What We Lose in Her Silence

I was asked to preach at a wedding a few years back, and the couple wanted Ephesians 5. Every pastor who's done more than a handful of weddings knows the particular flinch that request produces… half honor, half dread… because you know you're about to stand in front of a room that's heard this passage wielded as a leash far more often than they've heard it preached as love that empties itself to the point of death. You spend the drive over rehearsing how you're going to get to verse 25 before anyone starts bracing and only listening for verse 22.

You hear the one thing and forgo completing the thought. (Insert “Bruva eewww”.)

Most of the conversation around toxic masculinity and Scripture settles into one of two grooves. Either it's about impact; what this does to women, which is real and true and not nearly said enough. Or, it's about worldview, a debate over whether the gospel should be dragged into politics and ideology at all, as if quoting what a text has been used to justify is somehow the politicized move and the misuse itself was neutral. Both conversations are worth having. Neither one is the conversation I want to have here. I want to talk about what the rest of us lose, the Body, the mission, the watching world, when half the church is told to sit down and be quiet, and we call it order.

A church with half its voice missing isn't smaller. It's wounded. And wounded deeply.

Start with the text itself, because misuse always starts with the text. Genesis 3:16, "he shall rule over you", spoken to the woman in the same breath as thorns are spoken to the ground, is a description of the curse, not a design document. Every commentator who's honest about the Hebrew grammar concedes that "rule" there sits in the same sentence structure as the sin "desiring to have". Cain in the very next chapter (Gen 4:7), it's describing a broken, grasping dynamic, not blessing one. Read as prescription instead of diagnosis, the curse gets promoted to a job description. That's not exegesis. That's taking the wound and calling it the cure, something I'm realizing the church is really good at now and throughout history.

Paul's actual argument in 1 Corinthians runs the opposite direction, and it's the one I keep hearing in my head: "if one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together" (1 Cor. 12:26). That's not a verse about women specifically. It's a verse about amputation. You don't get to silence a hand and call the body undiminished. Paul's whole point in that chapter is that the parts you're most tempted to treat as dispensable are the ones the body can least afford to lose (1 Cor. 12:22-23); and if that's true anywhere, it's true of half the members of the actual, physical, gathered church.

We call it order. But really, it's amputation with a verse stapled to it. Again, something the church is and has been really good at doing to justify positions and doctrines.

And this isn't a hypothetical loss dating from some abstract theological miscalculation. The New Testament church ran on the voices we've spent centuries trying to explain away. Junia was called "outstanding among the apostles" by Paul himself (Rom. 16:7); a phrase so plainly stated that it took until the medieval period for anyone to decide her name must actually be a man's, an "error" scholars are still quietly correcting. Chrysostom, of all people, read it the plain way and marveled: to be counted among the apostles at all is remarkable, he said, but to be called outstanding among them: that's a height of philosophy words can barely reach. Phoebe carried Paul's letter to Rome bearing the title diakonos (Rom. 16:1), the same word used for the office we ordain men into without a second thought. Priscilla, not her husband, is the one Luke names first when the two of them sit Apollos down and explain "the way of God more accurately" (Acts 18:26). And the first sermon ever preached on the resurrection wasn't preached by an apostle at all, it was preached by Mary Magdalene, to the apostles, who didn't believe her (Luke 24:11) until they went and checked. Hippolytus, writing in the third century, gave her and the other women at the tomb a title that stuck: apostola apostolorum, "apostle to the apostles". The gospel's first courier was a woman the men in the room initially dismissed as hysterical.

It wasn't just the New Testament writers who noticed, either. Around 112 AD, the Roman governor Pliny the Younger wrote to the emperor Trajan describing his interrogation of two Christian slave women he referred to as ministrae (ministers) because that was apparently the office the church itself had given them, and a hostile pagan governor gathering evidence against a suspicious cult had no reason to flatter Christian claims about its own leadership. A century later, a young North African woman named Perpetua kept her own prison diary while awaiting execution in the arena, and the early church thought so highly of her voice that congregations kept reading it aloud in worship for generations. So long that Augustine himself later grumbled some churches were treating it with almost as much reverence as Scripture. Women planted and hosted actual congregations from the beginning: Lydia's house was the first church in Philippi (Acts 16:14-15, 40), Nympha's home held the church at Colossae (Col. 4:15). None of this was controversial in the earliest centuries. It became controversial once the church started borrowing its politics from an empire that had never made room for a woman like that to begin with. By the time the Council of Laodicea got around to legislating against ordaining women presbyters in the fourth century, it wasn't correcting a scriptural error...it was catching up to Rome.

I've seen many a gift be lost on the church and for the church because of its shallow view of women. That doesn't make the church stronger…how can it?

Every one of those silences, historically, cost something beyond the woman silenced. Marguerite Porete was burned in Paris in 1310, in large part, for the offense of writing and teaching theology in her own voice rather than through an approved male intermediary. The church didn't just lose Marguerite that day. It lost whatever she still had to say; and, not incidentally, told every woman watching exactly what would happen if she tried. That's not collateral damage. That's the actual mechanism. Silence one voice publicly enough, and you don't just mute her; you train an entire body to stop listening for that register of the Spirit's voice altogether.

Another issue is that it doesn't stay in the sanctuary. A theology that trains a congregation to expect a woman's voice to yield first, defer first, go quiet first: doesn't clock out when everyone walks to the parking lot. It goes home with them. I've sat across from women whose pastors, when they finally found the courage to name what was happening behind closed doors, told them to submit harder, pray more, and trust God to change it…the same script, almost word for word, that had already been rehearsed from that pulpit every time a woman was told what she couldn't do in the church. If a theology can silence her in front of the whole congregation and call it order, it was never going to hesitate to silence her across a kitchen table and call it submission. The pulpit doesn't just describe what a marriage should look like. In a lot of houses, it trains it. The amputation doesn't stay in one room.

The world isn't watching a smaller church. It's watching a wounded one, and being told it's healthy. And there’s real cost to that.

Here's the missional cost, and I think it's the one we talk about least: "there is no longer male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28) isn't a private spiritual truth with no public shape. It's supposed to be visible; the new creation breaking into the old one, in a body of people actually living the reversal out loud, so the watching world sees something it can't get anywhere else. When the church instead reproduces the same domination it already assumes about religion (a woman's voice is worth less, her gifts are something to manage rather than release) it isn't neutral. It's confirming the world's worst suspicion: that Christianity is just patriarchy with music and projected moral superiority. We don't just fail to be salt and light. We become a mirror. And nobody comes to church for a slightly more polite reflection of what they already have at work.

Maybe the wound was never hers alone. Maybe it was ours, all along, and we didn't feel it, because it wasn't our hand that got cut off...it was hers.

I still think about that wedding sometimes; the room full of people bracing for verse 22, waiting to hear whether this was going to be another leash dressed up in white lace, or something that actually cost the man in the room something real. Because when you realize what Paul says, it's mutual service and submission. But the man has to GIVE HIMSELF UP FOR HER…so that she is exalted into the realm of eye-to-eye equality that makes her a true ezer-kenegdo…his warrior, his rib, and his perfect match. A true co-laborer in the faith. Imagine a church that exercises this instead of diminishing it. Because that's the church Christ wants and the world needs.