Equality I Preached, Hierarchy I Practiced

Learning the slow, imperfect practice of repentance, mutuality, and shared power in marriage, ministry, and the Church.

Amanda and I have been married for 21 years and have six very different children between the ages of 22 and 10.

At this point, our NYC apartment is usually overflowing with too many snacks, too many sports schedules, too many theological debates, loud dinner tables, and at least one person frustrated with me at any given moment. We are, to put it gently, a very passionate bunch.

Amanda and I spent our early years in Detroit helping pastor a large megachurch before moving to New York City thirteen years ago to help build multicultural faith communities rooted in the justice of Jesus.

If you had asked me during the early years of our marriage whether I believed in gender equality and the empowerment of women in society, and within the Christian Church, I would have easily answered: “Without a doubt!”

I held what most people would call an egalitarian theology; Women and men made equally in the image of God, equally empowered by the Holy Spirit, and equally capable of holding the same spiritual authority and leadership positions within the church.

Like many young Christian couples, Amanda and I read the pre-marital books, attended the marriage workshops, listened to the experts and mentors, and built our roles as a newly married couple around gifting, wiring, and unique competencies.

We thought we were building a healthy partnership.

Early in my ministry, I discovered I was decently gifted in a few specific areas; organizational leadership, communication, and starting new things. Church folk would say I had an “apostolic” gifting, which is a spiritual way of saying I constantly launched new initiatives and ministries that required compelling vision, risk, mobilization, leadership development, and serious productivity.

Amanda, meanwhile, is what author Malcolm Gladwell would label a “Maven” in his best selling book “Tipping Point.” She is extraordinarily intelligent and competent in nearly every area of life, which is both impressive and deeply inconvenient for someone married to her.

Naturally, she filled in the gaps. (Even during times she wasn’t directly asked to)

She handled logistics better than I did.
Finances better than I did.
Scheduling better than I did.
Managed the home better than I did.
Did extended family relationships better than I did.

Honestly, she’s even better at home repair projects than I am. I once watched her fix a water heater with no prior experience. This woman….she is hard core.

And because she was so capable, everyone benefited from it, especially me.

Over time, Amanda and I began to name something uncomfortable: competency, left unexamined, becomes one of patriarchy's most elegant traps. The more capable a woman is, the easier it becomes to mistake her exploitation for her “God given role.”

Despite all our egalitarian language, we quietly built a life where my vocational calling was protected, while Amanda’s calling adapted around everyone else’s needs.

My leadership was platformed, supported, and funded.

Our egalitarian church sent me through graduate school (Thanks Be To God!), while Amanda never received the same investment. Looking back, I’m not even sure she would have imagined asking for it given the organizational culture surrounding us at the time.

In 2013, we moved to New York City with five children under ten years of age. After a few chaotic years, life finally began stabilizing enough for Amanda to dream again about her own future and her own vocational goals.

Then we unexpectedly had child number six. My one true New Yorker.

Judah Robert.

Suddenly the math stopped mathing.

It became impossible to ignore the disproportionate weight Amanda carried while helping lead the church, raising children, managing our lives, and somehow trying to remain connected to her own gifts, ambitions, and humanity.

What we had called “partnership” was often Amanda absorbing the overflow of my ambition.

That realization brought conviction…

The kind of conviction that exposes the gap between what you preach and what you embody. It seems it is entirely possible to preach equality while quietly benefiting from systems that suppress the leadership, ambition, and flourishing of women.

For many men like me, (egalitarian men), repentance is often still required.

Patriarchy is not merely a doctrine. It is a discipleship system deeply embedded in both culture and the church. This means that unless we consciously repent of it (agreeing with God about reality, in an embodied way), we will continue to be formed by it.

And just to be honest, this revelation did not suddenly transform me into an enlightened husband floating through Manhattan joyfully doing equal amounts of laundry, dishes, and bills while sustaining my vocational responsibilities. This has turned into the ongoing practice of repentance for me.

