Even though I don’t believe in restricting women from serving in church office, I think the project of exploring the complementarian position looks promising. It seems to me that the egalitarian position has the liabilities of a contemporary cultural/political ideology enforcing it as well as a comparatively flat perspective in gender differences. I think the conflict over women serving in church office temporarily retarded the exploration of positive gender differences but over the longer term the inclusion of women serving in office has increased the data regarding what they bring to the table. In a funny way the tensions produced by the conflict and the opportunities brought by victory of the egalitarian position (in the CRC and other places) have given us a richer perspective on the base assumption of the complementarian position. In other words, the more we go into the egalitarian position the more vivid some of the beauty of the complementarian position becomes. Sometimes you don’t get to really explore the difference between apples and oranges until you’ve got them both on the same table.

Part of what attracts me to the exploration of the complementarian position is the movement of mutual voluntary submission and the basic gospel resonance which it evokes. If the relational polarity of the age to come, the relational polarity of the life within the Trinity is in fact sacrificial self-donation for the benefit of the other making the complementarian dance looks potentially rich and lovely. The dance is simply richer when the partners are complementary rather than mirror images of each other. A lot of the music surrounding the egalitarian sound to me to be more grabby, demanding and selfish. It’s about me first, my needs, my rights, my exaltation. This too often evokes the relational polarity of the age of decay: “my needs at your expense”.