Category Archives: Personal Journey

White Evangelical: Let’s Talk About Race, Baby

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(or Why I Associate My Spiritual Heritage with Race)

The majority of my posts have, in one form or another, addressed the problems with patriarchy in the white evangelical church. The most unexpected pushback I regularly receive on social media and in real life is not my criticism of patriarchy, but my use of the term white evangelical to describe my spiritual heritage. I realize I’ve never clarified why I choose to use the term on my blog and would like to directly address my use, even though it’s a term very few white evangelicals actually use to describe themselves. My post White Evangelical Married Sex is Not a Beautiful Union: The Pride & Profitability of Patriarchy most frequently raises good questions from my readers about my employment of the term white evangelical:

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Raising my Ebenezer: Why I’m still a Christian

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It’s been 3 years, 10 months, and 5 days since my family walked out of the doors of our local Southern Baptist church for the last time. I knew when we were leaving that we were leaving something much bigger than our local church and even the Southern Baptist Convention, but I did not yet comprehend how far outside of conservative white evangelism the journey would take us nor how long we would be wondering in a spiritual wilderness. Sometimes the grief still leaves me breathless. I often feel embarrassed that it still hurts so much.

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Life under Patriarchy: Death by a Thousand Cuts

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Examining the wounds of my past is part of my journey towards healing. Wound-care is often messy and uncomfortable.

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Different AND Equal: One Woman’s Journey from Complementarian to Egalitarian

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Why did I avoid wrestling with egalitarian theology for so long? A weird stew of several factors: desire to be objective, rejection of secular white feminism, result of my circumstances, propensity towards self-flagellation, and fear of becoming a feminazi.

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Finding My Voice (in the wilderness) – Part 2

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Sometimes I think I’m done writing for awhile, and then I stumble across something that reminds me of all the pain still trapped inside. This week I stumbled upon an article on social media entitled A Southern Baptist Pastor’s Plea: Please Listen, and I started bleeding again. Watching a complementarian man receive praise for “listening” all week on social media has been painful, and at first, I chose to stay silent. I knew to speak would open the floodgates and unleash the hurt still buried deep in my soul. Then Aimee Byrd wrote her response, Why Complementarians Can’t Listen. I found the cries of my heart echoed in her words and those cries are no longer able to be stifled.

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The Apostle Paul Led Me Out of Patriarchy

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Three influential factors that led me out of complementary/patriarchal theology: the racism inherent in allowing white women to teach BIPOC men overseas but not white men in our own churches, the wake of devastation left in my own church from the vacuum of female leadership, and…the teachings of Paul.

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Finding My Voice (in the wilderness) – Part 1

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Living in “complementarian” spaces was death by a thousand cuts. It can be hard to articulate, because each cut on its own sounds petty. Also, some of my pain is intertwined with other women’s stories, and it can be difficult to know how to talk about my own role without oversharing the details of their stories. This is my first attempt to put down in words the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual pain of living in patriarchal spaces most of my life. I think this old outline I recently rediscovered is a good place to start, because it shows my head space when I still considered myself comp.

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Sexual Healing in the Song of Songs

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I wanted to share specific ways I found sexual healing in Scripture as a woman raised in a Christian culture that overwhelming focuses on male sexual desire.

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