“In our country the women are going on ahead and the men are being dragged along like luggage. The problem is not with the women, the problem is with the men.”

So said my new friend while I was quizzing him and his wife about their spiritual journey and church planting adventures. I’m sure his diagnosis has people nodding heads from across both sides of the gender debate. There is nothing particularly new about that insight.

He told me how he was introduced ten years or so ago to the preaching of Mark Driscoll. Oh oh. I know some of you are thinking that. He is after all one of the most polarising figures in recent evangelicalism. Hang in there with me though.

He began to share how his teaching began to shake him out of his lethargy and passivity, how he began to take on responsibility for his family, for their spiritual life and how he stopped abdicating out of decisions.

I turned to his wife and wondered what this intelligent, capable woman thought when her husband was first converted and then began talking about his responsibility as ‘head of the household’?

“I thought it was great” was her immediate and unhesitating response. “He started caring, he started being involved, he stopped saying ‘whatever you think’ or ‘whatever you want’ to everything.”

She went on to share how she felt the weight and burden of running the family was lifted and she felt they were more of a team when her husband finally decided to lead. She was so incredibly positive about the benefits as a result of the change in her husband, that I was surprised.

It would seem to me reasonable to suggest that egalitarianism has been more effective at helping women see and use their gifts and talents, to believe that their gifts can be put to more use than simply making the tea and making up the numbers. As a result I increasingly see complementarians raising their game and responding to the challenge to ensure their teams could match Romans 16.

Yet I wonder if it is also reasonable to suggest that the complementarian view is more effective at rousing men from the sin of passivity and a slothful laziness that leaves women carrying all the weight? That it more powerfully speaks to men in their slumber and wakes them to get up off their backsides and invest in their families?

I feel compelled to qualify what I’m saying and not saying. So I’m not calling egalitarian men, passive. I’m saying that there are passive men who are failing their families and I’m asking if teaching on the role of men as leaders in their families is more effective at causing them to change than an egalitarian view.

I wouldn’t personally be surprised if that was the case.