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

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.

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.

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.

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.