Cheryl Schatz

I have a thought and maybe others can give me some feedback. So do you think that the average comp husband if he knew how his exercising unilateral authority in the home was actually keeping his wife from reaching her potential in Christ, do you think that he would stop or do you think that the lure of power would keep most going in the same comp direction?

In our marriage, we were unaware for a long time about the damage that it was causing me. In fact I would have fought an egalitarian who would have tried to persuade me that what we were doing wasn’t Biblical. I remember a time many years ago after I had led a Bible study and support session for ex-JW’s that an ex-cult member approached me with a book about egalitarianism and she was telling me that she had learned that the husband was not the authority over the wife. I politely took the book but never read it. It seemed to me that what she was saying was tantamount to heresy.

It wasn’t until years later when I was emotionally forced to set a boundary in order to stop my own personhood from being dissolved and destroyed, that we actually studied this issue and came to understand that what we had long accepted as Biblical was actually a veiled form of abuse and was well on its way to destroying me as a person. When we both came to understand that and saw from the Scripture how we were both given authority and we were equal heirs in Christ, my husband booted the comp model of marriage with my approval and we never looked back.

The freedom that I now have to be myself and not the image that he wants me to be or even a clone of him, yet I am still able to work with him in unity, was so refreshing that I saw the freedom of Christ in it and it became very precious to me to the point that I wanted to be a change agent to help others who were also stuck in a world model that they believed to be the Christian model. When the blinders of deception have been pulled back from our eyes, we could never go back into that restrictive lifestyle. What I didn’t realize for a long time is that my husband was as deeply harmed by the comp lifestyle as I was. He was forced by tradition into a mold that was also hurting him because it forced him to have responsibility for things that were not his responsibility.