what if you're wrong?

This is one of my favorite questions to ask myself. I’d probably ask it of others, too, if it didn’t sound quite so confrontational—that’s not the way I intend it, but we all hold our beliefs rather personally and it can be hard not to go directly on the defensive when they feel threatened or questioned.

Today, I’m examining a belief I held tightly for the first 20, maybe 24 years of my life—and have held a bit more loosely for the last half-decade or so, as real-life experiences and extensive study have required me to do so. Here it is:

Men and women have different but complementary roles and responsibilities in marriage, family life, and religious leadership.

This is the official Wikipedia definition of the term “complementarianism,” which is Christianese for patriarchalism. In complementarian theology, a selection of Pauline passages and Genesis 1-3 are used to justify the idea that men and women are equal, but women are both naturally created and divinely called to subjugate themselves to men, and men are both naturally created and divinely called to exercise authority over women. Some “softer” complementarians will say that they do not believe women in general must submit to men in general—only a wife to her husband—but that distinction is difficult to support practically, since the same will typically say that within the context of church, women as a group are still expected to submit to the general male leadership of the church, and under no circumstances should a woman be allowed to hold a position of authority over the men in the church.

In any case, complementarianism is the doctrine of gender roles I was taught from a young age all the way through my time in Bible school. It’s about then, suddenly armed with a far broader understanding of God’s Word than I’d ever had before, that this doctrine began to not sit well with me, but every time I was tempted to consider other views I got scared. What if they’re wrong?

It’s been a decade since then. I have more life experience, more church experience, and more importantly, a lot more Bible studying experience now. And slowly, the question bugging me has shifted from “What if they’re wrong?” to “What if I’m wrong?”

What if complementarian theology is wrong?

I’m not a historian, a Greek language scholar, or a PhD in Paul’s epistles. Plenty of incredible people are, and they have put a lot of work into this debate. Paul and Gender by Westfall, The Making of Biblical Womanhood by Barr, and On Purpose by Coleman are all good places to find Biblically-serious treatment of the topic if you are looking for further study.

I’m more interested, for the moment, in asking the uncomfortable questions that may help us examine the quality of the fruit this doctrine has been producing over time.

Let’s consider. If complementarian theology is right, then some of our biggest concerns for the Body of Christ should be:

• Ensuring that those who lead in the church are physically and spiritually qualified to do so.

• Ensuring that men never hear the Word of God preached or taught by a woman.

• Encouraging women to submit themselves to the authority of their husbands and the church.

• Encouraging and equipping men to lead their wives and the church.

If, on the other hand, Scripture favors equality between men and women as image bearers of God and co-rulers over Creation (as Genesis 1-2 and Galatians 3:28 would suggest), then the biggest concerns for the Body of Christ should be:

• Ensuring that those who lead in the church are spiritually qualified to do so.

• Encouraging all believers to submit to God.

• Equipping all believers to know, understand, and share the Word of God.

• Empowering families to reflect the selflessness of Christ in every role.

In the complementarian vision for the Church, men are up front, visible, leading the way for everyone else to follow Christ. Women are behind them, following and making sure the children don’t get left behind. Men who don’t enjoy the role of leader or don’t feel equipped to spiritually direct their homes are required to do it anyway, or at least made to feel sinful for not doing it; women who are gifted in leadership and spiritual shepherding are required to set those gifts aside, or at least relegate them to the nursery and the Pre-K class. What’s taught from the pulpit on Sunday mornings and in co-ed Bible studies throughout the week is reflective of what the male leadership of the church considers important. Topics deemed to be mostly of concern to women are left to the discretion of women-only Bible studies (although these, too, are subject to veto by the board of elders). In this way, the very structure of the church is designed to prevent anyone from questioning or reconsidering its rightness.

But is this the Messianic vision for the Church?

Jesus’s ministry on earth began with a declaration that the Kingdom of Heaven had drawn near. That kingdom began in a paradise called Eden, but humans lost access to its threshold when they disobeyed God’s command—and part of that tragedy was a destruction of the oneness between male and female (see Genesis 3:16). The Kingdom vision of man and woman as two halves of God’s image, ruling together over His Creation, was lost to the suffocating grasp of sin and death, leaving gender hierarchy in its place.

But if Jesus’s death and resurrection defeated sin and death, and if following Him means joining Him in taking back every lost inch of territory for the Kingdom of Heaven, why would we choose to remain in our fallen and divided state as men and women? How can the Church, which is Christ’s Body, animate His heart for the New Creation when we are still clinging so hard to the old?

