(from Stacey Midge)
This is an essay I wrote some time ago, so some of the references are a bit outdated, but given the current discussions in the RCA, it seemed relevant.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." ~ Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride
I've come across a lot of anti-woman sentiment lately. Some of the more conservative members of my denomination have a Facebook group that I occasionally look at when I'm in the mood to get good and mad; this week some of them took a break from blasting the evil homosexual agenda to share some of the grief with the evil feminist agenda. Then I met a random guy at my hangout of choice who, out of nowhere, with no idea that I am a minister, announced that he was against women in church leadership. He then made a valiant attempt to out-Bible me, which is always fun. And then there have been a slew of articles like this interview of Mark Driscoll, in which he reveals himself to be arrogant, pushy, and fairly unconcerned with facts, and this article from The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, in which femininity and females are characterized as all manner of negative things, including imbeciles. Different but equal, eh?
So, I have a confession: I was a complementarian once. At least, I tried to be, back in the day when the only people I knew who seemed to take Christian faith seriously were a group of quite conservative evangelicals at my college. I tried very hard for two years. Really. I had had one of those dramatic conversation experiences, and I thought their path was the one I needed to follow, too. They told me a lot of things about what the Bible said. Among other things, they told me it said that women were supposed to be submissive to men, that husbands were supposed to rule their households, that women were not allowed to teach men or hold any position in the church that might be considered higher than a man. And I believed it. I tried very hard to believe it.