A Quiet Simple Life | Sallie Borrink

For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Romans 6:23

A Quiet Simple Life

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Sallie Borrink

Trusting God With Romance and Marriage


Lately I’ve been contemplating the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of individual believers and, more specifically, how God brings two people together for marriage. Among a significant number of Christians (especially in the homeschooling community) there is a strong leaning toward courtship. This view has been heavily promoted by various authors and organizations over the past fifteen years.

I’ve never been comfortable with the whole courtship concept and I’ve definitely not bought into the idea that courtship is the only Biblical model for a number of reasons. Primarily, my own life did not develop like that and yet I can clearly see God’s hand in every aspect of my meeting David and marrying him. I’ve seen God clearly move in the lives of friends and it had nothing to do with courtship.

Christian Courtship Is Too Often Man-Centered

I had one of those aha moments this past week when God brought something to mind that affirmed to me afresh that the parent-led courtship model is… flawed? Dangerous? Wrong? I’m not sure where to draw the line with my statement.

But I’ve become increasingly convinced that the courtship model is often man-centered and not truly God-centered. I know that courtship proponents would argue that it is God-centered, but I honestly don’t believe that is true in many cases. It is parent-directed, parent-centered, and, in many cases, father-centered.

I even find it hard to accept that it is couple-to-be-married-centered in many cases. Yes, there is prayer involved and so people would call it God-centered. But the idea of parents setting the agenda for a child’s marriage – even with that child’s “input” – simply does not seem God-centered to me.

Holy Spirit’s Leading In Marriage

I have never understood why a mature young man or young woman who has been brought up in the church and taught to love Christ and follow the leading of the Holy Spirit would need parents to direct them to a suitable marriage partner. Isn’t that what the Holy Spirit is for?

If the child isn’t mature enough to walk with Christ and find a spouse on his/her own, then submitting to a courtship process isn’t going to make him/her any more ready for marriage and all the spiritual aspects that it entails. If the child is mature enough to marry another Christian, the child is mature enough to be led by the Holy Spirit to find a proper spouse.

For More Than A Diamond

Back when I was a struggling single and wanted to be married, I came across a little book put out by Moody Press in 1966 called For More Than a Diamond: Romances from Real Life compiled by Don W. Hillis. I don’t know if I can fully express the impact this book had on me. It was profound for a number of reasons and I knew when God led me to it that it was a tremendous answer to prayer.

The collection of short stories tells the romances of fourteen couples. In every case, there is an overwhelming sense of dependence on God to intervene in the romance.

There is no formula. There is no parental direction or oversight. But there is a clear recognition that Christ is sovereign in their desire to marry the person of God’s choosing.

There are people who meet and then are separated by the mission field (long before the days of Skype and regular jet travel). Others make the difficult choice to put their Isaac on the altar to keep God’s calling on their lives first and their desired romance second. These are young men and women who found romance while serving God in ministry, at college, on the mission field, etc.

These are all people who found their spouse while serving God in the world. The romance simply grew out of the fact that they were living full lives in service to the Lord literally around the world. They trusted that if they sought the Kingdom first, everything else that was good would be added to them (including a spouse).

Courtship and Excessive Dependence On the Parents

I contrast these men and women with the young people today who are kept dependent on their parents for everything – a place to live, work to do, and choosing a spouse. The women especially are expected to go from complete dependence on their fathers to complete dependence on their husbands. The idea is promoted that they cannot have lives of their own and ministries of their own. They aren’t even trusted to follow the Holy Spirit on their own.

How profoundly sad it is that these young women and men are being kept in a perpetual state of spiritual adolescence rather than being set free to follow the Holy Spirit. Shouldn’t parents rejoice that their child is spiritually mature enough to make her own decisions rather than continually telling her that she needs parental direction in order to make the right choice?

Raising Our Children To Walk With the Holy Spirit

I can think of nothing that would make me happier as a parent than to see Caroline walking in step with the Holy Spirit and experiencing the overwhelming joy of seeing God’s hand at work in her life. The moments where I have been overwhelmed by the obvious presence of God’s hand in my life are the greatest moments of my life. They are the stones of remembrance that I return to time and time again.

What more could I want for her? To see my child trust and wait on God… what else is there as a parent that can possibly compare? And what greater gift could I give her than the understanding that God directs her steps and orders her life? What better heritage could I give her than the knowledge that the Holy Spirit is active and alive, guiding and protecting her?

