From Complementarian to Egalitarian: It Cost Me My Church
A few years ago, a woman in our congregation asked if I would read a book with her. She wanted to understand why our church would disagree with it. The book was Beth Allison Barr’s The Making of Biblical Womanhood. I said yes, partly because that is what pastors do, and partly because I assumed it would be easy.
I had been an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America for about fifteen years by then. I knew our answers. I had given them many times.
Now, I no longer serve in the PCA and am no longer ordained. February 2025 would have been my twentieth year at the same church in Charlotte, North Carolina, the church where I started as a youth intern, and by the time I left, I was serving as one of the three principal pastors tasked with leading the spiritual direction and health of the church. In this church, I officiated weddings for students I had known since middle school and baptized some of their babies. “Would have been.” That past tense is the cost of this story. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Why was I complementarian?
The honest answer is that I was complementarian in the way I spoke English. It was not a conclusion I had reached; it was the air I breathed. I grew up in Reformed and Pentecostal traditions, studied at Reformed Theological Seminary, and was ordained in a denomination whose Book of Church Order restricts the offices of elder and deacon to men. Everyone around me held the position; godly people, brilliant people, people I loved and still love. The answers we gave included Bible verses, and they seemed good. Normalcy can blind us to complexity.
But I do not want to make my earlier self a fool, because he was not one. If you had asked me to defend the position, I would have taken you to 1 Timothy 2:12–13.
Paul does not ground his instruction inside the chaos of Ephesus or the customs of the first century. He grounds it in creation: “For Adam was formed first, then Eve.”
That looked transcultural to me. It looked like the plain reading grounded in Genesis. Why, I would ask, do we need interpretive gymnastics to get anything else out from that text? I found the argument compelling for years. I preached out of the framework I was taught, that hierarchy and primacy are the model in male-female relationships. What I could not yet see was that my own reading required gymnastics too; I had simply learned and been practicing the routine for so long that it appeared like standing still.
I should also be honest about something less flattering. My salary, my standing, my friendships, and twenty years of pastoral relationships all sat on one side of this question. I do not think I was consciously protecting any of that. That is rather the point: we rarely are.
There is a question I have learned to ask myself, and I wish I had learned it decades sooner: do I believe a doctrine because of the force of the evidence, or because of the effect of the consequences?
How did I come to change my mind?
Not through one argument, but through an accumulation of dissonance, I eventually could not ignore.
For years, I have carried around a line from Kafka, who wrote that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” I quoted it often. I believed it. I just assumed the frozen sea was always somewhere else; in other people, other camps, other certainties.
I did not expect the axe to arrive in the hands of a woman in my own congregation, holding a book she wanted her pastor to explain away.
Some of it was watching. Families left our church, including people in leadership, because they could no longer hold the theological position. And I began to notice something in our own practice that I had walked past for years: we kept saying we valued women, wanted their voices, and treasured their wisdom. Then I would look around the leadership tables where the actual decisions were made, and there were no women at them. Only men, sometimes speaking on behalf of their wives. I sat at those tables for years and never once asked who was missing. Whatever that arrangement was, it was not complementarity in any meaningful sense of the word. There was nothing there to complement.
And some of it was a person. There was a woman in our church, a brilliant and careful thinker I deeply respect, who had long held the other position. She never lobbied me. She just asked questions; good ones, the kind that put a pebble in your shoe. I would try to shake them out and keep walking. I see now what was actually happening: her mind was doing the work mine was unwilling to do, because she was free to follow the question wherever it led, and I was not. She had no strings attached to this question. I had nothing but strings.
Some of it was consistency. My own denomination permits diverse explication of non-theological doctrines. There are multiple interpretations of the creation days in Genesis 1. We practice infant baptism while extending real charity to those who reach a different conclusion from the same texts. Calvin openly reinterpreted centuries of settled teaching on usury. And Presbyterian pulpits in America once defended chattel slavery from the “plain reading” of Scripture; sins of our fathers that my own denomination’s General Assembly publicly confessed and repented of in 2002, repenting of “our pride, our complacency, and our complicity.” No one concluded that this repentance meant we had abandoned biblical authority. So why was interpretive humility normal everywhere I looked, creation days, baptism, usury, slavery, except on this one question, where a changed conviction was treated not as scholarship but as surrender?
So when I went on sabbatical in 2024, I made a decision that, in retrospect, decided everything else: I would read the other side directly. For years, I had read about egalitarians, through Köstenberger, Schreiner, DeYoung, and others in my camp, but almost never the scholars themselves. That is not a study; that is surveillance. So I read them, and corresponded with some of them, and discovered they were not the Scripture-evading caricatures I had been handed. They were making careful, conservative, textual arguments, often more textually conservative than ours.
Over the next year, I read everything I could reach, reading one author, then hunting down the response from the other side, books spilling into journals and articles. Two dominoes fell first.
