Dare to Love Women

Calling Women Back to Responsibility

One of the huge challenges in ministry right now, and there are many, is helping women regain agency and strength.

Now, before I say what I mean by that, some of you are already thinking, “Yeah, but what about men? Isn’t that one of men’s biggest problems too?” Of course it is. I just said there are many problems.

But another problem is that many of you can’t read what’s right in front of you without immediately thinking about the opposite. You’ve been trained to read antithetically. Instead of taking the point being made, you immediately think about how it isn’t universally true or how it applies to someone else, and you miss the point entirely.

When it comes to men and women, our culture assumes you can never talk about one without immediately talking about the other. If you praise men, you have to praise women. If you criticize women, you have to criticize men. Everything has to be perfectly balanced. It’s one of the ways our age has made honest conversations unnecessarily difficult.

Back to the point.

Modern culture has told women they can do anything a man can do, and probably do it better. It has told them they can have it all. They can be a mother, a lawyer, an astronaut, bake sourdough, keep a spotless house, and become the next Allie Beth Stuckey.

At first glance, that sounds like the culture is giving women unlimited agency. But there’s a twist. While women are supposedly capable of everything, they’re also told they’re rarely responsible for anything. If they fail, it’s because the “patriarchal system” is rigged. If they’re anxious, it’s because their husband doesn’t love them like Christ enough, not because they refuse to take their worries to God. Then there’s trauma culture, which labels nearly everything as trauma and then uses that label to excuse sinful reactions and behavior.

So women are told they’re stronger, smarter, and more capable than ever, yet they’re also taught that their failures and sins are almost always someone else’s fault. That combination produces people who are proud and fragile at the same time. They’ve been raised in a culture that constantly flatters them, so correction feels like an attack.

That’s what I mean by women losing agency.

Women need to be told they are responsible before God for the outcomes of their lives. They are responsible for their sinful attitudes and actions. Outside circumstances affect everyone, but they do not remove personal responsibility. Women must own their sin, repent of it, and accept the consequences that often come with it.

That isn’t misogyny. It’s love. It’s helping women recover adulthood from a culture that constantly encourages them to remain children.

I am very much in favor of strong women. But by strength, I mean strength of character. Nothing keeps a person weaker than refusing to take responsibility for their own sin, and nothing makes a person stronger than humility, the ability to see yourself truthfully before God.

That kind of humility produces remarkable women. Women who are gracious. Women who walk through life with poise. Women who are not easily offended because they are far more concerned with their own souls than protecting their pride.

Any pastor or ministry that undermines a woman’s agency is a people-pleasing, woman-fearing, God-dishonoring ministry. They do not have the courage to love women enough to tell them the truth. More often than not, they are married to women who think this way themselves. Instead of helping them grow in grace, they flatter them, excuse them, and surrender to their weakness and sin.

Another part of this, and this is where the men come in, is that many men are married to women who have bought into these modern lies. They are proud and very difficult to correct. The husbands have either bought into the same lies themselves or have simply surrendered to the fact that their wives won’t receive correction.

These are the “happy wife, happy life” kinds of men. More than anything, they just want to keep the peace. They want their wife to be happy regardless of her spiritual condition so they can go about their lives without conflict.

So when something in the culture or the church upsets their wife, they get upset too, not because you’re wrong, but because you’ve disturbed the little bit of peace they’ve managed to carve out in their marriage.

That’s when the names start. You’re a misogynist. You’re a woman-hater. You’re unloving. They’ll say whatever they need to say because they have to reassure their wife that they don’t agree with the man calling her to repentance. They need her to know she’s basically fine, or at least that you’re overstating the case. The goal is simple: get things back to normal.

Many of these men are pastors.

On the other side are men who have become embittered. They’ve watched this for years, they’re tired of it, and now they’re overcompensating. They speak without patience, but patience is exactly what’s needed. When an entire sex has been catechized by a lie for decades, sanctification takes time.

So you’ve got flattering, enabling husbands on one side and embittered men on the other. Neither helps.

It’s our mess. God has given it to us, and it’s our responsibility to deal with it. So we must.