I sincerely hope people will rethink the courtship model and ask themselves if there isn’t a better way. A way that is God-focused and allows young men and women to strike out on their own walk of faith. A path that allows them to experience the joy of seeing God personally move on their behalf without any intervention from their parents. A way that brings maturity and consistent spiritual growth as men and women of God.

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The Pain, Loss, and Humiliation Gifted Women Experience in the Church


A few nights ago I was sitting in the car, waiting for David and Caroline to come out of Meijer. I turned on the radio and found the broadcast of a church service. I knew right away what kind of a church it was. The soloist was doing a heartfelt job, but was obviously not a professional. It was not a church with a band and drums, but a certain kind of piano accompaniment. As I listened to the pastor pray, I was about 90% certain that I was listening to a Baptist church service.

And it made me feel incredibly homesick.

So what does that have to do with the book How I Changed My Mind about Women in Leadership: Compelling Stories from Prominent Evangelicals?

Everything, really.

The chapter I’m highlighting today is “How I Changed My Mind About Women in Church Leadership” by Cornelius (Neal) Plantinga, Jr. Plantinga is the President of Calvin Theological Seminary, the flagship school of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC). The church where we are currently members is a part of the CRC.

Plantinga offers so much food for thought in his chapter it is hard to know where to begin. So I will begin at the end and leave the rest for you to read if you choose to buy the book.

Plantinga discusses at length the issue of slavery in the Bible and how Christians’ views have changed over the years. But, even more importantly, he discusses the only way to handle all of the passages on slavery:

The upshot is that it is remarkably hard to dismiss what Paul says to slaves. You need a big, subtle hermeneautic to do it. You need one just like that used by the gender egalitarians. You need to be able to tell time, theologically. You need to see the big movement of the history of redemption that rises above the small print for local times and places.

It is very hard to explain away what Paul says about slavery. It requires thoughtful application and consideration in light of all of Scripture. This is a key point that many often overlook. We dismiss slavery out of hand as Americans, but very few Western Christians have ever been asked to give a theological explanation of the verses that condone slavery and encourage slaves to even stay and submit to their masters. Almost every Christian today would say slavery is wrong, but how would they carefully handle the passages related to it? It takes a subtle hermeneutic, just like the issue of women.

Plantinga then quotes F. F. Bruce on Paul’s teachings that relate to the idea of female subordination. Bruce writes:

If general, where there are divided opinions about the interpretation of a Pauline passage, that interpretation which runs along the line of liberty is much more likely to be true to Paul’s intention that one which smacks of bondage or legalism.

Perhaps most meaningful to me are the next two paragraphs:

Given the almost universal sexism of first-century settings, the preaching and ruling of women might then have been scandalous and detrimental to the preaching of the gospel. Today the situation is precisely reversed. It is the exclusion of women–often done with lofty and humorless reassurances that they are equal even if subordinate–that is scandalous and enervating. One result in conservative churches is that they are hemorrhaging devout and gifted women to denominations that are not their home.

Alongside the pain and humiliation it visits on women, besides the diminishments it brings to churches that drain or dam half their talent pool, the policy of excluding women has become deeply embarrassing. Males discuss somberly whether we ought to “allow” women into church offices. The discussion sounds so much like that of parents trying to decide whether their adolescents are ready to assume adult responsibilities. It sounds so much like majorities dithering over whether they ought to invite minorities into their club. It sounds as if the church belongs to males.

Plantinga concludes with an acknowledgment that these kinds of issues make people uncomfortable. It makes him uncomfortable to think with concern that it could lead to the proverbial slippery slope where anything goes.

He then writes:

But any of us who relativizes the slave subordination commands in the New Testament has already been walking that path. We are embarked. We reject slavery not because individual texts condemn it, but because the sweep of Scripture does. Most of us evangelicals are so convinced that slavery is wicked that Ephesians 6:5 & co. will not move us. The text must have had local and temporary application.

