The Junia Project

Advocating for Women's Equality in the Church and Home

Sex, Supper, Submission

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A few months after we said “I do,” my wife, Amy, and I attended a class for newly married couples at our local church. Each week, we were taught a different topic by a different teacher intended to help us grow in our marriage. That week’s topic was “Women’s Roles.” I remember sitting in that room like it was yesterday. The teacher walked into the room, strode up to the whiteboard, and wrote the following list:

SEX
SUPPER
SUBMISSION

She then said, “Ladies, these three S’s are the best way to remember your role in marriage.”

I could feel Amy stiffen in anger next to me. I began laughing involuntarily. I assumed the statement was a misguided joke meant to alleviate the tension in the room. But after I got a “stop laughing, moron” look from the teacher, I realized something horribly tragic: this wasn’t a joke at all. I was stunned.

How to Be Egalitarian with a Complementarian Spouse

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How to Be Egalitarian with a Complementarian Spouse. Well you cry a lot, sometimes, especially in the beginning. You both get mad and accuse the other of not being the person you married. You get into theological fistfights.. You sit opposite each other on the kitchen floor and joust back and forth with “Well how come we care about the prohibition of women teaching but not women wearing gold jewelry?” and “Well despite Jesus being so countercultural in his treatment of women, why were The Twelve all men?”

6 Ways to Know You’re Living Out an Egalitarian Marriage

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In 2015, a few months before my wedding, I wrote a blog for the Junia Project titled, 6 Things Egalitarian Marriage is Not. At that point, I had only a theological and biblical understanding of egalitarian marriage. Today, Ryan and I are just just shy of our 2 year anniversary, and I’ve got some egalitarian newlywed experience to offer as a sequel. Two different, individual people coming together to live as one flesh, come to find, is a process! It’s all too easy to live in the world of “me, myself, and I” when it comes to feelings, thoughts, opinions, and decisions. I continue to learn what it means to be “us”, and that what I do always has a direct effect on my husband. With that said, these are the relational dynamics that I’ve found to reveal whether or not an egalitarian marriage is underway.

Hyphenating My Last Name: A Deal Breaker?

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So about a month ago a friend and I got into a debate on Twitter after he mentioned that a woman wanting to hyphenate her last name with her husband was a relationship deal-breaker for him.

Obviously I thought it was ridiculous, which was why we got into a debate over it. I couldn’t understand why something as frivolous as a name would cause him to throw out an entire relationship- especially if that relationship was a healthy one- all because she wanted to maintain an important aspect of her earlier identity.

Co-Leadership in Marriage: Who’s in Authority?

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We believe authority is at the heart of much marriage misunderstanding and debate. Over the years traditional-hierarchical-complementarian marriage-view proponents have described their perceived authority to us in different ways.

VARIATIONS ON A THEME

Some husbands have told us that as the leader they have a 51 percent role in making decisions and the wife has 49 percent. As we listen to these men explain their marriage, we can’t help but wonder, “How is a 51/49 functional authority any different from a husband who has 99 percent authority and a wife who has 1 percent?” Either way, the husband has final authority to make decisions.

Co-Leadership in Marriage: What about Headship?

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Headship can often become a divisive issue in marriage discussions—especially in religious circles. Various “infallible” headship interpretations and accompanying dialogue could fill a library. Our experience is that people will endlessly argue the original Greek and Hebrew, lexicons, grammar roots, verb tenses, hermeneutical and eschatological anthropomorphisms, and endless jots and tittles until Jesus Christ returns.

How I Became A Christian Feminist

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It seems that in many Christian communities being a “biblical man” or a “biblical woman” is just as high of a priority, if not more so, than being a biblical person. How did we come to the conclusion that men and women are to imitate Christ in different ways? I’d like to know where people see Jesus mentioning or even emphasizing that a man’s highest calling is to be a leader and a decision-maker, and a woman’s highest calling is to be a nurturer and “advice-giver”. From what I know about the life of Jesus, he called us to love God and love others selflessly. That’s all Jesus seemed to really care about.

Let My People Go: The Impact of Patriarchy in the Church

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Patriarchy is an oppressive cultural norm with a history that predates Christianity.

Fortunately, it is fading from our global community. Unfortunately, it persists in some corners of the institutional church today, where some Christian leaders still teach that it is the God-given right of men everywhere to exercise authority over women at church and at home. From my vantage point as a male social worker, psychotherapist, and former department head at a multi-denominational Bible college, I’ve had many opportunities to observe how patriarchy impacts people every day on a very practical level.

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