Editor’s note: The following essay appears in the Spring 2022 issue of Eikon.
I have recently completed my twenty-first year as the teaching pastor at the Master’s Community Church. As I look to the next twenty, I want to be more strategic about cultivating complementarity. I am concerned not just for the health of families in my church, though complementarity establishes a framework for that, nor am I concerned only with men and women living according to Scripture’s teaching on gender roles. I am concerned for the place of Scripture in the life of the local church. In 2008, Mark Dever observed that complementarity is a watershed doctrine by which one can see if an individual or organization accommodates Scripture to culture or culture to Scripture.[1] Dever’s observation holds today, evidenced by evangelical feminists like Beth Allison Barr’s recent reluctance to publicly subscribe to the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy when given the opportunity.[2]
Since the…
