A Good Wife Is Hard to Find
People often ask me how I came to be egalitarian, or to believe in co-leadership between men and women in marriage and the church. I always tell them, while laughing, “Well, my husband Mark became egalitarian, so I submitted to him and became egalitarian too.”
And I’m only half joking. Mark took a class on women in leadership during his studies at Elim Bible Institute, and it opened his eyes to what the scripture truly says about women in ministry. It wasn’t hard for him to convince me. I was an eager convert.
Recognizing that God had invited women into positions of leadership and authority throughout biblical history—and that he continues to do so today—was only the first step on a journey of more than fifteen years. At that time (and even still today), so many of the churches that were starting to empower women into leadership roles still believed those women needed to be submitted to their husbands at home. They needed a male “covering” in order to be rightly aligned with God.
(This teaching is based in 1 Corinthians 11:3, where Paul says that man is the head of woman just as God is the head of Christ. Much could be said on this passage, but for here, it’s enough to say that many theologians believe the word head in this passage means “origin,” not “leader.”[1])
So even after I began believing that women could lead and preach in church, I still saw myself within a clear hierarchy: God first, man second, woman third. And because of this, I assumed a woman couldn’t be a senior leader or pastor of a church. After all, if her husband needed to be her leader or covering, how could she lead a church where he was a member?
A few years later, I had the chance to help an author write a book about empowering women within the church and marriage—and the author’s content and the research I did for his book upended all of my previous ideas about needing a male covering. So much of what I’ve written on this topic started with that project and the way it forced me to grapple with the various viewpoints around God’s ideal for the marriage relationship.
But changing my beliefs did not automatically change our marriage. Even though both of us now wholeheartedly embraced the idea of co-leading our marriage and family together, learning how to walk that out has been a process of years.
So many of my friends who grew up in complementarian churches (churches that teach male headship and female submission) have expressed the same struggle to me. Just the other day, a friend texted me, “We bought into egalitarian principles before we were married, but our personalities and the fact that we were raised in complementarian homes mean that reality is hard to live out.”
One of the biggest hurdles Mark and I have faced is the hard work of overcoming subtle mindsets and presuppositions that we learned as children and teens. For me, this has included learning to actually believe my opinion matters, learning to be OK with saying something that might not be what Mark wants to hear, learning not to discount my thoughts in favor of his. I so firmly believed that a good wife was an agreeable wife that it caused me to suppress my personality and to believe I was better at following than leading. Even though I believed in co-leadership, I still often functioned out of a “follower” mindset.
It’s one thing to believe other women can lead, to believe in marital co-leadership as a theory. It’s another to identify and uproot the longstanding beliefs I’d held about myself—and see how these were deeply rooted in my identity as a woman and wife.
Just recently, I took the StrengthsFinder[2] assessment as part of a leadership course. Before we took the assessment, our instructor explained the four domains, or categories, that each of the 34 strengths falls into: Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking. As she explained the fourth domain, Strategic Thinking, a friend leaned over and whispered into my ear, “That’s you.”
I didn’t say anything in response, but in my head, I thought, That’s nice she thinks that, but she’s wrong. I don’t have what it takes to be strategic.
But a few days later, when I took the test, I discovered, to my astonishment, she was right. Three of my top five strengths were in Strategic Thinking. Initially, I had such a hard time believing it that I thought I must have messed up the test. Even after Mark told me he thought my results were accurate, I still struggled to accept them. So I sat with God over the results and asked him, Why is it so hard for me to accept that I am strategically gifted?
The answer was simple. He showed me that because I had grown up believing men were made to lead, and strategy is essential to leadership, therefore, I believed men are typically more strategic than women. I had never consciously laid this out for myself, but on a subconscious level, I had automatically disqualified myself from being strategic and visionary. I didn’t even realize I’d done it. I just thought that’s how I was.
The journey of unraveling my definition of a “good wife” has felt long and painful at times, but also exhilarating and liberating. I’m still on that journey and still discovering what God is calling me into. The truth is, a woman can be and do anything God calls her to. She can be a strategic military leader like Deborah or a top-tier church leader like Junia or a prophet like Anna. She can also be a homemaker or an administrative assistant or a nurse. Regardless of vocation, she can co-lead her family alongside her husband. And nowhere in the Bible does it say she needs her husband’s “covering” to do any of it.
A good wife isn’t a compliant, passive wife. A good wife is a confident and assertive wife. A wife in pursuit of Jesus. A wife who speaks the truth, no matter how uncomfortable. A wife who shows up fully and lives with her whole heart.
Notes
1. Marg Mowczko gives an excellent explanation of this in her article, “Four Reasons ‘Head’ Does Not Mean ‘Leader’ in 1 Cor 11:3,” (Aug 14, 2017); https://margmowczko.com/head-kephale-does-not-mean-leader-1-corinthians-11_3/.
2. “CliftonStrengths Online Talent Assessment,” Gallup, https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/home.aspx.
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