Christian Leadership and Dating

Two weeks into one of my previous relationships, we decided to play Portal 2 together. I had played Portal 2 in co-op mode before. Player 2 had not. I let him pick the level, thinking it would be a good exercise of ‘Christian Submission in a Relationship’.

We spent the next two and a half hours with me growing steadily more frustrated at the gameplay and Player 2, until I told him the truth. He’d picked the hardest level. Suddenly, us being stuck was my fault for not saying anything earlier. It was a great time.

Folks, today I want to talk to you about Leadership, Submission, and Dating.

First off, I’ll clear the air. I...don’t feel entirely qualified to be speaking on the topic. BUT. This is not a matter of teaching scriptural truths on closed-hand topics. So I consider it okay for me, as a woman, to be talking about it.

*takes deep breath*

Here’s what men and women are listed as equals in, in scripture.

Hosting a church

Priscilla and Aquila are a husband and wife team who ran a first-century church in Corinth. They taught the scriptures, hosted the group, and offered correction as needed.

Acts 18, 2 Timothy 4:19

Earning an income

Paul worked as a tentmaker before he was commissioned by Jesus, and he used the skill to support himself as he travelled around and taught the gospel. In fact, it was his point of contact with the aforementioned Priscilla and Aquila.

Lydia becomes a patron of the early church after meeting Paul and his cohorts in Thessalonica. She’s a merchant of purple cloth. (Which meant she was quite well-off. Purple dye was rare and expensive.)

Acts 16:11-15, Acts 18

Owning property

When his wife Sarah dies, Abraham purchases land so he can bury her. He insists on purchasing the land, despite the owner wanting to straight up give it to him. It's the first piece of land he owns.

After the taking of Canaan, land was allotted to different family groups and tribes. Because one family had daughters instead of sons, the leaders were commanded to not only give land to them, same as their peers, but for that land to remain in their family line, rather than be claimed by a husband from a different tribe.
Genesis 23, Numbers 36

Leading God’s people

The judges were a group of people who looked after the Israelites between them being led by Moses and Joshua after they left Egypt, and having their first king - Saul. The judges were raised up by God, and delivered messages from him to the Israelites. They also got involved in making decisions for the people, and when the time called for it, overseeing their battles.
Deborah and Gideon both took up these duties at different times.

Judges 4-8

Running a country

Shortly after Solomon builds the temple in Jerusalem, he’s visited by the Queen of Sheba. They meet, debate, gift, and trade as equal monarchs.
1 Kings 10

In Genesis, men and women are created as equal. Different, but equal. And throughout the rest of the bible, we see that they are equal in stacks of skill sets, too.

So where does the submission thing come in?

Before we hit the S-word that can have so many hackles raised, let’s have a look at two things that sit on the other side of it.

Responsibility

And

Authority

Responsibility comes first. You can have equals work on a project and one of them will be responsible for the success or failure of the project. After the fall, Adam is held responsible for the sin of mankind, not because he was the first to commit the error, but because he is responsible for Eve.

If you want a more modern example, my manager is responsible for me and my co-workers. It means that she is obligated to look out for the workers under her, and if something goes wrong, it lands on her first.

Because you have this relationship of person A is responsible for person B, it means that there is going to be some degree of authority either awarded or given to person A in order to make the work achieved by both harmonious.

So when Paul talks about the authority that comes with teaching in 1 Timothy 2, he’s also talking about who’s marked as responsible for those being taught. When he calls for women to submit, and to not hold teaching authority over men,  it’s because the men have been marked as responsible for them, and therefore have to be given authority over them in order to effectively be responsible.

Despite the fact that I’ve been working in my specialised field for longer than my manager, she has authority over me, because she is responsible for me. She tells me what to do, because it’s on her if things go south.

Responsibility and Authority are the opposite side of the coin to Submission, and to claim authority over someone without the responsibility precluding it is a foolish thing to do.

If you want an example of claiming authority without taking responsibility, look no further than the gospels. In Matthew 23:4 and Luke 11:46, Jesus tears into the Pharisees;

“Woe to you Pharisees! For you crush people with your demands, yet you never lift a finger to ease the burden.”

The Pharisees were responsible for teaching God’s law to the people, and they were so devout in doing so that they’d set additional laws to keep to prevent the breaking of the first laws. But at the same time, they didn’t take responsibility for caring for the Jews, or actually teaching them about who God was.

Godly submission should never be demanded, as though men and women were of different value or standing. Godly submission is given.

What things do submission and authority factor into in a God-seeking marriage?

