are compatibility and complementarity at odds?

Owen Strachan has penned an interesting piece in which he states that perhaps nothing has been more damaging to male-female relationships than the notion of compatibility. He opens with this thought: “Compatibility. Has any concept done more to hinder the development of love?” Such a statement must surely have in mind a narrow working definition of compatibility, something along the lines of a Match.com profile and the self-serving search for the perfect soulmate. And I get how that's not healthy. But in complementarian marriage, is the desire for compatibility out of place? In the minds of most, the two terms Strachan juxtaposes would be defined briefly like this:

Compatibility: what is shared between a man and a woman

Complementarity: what is different between a man and a woman

So, do these two ideas live in opposition to one another? We find a carefully constructed story in Genesis 2 that I believe addresses this question directly. It is a story in which God creates man, notes he needs a suitable helper, then commands him to give names to every living creature. The animals parade by: ostrich, camel, alligator. Adam obediently names each one. It must have been a very long line of creatures great and small, as Adam “gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field”. Yet none of them is a suitable partner for him. Though half of them share his maleness, none of them share his humanness. They are beautifully formed, but they are not formed in the image of God.

Imagine Adam’s state of mind as the animals parade past him: “Ostrich: not like me. Camel: not like me. Alligator: not like me.” He becomes increasingly aware that, though surrounded by God’s good gifts, he is in a very fundamental sense, alone. You and I know what the solution to his aloneness will be, but the text takes its time establishing that his state is “not good” before pulling back the curtain. Before Eve can be prepared for Adam, Adam must be prepared for Eve.

And then, after a brief nap, Adam awakes. And there she is, at last.

Adam bursts into poetry:

“Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called ishah (woman) because she came from ish (man).”

Don’t miss what Adam is saying. After the animal parade of one not-like-him after another, at last he sees Eve and rejoices that she is wonderfully, uniquely like-him.

“Same of my same, same of my same. She shall be called like me because she came from me.”

The Bible’s first word on man and woman is not what separates them, but what unites them. It is a celebration of compatibility, of shared humanness. Ours is not a faith that teaches “men are from Mars and women are from Venus”. Rather, it teaches that both man and woman are from the same garden, created by and in the image of the same God, sharing a physical, mental and spiritual sameness that unites the two of them in a way they cannot be united to anything else in creation. Before the Bible celebrates the complementarity of the sexes, it celebrates their compatibility. And so should we.

To make how-we-are-different our starting point is to reinforce the tired idea that men and women are wholly “other”, an idea that lends itself neatly to devaluing and objectifying, rather than defending and treasuring. It is the very idea that fuels the cultural stereotypes of the incompetent husband and the nagging wife. I push away and discredit what is not-like-me. I cling to and elevate what is like-me. Compatibility is what binds us together, like two Cowboys fans finding each other in a sea of Eagles jerseys.

No one goes on a first date and remarks, “Wow, we had nothing in common. I can’t wait to go out again.” Same-of-my-same is what keeps man and woman in relationship when differences make them want to run for the exit. Same-of-my-same is what transforms gender differences from inexplicable oddities to indispensable gifts. Because my husband is fundamentally like-me in his humanness, the ways he is not-like-me in his maleness elicit my admiration or my forbearance, instead of my disdain or my frustration.

Compatibility. Has any concept done more to nurture the development of love?

So, no, complementarity and compatibility are not at odds. And it is precarious to pit them against one another. Compatibility is the medium in which complementarity takes root and grows to full blossom. Until we acknowledge our glorious, God-ordained sameness, we cannot begin to celebrate or even properly understand our God-given differences as men and women. This is the clear message of Genesis 2, so often rushed past in our desire to shore up our understanding of what it means to be created distinctly male and female. But we cannot rush past it, any more than Adam could rush past the parade of animals that were not-like-him. As Genesis 2 carefully reflects, a world which lacks the beauty of shared human sameness between the sexes is a world that is distinctly “not good”. But a world in which compatibility undergirds complementarity is very good indeed.

that which i did not sow

This spring he put his foot down: “No more tomatoes.” Gardening in North Texas can batter your ego and empty your wallet. You learn what to plant by taking note of what withers in the summer sun. Tomatoes, for instance. Not many delights surpass that of a home-grown tomato still warm from the vine, lightly salted and peppered. But this year it was not to be. Tired of the futility, Jeff decided to leave vacant our raised bed next to the compost pile.

The compost pile: that glorious chicken-wire structure of rotting goodness. Patron saint of gardeners. Colossal eyesore. A steaming homage to our love of eggs, coffee, and the once-fresh produce we were too slow to eat, moldering three feet deep outside the guest room window. Welcome, guests.

