Hi Morgan Guyton

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Jonathan Brink
Provoketive Magazine

You posted the following comment:
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In servant leadership, there is no hierarchy, because servanthood implies not only doing something for somebody else but submitting to them at the same time. If Christian leaders are truly douloi christou (slaves of Christ) and diakonoi pantou (servants of all), then they should be the most submissive members of the congregation whose goal is that everyone else should be empowered and exalted to follow God's call. Thus, in a truly Christian household or church, there would not be any way of knowing who's "in charge" because everyone would be trying to exalt everybody else.

My wife is also a minister. When she and I got married, we preached a sermon together on the passage about marriage emulating the bride/bridegroom relationship of Christ and the church that patriarchal Christians love so much. I washed her feet while she talked and she washed my feet while I talked. We talked about why it was a sin for Simon Peter to refuse to let Jesus submit to him by washing his feet and how it's in our best mutual spiritual interests as a couple to take turns being Jesus and the church, balancing the amount that we submit to each other, because the one who is being submitted to is really the weaker party. 

The original historical need for a patriarchal society is understandable. One gender gets impregnated if they're raped, and there were gangs of horny men wandering the streets of ancient cities (Genesis 19, Judges 19). Thus for an ancient city-state to have any kind of social order when people from different extended families were living side by side, every woman needed to be sheltered behind a father or husband. Patriarchy had a purpose, but our more developed social order has made it obsolete.

I suspect that the reason some conservative evangelical women accept a patriarchal society is because it allows them to be servant leaders while the men "get up front" and puff up their egos. Men are the ones who are in the greatest spiritual peril in a patriarchal society. We should insist that women be given equal authority to put a check on the damnation of our own spiritual pride.