One night quite late on a friend in the church messaged me. She’d read this and was pretty angry about it. She wasn’t alone. It got me wondering as to why as a complementarian I often find myself having more in common with many egalitarians. There’s a culture over there on that side that I prefer to much of what I see over here on this side. I find much of the tone of ‘my side’, particularly (but not exclusively) as it finds expression from the US it has to be said, to be all too often tone-deaf, unkind, unreasonable, lacking in empathy, sympathy and often love. If winsomeness is a factor in how we judge an argument, and for many it is, then much of the time too many complementarians deserve to lose.

So here I am on that side, sometimes wishing I wasn’t. But why am I on this side?

Personal history

I think honesty just requires us to evaluate where we’ve come from and what has shaped us. We all come from somewhere and this post is less about my theological convictions and what I believe to be both true of the Bible’s story or what I think is needed in our time and culture than it is about seeing the experiences that have shaped my thinking.

I grew up in the 1970s & 80s in a British conservative evangelical family. My father was a pastor of a non-denominational church affiliated to the FIEC on the south coast of England. This environment meant then, as it still does now, that pastors were men. But also in every other denomination except for perhaps the Methodists, the pastors and priests were also only men. And in our tribe’s thinking, then as now, the Methodists were ‘liberal’ and in decline, so no one saw their stance on issues like this as an example to follow. The only Methodists the evangelicals I knew looked up to were the Wesleys.

By the time I started at university in the early 90s I was surrounded by competent and capable women and it was around then that the Church of England finally ordained women. As my friendships and connections broadened I slowly became aware that not everyone took for granted the same things I had done. I remain amused by the scorn heaped on us laggard complementarians by progressive Anglicans who are so proud and superior of their advances with their 25-year long history of equality. 25 years you say, that’s a biblical blink of the eye.

I found myself knowing Anglicans who believed the Bible, which came as something of a surprise having never met any of that sort before, but I was still apt to dismiss their case as just another symptom of their denominations wider drift towards liberalism. None of the arguments I heard from those early advocates for women priests did anything to persuade me I might have been wrong in that assessment. And in that regard not much has changed.

After university I found that my church while I had been away had become a part of Newfrontiers, whom I had never heard of before. My church had male elders and plenty of female leaders (small group leaders, worship leaders, my youth leader, the occasional woman preacher) and as far as I knew, everyone seemed happy enough with that. Complementarianism was never foregrounded before, nor as far as I recall after becoming a part of Newfrontiers. It was obviously a factor but it just wasn’t the thing anyone talked about much. I can’t say at this point I’d still ever really looked into the issue despite now being in possession of a theology degree. I took the ‘plain meaning’ of the Bible and accepted it. I mostly still do.

Other life experiences should probably be factored in. I regularly read women’s stories of their treatment at the hands of male leaders and it is obvious this forms part of the fabric of their conviction that something is wrong. Well, leadership is, as I’ve learned hard. No one bats a 100, I certainly don’t. And these experiences can cut both ways. Most, if not all, of my experiences under female mentors and leaders (as a trainee teacher, a field worker for an NGO in Africa, in church environments) were mostly mediocre. I wish one of them had changed the game for me, showed me the possibilities, convicted me or something. That didn’t happen and instead I struggled under poor and often weak leadership. I don’t think I’d say that I still carry the scars anymore but I probably did for a while. Today I just think that leadership is hard and that these decent women tried their best. In key moments (and in some cases in all moments) they weren’t quite up the grade, but that’s just like me in some moments when my leadership isn’t what it should be either. I don’t know that a man would have been better and it’s true to say that I’ve had some, though fewer, bad male leaders too. In the interests of an over-abundance of caution and desire for clarity I don’t think ALL women are incompetent or weak or incapable of excellent leadership just because at times these leaders were.

However as culture and an increasing number of evangelical churches embraced an egalitarian position and as a leader of a church plant with numbers of competent and gifted women I had to finally wrestle with the issue. Some women in the church were egalitarian but there were others who came to me desperately hoping that their husbands would provide more leadership in their marriage. I kid you not, passive husbands who weren’t pulling their weight in the decision making department of their family even when they were pulling their weight with the chores was not an isolated pastoral problem. So I began the deep dive into both the Biblical arguments and the cultural tides and currents that are at play in the UK (and also in Sweden where I am today) and I have been mostly keeping up with that for the last twenty years or so. When you repeatedly read books on the same subject, you become quite familiar with the arguments on both sides.

I think it is interesting to note that in the space of my lifetime we’re now in a place where the struggle in culture is not the place of women but the worth of men who are, across the western world, struggling. I think egalitarians have failed to offer anything useful about what it means to be a Christian man. I’m not always impressed by the example that complementarians put forward but at least they’re trying and they’re trying to think through the bigger landscape of what it means to be male and female.

As I think about where I started this post, I hope the people in our church and the women leaders I know and respect within it would say that I champion them and am for them. I hope we have a culture of mutual honour and respect and that we have all the kindness and that we don’t just permit but pursue women to use their gifts for the glory of God. But it remains the case that I’m not convinced by the egalitarian case about the Bible and I’m definitely missing some answers to questions which I consider important¹.

1. PS: That’s not me in the picture [↩]