Photo credit: Gatis Vilaks, Unsplash

Article first published by Christians for Biblical Equality International on June 23, 2024.

I fought back the familiar muscle aches that flared as I read yet another article about a woman robbed of her agency in ministry. The physical pain made me wonder whether the author’s own health was okay. Mine was not, and I experienced post-traumatic responses every time I heard about a woman being wronged.

How did I get there?

I’m now sufficiently past the crisis peak to process and am astounded at how apparently manageable situations compounded to become trauma that lingers as PTSD. Specifically, betrayal trauma, as the counsellor identified it, including feeling deeply betrayed by the church. The counsellor called what got me here “the perfect storm.”

What follows is a recipe for shipwreck—a sign of things gone wrong—after which I’ll share the beginnings of a recipe for hope and healing because our powerful God and saviour, Jesus Christ, has proven present and at work in the middle of the storm. This article is an exhortation to those who join him in judiciously exposing the effects of structural sexism and justifying women following the Spirit’s call into ministry: this recipe for healing has been to me a powerful antidote to the recipe for shipwreck.

If you, too, need just the antidote, skip to the last section. If you’re ready to take stock of signs of church culture gone awry in order to see why the work being done to counter it is so important, read on.

Preparations

The recipe begins with one young woman (me) whose childhood lacked the presence of stable, healthy males, and so she developed a craving for dependable male presence. Add an impressive young man secretly addicted to pornography. Have his Christian community encourage him to read Joshua Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye (for which Harris has profusely and publicly apologized ^[1]), after which he explicitly asks said young woman to let him lead the relationship.

The request had the semblance of romance, even chivalry, but it didn’t sit right and remained an uncomfortable memory that vividly stuck with the young woman for decades to come. It was an insidious irony that the young woman was asked permission to relinquish her authority: a vow of silence.

Stir in Confusion

The young couple moved through multiple church environments for their respective military training postings. Some ministry leaders said nothing in the Bible prevented porn use, while others said it was outright marital unfaithfulness. Most tolerated jokes about wives “wearing the pants,” being “the boss,” and having the real power in the home. The young man wanted to escape the addiction, and as ministry leaders did their best to help, they also exhorted the wife to forgive and not let a “root of bitterness” grow. She was eager to please and had a knack for dropping feelings of unforgiveness and anger like hot potatoes. The problem was that the hot potatoes only fell as far as the pit of her stomach. Just a little chronic indigestion to begin with, and motion sickness on military aircraft. But military training had taught her to prioritize the mission and teammates over herself, so she ignored these symptoms in favour of church and husband.

Now add to the mix a series of churches explicitly espousing gender hierarchy: women were not to be elders or pastors, but rather were to teach women and children and submit to their husbands, ideally stay at home and homeschool too. The young woman didn’t recognize the confusion of excelling at work but being implicitly discouraged at church from working at all, a confusion which deepened when her husband was invited to leadership based on her “permission.” Cue the cognitive dissonance of being given a say in whether her husband became a leader alongside the undertow of general refusal to allow women a say in the church or in their own lives. The mixed messaging churned to a boil.

Simmer on High

The wife felt powerless to help her husband escape the addiction; she took her marriage vows seriously and had no overt physical abuse to complain of. She told herself she could handle it. Not be angry. Forgive. Control emotions like she did in military emergency exercises. She “died to self” (a popular church phrase at the time) to maintain physical intimacy, since it was a man’s “need” that she had been “created to fill.” Add to that a military work environment with a socially acceptable underground porn culture: The very thing she felt powerless against was everywhere she went.

Mix Vigorously

Where she had been fit enough to keep up with the majority of men at work, the wife began to feel pain during fitness, despise getting up for work, and sleep almost fifteen hours on Saturdays. She developed constipation and bloating; then it worsened. Her joints got injured without any physical impact: first a shoulder, then a knee.

