Written by Jason K. Allen |
Tuesday, April 16, 2024
We are called to be advocates, not just affirmers. We are called to be articulators, not just adherents. Compromise usually begins with silence. It ends with disavowal. And we must have an ear for the silence. Yes, each of us will have different ministry passions or commitments. But we must keep before us an ever-present awareness that these issues are being threatened by the day, in our families and in our churches, and we must be those who are willing to confidently and cheerfully speak and advocate to these great truths, especially as codified in the Danvers and Nashville Statements. Silence often is deafening.

My first encounter with the Danvers Statement and CBMW was in the late 1990s. I was a young man in college, and I was at my church, a rather large Southern Baptist church, and I was talking to a staff member in his office, and I saw on his bookshelf a big, thick, blue book that said Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. There were two names on it: Wayne Grudem and John Piper. I had heard the latter name, not the former. But I had never heard of the topics to which that book was addressing. And I asked the staff member, “What is this book about?” And he said, “Well, it’s about complementarianism,” and I responded, “What in the world is that?” And he began to unpack it just a little bit to me that summer afternoon, and I stood there really mystified by the whole reality. I grew up in a conservative home and a conservative church, and I knew that generally, men were supposed to lead in the home, and in the church, and that women were not to preach, but little more than that.
As a college student in the late 1990s, the whole topic struck me as an awkward anachronism, a doctrinal hot potato, an angular, often inconvenient truth to which we were to hold. But I sensed then that men and ministers both would speak of these things only when necessary, and then do so only uncomfortably. And when it was necessary to speak to them, it would usually be with some glib, throwaway line along the lines that, “When we got married, I told my wife I would make all the major decisions, but in 30 years of marriage, there has never been a major decision!” That was my encounter and my understanding of complementarianism in the late 1990s.
Then you move into the early 2000s, and a huge surge of awareness — thanks to CBMW primarily — took place. The TNIV pushback even had leading voices arguing for a return to the phrase and the concept of “biblical patriarchy,” a call to recover that term. That concept and the room seemed set. And it seemed as though this renewal of Reformed theology, the New Calvinism, that complementarianism was really part and parcel of that movement. Yet over the past five to ten years, it seems to me that we have had a swing of momentum: self-inflicted wounds; moral failings by leaders; crudeness and rudeness on social media and other places; militant egalitarianism that is always on the hunt for a complementarian to shoot down. All of this and more presents those of us who are complementarians with significant challenges.
Then we come to my own denomination — speaking of challenges — the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). In recent years, the issue has become fever pitch. It really burst just a few years ago when Beth Moore tweeted in the lead-up to Mother’s Day that she would be preaching. And that set off a conflagration. Then, of course, more recently, Rick Warren announced an exegetical breakthrough, not just permitting women to preach and to lead in the church, but necessitating they do so.
Before us now is the Law Amendment that many of you have heard about, and read about — an admittedly blunt instrument, but seemingly a necessary one. And some of those opposed to it are making the argument that sounds something like this: “This is a red herring in our convention, because only a handful of churches are in danger of being afoul of the BF&M 2000. But if we adopt it, we will alienate an intolerably high number of churches that would then be outside of the BF&M 2000.” Well, which is it? We are a free church denomination, and we understand that swapping inconsistent nomenclature is part of that cooperation. We seek to find reasons to work together, not to come apart. But our response should be to educate, not to excuse, to reaffirm and rearticulate, not to shrug off, not to say things like, “On the one hand, these issues are rooted in the created order, but as long as we do not violate it too often, then it is no big deal.”
Four Observations on the Lay of the Land
In what follows, I will make four observations as I see the lay of the land, and then bring six words of challenge to card-carrying complementarians.

America Is Spiraling into Greater Darkness than Any of Us Fully Realize

I was in the United Kingdom recently for our acquisition of a Spurgeon collection at MBTS. I was in the London area in a car with a minister from there. We were at a red light, and to the left of the light was a large building with a sign. On the sign was a man — clearly a man with large muscles and a beard, exuding masculinity in every way by the muscles and the facial hair — wearing lingerie. The minister said to me, “You know, Jason, America has exported that to us.” It struck me at that moment not only was he right, but he was tragically so, because until very recently we were on the receiving end of such exports: Europe sent us their nonsense. Now we are sending ours to them. We used to be the arsenal of democracy. We used to export virtue. Now we are the arsenal of hedonism, exporting perversion.

The Greatest Threat to Complementarianism Is Not That We Fail to Persuade the Culture, but That We Fail to Persuade Our Own Families and Churches

In the lead-up to America’s interest in World War II, FDR famously observed that to be the President in these times required that the President be the Educator in Chief. And for us in the room who love our sons, daughters, spouses, congregations, and extended family, my great concern is not so much that the culture will not hear and heed, but that our own loved ones and our own churches are not hearing from us, and thus not heeding accordingly the clear teachings of Scripture.

There Is No Mushy Middle

Stop trying to find the mushy middle. If you want to see people looking for it, you do not have to attend a feminist conference these days. You just have to attend ETS. But there is, in the final analysis, no mushy middle. That phrase first hit me over a decade ago when I had just moved to Kansas City.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, August 20, 2022
There is no pressure in Christianity to be happy. There is instead an invitation to feel. To truly enter into the reality of the things that life throws at you, good and bad. To discover the emotions of God, what he loves and what he hates. We are invited to live life to the full. And that may look more like your life than you realised as you read through tear-stained eyes. Or it may not, and you may have to truly enter the joy and the sorrow of the situations that you find yourself in. Jesus did, and he invites us to follow him, with a cross on our shoulder.

