will have come into contact with the doctrine of male headship.

Now this doctrine can take on lots of different forms, but in this episode, I want to explore what the doctrine of male headship really means and what it creates, as far as lived experience in the lives of Christian people, particularly women.

Well, I am delighted to be here with two of the best women I know here in my tiny little podcast studio.

Today, I'm joined by my friends Dawn and Leah, and we are here to talk about something we are all so passionate about, and that is the topic of male headship.

So we'll get into that in a moment.

But first, I just wanted to give you an opportunity to say hi and hear the guy with the bass driving by in my neighborhood and tell us something you would like folks to know about you.

Who are you in the world?

And just something you think that maybe we ought to hear about you.

I didn't, by the way, prompt them that I was going to do this.

This is just a fun surprise.

Well, everyone's looking at me, so I'll start.

I'm Leah Dillman, and I'm delighted to be here discussing this topic, something that we've all been discussing together for quite some time.

I have four kids, so that's a lot in my life, two girls, two boys.

And then also, just a long history of a lot of years of work with young life.

So that was kind of, that's been pretty informative.

So my husband, he worked for Young Life for 12 and a half years, and I worked unpaid for Young Life for most of those years as well, which was great in many ways.

So that is my probably most prevalent in a lot of ways, church formation experiences through working with Young Life for so many years.

Awesome.

Thanks.

I'm so glad you're here.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Good to be here.

All right, Dawn.

Well, I'm Dawn and I have two kids, a boy and a girl.

They're both in their 20s and I have been married for 25 years.

And I am a storyteller and a student.

I've been a student for the last three years, one more to go.

And I have grown up in the church.

It's been a part of my life since the very beginning.

My mom was a pastor and I'm happy to be here and to talk to both of you today.

So I'm sure I've heard you say this before, but it's never registered.

Your mom was a pastor.

She was a children's pastor.

A children's pastor.

Okay.

Well, I'm sure we'll get to that.

For context, these women are friends of mine, sisters, and we all attend the same church.

So we've been doing life together for a few years now.

And a while ago, we began to talk about what does it mean to be a woman in the church, in our homes?

And what is this business with male headship?

How does it affect us?

What's our experience?

And so we started listening circles a while back where we just share our stories, just speaking from our own experience.

How has this doctrine that we have all been exposed to in various ways informed first our view of ourselves and also our practice in faith, in vocation, in church, in the home, et cetera.

And so we just think it's a really important conversation to have with one another.

So listeners, you're welcome in here to hear our conversation.

And then I would just say, if you happen to be in our area and you would like to join the conversation, please get a hold of one of us.

And we will issue you an invitation because we will continue to do listening circles for a while now.

So all right, before we begin, this is a hot button topic for so many people.

I just want to lay down a few things that we are not about to say.

I find that it's very useful to mention the myriad elephants that walk into the room anytime we talk about things like the doctrine of male headship.

And so I like to take on arguments that might come at us later before we even get started.

So I have this handy list here of eight things we are not about to say in regards to the doctrine of male headship.

So here's what we're going to do.

I'm going to read one and then I'm going to ask you, Leah, to respond to it and then you read the next one and then Dawn will respond to it.

And we'll just do a little round robin that way.

Okay.

Something I often hear in these conversations.

Oh, you women who talk about these things, don't you hate or resent or blame men?

What would you say to that, Leah?

I would say that I have been married 22 years, not quite quite up to Dawn yet, but edging up there, to somebody who I highly respect and adore.

And I have two sons, so who I adore.

And I have no interest in diminishing them.

I have no interest in displacing them or blaming or resenting them for anything.

In fact, I want the world to be a better place for them as well.

So, I'm kind of maybe going into the second question.

Well, that's a great segue.

Go ahead and ask Dawn that one.

Oh, okay.

Dawn, would you like to go ahead and jump in on the second one here?

We would be better off without men who are the problem.

I would say that I absolutely disagree with that.

I feel like partnership is what we're talking about here.

We complement each other.

We have great things to offer and so do men.

So, you don't want to join the planet where only women and girls live, and if we happen to birth a boy, he can stay until he's 12 and then he has to leave.

Okay.

I love my boy.

Good.

All right.

All right.

So, I'm going to actually go out of order here because I want to address this one.

In any conversation where gender is the topic, I always want to say this, this next question, are you saying there are only two genders?

Depending on your audience and who you're talking with, that could be asked in a couple of different sentiments.

Here's where I stand from my understanding, gender has been treated as the stark binary, which just is not supported by science.

So, if you happen to listen to my podcast, recently I interviewed an intersex individual who has both male and female qualities in his physiology.

So, I am never going to say there are only two genders.

I realize that when I talk about this kind of topic, I end up sounding pretty binary because I talk about men and women.

And I just want to say to anybody who is listening and identifies as gender fluid or non-binary, or you're part of the queer community or any other community that says, hey, I feel excluded in this, my apologies and I do not mean to exclude you.

My language is becoming more inclusive, which now I know we've lost half the listeners on the other side of this argument.

But this conversation is really about women's roles in church and marriage.

And so I just wanted to highlight queer community.

I see you, I love you, I value you, and we need your voice in this conversation too.

Okay, Leah, are you about to say that women are exactly the same as men?

Obviously, yeah, that's what I'm about to say.

Because Tim gave birth to half your children and you did the other half?

Yeah, that's right.

We worked it out that way.

That was how we complemented each other.

Obviously not.

Women and men are not exactly the same.

However, I do think that the roles that we have been assigned and the way that we have been required to contort ourselves to fit into the stereotype of man and woman has done us disservice.

And what I mean by that is the inability to see how our genders could actually really dovetail.

And that men could express traditionally feminine qualities, women could express traditionally traditionally male qualities, I think has stunted us.

Not exactly the same, but also the stark contrast, the stark delineation, I think has harmed us.

Well said.

I always add to this question.

We are saying equality in worth in decision making, power, the ability to guide the ship, if you will, and not necessarily that my body is built to do everything my husband's body is built to do.

Although it is well known, men are generally bigger, stronger, and faster than women, but I know women who are bigger, stronger, and faster than men.

So even that distinction can get it.

We can paint ourselves into a corner when we try to make sweeping.

Well, all men are stronger than, no, they're not.

No, I mean, I could arm wrestle some men to the ground.

So, yeah, let's...

I couldn't.

I bet you could.

Okay, Dawn, question five.

Are you about to say that now let's turn the tables, let's have matriarchy where women are in charge of men, so they know what it feels like?