What if, in the Messianic vision for the Church, men and women are side-by-side, each using their gifts to build up the others, with all eyes set on the selfless example of Christ? There are men teaching and preaching and leading, but there are also men serving invisibly behind the scenes to protect the vulnerable and care for the children; there are women faithfully raising their families and staffing the nursery, but there are also women speaking the truth of God’s Word with strength, clarity, and conviction. Men are educated and enriched by the perspectives brought to them by these women, and the women’s entire experience of life in Christ is finally made abundant when they are set free from the demands of the Pharisees.

What if that is what we are missing when we subscribe to complementarian theology? What if we have tied half the church behind Christ’s back with our gender doctrine? And what if we are wrong?

I struggle to imagine a ministry or aspect of Christian life that would not be enriched if both men and women were equally interested, involved, and obedient in it. But I can clearly see that many ministries and aspects of Christian life are suffering from being lopsided in one direction or the other. Surely a family where both parents exemplify spiritual leadership and mutual respect for one another is better off than a family where that entire responsibility falls to the father? Surely a children’s ministry where both men and women feed into kids’ lives is better off than one where the children are only treated as valuable by women? Surely pastoral counseling for a couple in a broken marriage will be far more effective when a woman’s voice is present, too?

There’s a phrase we all like to pull out when we imagine meeting Jesus face-to-face. “Well done, good and faithful servant.” It comes from the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:14-30—when the master praises his servants for stewarding his resources well in his absence, and even increasing their value. But he says something very different to the servant who, out of fear, buries his master’s money uselessly in the dirt.

What if Christ’s servants and earthly representatives have buried half the wealth of the church under a fallen idea of what it means to be a man or a woman? What will be said to us when King Jesus returns in glory?

We aren’t all called or gifted to be teachers and preachers and leaders. But some of us are. And some of us are women.

We have tried to fit these callings and giftings into the complementarian framework for decades now. And the Church and its testimony are suffering for it. The tree is bearing rotten fruit. It’s time to ask the hard questions.

What if we’ve been wrong?

God is here

I’m not sure how noticeable it is in this journaling space of sorts, but I’ve been going through what feels like a massive shift in how I understand the Gospel and, really, the Bible in general over the last few years. For so long, I thought of it mostly as a guidebook through the wilderness wasteland of earthly life to the Promised Land of heaven beyond—a view that I think a lot of Christians have, and one that is easily reinforced in our churchly experiences. “Repent and be saved so that you can go to heaven when you die” has been the prevailing message of what has been called the Gospel for many recent decades.

The trouble with such a gospel is that it leaves us there in the wilderness wasteland, waiting around for death. What then is the point of life? Is it any wonder that we’re so often tempted toward either fearful legalism or lawless hedonism when we don’t know what else to do with the intervening years before our salvation is, in our mind, actually realized?

But if the whole story of the Bible informs how I understand the Gospel, then there must be so much more to it than repent, be good, and wait around to die.

In the beginning, God planted a garden paradise where His presence would dwell, and He placed His image bearers within it. They were to cultivate and keep it, and to fruitfully multiply into families of image bearers, working in partnership with a present God to push the borders of Eden wider and wider until His holy garden-temple-kingdom might envelop all Creation.

We know what happens next: Instead of working in cooperation with the plan, the bearers of God’s image rebelled against His wisdom, choosing their own instead, and were consequently banished from His presence.

All this takes place in the first three chapters of Genesis. What then is the rest of the Bible? It’s the story of God’s relentless efforts to remedy the breach and return to dwell among His people—from the wilderness tabernacle to Solomon’s temple to, finally, incarnation in Jesus Christ, Immanuel, God With Us.

He, crowned King over all Creation and then ascending to sit at God’s right hand, sent His Spirit to dwell not only with us but in us. And He has never left.

God is here.

And yet our version of the Gospel seems too often to tell us that we’re just like the intertestamental Israelites, living in a broken and oppressed society, our temple overrun by moneychangers, our God silent, and our only hope in some unknown day when the Messiah might appear or we might die, whichever comes first.

Does that sound like good news?

