(Part 3 of a 5-part series on Complementarity & Mutuality. This series was orginally published on the Girls Gone Wise blog at www.girlsgonewise.com).
By Mary Kassian
This is the third of a 5-part series on Complementarity & Mutuality. Though our Coach has assigned husbands and wives complementary positions, He has common expectations of all His players. Complementarity AND mutuality are part of His game-winning plan for the team.
I don’t know. Chalk it up to the fact that I married an athlete, birthed boys, and have spent countless hours in the bleachers cheering for football teams, hockey teams, and volleyball teams—but I have absolutely no problem with the complementarian claim that leadership and teamwork are compatible concepts. Every winning team has a team leader. Good leaders encourage and facilitate teamwork. Every athlete knows that a team with a good leader makes for a better team than a leaderless one. Hence, why some people can’t fathom how a marriage can be characterized by both complementarity and mutuality is, quite frankly, beyond me.
In His playbook, our Coach has given us some sex-specific assignments. He instructs me to respect my husband as the team leader of our family unit. He instructs my husband to be a good leader—a self-sacrificial, loving one who looks out for the best interests of his wife and family. But He also gives us both a host of instructions about His expectations of all the players on the field. Though we’ve been assigned different positions, there are many common “do’s and “don’ts”—clear responsibilities my husband and I have toward one another as members of God’s team. Our Coach says:
That’s quite the list! It certainly doesn’t sound like the Coach allows for one player to dominate, repress, or abuse another, does it?
All of our common responsibilities are to be carried out in the context of relationships in which the Coach has delegated some players—like the husband of each family unit—the additional responsibility to provide loving team leadership in their respective corners of the field. (Ephesians 5:21-32)
How anyone can read through this list of responsibilities, including the sex-specific responsibility of husbands to love their wives in emulation of Christ’s love for the church, and conclude that complementarity is bad for women, or that it doesn’t support mutuality, is, again, beyond me.
Yes, it’s true that some Christian men don’t take their assigned responsibility seriously. Yes, it’s true that men fail. But the same could be said of women. When I read the list, I am conscience-stricken about my own short-comings.
The fact that some players don’t carry through on the game plan doesn’t mean the plan is a bad one. Nor does it mean that we should hold a collective mutiny and declare a free-for-all on the field. It just means that we need to work harder to execute the game plan in the way our Coach has designated.
It’s absolute nonsense to say that complementarity means that men and women can’t be team players. Complementarity and mutuality are both important parts of God’s game-winning plan.
(Stay tuned. My next post is entitled: Covenant Sex—where Complementarity and Mutuality Kiss. In it, I’ll get down to some of the nitty gritty questions that prompted this whole series.)
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