Her goals had been to help her husband escape the addiction, thrive at work, get promoted, and serve in church leadership. Instead, the wife got so sick she exited military service and sat at home marvelling at the unseen weight dragging at her body, like a stone rolling toward a grave. She went off gluten, off dairy, off sugar, salicylates, histamines, starches, everything sweet.

Then suddenly, a light shone from heaven . . . nearly. The wife experienced miraculous healing following prayer at an egalitarian charismatic church she visited, and the bloating simply disappeared. She went back to eating everything and regained an excitement for life.

She began attending a complementarian seminary and volunteered with a parachurch ministry. But the ministry leader repeatedly denied her recommendations, while a paper at school required she research whether women could be pastors and elders. As she read the authoritative voices underpinning her church, denomination, school, and parachurch leader’s stance on women, every health gain began eroding without notice until she was worse than she had been before the healing. What was happening? She was careening into the storm.

Keep the Heat on While the Trauma Thickens

The wife left parachurch ministry to rest and then found new energy to pour into local church ministry and community chaplaincy. She was invited to preach. Or rather, to speak or share, depending on how one splits the hairs of whether a woman can preach. Two of her own dear friends left the church in protest that she, a woman, had been invited to “speak.” She engaged with church and denominational authorities about “the issue of women.” She asked a professor why hayil in Hebrew was translated with respect to women as “noble character” and “valiant” for men; the professor warned about “getting on a hobby horse.” The wife told several other professors that this issue of women in ministry was becoming unsustainably painful. Their faces betrayed no emotion, though they did ask whether professors other than the one aforementioned had said anything directly hurtful. Well, no, it didn’t seem so.

The wife felt like a request for fish had been answered with a snake (cf. Luke 11:11); the betrayal by friends and professors compounded with years of repeated betrayal in marriage.

Bake It All Together

Suddenly, the wife’s body could no longer let her step foot in her own church building due to overwhelming physical pain at even the thought of doing so.  She quit working as a chaplain after seeing red when the denomination told her, “Good news! We’re working on letting women chaplains conduct weddings without being ordained.”

How on earth did I get there?

In a perfect storm.

I was the fishing boat who thought I could navigate the confluence of smaller storms for the potential of fruitful ministry. But my storm-tossed body preached what no one else would: My communities’ theological underpinnings denied ministry to ministering women.

A New Recipe

Now living in a new city, attending a new church and new seminary, I can better recognize the betrayals. But even in the storm, Jesus had been present as my rudder via the warning voices that informed my conscience: the woman who recoiled in disgust when I parroted my then-pastor saying that God allowed women to lead because men were failing to pick up the slack; the people who quietly encouraged me to lead more; the resources I encountered vindicating women in ministry; the friend who scoffed at the dissonance of jokes about a wife being the neck that turns the husband, as head of the home, where she wills.

Discovering others working to expose the structural sexism I’ve been steeped in is one of the most incredible reliefs I’ve found as the crisis settles. The conversations, books, articles, courses, podcasts, and more powerfully minister to my broken spirit and body: the makings of a recipe for healing.

You who do this healing work are the hands and feet of Jesus, resetting broken rudders––that is, informing consciences to bring women in ministry into safe havens––and coaxing wrecked ships back into action, not only to stay afloat but to thrive in community with the body of Christ: thank you!

You do not participate in merely natural work: I perceive how you press back against the destructive “cosmic powers of this present darkness,” against “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph 6:12). I see that it may even cost you dearly to study and speak and write and organize conferences, to rehabilitate storm victims and help those still in the storm to navigate it. You are contributing to a recipe for healing that is integral to the good news of Jesus, which has made all the difference to me and God-knows-how-many others.

[1] Joshua Harris, “A Statement on I Kissed Dating Goodbye,” JoshHarris.com, July 11, 2023. https://joshharris.com/a-statement-on

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God, bless and protect those exposing structural sexism in the church. Bring more women and men alike out of this storm onto safe shores. Heal them. Give them safety and rest. Restore them to walk in the calling you’ve given them, and make them thrive again.