For six summers Jeff patiently nursed my fledgling tomato plants, too kind to tell me that my eternal hope for a bumper crop (and my selective memory of the previous summer) was heading me once again toward disappointment. But August said everything he had not, in capital letters.

It’s been a hard spring for my family. The people I love the most have sustained deep hurt and loss. The kind you don’t blog about or tweet about or share on Facebook. “I’m tired of being sad,” I tell my stepmother. “Yes,” she says.  One unexpected phone call is hard. When the phone keeps ringing, well, it begins to feel like August. We are withering.

I didn’t look out the guest room window the entire month of May. I didn’t walk down the far side of the house. I didn’t want to gaze on that vacant rectangle of dirt, dotted with decaying eggshells, where my hope of tomatoes used to grow. “Come out here and see this,” he said.

Mint, engulfing half of the bed. Two enormous pumpkin vines in full bloom, scaling the fence, breezily and brazenly trespassing the neighbor’s yard. And ridiculously, a tomato plant. Forbidden. Unbidden. Sometimes compost has a gardening agenda of its own. Despite our resolve to raise the white flag of surrender, to the west of the guest room the Lord God has planted a garden.

We stand there gaping, two quitters thwarted in our quitting, the seeds of our disbelief sprouting into uncontrolled laughter. We are shaking with it. He reaches for an abandoned stake and places it resolutely around the tomato plant. “Maybe I can build an awning to get it through that August sun.”

This ruling and subduing, this fruitfulness and multiplication - it is a tough business, punctuated with the losses of many Augusts. Gardeners know better than most that we reap what we sow. But the gospel gives a better word: we reap what we had no hope of sowing, a miraculous harvest of grace, sprung from the rot, grown in the shade of a good Gardener ever at our right hand.

This is where I stake my hope.


"The LORD is your keeper; The LORD is your shade on your right hand." Psalm 121:5

the complementarian woman: permitted or pursued?

I recently had an exchange with a young church planter who wanted my thoughts on how to address the needs of women within his church. He told me it was clear to him what women were permitted to do from a doctrinal standpoint, but that he was not comfortable that his responsibility to women ended with simply identifying that list.

I asked him to think about that word – “permit”. It is a word women in complementarian settings hear with some frequency, and how our male leaders use it shapes our ability to contribute to church life. The challenge for any pastor would be to consider whether he is crafting a church culture that permits women to serve or one that pursues women to serve. Because a culture of permission will not ensure complementarity functions as it should.

Consider the analogy of marriage. Most pastors would counsel a young husband that he must pursue his wife to keep their union strong – that he must make a study of her needs and wants, that he must celebrate her strengths and find ways to leverage them for the good of their marriage. They would warn against the dangers of passivity. I submit that a similar awareness is necessary on the part of male leadership in complementarian churches. A culture of permission can communicate passivity and dismissiveness to our women. They long to be pursued.

The negative implications of a culture of permission become clear if we overlay them onto other areas of ministry. Imagine if we swapped the language of pursuit for the language of permission in our church bulletins:

“If you need community, you are permitted to join a community group.”
“If you battle addiction, you are permitted to go to Celebrate Recovery.”
“If you are interested in serving, you are permitted to serve in the nursery.”

Now consider if we applied the language of pursuit to the way we speak about women’s roles. We would have to alter our speaking – and our thinking – rather dramatically.

• It is one thing to say women are permitted to be deacons, and quite another to actively seek out and install women in that role.
• It is one thing to say women are permitted to pray in the assembly or give announcements, and quite another to ensure that they are given a voice on the platform.
• It is one thing to say that women are permitted to teach women, and quite another to deliberately cultivate and celebrate their teaching gifts. 

I am not certain when it became common to speak of permitting rather than pursuing women to serve, but I admit that it grieves me. Yes, there is that well-worn verse in 1 Timothy, but it seems a shame to let one occurrence of a term dominate our language and practice. It may be that permission vocabulary persists because of the unfortunate woman-as-usurper stereotype that sometimes underlies complementarian thought.

And I can’t help but reflect on how far removed that vocabulary is from the words of Adam at the creation of Eve: “This is at last bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” Adam’s words are a hymn of thanksgiving, a joyful acknowledgment that one has arrived whose contributions will bring vital and necessary completeness to the Imago Dei. It is a hymn intoned not in the language of permission but in the language of pursuit.

How sweet a thing when a woman of apparent ministry gifting elicits from male leadership not “Oh, no”, but “At last!” God help complementarians if we spend our energies fastidiously chalking the boundaries of a racecourse we never urge or equip our women to run. I have to think that egalitarians would grow quieter in their critiques if we could point to more women within our ranks who convincingly demonstrate equal, complementary value in our churches.

