Lee-Barnwell pleads that our theology of ministry for both men and women “should be able to show how the ministry of leaders points toward God, not the leaders themselves, and highlights the power of the cross, not just personal areas of competence and responsibility”(168). What I see so often is clamoring of the loudest and most highly paid voices to claim who gets to lead and who has to submit, while the pastors and husbands who truly understand headship are quietly taking out the trash and wiping runny noses.

 
My spellcheck has never recognized complementarian as a real word. But in the circles I run in, I am considered extremely suspect if I don’t identify myself as one. It’s a fairly new term, coined less than thirty years ago. As I have been digging deeper into the movement behind this word, I am finding that it carries different implications depending on who is using it. I have been called a thin complementarian for questioning some teaching from the leaders of the movement that as a woman I am to be constantly looking for and nurturing men to lead me. (To which I responded here.

Within the culture in the church today, many questions are still being asked about the equality of men and women and where and how women can serve. As I have been participating in this conversation, I feel like I need to continue to begin with my convictions that Scripture places the responsibility of the ordained office on particular, qualified men, so that I am not labeled a feminist and dismissed. While I’ve been working on a book project of my own on related issues, I have found this new book out from Michelle Lee-Barnewall, Neither Complementarian nor Egalitarian. In the conservative, Reformed-ish community, a title like that is like saying that you don’t identify as male or female. So of course I had to read it.

Lee-Barnewall aims to offer a kingdom corrective to the evangelical gender debate, as stated in her subtitle. She begins the book saying that we need to take a few steps back from our current conversations and debates to recognize how the terms we are using are the product of cultural forces of the era in which we live. She makes the case that our discussions on gender weren’t always framed with vocabulary such as “authority”, “equality”, and “rights.”

So in Part One of the book, the author gives us a history of gender in evangelicalism, showing how women played different roles according to the cultural values of the time. At the turn of the nineteenth century, women were seen as important influencers and leaders in the wider cultural sphere, and were pioneering leadership roles in benevolence movements and missions. Their work in society was seen as imperative to the welfare of the country.

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