A conversation started up in the comments of an older post called Should Women Say The Lord’s Prayer in Church? I started writing a lengthy reply and realized I think this is important enough to put in a post.
Kris said here:
I think we already have a disaster for conservative women in the church. Many are deconstructing and going over to the liberal progressive side. As a result, I see women believing and taking in so much either politically or in the church and believing it all to their detriment. Having little discernment left. Cherry picking scripture to fit their beliefs (Christian or otherwise) instead of looking at context.
On the other side of things, there are conservative women (like many of us) who are just struggling with being in the church in general and not being able to speak. They are still strong in their faith, but don’t agree with the complementarian model or totally with the egalitarian model. Don’t like the patriarchal aspects of the church either. Many conservative women believe it just because their husbands do and will stay with it because of that.
So rather than leave this as a comment, here are my thoughts as I would reply to Kris.
I am completely in agreement with your observations in your second paragraph that there is a cohort of conservative, born-again Christian women who believe in the authority of the Bible who don’t fit in anywhere. I think there are more than people realize. How many women are there who still faithfully show up on Sundays, but feel a level of disconnect that is emotionally, spiritually, and physically painful? They don’t believe they can walk away from a weekly gathering, but they gain almost nothing from it spiritually or personally.
In addition, how many have left the institutional church and are in home churches or organic churches now? I would argue many of our best Christian women have left the institutional church in order to find a place to use their gifts. I am not talking about going to liberal churches. I’m talking about seeking out anything that doesn’t feel like she has to choose between her own spiritual well-being and compromising theologically in a way she simply won’t because she is a conservative, born-again Christian woman who believes in the authority of the Bible. See my posts on Alana Lagares leaving Calvinism and moving to a home church. She represents just one of many women.
I disagree with part of your first paragraph. I don’t think it’s possible for a conservative, born-again Christian woman who believes in the authority of the Bible to go progressive and deconstruct. I really don’t. She might have appeared that way on the outside, but there had to be something amiss under the surface that grew and she allowed it to lead her astray.
(Different people might view it differently based on their beliefs about eternal security and once saved always saved. I personally do not think a person who has been redeemed by Jesus Christ can be lost. They can make lots of bad choices, but I don’t think they can remain in sin and rebellion. Other good brothers and sisters in Christ will disagree with me and that’s fine.)
In the end, those of us who are conservative, born-again, Bible-believing Christian women are stuck in a paradigm that just kind of stinks. I loathe the term egalitarian which I’ve mentioned before. Complimentarianism is patriarchy lite and full of blatant contradictions in how it is practiced. Patriarchy is not defensible from the New Testament. There is just no good category for us at this point in time.
I have a whole bunch of posts about this that I haven’t republished because I used the term conservative biblical egalitarian in them out of desperation to find some label that would work. That was in the 2012-2015 timeframe. If conservative biblical egalitarian was a loaded term then, egalitarian in any form is just completely toxic now after the past ten years of sexual madness and chaos. I don’t want to defend that term and so I’ve dragged my feet at republishing them even though there are some really good posts in that collection. Complimentarity without hierarchy works in a way, but who wants to keep using that term when writing and discussing? (Update: I’ve now republished most of them.)
There is an entire cohort of us who don’t fit in anywhere.
Here are a few related posts.
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