The first was authenteō, the word in 1 Timothy 2:12 usually rendered “exercise authority.” It appears exactly once in the New Testament. Paul had ordinary, well-worn words for legitimate authority available to him, and he chose none of them. He chose a rare word with a dark resume, domineering, usurping, coercive force, which is why Jerome’s Latin Vulgate rendered it dominari, to dominate. Add to that the fact that in extra-biblical manuscripts, we have very, very limited uses of this word if you review documents that span the 200 years surrounding the time Paul wrote this letter. I had imposed a universal, permanent restriction on half the church, based on an extremely rare word, whose meaning is genuinely contested. The weight the argument placed on that word amounted to a weight it could not bear.
The second domino for me was weirder because it came from inside the house. In an early edition of Women in the Church, the standard complementarian volume on 1 Timothy 2, first published in 1995, there is an appendix by Daniel Doriani surveying the history of interpretation. Doriani, himself a complementarian, documents what the church’s theologians actually said for most of two millennia: that women were intellectually inferior, prone to deception, unfit by nature for public teaching. Superiority and inferiority were the standard vocabulary through Luther, Calvin, and the Puritans. Then Doriani concedes the crucial thing: the modern position has developed. Ontological arguments have vanished from serious discourse, and vital to that shift was a “reinterpretation” of 1 Timothy 2:14. Traditional interpreters now deny that Eve’s deception says anything about women’s nature, because they recognize that argument “proves too much.”
Doriani puts it this way, “Besides, if women are prone to deception after the model of Eve, is not man prone to wanton rebellion after the model of Adam? And if so, how would that qualify Adam to lead? This would give us a church in which rebels instruct fools.”
Read that again slowly, as I had to. The historical practice (men only) was retained. The historical reason for the practice (women are inferior and easily deceived) was abandoned (rightly!), and a new reason (equal in being, different in role) was constructed in roughly the last sixty years to uphold the old conclusion. The appendix does not appear in the current edition of the book.
William Witt puts it in nine words: “The practice is the same. The theology is new.” A tradition retained for different reasons is not the same tradition. It is a new one. Which means there is no purely “historic position” left at the table. The question was never whether to interpret; it was which interpretation makes better sense of the passage, the whole canon, and the history. And once I saw that I had been making interpretive choices all along, taking 1 Timothy 2:12 as timeless, yet viewing verse 15 (“she will be saved through childbearing”) as cultural or mysterious (within a single breath of Paul’s Greek), I could no longer pretend the plain reading was plain. I had touched what our circles treat as the third rail, and I could not untouch it.
I want to make sure I am careful here, because this is where I am most often misunderstood. None of this is a question of biblical authority. I changed my mind because I submitted to the text, not because I escaped it. I can still articulate how a thoughtful person arrives at complementarian conclusions; I was that person for two decades. But I came to believe the mutualist reading is simply the stronger account of Scripture, history, and the gospel itself.
What difference has it made?
Personally, it made all the difference in my life. It cost me my denomination, my ordination, and the only church my wife and children had known for twenty years. I will not pretend that it was painless. But I have come to see that loss in one area can create freedom and growth in other areas.
The first difference is in my own home. I no longer live like an egalitarian while pretending to be a complementarian, which, if I am honest, is what the practical texture of our marriage had quietly become. My wife is what God calls Eve in Genesis; she is my ezer kenegdo. I now see my wife in the full Hebrew weight of that phrase: not an assistant, but a strength corresponding to me, an ally, a word Scripture most often uses for God himself. I now get to say out loud what was already true.
The second is what I can finally see. I understand now (in a way, I am ashamed it took me so long), the internal conflict my sisters in Christ have carried: feeling the Spirit’s nudge toward teaching or shepherding and having to weigh that nudge in ways no man in my tradition has ever had to weigh his calling. I judged some of those women once. I owe them more than an apology, but an apology is where it starts.
And the third difference is the one I most want to leave with you, because it is not about me. The Reformers recovered the priesthood of all believers, and then, on this question, declined to finish the sentence. Even where Luther and Calvin restricted women’s leadership, they tended to ground it in social order and decorum rather than eternal creational law; it is the modern position, ironically, that hardened custom into cosmos. Semper reformanda was never meant to be a museum placard. If the priesthood really has passed from a tribe of Levites to the whole body of Christ, then the gifts of shepherding, teaching, and leading are distributed by the Spirit’s discernment, not by DNA.
Leadership in the Kingdom is not a pie to be divided; it multiplies in the giving. What I see now is a body that no longer has to limp, but a body with both legs called into action, to run the race the body as a whole was called to run.
Could I be wrong? Of course. I have preached many times that we will arrive in heaven and be graciously shown all we got wrong. But Paul rejoiced from a prison cell that Christ was preached, even by rivals with crooked motives (Philippians 1:15–18). So here is the wager I have made, and I commend it to anyone who is standing where I stood: I would rather be told at the end that I erred in freeing my sisters to preach Christ, and find the room fuller because they did, than be told I erred in silencing the Spirit’s call on half the church.
I know which mistake I can live with. I no longer believe I have to make either one.
(Tim writes at timmascara.substack.com, where he is working through Genesis, Ephesians, and 1 Timothy in detail.)