Women who flourish in ministry can point to not just female leaders who affirmed them but to male leaders who championed and cultivated them. That has certainly been my story. Glenn Smith asked me to shepherd and teach women even before I knew the depth of my desire to do so. John Bisagno affirmed and mentored me when I had no idea what I was doing. Mark Hartman taught me the beauty of a well-run ministry. Matt Chandler and Collin Hansen gave me a voice. And every day for twenty years, Jeff Wilkin has spoken unmitigated blessing and encouragement to me. Would that all women in the church could know such grace. 

So here is the suggestion that I offered to that young church planter: Do you desire to leverage the equal complementary value of women in your church? Don't give us a chance to ask permission. Get out ahead of us. You approach us with what you intend to empower us to do. End the culture of permission and you will dispel the stigma of submission. We are not usurpers, we are the possessors of every capacity you lack and the celebrators of every capacity you possess.

Brothers, don't permit us. Pursue us. 


See Thabiti Anyabwile’s insightful thoughts on this subject in a series of four posts found here and here and here and here.

the truth about pain in childbearing

It's that day again---the photos are everywhere on Facebook and Twitter: scrubbed faces, neatly trimmed hair, un-scuffed shoes, and bulging backpacks all heading out the door. The faces in the photos are all smiles---it's behind the camera where the tears usually spring up, as mothers everywhere faithfully create a steady record of that bittersweet morning when the kids return to school. 

Jewish rabbis taught that pregnancy is a mother's most blessed season. During pregnancy she could know with certainty that her child was safe, warm, nourished, and near---a certainty that would vanish as soon as the child entered the outside world. With a measured inhale, a steady exhale, and a mighty push, she would irreversibly move her child from safety and provision to separation and uncertainty.

The rabbis may not have been far off the mark. Birth is euphoria tinged with the ache of separation, the loss of a kindred closeness. It feels a little like a betrayal of a trust, thrusting a tiny person from a place of relative self-sufficiency to a place of complete dependence. It is undeniably natural and necessary (I'm glad my 15-year-old is not still in utero); nevertheless, we are stunned by the pain it involves and astonished at the amount of adjusting to come to grips with our new reality as a mother.

As the years unfold we begin to understand that we have been introduced to the great truth of pain in childbearing, a pain we naively believed would be confined to labor and delivery, but that visits us at every transition we nurture our children toward: the measured inhale, the steady exhale, the mighty push. And separation. Preschool. Kindergarten. Middle school. High school. College. Career. Marriage. With a familiar aching euphoria, we push them out---from safety and provision to separation and uncertainty. It feels like they would be safer just staying with us, as if safety were the greatest gift we could give them.

Somehow, this painful separation process is for our sanctification as mothers. For years I was not sure what the Bible meant that women would be saved through childbearing, but it grows clearer to me now. I once thought it referred only to giving birth, but its meaning encompasses the span of motherhood. Children are born in an instant, but they are borne across a lifetime. Childbearing saves me because it faithfully (albeit painfully) reminds me over and again that I am weak. It reminds me that I am not self-sufficient, that I do not have what it takes to preserve and protect my children, but that my heavenly Father does. It saves me from the belief that I am God.

Motherhood teaches women the imagery and language of the gospel on an intensely personal level. How appropriate the intertwined imagery of childbirth and the Cross: the necessary spilling of blood for the commencement of life, great loss holding hands with great gain. How appropriate the intertwined language of motherhood and the Great Commission: at the threshold of an unkind world we smile bravely at our children and say "go," though our hearts may whisper "stay" as the door closes behind them.

My maternal feelings mislead me. There is no betrayal of a child's trust in sending him out into uncertainty: there is only opportunity to further teach him the one worthy Object of his trust---and to learn the lesson again for myself. To paraphrase a favorite author, I cannot raise my children to be safe, but I can raise them to be strong.

So on such days of transition, I will steady myself to take those precious photos and send those precious children out. Inhale. Exhale. Push. And it will hurt the way great loss holding hands with great gain tends to do. I may cry for a little while after they go, but I will also give thanks for God's faithfulness---faithfulness in turning the pain of childbearing from a curse to a means of grace. Only he can do that. He can be trusted, and he alone.

the death of idolatry

Gen 35:2-4 So Jacob said to his household and to all who were with him, “Get rid of the foreign gods you have with you, and purify yourselves and change your clothes. Then come, let us go up to Bethel, where I will build an altar to God, who answered me in the day of my distress and who has been with me wherever I have gone.” So they gave Jacob all the foreign gods they had and the rings in their ears, and Jacob buried them under the oak at Shechem.

