So I want to ask, for those of you who were on one side, but are now on the other? What changed your mind? What are your stories?
I was raised in a church and a Christian K-12 school that held the patriarchal view. (The euphemism "complementarian" hadn't been coined yet, but I'm willing to use it for the purposes of this discussion.) I am now egalitarian. Many things worked together to change my mind, over the course of 10-20 years.
1. Over time, I changed the way I read and apply the Bible. When I read the New Testament epistles (where the standard "clobber verses" are found), I'm not reading a message written directly to me, sitting in my back yard in New Jersey in June 2024. I'm reading someone else's mail. I'm reading the advice that St Paul and others wrote to particular first-century churches facing particular situations. My church's situation may be like that earlier situation, or it might not. We have to think about what's similar and what's different, as we seek to apply the early church's wisdom to our present lives.
2. Simply living the life of an adult woman for a couple of decades gave me important information. Various reasons are sometimes given for why it's good for men to be in leadership and bad for women to be in leadership. Women shouldn't be in leadership, I was told, because {women aren't logical thinkers; women have emotions; women aren't well-educated; women don't understand theology as well as men; women are easily deceived, and men aren't}. (Did I miss any?) After I got away from my youth group leaders and lived some years of actual life, I found that all the reasons provided to me were either overgeneralizations, plainly false, or irrelevant. So that leaves us with: The reason to suppress women's leadership is because St Paul imposed it as a Law on the church, and we obey the Law simply because it's the Law, even if it doesn't make sense and even if it harms people.
3. Except: St Paul goes out of his way to argue, in Galatians and Romans and elsewhere, that as Christians we're freed from the Law. He does not seem to be saying that we replace Moses' Law with Paul's Law. So we're misusing St Paul's letters if we look at them as a new Law.
4. Finally, the Bible isn't just "clobber verses". There are positive teachings for women in the Bible as well. The standard one to cite is "there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." I'll add that later in Galatians, St Paul writes "For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." And that brings me to a last observation, that in many places throughout the Bible we see God siding not with the oppressors but with the oppressed. The God of the Exodus, of the Prophets, and of the Magnificat sees when women are held down by patriarchy, and cares about their suffering.