Contrast this dismal picture with the language of the New Covenant for Israel, described in Ezekiel 36:

Thus says the Lord GOD, “On the day that I cleanse you from all your iniquities, I will cause the cities to be inhabited, and the waste places will be rebuilt. The desolate land will be cultivated instead of being a desolation in the sight of everyone who passes by. They will say, ‘This desolate land has become like the garden of Eden; and the waste, desolate and ruined cities are fortified and inhabited.’ Then the nations that are left round about you will know that I, the LORD, have rebuilt the ruined places and planted that which was desolate; I, the LORD, have spoke and will do it.”

Ezekiel 36:33-36

This is, importantly, a text directed at God’s people Israel, describing the New Covenant that superseded the Mosaic Covenant through the Messiah. It wasn’t written to you and me. But as adoptees into God’s family, we have been grafted into this covenant (Romans 11), and so while the specific renewal of the Holy Land isn’t directed at us or our nation, the imagery remains applicable: desolation gives way to flourishing, desertion gives way to multitudes, waste gives way to fruitfulness. Ruin gives way to Eden. Death gives way to life.

Because for those whose iniquities have been cleansed, God is here, and He is hard at work, partnering with us once more to transform a desolate world into a heavenly kingdom.

Too many of us, including myself a lot of the time, are loitering around the construction site dressed in suit jackets and pearls or collecting signatures on a petition or just sitting on the ground with our head in our hands, waiting for a rescue that has already occurred while the job that still needs doing sits undone.

Yes, it’s slow, dirty, uphill work. It’s discouraging at times to know we will not see its completion during our earthly lives. It’s curiously the richest and poorest vocation simultaneously, the loveliest and the ugliest, the biggest and the smallest; it’s both completely invisible to the untrained eye and a shimmering beacon in the black of night, a city on a hill.

And it’s so much better than whiling our lives away walking circles in the wilderness, trying to attain Pharisaical perfection or giving ourselves up to selfish depravity.

God is here. Not only with us, but in us. I wonder what might happen if we started living like it—not in a guilty or shame-based way, but by breathing deeply of His Spirit and letting His life animate us to work in partnership with the heavenly vision. As Jesus said in John 15:4-5,

“Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.”

The focus is not on tirelessly pumping out fruit until we die so that God will be pleased with us, but on restfully drinking up the life offered by the Vine, with fruit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, and their holy results as they feed the hungry souls of others—being the happy byproduct.

Advent is a beautiful season. I’m enjoying reading a Scripture and singing a hymn each day with Clara, in symbolic anticipation of the coming Christ. But I’m also firmly reminded that I’m not a B.C. Israelite waiting in a dark silence—I’m redeemed, made new, and indwelt by the Spirit of God. He is here. And because that is true, my role is to abide in Him, to bear His image, and to live as a citizen of His heavenly kingdom—both now and not yet.

how to bear fruit (that will remain)

“I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit. You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned. If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples. Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love. These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full.

“This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends. You are My friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you. You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit, and that your fruit would remain, so that whatever you ask of the Father in My name He may give to you. This I command you, that you love one another."

John 15:1-17

Though it's now one of my most-beloved (and by far the most annotated) pages in my Bible, I once had a very negative understanding of this passage - one shrouded by the dark shadows of guilt and fear. I looked at the requirement of fruitbearing as a threat (what would happen if I didn't bear enough fruit?), not a loving call to walk with Jesus and allow Him to work through me.

Key to this unfortunate misinterpretation was one central issue, which I have slowly come to recognize as I've studied God's Word for the last half-decade: I had a very limited definition of what “fruit” really was.

In my mind, fruit could only mean evangelism. New converts. Revivals and altar calls, Billy Graham style. Or handing out tracts, or having "intentional" (that word always sounds a bit salesy to me) conversations with the cashier, or preaching on the streetcorners, like John the Baptist. Maybe I was alone in this assumption, but even now, rarely do I hear the word "fruit" mentioned in Christian circles without implications toward sharing the Gospel with unbelievers. It was foreign to me for the first 18 years of my life that it could mean anything else.

But when I actually read the Bible I found (as so often happens) that I was wrong. While evangelism obviously does make up an important part of the reproductive process of Christianity, I can't find any indication that Jesus looks for a mere tally of “decisions for Christ” in our harvest. This is about more than fruit—it is about fruit that will remain.

My fear is that we tend to teach and model evangelism disproportionately, under-representing the vital role of discipleship, so that what we end up with is a whole lot of fragile baby grapes that are never given the tools they need to grow bigger and stronger, and won't even be able to withstand the first frost.