No, I think about...

I've listened to some discussions, and matriarchy, I don't think is really a thing.

If women were in charge, they would share their responsibilities.

I think it's a very feminine quality to not be hierarchical.

You mentioned partnership is what we're after before.

And it's also fascinating, because I follow some people who are advocating for matriarchy, but they are quick to point out that in true matriarchies, both past and present, and yes, there are some on the globe, go ahead and Google matriarchal societies in the year 2025.

They do exist.

Exactly what you have expressed is the reality.

The women do not tell the men what to do.

There isn't a sense of hierarchy.

It's collaborative, it's relational, and there isn't a sense of some people are born better than others.

So even if we were to say, let's have a matriarchy, it wouldn't look like revenge.

I love that t-shirt.

Maybe Leah, you told me about that you saw a woman was wearing a t-shirt that said, thank goodness women are only asking for equality and not revenge.

Yeah.

Well, then that leads to question number six.

Are we trying to dismantle all hierarchies and just let chaos rule?

I get this question a lot from certain beloved members of my family.

When I start talking about the backward ways of hierarchy and how it causes all kinds of problems, people get real worried that then I'm just looking for anarchy.

And I would say not all hierarchy in the sense of, I think it's fine for corporations to have a CEO, to have a board of directors, governing officials, etc.

I'm not saying give everyone an equal role in every single thing.

But we are trying to focus a very pointed light on the problem that traditional hierarchy with always a man at the top has brought to us.

Leah, are we saying that we have no need of God the Father anymore?

Let's get rid of him.

We have a mother now.

If you listen to my other podcast, you know I talk about her a lot.

Are we trying to get rid of God the Father?

Thanks for that.

We don't need you anymore.

Oh, gosh.

No.

And yeah, I think that yeah, fatherhood needs to be redeemed.

And we need a picture of God as the good father to be an example of fatherhood.

And I think redeemed some of the pain that a lot of people have about fatherhood.

And I'm hoping that we can expand that view beyond the traditional view of what a father looks like.

When we, when most of us picture fatherhood, which I think has a lot of very patriarchal top-down power overtones, I hope we can expand that view to include some of the more maternal qualities that I believe Jesus intentionally advocated for when he was talking about God the Father.

So don't want to get rid of the idea as of God as Father.

Would like to include or just consider maybe some different ideas about what fatherhood is and what it should look like.

Yeah, thank you.

All right, Dawn, you women, you've tossed out the scriptures that no longer serve you.

You don't respect the Bible anymore.

What would you say to that?

I have a great deal of respect and reverence for the Bible.

And I try to view it through the lens of what I know about Jesus.

And I know one thing for sure is that he is love and he is good.

And that's the lens through which I read the rest of scriptures.

I just finished, for the second time, I just finished reading Brian Zahn's Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God.

Fantastic book if you're looking for your theology to be deepened and purified.

And he sets up this place where Paul and Jesus seem to be at odds with one another.

One says one and one says the other.

I think it's in this book, but I also listened to him online.

So anyway, Brian Zahn.

And he said, look, Jesus is my savior.

Paul must bow to Jesus.

And so when the two are in conflict, I take Jesus at his word and then I filter everything that Paul says through his lens and I wonder about it.

And so you all know I'm in theology school right now, learning to dig much deeper into scripture than just a surface reading.

And I do find treasure when I dig.

And so instead of the tradition where I was taught actually at a church here in town, I once brought in my Greek and Hebrew lexicons and my concordance because the pastors heard I had been challenging the doctrine of eternal conscious torment, you know, hell forever and ever.

And I said, is there any place in this church for conversation about that?

And they said, well, why don't you come in?

And so it was a man and woman pastor team.

So I came in with this big stack of heavy books.

And when we started talking about hell, where I knew Jesus had used the word Gehenna, I reached for my Greek lexicon and the pastor put her hand on the Greek lexicon and said, no, we are just reading the Bible here.

We don't need Greek.

And I was like, oh, yeah, but OK.

And, you know, we couldn't reconcile.

I ended up leaving very soon after that.

So a deep respect for the Bible, I would say, is I have had a deep and kneeing respect for it as I have learned the tools to actually read this ancient library rather than just taking it at the English translations surface.

So OK, so now that we've established what we're not about to say, I promise we're going to get to storytelling soon, but we have four terms that we are going to probably use in our conversation.

And some of these terms can mean different things to different people.

So we want to highlight what we mean when we say these things.

And the terms are male headship, feminist or feminism, egalitarianism and complementarianism.

And I know from my years as a teacher that before you can start a discussion, we all have to agree on our definitions.

So we're going to talk about the definitions of these words as we intend them.

And we will ask you, our dear listener, not to infer meaning that we don't ascribe to when we use a word.

So would you each feel comfortable reading one of these?

Sure.

Okay.

Leah, I'm going to give you the first one.

What do we mean by male headship?

We mean the belief and doctrine that men are central and primary while women are peripheral and secondary in function and or work.

This may include church or home structures, when men have greater leadership roles and women are expected to follow, submit, and serve.

In extreme cases, this can lead to women not being allowed to voice their thoughts and being restricted to service in the kitchen, the children's department, and as sexual servants to their husbands.

Male headship denotes a hierarchy and clear chain of command where Christ instructs the husband, who instructs the wife, who instructs the children.

Anni, would you like to tell your particular story about this definition?

I would.

Thank you.

I will exemplify this.

I once had a pastor.

This is one day I will put out a post or a podcast called To My Former Bible Students, I'm So Sorry.

And I will use this story to exemplify some things that I used to believe and purport that I think are very damaging.

So at one point, as I was a Bible teacher, I invited a pastor from a church here in this town to come and talk about gender roles.

And they have a very highly strict complementarian view, which we'll define in a moment.

And a very clear understanding of men are in charge of women in this particular church.

So he got up and he was explaining what gender roles mean to my high school students.

And he said, let me give you an example.

If Jesus Christ knocked on my door and my wife answered, the Lord Jesus would smile and greet her warmly by name.

And then ask to speak to me.

So that's what we mean.

Jesus talks to husbands and then the husbands talk to the wives, and the wives report to the husbands who then get their orders from Jesus.

And so Leah, you like to equate the term male headship with another term.

You want to tell us what you like to say instead of male headship?

I think now is a good time to introduce that.

Well, I think as we were mulling this over, the doctrine of male headship often sounds more familiar to the ears and even more palatable to the ears of the church.

