A few years ago, I was in the midst of a process of trying to discern my next steps. I had come to the end of a season on staff at a local church and was looking for my next vocational home. Making matters more complicated was my wife’s parallel job search; she had just finished graduate school and was also looking for her next landing place.
Since I did not have any particular next step clearly in view, I had cast the net fairly widely. I looked at local church jobs, mostly Senior Pastor positions in small congregations, but I was also exploring further education and my wife was likewise applying to jobs that would have seen us doing anything from staying put where we were living to moving to Boston or even overseas. At the time we had lots of possibilities but no clear leading, and we were navigating a delicate dance of finding the right opportunity for us both.
In the midst of this search, I had a conversation with a Wesleyan District Superintendent1 about the possibility of serving in a local church in their district. We had a phone call in which the DS told me about the church, its recent history, the sort of pastor and leadership they were seeking. It seemed like a fine church, but let’s just say that the Spirit wasn’t exactly moving for me. So, admittedly as a sort of deflection, I explained that I would pray about the position, but that I would also need to speak with my wife and that we’d need to see how God was leading her and what doors might open for her in her job search.
There was a pregnant pause on the other end of the line before the DS said, “Well, but… is your wife following you or are you following her?”
Turns out, actually, that the Spirit was moving for me, and this was a definite “no.”
Wesleyans (generally, if not individually) have long prided themselves on affirming the full empowerment of women in every area of ministry leadership.2 As my experience with this DS reveals, however, there has also long been a caveat to this affirmation: women may be able to preach, even serve as Senior Pastors, but maybe women are nonetheless required to be subservient within the context of the home.
This District Superintendent (again, in a denomination that affirms women in ministry!) was aghast that my wife’s calling and career, the ways God might be leading and using her, might be as important as my calling and career. The clear implication was that my wife, as a woman, could do anything God might call her to do, as long as she fit it in around my more significant calling.
There are some Wesleyans who are skeptical of the denomination’s official position on women in ministry. Thankfully, the denomination’s response, by and large, has been, “you are welcome to find a new ecclesial home, because this is a settled issue for Wesleyans.” My sense, though, is that there has been a tendency to make space for this pulpit/home dichotomy in our churches and among our pastors out of a desire to not rock the boat too much or cause division.
Wesleyans, it is time to be done with this sophistry. I can, perhaps, understand how one arrives at the belief that wives must be submissive to husbands. After all, a surface-level reading of Ephesians 5 in English seems to say this outright. But it is my contention that there is no hermeneutically and intellectually consistent way to hold that women should be encouraged to serve in ministry but should simultaneously be subjugated in the home.
Explaining why I believe this is the case fully would probably take a longer post than I have time for this week. Perhaps I will take a shot at some of the exegetical issues in a future post. For now, here are a couple of theological arguments in favor of this position:
There is no subjection of women to men in the original creation design as narrated in Genesis 1 & 2. This has long been covered in Wesleyan circles, but the primary word used to insinuate a hierarchy is the word “helper” in Genesis 2:18. The old KJV translation used the language of a “help meet for him.” While “helper” might read as “secretary” to many, in actuality the Hebrew ezer has no such connotation. In fact, the vast majority of the uses of this word in the Hebrew Bible refer to God helping Israel. God is certainly not Israel’s secretary.
Any subjection of women that might be said to have divine sanction is the result of the Fall, not the original design. At most, women’s subjugation to men is a punishment, a consequence of sin, not an eternal design. I am also inclined to read Genesis 3 as laying out the animosity between male and female as a natural consequence of human sin, or perhaps, rather, as the shape that human sin takes, not as a divinely imposed punishment, but that’s an argument for another time.
Any subjection imposed on women by the Fall is reversed in Christ. We are no longer bound by the power and ordering of the world imposed by sin, we are to live according to the Spirit, invited into the life of Christ and the Kingdom of Heaven, in which God’s original design of mutuality prevails.
Any continued subjection of women to men inherently assumes an inferiority of women to men, an inferiority disproved by reason and experience. There is no Biblical reason to maintain this assumed inferiority, and all other sources of knowledge argue against it. And no, I will not accept the idea of a hierarchy rooted in gender that says nothing about the relative value/capability of those genders. I will also not accept trinitarian… mistakes… that suggest a hierarchical eternal subjection of the Son to the Father and then further read this subjection onto male-female relationships.
Egalitarianism, mutual submission, does not entail an erasure of all difference between male and female. If nothing else, one can pursue full mutuality while also maintaining the distinctive embodiment of male and female, with no need to delve into stereotypical (and often harmful) tropes about love vs. respect, nurturing vs. protecting, emotional vs. rational, or the like.
The hermeneutical and theological principles that have guided the Wesleyan tradition to (rightly!) embrace the full empowerment of women in ministry likewise should guide us to reject all forms of patriarchal subjugation of women, whether in the home or anywhere else.
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1
The Wesleyan Church is my denomination. District Superintendents serve a similar function to Bishops, though without the full sacramental authority/role a true Bishop might have in other episcopal structures.
2
If you’re curious why Wesleyans would do something so “unbiblical,” check out this blog post (and attendant resources) from Wesleyan Bible Scholar, Dr. Ken Schenck.