Repentance is rarely instant transformation. More often, it is the slow reordering of love, power, ambition, habits, and attention.

And so, here are three ways men like me can begin to repent, not only of the patriarchy we inherited, but of the ways we have too often benefited from it, protected it, or remained silent while it continued unchecked.

Repentance As Slowing Down

One of the hardest practices of repentance for me has been slowing down.

And I know that sounds ridiculous if you know me, because I always seem to be doing something, building something, or going somewhere, but what you need to understand is that I have had to intentionally train my body to say no to the endless stream of ideas (some actually good) and the relentless ambition that lives in my mind and spirit.

Amanda is not going to feel particularly sorry for me here, but I’ve had to keep asking a steady question: “if I say yes to this, what is Amanda now saying no to?”

Left unchecked, I would probably have another degree by now, or started another church, or launched another organization. Good opportunities. Meaningful work. None of it inherently wrong.

But I haven’t moved forward (at least not with every opportunity)

Not because those things were sinful. But because my yes to ambition almost always requires Amanda’s invisible labor underneath it and unintentional restrictions then placed upon her dreams (or placed upon her dreaming)

So for a season, I have had to learn a slower, and sometimes more painful, practice of saying no to me, in order to say yes to her.

Amanda recently completed her master’s degree! We made a decision years ago that before I pursued any further academic work, it needed to be her turn first. And honestly, this is not “sacrifice” in the heroic sense that I’m tempted to romanticize it with. I have had to remind myself that equality and mutual submission can feel like sacrifice, when equality wasn’t there to begin with.

I’ve also had to confront something a bit uglier in myself: how easily I spiritualized ambition. Men like me are fluent in the practice of camouflaging drivenness in kingdom language, as if every internal restlessness is somehow part of the mission of God.

We call it vision. We call it calling. We call it mission.

But sometimes it is simply ego, other times unhealthy comparison, trying to climb another hill to prove I still matter. And that instinct is not just unhelpful. It is often antithetical to the way of Jesus.

The Spirit of Jesus continues to have me ask a very uncomfortable question:

Does my ambition make room for the flourishing of the women closest to me, or does it quietly consume them?

Creating a culture where women are seen

Seven years ago Amanda took over leadership in the first church we started as the Senior Pastor.

Seven years later, I still walk into rooms where people call me “Their pastor” or call her the “First lady.”

Not because they are malicious, but because systems have discipled their instincts and perceptions. Complementarian culture runs deep in the American Church, even inside communities that claim egalitarian theology.

People still naturally look to men first, trust men first, center men first, and give more generously when a man asks versus a woman in leadership.

This means churches cannot simply say they believe in women leaders.
They must actively create a culture that naturally empowers women.

I have had to practice refusing to answers a congregant’s question when they should be asking it to the lead pastor (even though I likely know the answer). There are moments where I have to re-position my body in a meeting so that people stop looking at me for direction, and start looking at her for it.

Culture changes through the repetition of small intentional and faithful practices

If we want churches to hire women pastors naturally, then congregations must first be discipled to recognize women’s authority spiritually, intellectually, pastorally, and organizationally. This is hard work. And work that our churches are still in the thick of.

So many “egalitarian” churches are not there yet.

In denominations like the ECC, we have deeply gifted, called, Spirit-filled women ready to lead. But too often there are limited openings because the cultures of churches have not actually been formed to imagine women as their next senior leader. I spoke with a 8,000 person church last year that was looking for their new senior pastor. They are a stated egalitarian church, that had hundreds of applicants come through, but not one woman made it to the second round of interviews. How? Because the culture was not yet cultivated.

This is why theology alone is insufficient. Culture eats theology every single time. You can preach equality while unconsciously practicing hierarchy. People always learn from embodiment more than doctrinal statements.

Egalitarian theology, without an egalitarian home

Another practice of repentance has been the slow, often clumsy work of shared responsibility at home.

And it is still a work in progress.

Sometimes Amanda gets frustrated because I cannot carry certain things around the home with the same instinctive capacity she has developed over twenty years.