These can be big decisions and small decisions, stuff like

Work - the type of job you take and the amount of hours and effort it will require

Ministry - the type of ministry you or your spouse gets involved in and how much time it is allowed to have

Having kids - how many, when you have them, how you raise them, what you teach them,

The company you keep - the jokes you focus on when you're with them, the nature and content of their jokes, the natural boundaries you have in those relationships

The type of lifestyle you choose/are granted - how much time you spend doing things, how you spend the money you *are* given.

These are all things that both parties weigh in on, and the only reason a husband should take point in the decision making process, is because he is responsible for the wife. He’s called to emulate Jesus, who loved the church and gave himself up for her.

For a husband to ignore the words of his wife and continually overrule them is to sail into a hurricane of trouble, and vice versa. This sort of thing is not a joint decision. It robs both parties of the ability to serve each other, and takes away from the personhood of the overruled party.

If I find you doing this, I am going to bring justice to your door. It’s not okay.

Okay, we cool?

Let’s take a step back, all the way to my light-hearted anecdote about Portal at the beginning.

If you are not married to your significant other,

There is no oath, no binding of souls. There is no obligation to headship/submission as a husband or wife would.

Sure, there is some of it. But it’s no different than to your other Christian brothers and sisters. We’re called to submit, out of reverence for Christ (Ephesians 5:21)

It’s wise, in that weird in-between space called dating, or courting, or whatever you want to call it, to work out if you could be responsible for; if you could submit to, that significant other, for the rest of your life. But there is no authority to have a say over the other’s work, or their friends, or their area of study.

The decisions that you make as a dating couple are not the same as the decisions that a married couple makes. A couple that enters into marriage enters into a partnership. Equal parties. Working together. One takes point because God decided one of them was going to be responsible for the other.

If that’s not you, then there’s no obligation. Not to demand or give submission, and not to claim or extend authority. We will always be responsible for each other to a certain degree, as brothers and sisters in Christ, but in matters that aren’t directly teaching scripture to a mixed group?

It is okay to disagree on.

In worldly matters where one of your has more experience in the area than the other?

It’s okay to use that expertise.

Besides, the respawn wait in the real world is far too long to allow the making of mistakes.

Introvert vs WAVE

So. Lemme tell you about WAVE.

The jobsearch is drier than the middle of Australia and all I really want to do at the moment is eat chocolate and watch a Miyazaki film and it's too early in the day to do either. So, in the aim of being productive, let me elucidate to you what it was like for an antisocial introvert to work on a kids section at WAVE.

For the readers who aren't my Novocastrian friends, WAVE is a summer kids club that my church runs in January. I signed up to be part of the thing about halfway through last year.

I remember that because it was a couple weeks before my car accident, when me and the other Swift driver at church jokingly made a pact that whoever's car died first would serve as an organ donor to the other car.

Don't make jokes like that. Also, give way at intersections when you have to cross them.

I'm good at segues.

I already knew was WAVE was. It's like, the biggest event on Hunter Bible Church's calendar. We go absolutely mental with telling the gospel to Newcastle for a week. I don't think I'd been asked to do it before, but that's mostly because when someone at church walks up to me and says 'Kids ministry?' I have a habit of throwing smoke bombs and batmanning off.

Kids are weird. They weird me out, with their ability to run for ages and ages and their noses which run for about the same amount of time, and they're sticky, and I don't understand them. I don't understand most people. And yet if you put me in a situation when I have to look after kids, I go all Nee-san on the situation, because that's what I am - the oldest of four, used to picking up after my siblings and looking after them and trying to get them to help me clean the house before Mum comes home.

But I'd been asked on three separate occasions, by three different people if I wanted to do WAVE, so after some prayer I was like 'maybe this is God giving me a nudge to give it a go'. So I said yes, aware that seven months out of D-day, I would be out of my comfort zone.

Fast-forward those seven months, through the soul-grinding harlem shake that was June, past my apathy when realising that I was investing my time in something that was temporal and wouldn't have any impact past my lifetime (pretty much anything to do with this world), the existentialism and the small successes I had with cosplay, through December and holidays and two weddings, and then WAVE was there in all of its being.

I don't actually have a lot of photos.
Combination of busy and child-protection.

The group of kids I worked with, and the team I was part of worked with, were the Skittles. Four and five years old.

Prior, we'd divvied up different responsibilities in the team, so there'd be folks working on craft, and folks giving a talk about Jesus, and I got the job of being our MC or character, since that was probably actually the easiest thing for me to do.

Y'all know I make costumes. Y'all know about the cosplay, and how it's easier for me to become someone else in order to deal with problems.

We had a tent to work in with the kids, and thusly we became the Skittle Circus. I donned my tophat and waistcoat, and performed magic tricks to grab attention of the kids. Despite the fact that all but one of them were planned the day before, they seemed to go well.

Day one's trick involved hair.