But what it really actually is, is a doctrine of male supremacy.

I mean, really, what it means is men are superior to women in the eyes of God and the hierarchy of the church, and I think even just in society in general, that idea has been permeated through society.

So I think male headship can sound real innocuous, right?

Oh, he's just a benign presence.

A dictator.

A benign leader of the family.

But really what that equates to is he's supreme.

He's more, he's of more worth.

He's a, he's, I mean, I guess essentially what I feel it means is that the man is more worthy to be spoken to by God.

That God views a man as more important, more capable, more able to know than a woman.

So to me, that's where it gets much more pernicious.

Um, because really what we're talking about is male supremacy.

Yeah.

And we see, we see this in our own experiences.

Um, we're having technical difficulties with this folding table.

There we go.

Um, and, and I can hear the voice of some people like, well, that's not how it is in my house.

We, okay.

All right.

We're going to speak from our experience, but I will say when you press somebody on male headship hard enough, as I have, they will inevitably at some point, blurt out under pressure, men are just better leaders than women.

And there you have it.

That is the underlying belief.

Men are better at leading, either wiser or more endowed with God's image or wisdom or something.

If you go to certain churches, men have the priesthood from the time they're, you know, this whole idea, it really is male supremacy, whether or not they come out and say it.

All right, Dawn, what do you mean by the word feminist or feminism?

This word has a host of implications, but when we use it, we strictly mean this, the belief and practice of viewing women as equals in all areas of leadership, law, decision-making, particularly where policy and direction are discerned, and worth.

We do not mean our bodies are always equal to men's in strength, size, or physical abilities as a whole.

Although many women are physically stronger, faster, and or taller than men.

And we certainly do not mean to belittle, blame, or ostracize men who are not interested in misandry.

We love, affirm, and appreciate men.

We simply seek equality for ourselves as white women and also other ostracized folks, the disabled, the poor, those who do not conform to gender binaries, the queer community at large, BIPOC people who are systematically excluded from the upper tiers of hierarchy, and anyone else who does not fit the straight, white, male, Christian, wealthy norm in our society.

So we do not mean that we hate men when we say feminism.

And I know thanks to our friend Rush Limbaugh, that awful term where he paired the word feminism with a group of people who tried to exterminate the Jews who I don't even want to name.

That is not okay.

Please do not do that.

We are not here to exterminate anyone.

We are here to uplift and uphold all people who bear God's image, which happens to be every human on the planet.

Okay, so for those maybe not real versed with the Christian terminology that's being tossed around right now, there are two sides of this argument.

Both can be supported by scripture, whether or not women can have leadership positions in the home and in the church, and we recognize there's a lot of scholarship on both sides, but there's one that we think is better than the other.

We'll just be real honest.

So that one is egalitarianism, and I'll explain what we mean by egalitarianism.

It has at its root, probably Latin.

I didn't look this up, but the idea of equal.

So egalitarianism is the belief and practice of women's full equality in the home and the church, where we are fit for service in any and every capacity that pleases the spirit to gift us.

Women are not born with certain roles, prescriptions or limitations for vocation or service.

Just like men, women are to discern with the spirit and follow Christ in the fullness of our being.

We have equal worth, value and decision-making power with men.

There is no tie-breaking vote.

Rather, when at an impasse, couples seek counsel from others or do the work of discerning with the Holy Spirit, as Christians are all supposed to learn how to do, or have some other agreed-upon method for deciding the matter.

Gender does not predetermine roles, and there is no testicular supremacy to ovaries.

And just because you are a male does not mean you get the deciding vote.

There was something in here that I wanted to highlight with a little caveat, but it has eluded me.

So, Leah, tell us what's the other side of the coin?

What is Complementarianism?

Okay, so Complementarianism is the belief and practice of women's subordination, whether or not this is based on a conviction of women's inferiority.

In practice, it always becomes so.

Women are born with certain roles and prescriptions for vocation and service, or at the very least, may not become leaders at the upper level of their home or church.

Most frequently, women are viewed as compatible of raising and instructing children, and may teach other women, but we may not have leadership role over men.

Women are not considered to be gifted leaders, but are programmed by our DNA to follow men.

There are soft Complementarianisms, who do not hold strictly to this, but even they reserve the right for the husband or male superior in the church to veto a woman's decision on the basis of gender.

On the basis of gender.

In marriage, in the case of an impasse, the husband has the tie-breaking vote.

Okay.

So now we have our terms defined.

We know what we're talking about.

We have laid out what we're not about to say.

The rest of this conversation is going to turn into a storytelling session where we will each share our own experiences with being in complementarian spaces that hold up male headship as the ideal.

Whether that be in churches or marriages or other spaces, I've found in the workplace I've run into it.

I'm sure you have too in your experience where a man's word and voice matters more than a woman's.

And so we will express what we have experienced in all of this.

So let's dive in.

It's time for stories.

As we consider our experiences, Leah, you've shared that your maybe most influential Christian experience has been surrounding around young life.

So that's the context that you're going to talk about.

Because I think I've heard you say your marriage has always been egalitarian.

Is that?

Well, funny dynamic.

I came into our marriage believing that I had to believe that complementarianism was the biblical mandate.

So I came into that thinking, okay, yeah, when push comes to shove, Tim's going to be the one to make the decisions.

That had certainly been modeled in my household growing up.

And then as I was not raised going to church, but as I delved into Christianity, and my later years of high school, my early years of college definitely absorbed the teaching that just felt there was this unquestionable sense of this is the natural and good and biblically mandated order of things.

So I came into my marriage with that belief.

My husband has never held that belief and never wanted it to be a part of our marriage.

And so that's just kind of a funny, interesting caveat of our marriage is that I was the one that actually had to unlearn that belief system.

So, yes, it would have always been, it's been, the goal has always been egalitarianism, at least where my husband was concerned.

And it took me a while to be on board because I didn't think I had a choice.

Wow.

God bless Tim for sticking in there.

You used your voice.

You are an equal partner here.

You matter as much as I do.

Thanks, Tim.

This is the Tim Nielman fan club now.

Much appreciated.

Dawn, do you want to talk about a little bit about the context that you're going to be speaking and sharing your story from?

Help us understand the particularly church experience that you've had with this whole topic.

Yes, well, I grew up in a church that would probably qualify more as soft complementarianism.

Women could be leaders, but I definitely absorbed a lot of the teachings that in the home, the man had the final word and that was just the water I swam in.