Last week in our study of Genesis we watched Jacob come to terms with the price of idolatry. After a shocking display of his own inadequacy in chapter 34, Jacob renews his resolve to worship only God and commands his household to get rid of the foreign idols in their midst. Determined to put the past behind him and live in the truth that God is his only hope, he symbolically buries the idols under an oak tree. Why there? Because it was the place idol worship was practiced. With beautiful irony, the place for idol worship becomes a burial ground for idolatry. It is not until Jacob perceives clearly his need for God that he is able to bury his idols. Until that point, a “both-and” relationship has worked fine for him. I can relate.

For the unbeliever an idol is someone or something that takes the place of God in their affections. Believers, too, wrestle with idolatry, though perhaps not in the same way that unbelievers do. For the believer an idol is something that competes for our affection for God. Rather than replacing God in our thinking, an idol fills a gap in our ability to trust God. Idolatry is a “both-and” arrangement: I need God and I need my idol. I need God and I need a husband. I need God and I need outward beauty. I need God and I need my health. I need God and I need my stuff. We do not replace God with our idols – like Jacob we simply add our idols to God. And it often takes a crisis to point out our folly.

The summer I turned twenty-seven I joined my first women’s Bible study. I had just had my first baby and was feeling all the inadequacies of new-motherhood. The farther into the study I got the more I became aware of my complacency toward the things of God. I clearly remember praying and asking God to show me that He was all I needed – not a career, not the approval of peers, not high-school skinny, not a double income, just Him. As has always been the case, God’s faithfulness exceeded my request.

That October, six weeks pregnant with my second child, I was diagnosed with malignant skin cancer. Though the cancer was safely removed and I continue to have successful follow-up to this day, I learned something I had previously taken for granted: that each day is a gift from God to which I am not entitled. I learned, as A.W. Tozer says, that I am “a derived and contingent self”, dependent moment to moment on the grace of my Creator – given life by none other than God Himself. I learned to put to death and bury my idols that could neither give life nor sustain it. God answered more than my summer request – far better than showing me He was all that I needed, He showed me He was all that I had.

When life moves along smoothly I forget this truth. I forget the lessons of my times of crisis. I scrabble in the dirt beneath my oak tree to resurrect my idols. I begin to say again that I need God and comfort, God and financial security. I consider again the lie that my life is sustained by possessions, people, circumstances. I begin again to devote my heart, soul, mind, and strength to things that pretend to meet the needs only God can meet. When life is easy I appear as though all is in order, but if you look closely you’ll see the dirt beneath my fingernails.

I am a grave-robber. So though I do not look with pleasure on the prospect of trials or suffering I acknowledge that they are for my great good: burying what must stay buried, raising to life what God would see live. And though it is right to be thankful for times without trials I will celebrate them circumspectly, remembering the lessons of discovering my own frailty, praying for clean hands and a pure heart, praying that the cemetery of my idolatry harbors no empty graves.

There is only one empty grave that brings life - it is the empty grave of Christ, with whom I too have been buried and raised. May our worship and our work be solely devoted to the Chief Grave-robber, who has stolen us from death to life. He is not merely all we need, He is all we have. And He is enough.

Colossians 3:5-10 Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.

full forgiveness

After studying the story of Lot last week, I have come to face an ugly truth: I’m not as good at forgiving as I thought.

Here’s what bothers me about Lot: He spends several chapters in Genesis edging closer and closer to a sinful lifestyle until at last we find him sitting at the gate of Sodom as a city leader. He is the epitome of recklessness, gambling on living shoulder to shoulder with depraved people, seemingly thoughtless as to the consequences for himself and his family. He calls Sodom’s mob “brothers”, offering his virgin daughters up to them to be gang-raped. He has to be dragged out of the city before it is consumed. His wife dies because she is too entangled in the lifestyle Lot provided for her. He wheedles and begs God’s messengers. His story ends in a cave where his daughters reveal the toll of having been raised in Sodom by committing incest with him.

He’s a dirtbag. But if 2 Peter is to be believed, he’s a dirtbag who was positionally righteous before God. Saved. Redeemed. Which means I’ll be spending an eternity with him in heaven. That makes me crazy. Not the saved part - I’m okay with Lot getting into heaven - I understand that God gives all of us unmerited grace. I just don’t want to have to see Lot, hang out with Lot, befriend Lot. He is someone who had saving faith, yet continued to live a life that harmed himself and others in the extreme. He can come to heaven, but I don’t want to be around him.

