Submitting to my husband was easy; if I asked for fifty dollars, he’d give me a hundred. At this point in my life, I’d never heard a woman preacher that I liked. So I went along with the teaching about women.

When my husband and I moved far from our families, we joined a charismatic non-denominational church pastored by a couple who operated as a team. At the time, I was still so shaped by complementarian thinking I wasn’t able to understand the beauty of mutuality or follow their lead.

I began to research what egalitarians say about all the passages having to do with women. I didn’t know who/what to believe, so decided to start attending seminary so I could gain better tools for research and access to a good library and people who have more extensive training.

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.

If I’m honest, when I set out, I expected to conclude that the hard complementarian position would make the most sense of the Scriptures.

Later that day, we attended a symposium chapel service on the same campus. After some prayer and a few songs, the speaker arrived to preach. To our horror, it was a woman.

Adding two women to our eldership team has brought wisdom, perspective, and discernment that we were missing. We are no longer led only by fathers of the church, but by fathers and mothers, as in every healthy family.