The Apostle Paul, by far one of Christianity's most prolific fruit-bearers, seemed well aware of this hazard, and outlined his goal for the harvest like this:

We proclaim Him, admonishing every man and teaching every man with all wisdom, so that we may present every man complete in Christ. For this purpose also I labor, striving according to His power, which mightily works within me.

Colossians 1:28-29

Notice that he does begin with the declaration of Jesus Christ, which we would call “evangelism.” We proclaim Him. But the sentence does not end there, because evangelism is not the end goal. A “man complete in Christ” is the goal! Evangelism is only the beginning, and to reach the point of completion, every man must be admonished (warned of the depths of his sin nature so that he can choose life in the righteousness of Christ) and taught with all wisdom (retrained in the Word of God so that he can navigate a hostile world without wavering). This can't be done in a weekend retreat or a single conversation; it takes, without exception, a lifetime.

This process, empowered by God, of taking a baby Christian and tending him to maturity in the faith is the whole purpose of Paul’s life of ministry. It is also the exact pattern of biblical discipleship as shown and spoken by Jesus. Compare Paul’s statement with one of the most familiar discipleship passages in Scripture, the Great Commission:

Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.

Matthew 28:19-20

Go therefore. This short phrase is one of the most-quoted snippets of Scripture in promoting missions, but mistakenly so. Go therefore is not the imperative of the sentence, but rather the qualifier—it answers the “When?” and “Where?” of this command, but does not embody the command itself. This technicality gets a bit muddied in the text’s translation from Greek to English, and might be more accurately phrased “In your going . . .” or “As you go your way . . .”

And make disciples of all the nations. Here, finally, the actual command—and in fact, the only active verb in the sentence—surfaces: make disciples. We have been given the where and when (“in our going”); now is the “What?” and the “Who?” This is where we find the actual task at hand, the fruit-bearing ministry to which we have all been called as followers of Jesus and branches of the Vine. It's not a call to get more people through the door or to get more hands raised during the altar call; it's a call to invest wholeheartedly in the health and growth of another person's soul as a bondslave of Christ.

Baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. A two-part answer is given to the remaining question, “How?”, and this is part one - the part that might fall under our common term of evangelism in the church today. This is the “We proclaim Him” that Paul declared in Colossians, and it is more than mere street preaching. It is the demand upon every sinful heart to make a choice. Christianity, by its very nature, is is an ultimatum: a choice between Jesus and the world, between eternal life and spiritual death, between the truth and the lie. Those who choose Christ are asked to publicly reject all else and root themselves henceforth in the Truth of the Triune God.

Teaching them to observe all that I commanded you. And here is part two, the essence of discipleship itself: the building up, the training and edifying and carving and shaping of a rough-cut soul into a beautiful temple of the Holy Spirit. The tending and watering and nourishing of a delicate sprout into a healthy fruit-bearing plant. The presenting of “every man complete in Christ” that Paul labored for. And this is by far the piece that demands the most time, energy, perseverance, and focus - which might be why it's the piece that sometimes gets overlooked, or passed off as a job limited to those in full-time ministry, when in reality it's part of the commissioning of us all.

Contrary to what I thought for many years of my life, it takes the whole Great Commission to create a picture of the fruit that the Church was intended to bear. It is the kind of fruit that will remain steadfast and reproduce in like manner through trial and hardship, through cultural rejection and social isolation and family ridicule, and even through the deceptive waters of prosperity and blessing.

The Great Commission isn't summed up in evangelism. Christian fruit isn't measured in how many people we can persuade to pray a prayer. There is so, so much more to this immense calling than just shouting down the world with the Gospel - it's so much bigger, so much harder, so much more beautiful. We're called to abide in Christ and to feed ourselves from His life-blood (apart from which we can do nothing), to allow God to lovingly trim away the things that dilute our effectiveness, to walk in obedience to Him by sacrificially loving one another, and to proclaim His Name with the intent of patiently cultivating the soil of every softened heart with the incredible story of the Word of God.

All of this is part of bearing fruit.

As any farmer can tell you, there is no way to rush the production process, and the imperative tasks aren't the same in all seasons of the year. Sometimes it's the preparation of the soil, sometimes it's the seeding of the earth, sometimes it's the watering of the crops, sometimes it's the harvest. And other times, the only thing to do is wait and rest and trust that God is still at work even while the ground lies dormant.

And I'll say it again: all of it is part of the fruit-bearing.

We, believers, are farmers. And evangelism is just one tiny piece of the vast, patient process of bearing hardy and prolific fruit; both before and after it come times of waiting and tending and weeding - and never giving up.