Jesus came to give us life, and life to the full. Life that is abundant, excessive in quantity. We know the words of John chapter 10 well enough, but I think it’s difficult for us to picture what that means.
I hear the phrase “life to the full,” and I inevitably picture someone into extreme sports—perhaps a surfer—who is living their life to the full by chasing the thrill of adrenaline coursing through their body.
Or, if we look at the culture of our churches rather than the things we say, we might wonder if ‘life to the full’ had more to do with being Middle-Classed and living a nice well-adjusted life where our psychological drama is kept to a minimum and we earn a good salary and live in a nice-looking house with our 2.4 children. You might scoff at the characterisation, but when 70% of the British church is degree educated, something is off, even if this is unlikely to be the cause.
Life to the full cannot mean living like a beach bum. It cannot mean living like an upwardly mobile knowledge-worker in the suburbs. It cannot mean being employed by a church. And, it must be possible for people in all three of those situations.
Why can’t it? It must include Jesus’ own life. If his life cannot be described as ‘to the full’ or ‘abundant’ then we are defining our terms wrongly. When Jesus said ‘life to the full’ he must, as Alain Emerson points out in his beautiful memoir Luminous Dark, surely have meant a life like his own.
At this point I suspect you’re still with me. Most of us know this implicitly, even when our cultures speak differently. We imagine instead that life to the full is a life replete with joy, with friendship with God, and with demonstrations of God’s power dogging our footsteps.
A fully charismatic ‘naturally supernatural’ lifestyle, that sounds more like it! That lines up with Jesus’ own ministry and sounds like ‘life in abundance’ as well. That’ll be it, right?
A life like his own. Marked by suffering as well as joy. We should imagine that our abundant life will be as marked by struggles, disappointment and pain as his was.
What is life in its fullness?
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In the machinery of modern industry and government, and in worldly, pragmatic ideologies, Machen saw a real threat to liberty, society, and the church. The only solution for him was the knowledge of a God who cared enough to send his Son, beneath whose cross and in whose church is the only refuge from the decay and depravity of the world.

J. Gresham Machen was certainly prescient about the havoc theological liberalism would wreak on the mainline churches in the 20th century. He also saw the rise of fascism and ethnonationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. We would do well to consider those warnings today.
Machen’s observations about the church and the world in his great short essay Mountains and Why We Love Them were published in 1933 (based on a mountain-climbing trip of the previous year) and have never been more relevant. In 1932 Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was probably more well-known to most Americans than Adolf Hitler, who lost the German presidential election that year. But Machen, who had studied in Germany and knew it well, was keenly aware of Hitler’s threat. He looked out across Europe from a peak in the Swiss Alps and did not like what he saw:
Then there is something else about that view from the Matterhorn. I felt it partly at least as I stood there, and I wonder whether you can feel it with me. It is this. You are standing there not in any ordinary country, but in the very midst of Europe, looking out from its very centre. Germany just beyond where you can see to the northeast, Italy to the south, France beyond those snows of Mont Blanc. There, in that glorious round spread out before you, that land of Europe, humanity has put forth its best. There it has struggled; there it has fallen; there it has looked upward to God. The history of the race seems to pass before you in an instant of time, concentrated in that fairest of all the lands of the earth. You think of the great men whose memories you love, the men who have struggled there in those countries below you, who have struggled for light and freedom, struggled for beauty, struggled above all for God’s Word. And then you think of the present and its decadence and its slavery, and you desire to weep. It is a pathetic thing to contemplate the history of mankind.
Here it seems that Machen had in view modernity and its dehumanizing machinery (of state and of steel) and its godless “morality.” See the introductory chapter of Christianity and Liberalism (written 10 years before) to understand more fully what Machen had in mind. In that book, Machen had extolled “the great principles of Anglo-Saxon liberty,” meaning the tradition of individual rights pioneered in the British Isles.
Machen goes on to speak of the evil ends that modernity’s machines and men were beginning to serve:
I know that there are people who tell us contemptuously that always there are croakers who look always to the past, croakers who think that the good old times are the best. But I for my part refuse to acquiesce in this relativism which refuses to take stock of the times in which we are living. It does seem to me that there can never be any true advance, and above all there can never be any true prayer, unless a man does pause occasionally, as on some mountain vantage ground, to try, at least, to evaluate the age in which he is living. And when I do that, I cannot for the life of me see how any man with even the slightest knowledge of history can help recognizing the fact that we are living in a time of sad decadence—a decadence only thinly disguised by the material achievements of our age, which already are beginning to pall on us like a new toy. When Mussolini makes war deliberately and openly upon democracy and freedom, and is much admired for doing so even in countries like ours; when an ignorant ruffian is dictator of Germany, until recently the most highly educated country in the world—when we contemplate these things I do not see how we can possibly help seeing that something is radically wrong. Just read the latest utterances of our own General Johnson, his cheap and vulgar abuse of a recent appointee of our President, the cheap tirades in which he develops his view that economics are bunk—and then compare that kind of thing with the state papers of a Jefferson or a Washington—and you will inevitably come to the conclusion that we are living in a time when decadence has set in on a gigantic scale.
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