I heard about the Allie Beth Stuckey blowup on Twitter/X after the fact and have done my best to accurately put all the pieces together. (If anything I’ve reported below is factually incorrect, please let me know in the comments.) What stood out to me is that it is the perfect encapsulation of what I have been saying for the past fifteen years.

If you missed it, Stuckey hosted a large women’s conference a few weeks ago. It was for women. The speakers were women. It was thousands of women gathered together to talk from the Bible about being Christian women.

Did I mention it was all women and all about being Christian women?

Stuckey gave the Sunday morning presentation, talk, or address. Whatever you want to call it. She got up and presented Biblical truth for women to women on Sunday morning behind some kind of stand on a conference stage.

As always after a large conference, short clips started circulating online with highlights of the different speakers, including Stuckey speaking on Sunday morning.

And complementarian and patriarchal Christian Twitter freaked out.

Allie Beth Stuckey was teaching on Sunday morning. That’s like preaching!

That’s not allowed!

Now think about this. What have these very same men been saying over and over and over again for the past 40 years since the establishment of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood?

Titus 2.

1 Timothy 2.

Women are to teach women how to be women according to those two passages of Scripture.

So Allie Beth Stuckey got up and spoke to women about what the Bible says about following Jesus.

And she was condemned for it.

These men will never ever be satisfied.

She is everything they say a woman should be. She’s a Christian, wife, mother, and Calvinist/Reformed. She’s openly complementarian in her views. Very pro-life. She ticks all the boxes that should give her the approval of these men.

And yet they still condemn her for speaking.

To women.

Someone said that the problem was the clips circulating. If she had just spoken at the conference, but no video of it had been released publicly it probably would have been okay. But now that clips are going around, she’s teaching men and drawing attention to herself.

Seriously?

I mean, really.

Seriously?

She’s stepped out of line because clips of her teaching women about the Bible are going around online?

This reminds me of the women who won’t speak to a women’s group at a church if a man is running the sound system because he might learn from the woman while she’s speaking.

I did not make that up. It’s a real thing.

You know where this is headed with these men, right? To the point where now women aren’t allowed to pray out loud in Wednesday evening prayer meeting in some churches.

Yes, really. It’s already here.

Intelligent, gifted Christian women will be forced to make a choice. They will either choose to use the gifts God gave them with the disapproval of the men “in charge” or they will have to knuckle under in order to stay in the good graces of the men in charge.

That’s basically the choice Allie Beth Stuckey has been presented.

Please note I am NOT advocating in any way going liberal. I’m not advocating taking the path of so many women who started out in Christian churches and made choices that led to them becoming apostate. I am not advocating going to a denomination that has turned its back on the authority of the Bible.

What I am saying is that we are living in a time when all of our institutions in America are undergoing massive upheaval. This includes the institutional churches which directly impacts all of us in the Body of Christ.

How many gifted Christian women are simply going to walk away from the institutional churches (and their denominations) and move to a home church or organic church gathering where they are free to speak and participate?

How many gifted Christian women will choose to use their gifts in ministry outside of the “oversight” of an institutional church?

The conservative institutional churches are in the process of swinging back hard from the insanity we’ve endured the last few decades. As with all pendulums, they will over-correct. That’s why women are not allowed to pray out loud now in some churches.

I believe the over-correction will get even worse than that.

Complementarianism is failing at an accelerating rate because it’s patriarchy lite.

(What’s funny is the patriarchalists call complementarianism “egalitarian lite.”)

As I’ve pointed out time and time again, complementarianism fails because it becomes illogical in its application. Those who wish to enforce it in the church are pushed into making inconsistent or even ridiculous arguments and decisions. I have many posts about that on here.

Someone left a comment on my blog years ago. She asked which was worse (paraphrasing):

• Patriarchy consistently applied where you know exactly what to expect but you have virtually no freedom to use the gifts God gave you
• Complimentarianism inconsistently applied so you never know what to expect when you attempt to use your gifts because the goalposts are constantly moving

Ask Allie Beth Stuckey how she feels after being attacked by the complimentarian camp she has championed for years. Ask her if she likes the inconsistent application of the rules of engagement for women in the public sphere.

So some gifted Christian women have a choice to make.

Women can submit to the rigid but consistent grid of patriarchy where you will be extremely limited in what you are allowed to do but will know where you stand.

Or women can continue to run in complimentarian circles where the rules and expectations change all the time to the point you will be blindsided by rules capriciously applied.

Both are unhealthy. Really unhealthy in their own ways.

I don’t think women should be subjected to either one.

I think they are both wrong.

The third choice is that gifted Christian women can look for something else. I suspect many already have. We simply don’t hear about it because they are happily engaged in ministry where they are blessed and appreciated.

All we will continue to hear in the public square is how Christian women need to be brought to heel by strong men and shame on women like Allie Beth Stuckey who step out of their biblical sphere when the men decide they don’t like what the women do.