And then for 10 years, well, we moved to the Seattle area when our kids were young.

And for the next 10 years, we were a part of Mars Hill Church, which definitely qualifies as a more rigid form of complementarianism.

It doesn't, the church no longer exists, so that's why I'm speaking about it now.

We named names when they were all done.

Great.

But yeah, so this, that's the 10 years.

Very deeply involved in that church.

And do you want me to share that right now, or should we get into that?

Whatever you're feeling led to say.

Don't censor yourself.

We've had enough of that in our life.

Yeah, there was, there was a lot of harm that came from that.

I, in my home life, my home life and my spiritual life became very compartmentalized because my home life still was very egalitarian.

My husband, he, he's a very good guy.

He, he did not hold that over my head, the things that we were being taught in the church.

And so I kind of, there was a separation between my spiritual life and my home life.

And the way that that kind of played out in my life was that I learned to outsource things that were spiritual and not trust my inner knowing.

I didn't think that I could hear from God.

I needed to listen to men to tell me what God was saying.

And it's taken a long time to unlearn that.

Yeah, it has.

That's one of the things that coming to a greater and more expansive view of myself and also God and the world at large has been such a relief.

Oh, I can have access, which I've always known.

I've had kind of two experiences in one.

So growing up, I had a couple of mystical experiences in early childhood that left me absolutely certain that I was beloved and that I was known and that Jesus can be absolutely trusted.

Like I've never doubted that.

And at the same time, I'm growing up in this very fundamental church that doesn't even identify as evangelical because they're just so far to the fundamentalist wing of evangelicalism, where I learned all kinds of things about that I wasn't as much as men and all of these things.

So I had these two competing experiences.

Thankfully, the mystical ones got to my core and the other ones just got to some of my outer layers.

But it has been really important for me to begin to understand, no, I do really hear from God.

I am really made in God's image.

Every bit as much as my brothers in Christ, as every other man on the planet, I am also an image bearer of God.

And I have a right to speak and share my experiences, the wisdom that I have won and gained and been gifted.

And my voice is necessary.

So I'll just piggyback off that a little bit too, because Dawn, you use words that are exactly what I would use.

And I don't know if that's because of our interior conversations, but I don't feel like they are.

So the fact that you said outsourcing your knowing, I think you said that, right?

That is exactly how I describe it.

And what has been so hurtful and so sad is I was taught that essentially when push came to shove, the person who had the right to say how things go was a spiritual leader.

And that spiritual leader was invariably a man.

And if it was, in fact, a woman, that was viewed as suspect, like going back to Tim in college, he went to a church that had a female pastor for a while.

And I remember when I heard that thinking, Oh my gosh, that's a red flag.

Like that makes me, you know, I can't believe that he would, you know, that seems dangerous, that seems suspect, that seems, that makes me nervous that he would go to a church that was pastored by a woman, because clearly the Bible says that's not allowed, right?

So clearly.

Such a slippery slope they're on.

Yeah.

So yeah, the sadness of getting to this point in my life and realizing how deeply I have been taught to mistrust myself, my interior knowing, and feel that I was required to outsource that to what, again, was ultimately always male leadership has been really painful and sad.

And my work right now is trying to reclaim what was lost in that, and my sense of ability, my trust in my own knowing, and my ability to be in conversation with God through the Spirit.

So, and it has to do with your agency also to make decisions about your life.

Here's a story I'll share from my marriage.

My husband and I are five years in, and I have had this awakening since we got married.

So, similar to you, Leah, when Guy and I got married, I was a soft complementarian.

And little by little, thanks to Mary Magdalene, she has been after me.

I tell you what, that lady doesn't quit.

I have had a whole lot of epiphanies, one after another, that have led me here to where I now believe that, you know, I stand on my own two feet and I don't need a man to tell me what God is saying.

So, as I was helping my husband understand, okay, here's what I am becoming and I need our marriage to be this structure.

And thankfully, he said, okay, we'll have an egalitarian structure.

I mean, it could have gone either way and it could have been really difficult.

But thankfully, he was like, okay, I'll view you as an equal.

That's great.

In one of the conversations that helped us to get here, and we're still figuring this out, we do not have it sorted, was when Guy was looking at maybe studying to become a priest in our church.

And so there's this long process, it takes six or seven months before you even begin called discernment in our denomination.

And you meet with this wonderful balanced group of people from different parts of the church, and they help you ask these questions and you answer them, and they get to really know you.

It's a beautiful, great, deep process.

And so during the time that guy was going through discernment for the priesthood, I was trying to help him understand, well, what does it do to a woman to know that I don't ultimately have the final say in things?

That as long as my husband and I are in agreement, then we're good, but if he disagrees with me, he has the headship vote, he has the Trump card, he could change the course of my life or our lives simply because he's the man.

So here's how I set this up.

I said, husband, would you be willing to get to flip the tables on this one and give me the final say in your priesthood decision?

Like let's say the committee comes back with a green light.

Yep, we think you're ready for the priesthood.

We want you to do this, we'll support you.

Then would you be willing to let me make the final decision whether or not you could do this?

Could you give me the final vote?

And at first, he said, yes, actually, that would be a relief.

I said, really?

Why?

And he goes, because there's so much pressure to make this decision.

If somebody else could make it for me, I would feel relieved.

And I was like, interesting.

So what you're telling me is there's an awful lot of pressure on you to have the final word.

And he's like, yes.

So we kept talking and a few minutes later, his eyes got really wide and his body language became rigid.

And he goes, wait a minute.

No, I cannot give you this decision.

I will not.

And I said, why not?

And he goes, because it would take away my agency.

And I was like, exactly.

Because women have for the last 2000 years in Christianity and probably back and back before that, but other religions will have to answer this question on their own.

We have been told you don't get the final say, and that removes our agency.

It removes us from the equation, hearing directly from God, doing the Christian work of discernment with the Spirit and knowing what she wants us to do.

It releases us from our ability to even say we hear God's voice and we will follow it.

And it puts us subordinate to a human, which I would say is anti-gospel, because the gospel in my understanding is Jesus is Lord, not Caesar.

I answer directly to him.

If Caesar tells me to stop being a Christian, I have to disobey Caesar.

So that conversation kind of offered us a way of understanding how disempowering it is for a woman to be told, well, you can have your thoughts and I'm not going to be mean about it.

But if we disagree, I have testicles, so I get to make the final say.

