This crisis partly calls for more theological and practical work that explains why Holy Scripture teaches a male-only episcopate. God does not act in arbitrary ways. A male-only episcopate is not a random or eclectic practice of the first century. Some deeper truth is at hand; some rational and explainable reason exists. God created the natural order to work in a specific way. 

During the last forty years, evangelicals have debated whether or not the Bible allows for women to occupy the role of elder or bishop. Egalitarians maintain that men and women may take the office of elder, while complementarians believe in a male-only episcopate. A host of other notions around gender and roles also appear in such discussions.
Yet I have noticed a recent shift in arguments. Yes, both sides still claim the Bible as their source for their conclusions. But egalitarians argue that complementarian teaching is inherently harmful or at least that it controls women. And since harming women is wrong (everyone agrees on this), it follows that complementarianism is wrong. 
A New Egalitarian form of Argument
To cite one example, Aimee Byrd explains in a recent article how she used to believe in complementarian teaching, but now she knows who pays the price for it (i.e. women). Sheila Gregoire explains in a comment how her body reacts—presumably due to experiencing trauma or seeing so much of it—when she considers complementarian teaching. She explains, “​​I just can’t do it anymore. Like, I physically can’t. My body has all those reactions as well.”
I trust that both Byrd and Gregoire have experienced all sorts of unkindness. My point here is not to deny their experience but narrate one example of what seems to be a common pattern. Egalitarians (or those who are at least anti-complementarian) argue:

Major premise: Abuse and traumatizing women are wrong (and all agree)
Minor premise: Complementarian churches have lots of abuse and trauma in them
Conclusion: Complementarian promotes abuse and trauma and is therefore wrong.

Now, churches that promote a late twentieth-century teaching called complementarianism could promote such things in their congregations. We might say they imbibed some modern and rotten theology. Recently, I met someone who basically followed Bill Gothard’s teaching of the family. Admittedly, I find such teachings bizarre and wrong. I had never encountered them before.
When I read Beth Allison Barr’s book on The Making of Biblical Womanhood, I found her negative examples of patriarchy wild and outside of my experience. You can read my review of her book by clicking here.
My suspicion is that those most critical of complementarianism have left a form of fundamentalism as well. And such an exodus often characterizes why they reject so strongly complementarianism. It, after all, encodes a gendered teaching on men and women in pervasive ways.
I also suspect there are many things evangelicals should reject that go under the name of complementarianism. As noted, when I heard about Bill Gothard or some of the things that Beth Barr narrates, I found them both foreign and incorrect.
With all that said, I still wonder if the argument that I described above masks the real debate at hand: what does the Bible teach about the role of a pastor and of men and women generally?
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Those who have experienced great loss and difficulty in life often treasure this truth more than those whose bellies and bank accounts are full. For those desperately seeking Him can be assured that God will work all things they have been given— gifts and trials alike— together for good. He has given us the greatest good of His Son, which can not be taken from us, and has given us more than we could ask for or desire in the unsearchable greatness and inexhaustible fountain of riches in Christ.

A man loses his fortune in a fire. Shortly after, all four of his young children die in a tragic shipwreck. A young woman’s husband is brutally murdered. Her second husband dies of cancer, and she herself passes away after a decade-long battle with dementia. A promising teenager becomes a quadriplegic in a diving accident. For the rest of her life she is confined to a wheelchair; from the neck down unable to move her once active body.
And yet, Joni Eareckson Tada, after learning to write with a pen in her mouth, reflected: “It is a glorious thing to know that your Father God makes no mistakes in directing or permitting that which crosses the path of your life.”
And when it seemed providence had dealt her a cruel hand in the death of her two husbands, Elisabeth Elliot wrote, “God never witholds from His child that which His love and wisdom call good.”
And even as his ship slowly passed by the place where his children drowned, Horatio Spafford penned the beloved lines, “Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say it is well with my soul.”
There seems to be a shocking dissonance between the words and the lives of these individuals. Were they deluded into thinking that God has been good to them? Or, had they taken hold of the promise many of us have a difficult time grasping— that God withholds nothing good from the upright, for God Himself is our greatest gift and gives Himself freely to us.
When the psalmist writes, “No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly,” our first instinct is to make a mental list of all the good things that we do not have. Like our first parents, we are tempted to believe that God is keeping something from us.
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Most abortions are committed by women destined to remain childless. A vast majority of normal American women intend never to commit an abortion, never do, and instead want to start a family. Rejecting abortions is normal. Having abortions is not.

Recently in Ohio, a constitutional amendment to allow some abortion-on-demand narrowly passed a popular referendum. The amendment would have failed had only about seven percent of voters switched from “yes” to “no.” This contrasts with recent pro-life wins in states that are in some cases arguably less red than Ohio such as the traditional swing state of Florida, Texas, and the blue-leaning state of Georgia. There, Republicans who passed laws that protect unborn babies with heartbeats have lately won statewide and even won big.
The Ohio setback is what results when the political right argues law instead of culture. The right outsourced its arguments on abortion mostly to its kindly Christian women, who have so far avoided using one of the most powerful tools they have: Shame. But shame is the way to train abortion proponents to care about the unborn, and shame comes from culture.
The political left knows this well. The left for a century has changed culture before law, turning the unimaginable into the standard, through relentless campaigns of public shaming. That’s how it trained a generation to avoid fanciful horrors of the so-called “politically incorrect,” even though no one ever believed it. The political right, if only it is willing, can far more quickly teach a generation to avoid real horrors everyone already knows are wrong.
The Median Abortion Seeker Is Far from the Median Woman
Trained to avoid the politically incorrect, much of the right assumes that condemning women who get abortions is like staring at a solar eclipse: something you just can’t do. But the left’s cultural wins are reversing. As more and more reject the bizarre racial and sexual pities of the aughts and the vapid norms of the nineties from which they sprang, now is the time to question whether it really is bad to shame women when they kill their children. Now is the time to break free from the Millian paradigm that negates historically normal enforcement of social norms and morality: shame and stigma. These things are always operative anyway. It is just a question of which morality governs and what “lifestyles” are elevated. 
There aren’t many women to shame anyway. The typical woman is far from the typical woman who commits abortion. Roughly half of all abortions are committed by women who have already had at least one. About a fifth of women who get abortions have several. Overall, only about one in ten who get pregnant ever go on to commit even one abortion.
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