Why I respect complementarians

The women in church office debate continues within the CRC even after the church opened up the offices. I hosted a specific debate over how this plays out in some classes  and it continues to be discussed on CRC-Voices, prompted by my posting of a wonderful piece by a female CRC Minister.

Here are a couple of posts I made to the conversation on Voices.

Post 1

I too hope that your churches that are not availing themselves of your gifts would do so. I’d love to have Cathy or Diane as an elder in my church. If you decide to relocate to Sacramento and join Living Stones you’ll probably get the chance.

As was noted many times in this debate this is not a “men vs. women” thing in general. In my experience in the KWOO churches just as many women are in the KWOO camp as men.

I’ve been an ethnic minority in most of the neighborhoods I’ve lived in most of my life. I remember many times in the DR especially receiving special treatment, sometimes positive, sometimes negative because of my appearance. It still happens today. Even in this broader culture it is assumed because I’m a large, white male that I have grown accustomed to privileged treatment and therefore … (fill in the blank)… must be true of me. I’m me, not a category or a label.

When I think about pain and regret most of the deeper things don’t come from discrimination done against me by virtue of my demographics, they come from mistakes I’ve made. If someone treats me poorly because I’m tall, white, have a Dutch last name (not much Dutch about me really) then for the most part that is on them. They are responding to stuff in their own heads, right or wrong. The more deeply troubling biases people have against me are those done by virtue of mistakes they can legitimately place on me as an individual, not on my group. Those are more difficult to deal with.

Church leadership is often cruciform, maybe that’s why so many men who are expected to assume it wear the yoke so uneasily. If someone doesn’t like me because I’m a man, that’s on them. If someone doesn’t want me to be their pastor or the leader of an organization they participate in because of things more individual to myself, well those cause me to examine myself more carefully.

Our church has a good number of men that have been former elders. In many ways they continue to be elders even when not in office. We’ve got some women who are elders but have never served. They’ve been asked numerous times but have declined because they didn’t want to offend precious friends who were against women in office in our church. I don’t like their decision, the church is lesser for their decision, but I must respect it. The last three elders (we have 2 at a time) we’ve had are all women. They’ve done a great job and I’ve really been able to see how they execute their office differently than men do. They are more pastoral, less organizational. That’s probably not as due to gender as background experience of the individuals. The women have had years of experience of care and nurture. The men usually have experience in business and organizations. Both gifts are needed for the church.

Part of the reason I’ve got sympathies for the complementarian position is because of my experience with women elders. Ideally I want both men elders and women elders because they bring different things to the office and serve in different ways in the church.

I also tell incoming elders that at least initially their jobs seem to look easier than the deacons, but that can all change in a minute. Elders in my experience share the same kind of exposure as pastors to criticism because they oversee in areas of greater complexity sometimes.

Post 2

The heart of the complementarian observation is that the genders are different and have different things to contribute. In that case you are making a complementarian argument and accepting their assertion.

Those complementarians that assert that women shouldn’t be permitted to primary leadership in the church (elders) essentially say:

1. men and women have different things to offer.
2. there is a mysterious reason that God has for withholding that position from women.

Now I can subscribe to 1, but not to 2.

At the same time point 2 is tricky because Christians hold lots of beliefs that we can’t explain but simply try to take on “faith” and in those cases either 1) develop rationales for those positions or 2) simply hold them because “God says so”. Even when we develop a rationale we often state that 2 trumps 1. Rationales change over time, but we hold to the practice because God says so.

We are dealing with a lot of these kinds of issues in the church. extra-marital sex, sabbath observance, etc.

Growing up I’d hear stories about faithful Dutch Christians who wouldn’t lie to Nazis about the fact that they were hiding Jews (because they didn’t lie because God said not to) and somehow mysteriously the Nazis didn’t look or find them. I can’t verify any of these stories but within our CRC culture deeply impacted by piety these stories reinforce a position of “rely on God, be obedient to God, even when you don’t know why.”

There is something deeply important about that impulse and I know that this is the impulse that leads many people to not embrace women in office. I won’t criticize them for that impulse even if I disagree with their conclusion. A lot of the Christian life is about obedience even when we don’t know why and sometimes in spite of “common sense”. There are plenty of other issues around where this dynamic is similarly holding true and we view it as virtue, not bigotry.