That kind of leads me to thinking about women's complicity in complementarianism because I think, well, I'll speak from my own experience.

There could be some real convenience for me in letting Tim have the final say of like giving that power to him when I didn't know how to make that decision, or I was really scared to wrestle with him about it.

So I have to own the fact that there were some conveniences for that.

Maybe that I wouldn't have spoken out loud at the time, but there was some benefit of ease that I was getting from that stance.

And I think I feel like I've heard some women voice their support of complementarianism by saying, well, actually, it's really nice because when I don't know what the right decision is or my husband and I can't reach an agreement, it's just like such an easy way to end the disagreement.

And, you know, then I just go, okay, I just defer.

I just I just can outsource that decision making to somebody else.

However, I'm learning in my midlife that that has stunted me.

Yes, because I could essentially in a lot of ways take the easy way out, like not stay in the rumble of figuring it out with my husband, not really dig deep on my own inner voice and what I wanted and what I didn't want.

I could just say, okay, you're going to make this call.

And so I'm complicit in that.

And there was benefit to me in the sense of it made the path feel smoother and easier as it tends to do when one person will just defer.

And that was coming from a marriage that my husband did not expect or require that from me.

So it's all on, that's all on me.

Also, I would argue all on the Evangelical Church who trained me that that was the way things should be.

Not coming from my husband.

But I think it stunted me.

And I'm figuring, I'm realizing now the ways in which feeling that I was required to abnegate my, my autonomy.

Let me off the hook from doing the hard work that is growing up into a fully fledged human and adult that needs to be able to do that for themselves and figure those things out for themselves and rumble.

So, I'm learning what I've lost by believing that I needed to ascribe to that doctrine or that viewpoint.

So I'm so glad you named it that because there are three things I want to talk about.

So help me remember pipes, women's complicity and my grandmother.

So I'm going to start with my grandmother.

Okay.

Because something that often gets asked, and I maybe should have made this point, number nine is, are you saying that like your grandparents' marriage was not the way God would intend, right?

Because my grandparents had a very complimentary marriage and he was very good to her.

But she, you know, supported him.

She was second fiddle to him, right?

And what I would say to that is, you know, who am I to stand in judgment of somebody else's marriage?

However, I've noticed that in marriages where that's the structure, we don't see the full flourishing of the wife unfettered with the responsibility and the burden to answer for her own decisions and her own self, because she can always pass it off to her husband.

He's always the last word.

She doesn't get to discover as fully as she would, who she is, what gifting she has, and express those to the fullest degree that Christ has given those gifts to her, because she's under someone else.

And so it truncates her flourishing.

Yeah.

And growing up.

Say more.

What do you mean?

I just feel like that's part of growing up into a whole human.

Yes, like finding your self, finding your voice and being able to advocate for that successfully.

Maturing.

Yes.

So it's part, you know, when we think about children, they, while they are children and their parents home and under their parents care, the parent, in many ways, depending on the developmental stage, kind of needs to be the last word on, no, you cannot eat five candy bars before you go to bed or whatever the case may be.

But at some point, they need to grow up and become fully fledged humans that are capable of knowing themselves and making good choices.

So it feels a little bit with my experience of complementarianism that it keeps you from the full maturation process, the full maturing into adult humanhood.

Yes.

And that to me is a great danger.

In addition, we see in structures where father knows best and the man is the head of the house, there is also scientifically a greater propensity to all kinds of violence and abuse.

But even in homes where the man is a good man, and he doesn't do those sorts of things to his wife and children, we still don't see her flourish like she would if she really thought she was an equal.

And I could talk about my grandparents' marriage, which is very different than your grandparents' marriage.

If we want to talk a little bit more about how that can get ugly real quick.

But let me say two quick things.

And then Dawn, I have, I think we need to hear more from you, but about pipes and about women's complicity.

So these are more, I'm just thinking of more disclaimers that I should add to our list.

Okay.

One question I get when I talk about equality and partnership, somebody usually says, are you now saying that you want to be a part of every single decision that's ever made?

Right.

And in my house, that would look like, so my husband used to be a farmer, right?

So when the irrigation has trouble, he fixes it because he's got knowledge and experience.

He has the tools and he likes that more than I do.

So am I saying, oh, now I need a say in which kind of valve he buys down at Home Depot?

No.

We're talking big upper level decisions.

People are still welcome to specialize and should.

And if we have something where I'm better at, then he'll probably defer to me.

Maybe if it's a decision about where do the children go to school, I have an education degree and so maybe I get more of a say.

So it's not, I need an equal say in every single thing, but who a shared power.

The other point that I wanted to highlight, Leah, that you brought up, which keeps coming up in conversations that I'm having is people will say to me, well, I've been hurt more from women in my life than from men.

And so it's not about patriarchy so much as like my mom was a dictator or right.

And we probably need to talk about women who act like male leaders and they end up suppressing voices.

But what I said to those friends is please do not let patriarchy off the hook just because you've been hurt through women.

We are all under this system and we are all warped.

And women, yes, like you said, Leah, absolutely do become proponents of male headship and they preach it and they write books about it.

And they expect it in other women and they talk about how happy they are to be under their husbands or their pastors authority.

And so please do not make the mistake of assuming that if you are hurt by a woman, then patriarchy is not their problem.

I promise you we can connect the dots.

It actually is.

It still is.

We all live in this patriarchal system.

So it is the problem.

It's the monster.

Okay.

So Box, done.

Dawn, what do you think about all of this?

What are you thinking right now?

I am thinking about, Leah, what you said about women's complicity.

And I'm thinking about my experience.

So I started, 20 some years ago, I was an elementary teacher.

That's what I got my first degree in.

And I worked for the first few years while we needed my paycheck.

And then I stepped out.

And I have been out of the workforce for more than 20 years.

And that was very much applauded in the circles that we were in.

And I'm not saying that women should not be stay at home moms, but I am looking back and wishing that I would have kept more of a foot in the workforce.

Because about a year ago, my husband and I went through a really hard experience.

He was unemployed for six months.

And he was the sole breadwinner.

And we had a son in college, and I was in college.

We had a lot of responsibilities.

And all that responsibility was falling on his shoulders as the sole breadwinner.

And I wanted to help him.

And I didn't even have a way to help him.

I had let my teaching license go.

I didn't even have the means to do anything.

And that was a big wake up call.

I enjoyed a nice life for the last 20 years.

And he took on a great deal of responsibility.

And I don't think that was fair to him when he lost his job, to have all of that responsibility on his shoulders.

