Complementarian men should respond to women with a listening ear and a resolve to better teach what headship actually means and what it does not mean. They should be reaching out to abused women, whose husbands and churches hide under the banner of headship and complementarianism, and call out the abuse and false teaching loud and clear. They should be working to help church leaders to recognize abuse and provide godly counsel and resources for those abused. And if they truly believe in complementarity, they above all should want to invest in women with solid teaching, since they know their value to the church.

 
We’ve been betrayed. This is something that has disturbed me, as well as a handful of other women writers, for a while now. We’ve tried to respectfully engage, and we have been ignored. Completely. So I put a few rocks in my snowballs and threw them out, hoping the sting would provoke some men to wake up and say something. Some have. That’s why I was so pleased to share Liam Goligher’s guest post. All of a sudden people are listening. And asking questions.

CBMW in particular owes a lot of women an apology. They haven’t acknowledged one woman* who has critiqued their fringe teaching and asked for them to think of its practical consequences. And they wouldn’t answer my one reasonable questionabout their stance on Nicene Trinitarian confessions. It has made some wonder whether they are even interested in listening to women. This is not complementarity according to how I thought of the definition of the word. It seems that “complementarity” has been reduced to nothing more than authority and submission, one inherent in men, the other in women.

Women have been betrayed by the packaging and mass selling of hyper-authoritative teaching under the guise of complementarity. Men who know better are just helping to perpetuate it. And women who know better are also silent. Why is that?

Are there just some things we are not allowed to say or question? It seems the more friends you make in these parachurch organizations, the trickier it gets. The unspoken notion is that if you want to build or keep your platform, if you want to write and sell books, then you need to know your place. You also need to know when to be quiet. And that silence is heard and received on the Internet as approval or indifference.

But apparently it is okay to teach in opposition to historic Nicene faith regarding EFS and eternal generation. You can even teach about hair length. You can go on and on about being micro-managed by your husband right down to the number of soap bubbles you missed on his dishes. And you can write all kinds of applications of about how women should relate to the postman, whether she should strength train, or if it’s feminine to compete in Mixed Martial Arts.

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