gengwall

My wife and I just had meals with both sets of parents for Father’s day – lunch with hers and supper with my. It was wonderful as always to get three generations of family together. With my wife’s family, the conversation just happened to turn to men, masculinity, and what it means to be a proper, biblical husband and father (I swear I had nothing to do with it). It was refreshing again to hear my father-in-law outline his view on what a proper male “head” should look and act like. It is significant that my wife’s family is a very conservative, very “traditional” family. Yet, somehow they have gleaned the proper context out of the scriptures.

He began by saying that the husband’s “job” is simply to “love his wife as himself” (Ephesians 5). He said, infact, that if a husband loves anything more than his wife except God, that is work, children, parents or other family, or recreational activities, he may not receive any respect from his wife. He also said that the husband has no right to “demand” anything of his wife, including submission, respect, or adherance to any decisions. In fact, he emphasized how important it is for husband and wife to arive at decisions together. He said specifically that it was sinful for a husband to “lord it over” his wife and that God’s purpose for marriage is so that the husband had someone who “completed” him. Implied in that* was the idea that all of the “things” that went into a marriage – raising children, activities of daily living, decision making, and everything else – was the result of this partnership, not some unilateral “headship”.

We did not talk about church ministry per se, but my wife tells me that in their conservative, male led congregation, there were discussions at least about females in deaconess positions. Although they never got to an egalitarian culture within that church, my suspicion knowing him and his study of scripture leads me to believe that he would turn to scripture if confronted with the comp/egal controversies. As my wife puts it, “he wasn’t going to support authoritarian male rule just because he was a man.” Most importantly, he would always discuss controversial topics with his wife and valued greatly her counsel. If she pointed out things from scripture that had not been covered by all the “macho men”, he was not afraid to go and stand against convention.

I tell you this simply to encourage you. Even in households and congregations that, from the outside, would look to be text-book complimentarian, there are individuals, and yes, very often individual men, who look into the scripture for themselves and have grave concerns and even outward rejections of complimentarian teaching. Sometimes it takes years to get there, but it is possible. Be encouraged – even the Cleavers sometimes get it right.

*The discussion ranged far and wide and covered a good deal of ground before we got into the nitty gritty of “love your wife…” You will have to trust me that this was the just of his meaning.