So I've been taking steps to be able to contribute more.

That's why I'm working on my master's degree right now.

I would like to teach at the university level.

And I don't want to be in that position again.

That's powerful.

And I like how you highlight, we're not here to say, hey, you know, women should not stay at home with their children.

If that is what you want to do, and if that is the structure that your husband is able to provide with one income, we also recognize that is oftentimes wrapped up in white privilege.

We realize that women of color have very, very often not had that ability to stay home and have worked this whole time as we've all been having this conversation.

So we are not advocating that women should all go to work and let the nannies raise your children.

We're actually advocating for something quite different that my therapist pointed out.

You need to highlight that the problem with all of this is the word doctrine, where it becomes a church rule that this is how families should live in respect to their family lives and their church lives, that men should be in charge, that women should stay home, etc.

That's the problem, not individual choice.

If you have a situation where you're a woman, you want to raise your own children in your own home, maybe you want to homeschool them, maybe you want to send them someplace online, and your husband is able to provide for you to do that, beautiful, or maybe you have a wife.

I'm just going to throw that in there.

Now we just lost more listeners.

We are not advocating for one size fits all life.

We are saying, hey, give us our autonomy and our sovereignty of our own selves and watch us flourish and come up with all sorts of creative solutions.

And Dawn, I can imagine that if you had been raised and given the ideas that you could be an equal contributor, you might have found creative ways while you're raising your children to keep your teaching credentials so that you had earning power.

Should there be a rainy day where you need to go back to work?

That's certainly something that has had been on my mind, too.

And it's why I still keep my certificate up now, even though I'm going back to school for the exact same reason, because otherwise, I mean, I can only imagine what that did to Derek to be like, it is my sole responsibility and I'm the only one who can do this.

That's way too much pressure and you're a partnership.

You ought to be able to say, hey, let me let me step in.

You take a breather.

I'll handle this.

That would be such a gift to be able to offer your husband.

Wow.

I'm wondering, one thing that maybe we left off of our list of definitions is patriarchy.

Oh, you know, it's so funny because the patriarchy is invisible.

It's kind of like Fight Club.

The first rule is you don't talk about it.

Thank you.

What do you mean?

Oh my goodness.

I can't believe I left that out.

That is also quite a loaded word, right?

That can mean lots of things to lots of people.

And yeah, okay, let's define it in real time.

Patriarchy go.

I would just, I think I would just essentially define it as the...

It's a system that we all take for granted, that ultimately believes, even outside of the church, that men should be on the top of the pyramid.

That that's where they belong.

Yeah, so it's kind of like male supremacy, but applies even outside of the church.

Yeah, when I think of the word patriarchy, I think of like a Biblical patriarch, where there's this man who's at the top of the pyramid, and he may or may not have several wives, and then lots of children, well, male sons, which would be much more important, and then animals and servants.

But he's at that top of that pyramid, and that entire structure is there to support him being at the top.

Yes.

And he needs to exercise whatever form of authority or control he can muster to stay up there.

Because usually there's a male son somewhere saying, I want my turn to...

I'm getting in the weeds on the definition.

The triangle works for me.

The thought of a Biblical patriarch that's like there's so...

The entire, essentially the entire economy is there to support that person's reign and comfort at the top.

And then the underlying assumption that that should always be a man up there.

That's my on-the-fly definition.

I like it.

Would you add anything, Dawn?

No, I just think of Ken's Mojo Dojo.

Ken's Mojo Dojo?

Is this a cultural reference?

The Barbie movie.

Oh, now we lost the rest of our listeners.

Oh yeah, they just turned it off.

We mentioned Barbie movie.

Yes.

That's funny.

I would also say for people who are like, well, I don't think that.

I just think that, you know, the husband should be the head, but not the top of the pyramid.

Okay.

Ask yourself this.

Why up until recently and still to a great extent now, but certainly historically, it's been more this way.

Any joke that you might tell, any story that you might tell is about a guy, unless the point is that the character is a woman for some reason, right?

She's maybe a mother or in a profession that's dominated by women.

But the male being the default character in our imagination, and when we tell jokes or we write stories or we watch movies, or we name things, we name things, right?

Why we think boys cannot be expected to watch a movie about a girl, but girls can be expected to watch a movie about a boy, right?

Or the worst insult you could ever tell a boy is that he's being like a girl.

If you told a girl she's being like a boy, she'd be praised, right?

Oh, you're being tough, right?

It's why men can be assertive, but women, we get called other things if we insert our voice.

So if this is your first foray into this conversation and you're like, I don't identify with this pyramid nonsense, just begin to pay attention to what our culture serves up as the norm and when we deviate from the norm.

There's a whole lot of work out there exploring this, but I think you've said that well.

I think that's a good definition of it's by the man, for the man, and I mean, just look at the Bible.

It's by men, it's for men, it's about men, it centers men, it's written to men with men in mind.

And if you don't believe me, ask yourself why the Apostle Paul is always talking about circumcision.

Who gets circumcised in Palestine 2000 years ago?

Hopefully, they weren't doing female circumcision then.

That's a horror that I think is more of a recent development, although now that I think about it, maybe it's been going on for a long time, but the Apostle Paul was referencing the Jewish circumcision of the penis.

And so just ask yourself how many main characters can you name in the Bible who are women?

Right, we can think of a few.

Now ask yourself how many of those women have conversations with other women?

Well, that whittles it down.

And how many of those conversations are not about men?

Right, that's the, what's the name of that test?

Oh, yes, that's a test to apply to literature and babies.

Right, to see how patriarchal it is.

And so once you begin asking these questions, like, oh, are there women who talk to each other about themselves?

Oh, no, not once in the Bible.

Mary and Elizabeth have a conversation, but it's about Jesus and John.

And so even there, the Bible flunks this test.

And so we have to ask ourselves, was the Bible written in a time when maleness was the norm and femaleness was secondary?

Well, absolutely.

In fact, I've been compiling a document that's now 14 pages long, where I've collected little gems from history in the present, men talking about their hatred, and it is hatred and fear of women.

And it's astounding.

People like Will Shakespeare and John Crisostom, and back and back further and further and further till you get to the Greek thinkers.

Maleness was viewed as supreme and femaleness throughout the ages has been considered dirty, perverse, dark, vulgar, and sinful.

So I get riled up real fast.

Can you tell?

Anni, I think that brings up what has become an important point for me is to point out that patriarchy or misogyny or the general fear or hatred of the feminine, it's not exclusive to Christianity.

