She Should Not Have to Wonder

For the women who came home with something the church did not know how to receive.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

A special thank you to the woman who asked me, “Did I ask the wrong question when I joined this church?” That question rattled my entire perspective on women in the church. It is also the question women in my care have been asking for years, in different words, with the same weight behind them: does the church value me beyond my mothering or my relationship status?

Thank you for asking questions that drove us to the One who can answer them. And for affirming what I already knew to be true. The answer is a resounding yes.

Women are filling seminary classrooms. They are pursuing theological formation, biblical counseling degrees, ministry training. They are doing the work the church has always said it values.

And then they come home.

And many complementarian churches do not know what to do with them.

That is not a small problem. It is a question about whether complementarian churches are living up to their own theology.

I ask that as someone who holds this theology and loves it. And who has also felt the gap it describes.

I am a biblical counselor and a seminarian. I sit with women who are formed by scripture, hungry for theological depth, and trying to figure out where that formation belongs in the life of their church. I am also one of those women.

Scripture gives us a picture worth returning to.

Start at the beginning. Before the fall, before sin complicated everything, God made Eve and called her ezer. It is a word used elsewhere in scripture for God himself coming to someone’s aid. Not a lesser helper. Not an assistant. The answer to something Adam could not be on his own.

That is the foundation. Difference by design, not difference by deficiency.

Move into the New Testament and the picture only gets richer. Paul commends Phoebe in Romans 16, calling her a deaconess of the church at Cenchreae and a patron of many. He greets Priscilla, who alongside her husband corrected the theology of Apollos, a man described as learned and mighty in scripture. He names women who labored in the gospel beside him, women he considered co-workers in the truest sense.

And then there is Titus 2. Paul gives older women a specific charge: teach the younger women. Not how to make sourdough, as wonderful an endeavor as that is. The list he gives is theological and formational, soundness in faith, love, self-control, how to live in a way that honors God. That is discipleship. That is theological formation passed from one generation of women to the next.

This is what scripture pictures. Women with depth, with voice, with something the body of Christ was designed to draw upon.

Somewhere between that and the modern complementarian church, something narrowed.

Ask most complementarian churches whether they value women and the answer is yes, without hesitation. Point to the evidence and it looks like this: a mothers group, a women's Bible study, a children's ministry director, or a woman on staff.

Good things, all of them. Needed things.

But they are not the whole picture. And for many women they are not enough, not because the callings of wife and mother are small, they are not, but because they were never meant to be the only categories the church had for women.

Consider the single woman. The widow. The woman whose life does not fit the wife and mother template. Where does she belong in a church whose entire vision of women is organized around family structure? Scripture has a category for her. The early church had a category for her. Many of our churches do not.

This is not a failure of complementarian theology. It is a failure to live it out.

It was always there. We just stopped building toward it.

The Titus 2 woman was meant for more than a Tuesday morning gathering. The deaconess was meant for real function, not just a title. The single woman and the widow were never meant to be problems to be accommodated. They were meant to be part of how the body works.

None of this requires moving the line on eldership. It requires something harder than that. It requires a church to ask honestly whether the women God placed in the body are being seen, formed, and drawn upon the way scripture actually calls us to.

That is not an egalitarian question. It is a complementarian one.

The woman sitting in your church this Sunday already knows she is valued by God. She has settled that. What she is still trying to figure out is whether you know it too.

Not whether she is welcome. Not whether there is a program with her name on it. But whether the church she has given herself to sees what God sees when He looks at her. A woman formed by scripture, shaped by wisdom, with something the body of Christ actually needs.

Scripture already has a picture of her. The ezer who is indispensable by design. The Phoebe who is named and commended. The Titus 2 woman who carries theological weight from one generation to the next.

The question is not whether complementarian theology has room for her.

It always did.

The question is whether we will build churches that do.