The hard heart of it all.

I do not feel the need to engage evangelical men anymore. But some things should be said for the good of the church.

My dear evangelical brothers,

You love to put me "in my place" with verses out of the full context of Ephesians 5, because I dare to speak and say how wrong you are in how you view and thus treat women.

And thus, with all due respect:

You are not a woman. I am. And your refusal to hear me and my experience, with the bondage that your interpretation of scripture placed upon me, is proof of my point.

I am an educated woman who mothers children and holds down a job, plus pursues higher education. Your teachings, when taken to their natural conclusions, simply do not permit women to be the whole people they were created to be.

You have no idea how much more your wives and daughters could become, when you insist their primary role is parenting: a role God created men and women to share.

You have no understanding of what codependency it creates, to insist women define their worth by submission to a man, rather than by loving obedience to God.

You prove your lack of respect for many women like me by your hubris and by refusing to censure your brothers who mock me when I speak. Your passive aggressive "grace and peace" close-offs don't impress me, nor am I less spiritual than you, nor do I need your kind of blind guidance nor "leadership." I am not broken, back-slidden, damaged nor lost; I am a beloved child of God, much as you once humbly believed you yourself to be, I truly hope.

Your way may work for you folks, but it was bondage for me.

Had I continued to submit to your prescriptive view of Scripture, had I denied the person God created me to be, I would never have become the person I am today, nor made the leap of faith to marry the man I love, against my dad’s wishes.

To follow Christ, I had to do exactly what you say I shouldn’t: defy a man perceived to be in authority over me.

But no man is responsible for my spiritual life: I am. No man is the beneficiary of my choices in life: I am. God will not hold a man accountable for my choices in life, whether sinful or righteous: I am responsible, as much as I am free.

I am blessed to be free of complementarianism, and no less following Christ than the women you hold up as model Christians.

I have not suddenly become a raging feminist as some of you like to label anyone who rocks your small boats. I have not once changed my views on the authority of God’s Word. I have instead come to an understanding that the evangelical interpretation of Scripture in this area is in keeping with fallen American culture, encouraging a life under the Curse, rather than living in the actual freedom that is only found in Christ.

Your teachings of men are simply wrong. They do harm to your sisters who you have silenced in your favor. It is a crying shame you can’t see this.

You will never effectively address abuse in churches and Christian families until you address the cruel heart of abuse that resides in your pulpits, when you teach erroneously that women are basically just objects to impregnate and temptresses to be protected from themselves. When you make women the butt of your jokes, when you ridicule as unbelieving, those who stand up to you, you sin.

You abuse.

Your smear campaigns of women

are the beginning of domestic violence.

By contrast, the fear of the Lord: actual humility before a holy God, who is set apart from all as the very definition of love, is the beginning of wisdom. And we know that only fools despise knowledge and understanding.

Wisdom is personified by God, in Scripture, as a woman.

Why won't you listen?