It's existed as long as the history that we know about has existed, right?

I mean, essentially, or any of the written history that we have, for sure.

It's existed in really various heinous forms.

And so I guess this is a point that I bring up is, when I'm talking to people about this issue, is I would hope that as Christians, we would see that truth of and take a really like full look in the face of kind of how awful women have been treated and spoken about.

And rather than being frightened by that or making it feel like, oh, no, now we're like blaming all of these, you know, societies or all of these people for a view that they themselves inherited, that it was passed down to them.

And that seemed totally normal to them while they were espousing it to say, but now we recognize that that is harmful, it's untrue, and if what we know of Jesus is true, it can't have been, it can't be what Jesus had in mind, or what God had in mind for women.

And so part of Christianity should be and always has been about, you know, inverting those triangles, like turning power, the power structures upside down and saying, yeah, this is the way that it's always been.

It's also awful and harmful, even if it feels normal.

And we're going to do the slow and steady work to like turn that over.

And so when we read the Bible, I think we get, we also miss how radical the inclusion of women is.

I remember in college reading a book called Tertullian's Apologies.

He was an apologist really early, maybe the first or second century, writing to his friend trying to convince him to become a Christian.

And he spends a great deal of time and energy in that book, apologizing, I'm doing air quotes, for the fact that Christians included women so robustly in the life, leadership, you know, different spheres of the church.

Clearly, it was an embarrassment to the men of that time, to the Romans and Greeks and I'm sure the Jewish men who got up every day and thanked God that he didn't make them a dog or a gentile or a woman.

So that was such an eye opener to me, like, oh, he's clearly embarrassed about how much honor, leadership, inclusion Christians give to women.

And that really kind of that always stuck in my mind.

And it was a little seed that just waited there for the right time to then go view the Bible with different eyes and say, we just miss how radical the inclusion and and leadership of women that is recounted in the New Testament would have been to its original audience.

Absolutely.

And our stance has become regressive.

But for its time, the stance of what women were doing and were allowed to do and included into, and how much they were mentioned, and what information they were given, was wildly radical beyond what we can even imagine.

It was almost, it was heretical to some, that Paul would appoint Phoebe to carry and deliver and read aloud his words.

Was mind blowing to the population of folks who knew that Jewish law included women or property, and they don't get a say, and the word of a woman is nothing, and they get up every morning, and thank God they're not a woman.

And so, yes.

And so you can't convince me that Paul wasn't being intentional by doing that.

He couldn't have found some man to do that work.

He didn't.

And there's a reason why.

That's lost on our modern ears, and gets muddied with those particular verses in the Bible that seem to say women need to stay home and be quiet.

And they're the reason that we have sin in the world.

So.

And let me throw this spoke in the wheel of that argument, because I just read six of Paul's epistles this last week for one of my classes.

And it was fascinating.

First of all, highly recommend reading the entire epistle start to finish, because it's a letter with like a thesis and points and it's going someplace.

So to just pick things out of the middle, not great practice.

And I noticed this one place, I didn't write down which book it was in, where Paul says, for the risen Christ first appeared to Peter, and then to the other apostles, and then finally Thomas, right?

And my eyebrows did the same thing, Dawn, because I'm like, what about Mary Magdalene and the other women who in other gospel accounts were there?

And Christ appeared to women first, his first word after resurrecting is woman.

Like, let's sit with that.

And he commissions Mary to go and tell the others, right?

Paul either doesn't know this because he hasn't read the gospels, right?

Those were actually written after Paul's epistles.

So Paul does not have the advantage of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

So let's just take a moment with that.

He has met Peter.

He has actually spent time with Peter.

Peter either didn't tell Paul that Mary knew first, or Paul chose not to include that.

One or the other, one of those men left Mary out.

Like, let's sit with that for a second, because we know Mary knew.

The gospel writers are clear.

Paul doesn't know that, or he claims not to.

So before we go underlining and quoting texts, let's have a little reverence for the fact that Paul's understanding is not complete, or he's lying.

One of those two things.

And then if we don't want to say he's lying, let's give him the benefit of the doubt.

But then Peter lied to him.

So what do we do with that?

Hmm.

Hmm.

Hmm.

But Dawn, I really love what you said earlier, and Leah, you just highlighted.

We need to view all scripture through the lens of what we know of Jesus, right?

So even if you take out all the other writings and you just leave the red letters, you've got a lot to work with.

And what do we see from how Jesus treats women, speaks to them, talks about them, names them?

What's your experience?

And while you're doing that, I'm going to look for this wonderful little picture on my phone I want to talk about.

OK, new idea.

Dawn's like, wait, you put me on the spot.

I found this picture.

This was seen on a sticker on a water bottle in our friend Kelsey's church the other day.

I went there and here's what the sticker says.

And I want you to hear this.

If you are a Christian and you are listening and thinking, wait a minute, but it's biblical for men to be in charge of women, I would read you this sticker and say, please, with all your heart, see if this is true.

Read the Gospels and see if this is true.

Jesus protected women, empowered women, honored women publicly, released the voice of women, confided in women, was funded by women, celebrated women by name, learned from women, respected women, and spoke of women as examples to follow.

Our turn.

Well, while you were talking about that, I was thinking, I do think of an example of Jesus really lifting up women, and I think about the story of the bleeding woman.

Yeah.

And then, you know, that's bookended by the story of the dying girl.

And a woman who, in that culture, was considered unclean, broke all protocol to reach out and touch him, and he did not condemn her.

He lifted her up.

And he made a powerful man wait.

Yeah, a powerful Jewish man wait.

Wait until his daughter died.

And Jesus was like, It's okay, I'm actually Lord of everything.

I'm going to hear this woman's whole story.

That jumped out to me this summer when we were studying that story.

She tells him her whole story.

And that's probably the first time she has used her voice in public, for 12 years, at least, you know, and as a follower of Jesus, with great respect for the scriptures, I would encourage anybody who's like, Yeah, but all these scriptures that seem to ostracize or subordinate women, hold on, please.

Will you open your Bible like stop the podcast?

Please go back to Genesis 2 verse 24 and listen for this, because this is before the fall.

Even if you want to cast all the blame onto Eve, you can't do that because in Genesis 2, nothing has happened with the forbidden fruit.

It says, God speaks to them and says, for this reason, man shall leave his father and woman, and mother, father and mother, and cleave unto his wife.