But that was only part of WAVE. The whole thing was far more than merely babysitting for two and a half hours. During that time there was play and entertainment, yes, but there was also the sharing of scripture - of learning about the God-man Jesus, and specifically, about the people he interacted with and made new.

Because that was our theme for the week - that Jesus makes people new and specifically, that He can make us new.

Interacting with four and five year olds is interesting. You can impart really important knowledge to them, but at the same time, not be completely certain whether or not they understood or remembered it. But come Friday, there were kids who could remember back to the beginning of the week, kids who were asking more, and being challenged with comprehending how a relationship with the Creator of the universe works.

Which is kind of cool.

At the same time, we got to hear about how things were going with the other age groups over lunch with the rest of the folks involved in WAVE. All through different age groups, there were kids hearing the gospel, asking questions - actively wrestling with the ideas we were talking about. Which is hugely encouraging. There were kids committing their lives to Christ, and that's probably the coolest thing that happened.

So even though there wasn't earth-shattering revivals going on in our sauna of a tent, we were part of, sharing in, what was going on in other places. They shared their triumphs with us, and we shared the story of our fearless leader getting urinated on.

But like I said, that wasn't the only part of WAVE. While we were looking after five bajillion yelling kids, their mothers and fathers were hanging around in the coffee tent, being served with free barista-made coffee and equal portions of the same gospel we were sharing with the kids.

And then in the afternoon, after we'd been run flat by the kids, eaten and had enough time to nap, we reassembled and went out again, in twos and threes, knocking on the doors of Newcastle, asking if there were folks that wanted to have a breather and bring their delightful children to the kids club, and also asking people what they thought about Jesus.

This was an interesting experience. Day one was the hardest - as Nick and I walked from house to house, I remember him talking about how doorknocking is simultaneously the most encouraging and discouraging thing to do. Because you can knock on six doors and only get answers from three of them. One of those three immediately shuts the door again, one tells you that they either already go to church or you find out they have a serious bone to pick with their idea of Christianity, and once in a while, the last door opens up and you have a conversation with someone who will entertain you standing on their doorstep and talking about this Jesus man for a little.

Sometimes those conversations are really hard, because they've got something that is difficult to talk about with a complete stranger. Sometimes those conversations are frustrating, because of previous ideas and how those are supposed to fit together when you talk to a guy about Jesus and he immediately wants to know about the Exodus. And sometimes they're searching. Sometimes they're genuinely interested in this Christianity business.

And when you have a conversation with one of them, suddenly the fifteen doors you knocked on earlier which were not having a bar of it don't weigh so heavily. It's worth it. It's so worth it, to be sitting at lunch with everyone else and recapping how things went in our different sections and someone stands up and tells you about how there were kids in their section, or adults in the coffee tent, because someone knocked on their door. It's worth it to walk away from a door and realise that they've had the gospel spoken to them, perhaps for the first time.

Because I believe the gospel is worth that. That Jesus is worth that.

Now.

Let me explain you another thing.

In case you've not read anything else on my blog before, in case you've never met me or known me very well, it will help you to know what kind of person I am.

I am not an extrovert, is the best way to begin. Although I love to go to conventions full of people, and enjoy sitting in a room full of people, I am not an extrovert, in a society that reckons you need to be an extrovert to get places.

Why do you think I enjoy pretending to people who can handle the situation I'm faced with?

A good night for me would look like sitting on a couch with a bunch of close friends and us geeking out over something inconsequential but fun; getting lost in worlds of fiction; playing a pen-and-paper RPG until two in the morning.

So to say that WAVE put me out of my comfort zone is an understatement. I was so far out of my comfort zone that I could no longer see that zone. The closest I got to that zone was being a ringmaster for the five minutes a day it took to gather the kids into the tent, sit them down, and then pull scarves out of nowhere. Dressing up and pretending to be someone else.

Knocking on a complete stranger's door and greeting them with "Hi, I'm Brooke and this is Nick, and we're from Hunter Bible Church and..."

That's out of my comfort zone.

But you know what?

That week - that week of madness, of getting to bed and midnight and leaving my house at 7:20AM, of herding kids and knocking on doors - that week was totally worth it.

It was worth the stomach-churning anxiety that happened when I knocked on doors in Lambton.

It was worth the complete exhaustion that took a week to recover from.

Because in that week, I saw the gospel go out to Newcastle, and I saw seeds sown in people's lives and people come to have faith in Christ Jesus. I saw people made new. I saw my own faith grow, as I watched the change and saw confirmed in hearts and flesh that Jesus stuff was going on, and it was good.

So, even though I would be a total ball of anxiety over it, even though I would be drawn to the point of exhaustion faster than that time I thought I could make a suit of space armour in ten weeks, I would do WAVE again.

Jesus is worth it.