And honestly?
She’s right.

But I also have to remind her gently: the same way she feels like she has not had as many reps preaching in churches, I have not had as many reps managing laundry, bathrooms, deep cleaning, doctors visits, and veterinarian appointments, etc. (I know I know, cue the violin music)

Unfortunately I have found that patriarchy does not only wound women. It under-develops men.

Many men simply have not built the muscles of domestic attentiveness because someone else always carried it for them. So learning mutuality requires patience. Practice. Humility. Failure. And then the Repetition.

It means I have to do things badly, long enough, to eventually become competent instead of retreating back into helplessness.

It means refusing to weaponize incompetence (Which I’ve been guilty of)
It means refusing the lie that men are naturally incapable of emotional labor, caregiving, organization around the household, or attentiveness to extended family needs.

You Cannot Stay Quiet

Lastly, one of the final things I’ve had to repent for, is silence.

Because silence is rarely neutral, especially for men like me.

Silence often functions as social currency inside societal institutions including the church. It keeps relationships intact. It preserves invitations, platforms, partnerships, and funding streams. Silence allows me to remain “safe” to everyone while costly truth gets quietly displaced onto women to carry alone.

And if I’m honest, there were years I knew exactly what my silence was protecting. I remember being invited to teaching retreats back in our megachurch days, gatherings where the room was filled with strong voices, laughter, great food, theological debate, and leadership formation. But there was something else too: not a single woman communicator was ever invited. And we definitely had them.

There was never a stated reason. Because there didn’t need to be one.

It was just easier.

Easier to curate a space that felt unguarded.
Easier to keep the tone unchallenged, informal, and yes, at times marked by a level of crude humor and cultural posturing that we subconsciously knew would need to be restrained if women were present.

And I went along with it… quietly.

That is what silence often looks like.

I have no doubt lost trust with complamentarian leaders over the years because of convictions like this, that I now speak about and write more openly about it. But if I’m being equally honest, I’ve also lost trust with some egalitarian leaders who prefer ambiguity, who know better but still choose strategic silence because it keeps the room comfortable, the relationships intact, and the funding stable.

There is a version of egalitarianism that loves the language of equality but becomes deeply uncomfortable once equality starts costing influence, access, or money. And this part has been harder than I expected.

There are conversations that shifted.
Rooms that became colder. A loss of potential friendships.
Networks that quietly loosened their grip, and stopped inviting me to the table. Funding opportunities that disappeared once people realized this conviction was not rhetorical, but embodied.

And I understand why. Because once mutuality becomes real, systems built around male comfort begin to feel uncomfortable. The Church has often tolerated women leading right up until it threatens the emotional economy of male-centered power.

And this is why silence becomes so seductive. Silence allows men to privately affirm women while publicly protecting themselves. But complicity does not become holy simply because it is polite.

As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a Birmingham jail: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

And honestly, I think many women in the Church feel this more than anything else, not outright opposition, but the weight of being consistently unprotected by the very people who agree with them in private.

And so, as I continue learning, (often imperfectly and clumsily), the slow and ongoing practice of repentance, mutuality, and surrender, I offer this blessing:

May we become the kind of men who no longer need to be centered in order to feel secure.

May we have the courage to repent not only of obvious domination, but of the quieter ways we have benefited from imbalance, silence, and the exhaustion, of the women around us.

May the next generation of daughters and sons inherit something better from us: not only the language of equality, nor doctrinal statements alone,
but communities where shared power, shared sacrifice, shared leadership, and shared dignity are normal because the Spirit of Christ has reshaped us all.

And….

To the women who walk with me, mentor me, challenge me, and love me: this is your invitation to continue to gently point out the places where my instincts, assumptions, or silence still reflect the systems I long to resist.

And to my male colleagues: may you join me in the difficult but liberating work of repentance, as we learn to more fully affirm the imago Dei in our sisters, not merely with our theology or language, but with our attention, our shared power, our advocacy, and our embodied lives.