In other words, a man is supposed to leave his tribe and go live in her tribe.

That's matrilineal.

And there are societies who have practiced this, where the woman is surrounded by her family and her tribe.

Why?

Well, one reason is for her protection.

She can't be mistreated, violated, abused in the presence of her brothers and her parents and everybody there, right?

He will be on his best behavior.

And so I thank God knowing, oh, this man could use his, you know, probably bigger muscles against her.

I'm going to set it up so that she's surrounded by her family always.

And he has to come and live in her life.

And then the children are traced matrilineally in that case by their mother's line.

They probably, when they finally start having last names, the idea is they have their mother's last name.

I was thinking about my two last names, Ponder Evans.

One's my dad's last name.

One's my husband's last name.

What's my last name?

My mother's lineage gets lost as soon as you look at my name.

So in Genesis 2, God sets it up so that matrilineally is the order.

And then in Genesis 3, God predicts, does not say it has to be this way, says now it will be this way, that patrilineally is going to be the order of patriarchy.

He's going to rule over you and your desire will be for him.

And all of this madness that we see comes in with the sin and separation.

And so why would Christians be arguing that that's what we need to uphold?

That's not how God wanted it in the first place.

So if it's up to us, if Jesus was like, go and do my will, right?

Why don't we go about dismantling systems that prioritize men and say, that's not a Christian thing to do.

Jesus wouldn't have done that.

And God in Genesis didn't do that.

So why are we supporting these systems?

It used to really bother me that Jesus didn't appoint, like officially appoint a male or a female apostle.

And I think there's, I don't know, I'm not going to speculate.

I could, but I'm not going to.

But one of the things that was really a turning point for me, I was reading this book called, and it's not even about, you know, patriarchy or women's roles in the church.

It's a book by Scott McKnight entitled, Reading Romans Backwards.

And he does go into some really specific detail on what women actually did in the early church, things that we would be missed, that we miss in a, you know, just a casual reading of the Bible, especially when we are bringing in all of our complementarianism, you know, ideas or patriarchal ideas that have been handed to us and the lens we view the Bible through.

But he was talking about how after Jesus died, there's apostles listed, and one of the names in that list is most often rendered Junius.

And he goes into great lengths to explain why that was not a name.

That was actually, her name was actually Junia.

And we have record to show that she was an apostle, named an apostle with her husband.

And that that name has been intentionally changed and suppressed throughout our renderings of the Bible, either maliciously, like we don't like this to be true, so we're going to write it out, or because it was so widely believed, well, a woman couldn't be an apostle.

And so that realization was a was really a big deal to me to realize, oh, no, like, I don't think there's any current question that Junius was actually Junia.

No, I have read on both sides of this issue and all scholars, even complementarian ones do have to shrug and go, okay, it was a woman.

Yeah.

Even even the Kastenbergers can't refute that.

Interesting.

Wow.

Okay, that says something.

Yeah.

So I just throwing that in there.

Like if you look at Jesus's life and say, yeah, but still he kind of surrounded himself with dudes and gave them like the title.

He surrounded himself with a lot of women too.

And the amount of times they get mentioned in the type of literature that the Gospels are is just unheard of.

But at the very least, the early church was appointing females as apostles and giving them that title and designation.

And it's fascinating and so frustrating to learn.

And we have to keep in mind that these stories that were written down were written by men with men in mind in a patriarchy.

And so I have a friend named Shelly who says, well, that's what the boys wrote down, which is not to discount scripture, but it is to place it squarely in its context and understand Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John might have seen, maybe Jesus had female disciples, but no one thought they could name them.

And so they just said, oh, and some of the other women were around.

It's like we wouldn't know because they were still apprenticing Jesus.

They hadn't figured it all out.

And they certainly lived and died for Christ and by the Spirit.

But that does not mean they saw the whole picture.

And it would be wrong to assume that all of a sudden, after Jesus is resurrected, they suddenly see things as clearly as they can.

And they realize, oh, we live in a male supremacist society, that, oh, hierarchy is not good because Jesus said he came to set the captives free.

So we shouldn't even have any slaves anymore.

Like they didn't have those epiphanies.

They were still set in their setting.

Yes.

And I will answer this question.

We can't be judging history by today's standards.

Okay, that's a whole other conversation.

But what we can say is now, what are we going to do?

Now that we know.

All right, fine.

We may not be able to judge them, although I still think we can, because they knew that it was wrong to steal and murder and rape.

And that's what you did to slaves.

So, but I digress.

If we're not going to judge history by today's standards, let's at least continue judging today's by today's.

And let's judge the systems.

Again, we're not here to like point fingers and name names and blame people.

We're here to uproot the system that allows it to perpetuate in the first place.

We're calling out male headship as male supremacy and saying, church, we have got to do better.

We are hampering our women, we're hampering our children, who are watching what it means to be a man or a woman.

And we're exhausting our men who think they have to shoulder the whole load of responsibility.

So it's time to share.

All right.

Well, I think that just about that's the good first draft.

It's a good first draft, right?

We've been going for almost an hour and a half now.

So here's what's next.

To the women of our valley, an impassioned invitation to you.

Does this conversation stir you?

Do you have things to add?

Would you voice your own experience?

Please get in touch with one of us and we will invite you to one of our upcoming listening circles.

Those who are not in the Wenatchee area, I implore you, start these circles on your own.

We have got to be talking about this.

And it would be great to invite men and other folks into the conversation too, but make sure to center women's voices and stories and really listen.

And finally, clergy, if you're out there and you're part of an organization that still centers men, and you're like, well, I agree that women should be centered, but you have to understand and there are bigger fish to fry.

I would say to you, really?

Because half of us are being suppressed and you're willing to prioritize other issues?

Please really sit with that in the Holy Spirit and see if you search your heart a little bit because we are asking, please take this seriously.

Please look at your policies that either overtly or covertly prioritize men and lead people to think that men are bearers of Imago Dei and women may be only in some fashion, but not entirely.

Let's be done with hierarchy and let's agree with the Apostle Paul who says, look, in Christ, there is no gender, class or race, no Jew or Greek, no slave or free and no male or female.

We are one in Christ.

There's the bell.

Amen.

Yeah.

Wow.

That was like, right on time.

Thank you so much for listening.

Let's connect.

I'm always happy to hear from my listeners and readers.

You can find me at barelychristianfullychristian.com.

And now for more of my favorite song by Wynn Doran and Paul Craig, please enjoy Banks of Massachusetts.