Last evening I was thumbing through a devotional book by my bed: Amazing Grace: 366 Inspiring Hymn Stories for Daily Devotions. As I went through it, I was struck by how many of those hymns I haven’t sung in years and years. I know the words to them as well as I know my own name. Many of them I could sing all three or four verses at the drop of a hat. They are a part of my faith heritage. But the church we attend now has a different hymn heritage and so I sing different hymns now.  Sometimes we sing familiar ones, but often the words have been updated (a personal pet peeve of mine) and so even then I cannot lose myself in the joy of singing those songs.

It all makes me very homesick for my faith heritage. There are days my longing to be back in a Baptist church is so strong it feels suffocating. The CRC is not my home and it never really will be. As much as I appreciate our current church, it is not home in the deepest sense of the word. And yet I had to leave my denominational heritage behind because I no longer fit in nor would I be welcome with the views that David and I hold about women in the church.  Just as Plantinga wrote above, I’ve been forced to move to a different denomination because of the questions I’ve asked, the giftings I have and feel compelled to use, and the steadily growing personal conviction that my brothers and sisters in Christ are wrong in their unwillingness to recognize women as equal partners in the gospel.

When Plantinga writes about the pain and humiliation women feel, he is not exaggerating or overstating his case. It is painful and humiliating for gifted women to be marginalized and dismissed. It is painful and humiliating for women to be told they need to sit down and shut up. It is painful and humiliating to know that friends and family members assume you have compromised your Biblical convictions because of your understanding of women in the Bible.

Many of the essaysists in this book mention the loss that accompanies such a view. No one who wants to “fit in” in the evangelical and/or conservative Christian environment today would ever make the choice to embrace this view. But when you realize the freedom and joy granted to women by God, the pain and humiliation pales in comparison. Far greater will the joy be to hear “Well done, good and faithful servant” when we see Christ and rejoice in all that we were allowed to do on His behalf and through the empowering work of the Holy Spirit.

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The Ginghams Paper Dolls (Free!)


Have you ever heard of The Ginghams Paper Dolls? They were very popular many years ago and women have fond memories of playing with them as a girl. I happened across a free download of these adorable paper dolls and wanted to share them with you.

I’ve already decided that I’m not showing  the Ginghams Paper Dolls to Caroline until we get all the furniture, dolls, and some of the clothes cut out. David will have to do all the cutting so I need to give him time to get some of it done while she’s in bed. But I know she will love it.

Caroline has been playing with her Little House on the Prairie Paper Dolls quite a bit lately and it has been fun to watch her enjoying the Ingalls family. I’m sure she will enjoy having some new paper friends to play with as well. If you would like to check them out, this link will take you to The Ginghams Paper Dolls Book in PDF format. (This is not my PDF and I have no control over it if it ends up missing at some point in the future.)

I also found another set of Ginghams someone posted online and featured them in The Ginghams Visit Grandma. That post has a link to another set of the paper dolls in a different theme.

In My Shop

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Spiritual Abuse | Fifteen Years Later


A few weeks ago Karen linked to information about the implosion within Sovereign Grace Ministries (SGM). On the forefront of the situation is C.J. Mahaney, the well-known leader of the group of churches. As I commented on Karen’s blog at the time, I was both surprised and not surprised. My lack of surprise was not due to knowing or suspecting bad things about Mahaney. I really knew very little about him. I knew enough about SGM’s core beliefs to know that David and I would not fit in and they were therefore not much on my radar.

My lack of surprise had more to do with the fact that it is almost sadly predictable that those in positions of leadership within churches and the Church so often are revealed to be less than what people thought. We’ve grown so accustomed to failings among Christian leaders that it barely causes one to stop for more than a minute and reflect on it before thinking about what to make for dinner.

Now before anyone accuses me of being callous and uncaring in the extreme, I’m not. In fact, last night a part of my life came full circle because of this C.J. Mahaney thing.

I was reading on SGMSurvivors the various stories of those who have been greatly damaged by their time in SGM churches. And while reading the stories, I put something together I had not before.

When David and I met, he was attending a church that was both reformed and charismatic in its teachings. Being a Baptist with reformed leanings, I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around it, but that’s what it was. David had been there quite a few years and was mostly happy there. When I moved to Grand Rapids while we were dating, I agreed to visit his church although I had reservations about it. (We were not officially engaged, but were in agreement we would be shortly.)

I visited the first Sunday after I moved (fifteen years ago this week) and was very uncomfortable. It wasn’t just the worship style that made me uncomfortable. There was something palpable in that church that made my spirit simply recoil. When David introduced me to the pastor, my spirit immediately withdrew. I rarely take an instant dislike to anyone, but every fiber of my being backed off when I met him.

