For me, it looks like fighting for a woman to speak during our Sunday morning gatherings. Or asking a woman to lead a Bible study of both men and women. Or talking with women about what their vision for ministry is.
If women have shown a capacity for the gifts needed to fill these roles well, it does not compromise God’s design to let them lead. In all these instances, male headship does not need to be undermined within the life of a church body.
The burden of privilege.
Recently, I had a conversation with my wife where I apologized for ways I sensed I had done a poor job of leading her and our family. Privilege is a burden of considerable weight, and I bear it with the joy Christ has set before me.
It is for this joy that I toil, knowing God has placed me in such a place to help people draw nearer to him. I hope we each feel the weight of the stewardship opportunities God has granted.
Friends, if the complementarian perspective is causing harm to people within the body, we must consider how we can uphold to the spirit of the law, while giving new space that the letter of the law seems to disallow.
I have heard far too many stories where the voices of many were shunned in order that a complementarian perspective can be left intact, to its full capacity.
Headship is not a license to silence those we serve.
So I charge you, not to change your views, not to hold a weaker view of the teachings of the Bible, not to begin viewing all of life through a gender-roles perspective, and certainly not to change how you govern within your church and families, instead I charge you to pray and meditate on what it means to value men, women, young, old, all races and ethnicities.
How can you better use your privilege to care for those without?
How can you raise up the voices around you that have experienced the pain of being silenced?
If we would give the Spirit the space to move in this way, our churches would more greatly welcome the previously downtrodden.
And in that, God will be greatly glorified.