I tell myself that I’m pretty good at forgiving other believers who offend me. Most people, by the time they hit adulthood, have at least a short list of people who have hurt them deeply. I am no exception. I have prayed over my list repeatedly, asking God to kill any bitterness that might begin or recur. I have asked Him to give me the heart of Christ, who taught even as he died that those who harm us do not know what they are doing. I don’t dwell on past hurts. But my reaction to Lot, whose offenses were not committed against me, has forced me to examine my feelings toward other Christians, whose offenses were.

My attitude to the Lots on my list has been “I forgive you. I just don’t want to be around you.” Out of sight, out of mind, off the list. Living in big cities and attending big churches has made this a formula that has not been hard to follow. But it is a coward’s forgiveness that I have offered my fellow believers. The reality is that one day I will stand shoulder to shoulder in heaven with them, praising the same God for the same grace. If I cringe at the thought of having to see my offenders there, I have not forgiven completely. And I have downplayed to myself my own need for forgiveness from God and others. I am someone’s Lot as well – who dreads having to meet me in heaven?

Our Lord looks eagerly to the day that His offenders will join Him for eternity. He does not cringe at the thought. He has set aside His wrath toward us. Completely. I pray that I would forgive as I have been forgiven – freely and to the uttermost. That I would not wait until heaven to turn loose the last of my hurt, to seek fellowship with my Lots. And that one day I would joyfully and willingly sing with my offenders, with Lot, and with those whom I have offended:

Grace, grace, God's grace, grace that will pardon and cleanse within;
Grace, grace, God's grace, grace that is greater than all our sin!

preservation and remembrance

Genesis 19: 24-26 Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And he overthrew those cities, and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. But Lot's wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

Everyone has a past. Some of us have logged spectacular moral failures, while others of us have managed to confine our sins to less horrifying categories. The longer we know Christ, the more we come to realize that all sin is spectacular when measured against the plumb line of God’s holiness. All sin is a spectacular exercise in self-focus and self-worship.

Saving faith frees us from sin’s power – it enables us to choose what God wants over what we want, and over time it aligns our wants with His. Instead of wanting to make much of ourselves we learn to want to make much of our Maker. But if we are honest, we still harbor places of self-worship in our heart of hearts. As we get better at setting aside one area of sin we often get better at concealing another. As much as we long to move forward in grace, we find that our past still pulls at us.

But it is not enough to recognize and regret our sin: to leave it behind, we must learn to hate it.

And this is where I begin to think about Lot’s wife. You remember her – raised a family in a city known for its sexual depravity, had to be physically dragged out of her hometown to avoid its imminent destruction, checked her rear view mirror, and presto-change-o: turned into your favorite popcorn flavoring. Pretty high up there on the “Weird Stories of the Bible” list.

But when we look at it closer, her brief story has much to teach. The sense of the phrase “But Lot’s wife…looked back” is that she regarded, considered, paid attention to. In other words, dragged free of her life of self-focus and set well on her way to freedom, Lot’s wife looked longingly and lingeringly on her past. Even as it was being consumed by the fiery wrath of God.

I think that a clue to understanding her demise lies in what she was turned into. God could have ended her life in any way, converted her to or covered her in any substance. But Genesis tells us specifically that she became a pillar of salt. To the modern ear salt is a reference to a popular seasoning, but this is because we enjoy the benefits of refrigeration. For thousands of years the primary function of salt was not as a seasoning but as a preservative. An apt metaphor for Mrs. Lot.

What if God had shown mercy to Lot’s wife? What if she had been allowed to flee the wickedness of Sodom to a better place, all the time harboring in her heart a love for her past? The virus of Sodom’s wickedness would have gone with her to her new home, preserved deep within her, waiting its chance to emerge and infect other lives. Rather than allow her to preserve the cherished memory of Sodom in a new place, God preserves her as a pillar of salt. She becomes a memorial for the preservation of evil, a warning to all who might see her frozen in her half-turned gaze of longing.

I am Lot’s wife. I preserve deep within me a memory of sin savored in years past. I see my sin, but I do not hate it. I linger on the idea of re-engaging it, even in my new-found freedom. And I risk spreading it to the lives of those around me. God have mercy.

If your spiritual gaze were frozen at this instant, on what would it be fixed? Every day is a choice to look forward toward life-giving grace or backward toward a sin-saturated death. Will you choose self-focus or God-focus? How will you be memorialized? As someone who preserved the pleasures of sin or the profit of sanctification?

My prayer is that the memory of our past sins would be laced with the pungent odor of the fires of Sodom – the reek of God’s wrath exterminating the godlessness of our former days, the aroma of God’s grace pointing us toward new life, eyes fixed on our Savior.

Luke 17:32-33 Remember Lot's wife. Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it.