I don’t remember anything of the following week, but I agreed to visit David’s church again the next Sunday. I did not even make it through the service. My spirit was so disturbed by things going on and the way the pastor addressed the congregation (forcefully scolding them for an extended period of time because they were not worshipping “correctly”) that I had to get out of there. I felt an overwhelming sense that I had to flee and I could not even wait for the service to end before I left. I whispered something to David about having to leave and seeing him back at my apartment after the service. And I got up and walked out.

That was a very long drive across town to get home. But while sitting in that service I knew that even if it meant losing David there was no way I would EV.ER. darken the door of that church again.

When I told David that I could not attend his church again, he agreed to visit other churches with me so we could chose one together. We decided to visit a Baptist church a friend had recommended. David, being the loyal and honest man that he is, called his pastor and told him that I was uncomfortable at his church and that we were going to visit some other churches together.

And then the abuse began. And it completely blindsided both David and me.

The guilt, manipulation and control tactics were unleashed on David in a way that we were totally unprepared for. He received threatening calls at work. He was told that if he married me he would be unequally yoked. He was told he was stupid to throw away everything he had at his church to take up with some Baptist woman he had just met on the internet. He was told he needed to wash me in the Word and assert his leadership and demand that I return to his church. They asked him how he could possibly leave a church where he had learned the Truth and turn his back on that and go to a Baptist church. He was told he would have psychological problems if he left and that he would face certain personal failure in leaving. The ultimate was when he was told he was barred from the communion table because he was in rebellion.

When David did not succumb to the pressure that went on for a few weeks, he was ostracized and his character and faith were defamed at the church. People were told he had fallen away. He had left the true church and taken up with a woman that would bring about his destruction. They were told to have nothing to do with him because he had “problems.”

I cannot even begin to express how this experience overwhelmed our lives for months and, really, years. Our time of engagement was overshadowed by an intense numbness over what had happened. David lost almost his entire church family that he had known for ten years. Only a few people dared speak to him and only a few were at our wedding. It was heartbreaking to see how he was treated over simply choosing to go to another church and having the ability to walk away from something.

So what does this have to do with Sovereign Grace Ministries?

While reading those stories of abuse and suffering last night, it was like reading our own story. Change a few details and it sounded exactly like what happened to us. And then I realized why.

David’s church was “descended” from the same group as SGM. They all go back to the same group of people. Different branches, but the same kinds of authoritarian leadership, manipulation and thinking that they are the church with all the answers.

When I realized this, it all made sense to me. The same beliefs and practices are driving those churches that drove the church that spiritually abused us.

David and I were discussing this tonight and I shared with him how my heart grieves for those people in SGM. I know what spiritual abuse does to you. I know how it completely disrupts every aspect of your life for months and years. There is no way around it. You have to walk through the process and come out on the other side.

Fifteen years later I can read those stories and have no personal emotional response other than to grieve for those people who have been abused. This was not always the case. For years afterwards we lived in fear of running into someone from David’s former church. Any time the topic came up, my stress level would skyrocket. Praise God that we have moved past that. We see the abuse for what it was. And we thank God it was only as bad as it was. It could have been much worse.

But I understand why people post their stories anonymously over there. The fear of retaliation is real. It has taken me fifteen years to publicly write our story and even then I have left out many details. But I no longer fear those people. I grieve that we allowed them to impact us as much as they did. While we were happy to be engaged and enjoyed our wedding, it was not what it could have been. Emotional numbness from spiritual abuse doesn’t just go away because you are getting married. I believe God is sovereign and for whatever reason He allowed things to happen the way they did. But to this day it grieves me that those people robbed us of a full measure of joy during our engagement.

David and I were also discussing how neither of us have ever returned to the same place spiritually we were before the abuse happened. I fully realize that we can’t go back. But at the same time, the spiritual abuse took something away from both of us that we can’t ever get back and we both grieve that. At the same time, it also gave us things we would not have had before. We look at the suffering of others very differently because of what we went through. We look at theology differently. We look at church leadership differently. So many things that are good and healthy. But don’t ever doubt the impact that spiritual abuse has on those around you. It changes your life. Permanently.

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