| Return |

When Others Don’t Embrace Your Call

By Anita Koeshall

Brussels? I don’t want to leave Germany, my friends, my church! Something angry in me rose up and said, “He may be done with his work here, but I am not done with mine!”

It was 1990 when my husband John asked me to sit down and talk concerning the change we sensed was coming in our work and location. John and I had started a Christian organization for secular university students called Students for Christ, in Munich, Germany. The group was growing and was under the leadership of a fine young couple. John was beginning to travel a lot, encouraging other groups and training leaders throughout Europe. I knew that change was in the air, but I was not prepared when John said to me, “I feel that God wants us to move to Brussels.” It felt as if a cold, rough hand went around my heart and began to squeeze.

Submission is a dirty word in our culture today. Just the sound of it causes many women to seethe. It brings to mind cold, authoritarian, self-centered men who callously (sometimes even clothed in spirituality) use others to attain their own selfish goals. It creates images of women who are nothing more than servants in their own homes, whose only purpose is to clean, cook, raise children, and have sex on demand. One thinks of the death of a woman’s intelligence, her talents, even her own personhood. No wonder the women on European universities say, “Submit to a man? Never!”

And yet, there it is, not once but several times in the Bible. “Wives submit to your husbands as to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:22).

It takes only a superficial glance into the Old Testament to know that God hates oppression. A general understanding of the message of the New Testament gospel makes clear that in Christ there “is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). None of the former social divisions (race, gender, class) that automatically placed power into the hands of a certain group are relevant in Christ (Fee, 2004). If Christ wants us to submit to our husbands and our definition of submission contradicts the heart of the gospel, perhaps we need to look again into God’s Word and ask what God intends for us to understand and do.

In Genesis 1:27, we are told that God created humankind in His own image as male and female. Both genders together reflect the image of God; both are needed to know who God is and how He interacts with His creation. In God’s person there is a constant desire to give himself and to love sacrificially; but to love and to give, one needs a receiver of the love and the gift. One gender in itself cannot reflect these attributes; there must be a reciprocal giver and receiver of that love.

In the more detailed retelling of the creation story in chapter two, God created Adam first and then pronounced that “it is not good for man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” It suggests that what God created for Adam will correspond to him. It will neither be inferior nor superior, but a complementary equal. The helper will be one half of a polarity—she will be to a man as the South Pole is to the North Pole.

Often we think of a helper as the one who does the odd jobs but doesn’t have the intelligence. They are the ones who hold the nails for the carpenter or the wrench for the mechanic or the scalpel for the surgeon. However, the word “helper” in Hebrew, ezer, is used almost exclusively in the Old Testament to describe Yahweh’s relationship to Israel. He is Israel’s helper because He is the stronger one. The verb associated with the noun “helper” means to “save from danger” or “deliver from death.”

Dr. Paul Tournier (1967), a Swiss psychologist, suggests that woman delivers or saves man from his solitude. No one comes to know himself through introspection or in the solitude of his personal diary, but only in his meeting with other persons. A human being needs fellowship, a partner, a real encounter with another. He needs to understand others and to sense that others understand him. In the demanding confrontation which marriage constitutes, man must ever go beyond himself to develop and grow into maturity. “What if,” demands Gary Thomas in Sacred Marriage (2000), “God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?” Whether married or unmarried, men and women need each other in real relationships for it is in the process of self giving that a God-like character is formed in the participants which alone they could never attain.

Woman is man’s partner in the work that God planned for humankind to do. God’s purpose was that this couple working in harmony should subdue the earth and rule over the plant and animal life—a big job, requiring all the intelligence and talents, skills and intuition that God had given both of them. No suggestion of weakness, inequality or inferiority is implied in this description of woman.

Unfortunately, the next event that happened in Genesis is the story of the Fall where harmony was destroyed. Instead of working together to subdue the earth, man and woman became hungry for power and influence and began to try to rule over each other. God accurately told the woman what it would be like to live with a fallen man—he would dominate. This natural inclination of humankind’s new fallen nature was a sad commentary of how things were going to be now that sin had entered the world. Greed, selfishness, and most of all, the will to dominate became the driving forces for this couple and all the generations to follow.

When Jesus arrived in the New Testament with the good news, He walked into a time and culture where men had “the power” firmly in hand. Even in the religious organizations women were thought of as little more than slaves. A pious Jewish man would thank God daily that he had not been born a woman. Jesus treated women with respect by His teaching and example. He praised Mary for sitting at His feet and learning, He spoke of the Resurrection and the life to Martha, He taught the woman at the well about true worship, and He gave the assignment to announce His resurrection to the women at the tomb. A good portion of His parables spoke of women or women’s work in a positive light. Several women were a part of His traveling company and supported His ministry financially. Jesus addressed them publicly, treated them with dignity and did not scorn their touch.

The Kingdom that Jesus inaugurated had a different meaning for greatness—it was no longer measured by power or influence, but rather by servanthood. There was no “ruling class” in His Church, just a “servant class.” He said, “The greatest among you will be servants of all.”

This is the nature of the gospel. We need to wear these gospel lenses, so to speak, as we approach the topic of submission in Paul’s letters. Contrary to much popular belief, Paul’s attitude toward women was very positive. He encouraged them to learn, to pray and speak in public. He acknowledged them as deaconesses, apostles, fellow workers, and fellow prisoners for the cause of Christ. Indeed, very little of the teaching of Paul or any other part of the gospel is gender specific. God did not look at women and judge them to be inferior and consign them to a lifetime of restrictions and subjugation.

Ephesians 5:21 says, “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ,” which is followed by three examples of how radically relationships in the body of Christ were transformed in Paul’s vision of the Church. There was nothing new or different in the statement that women should submit to their husbands, or that children and slaves should obey their fathers and masters. Cultural norms already demanded that of them. The truly radical revelation was the revolutionary change in the attitude of the one man in the household who filled all three roles: husband, father and master. He no longer had the right to totalitarian, selfish control; instead he was to love his wife as Christ loved the Church, to treat his slave as a brother under the same Master, and bring up his children in the nurture of the Lord. The role of man was transformed totally by this new relationship with the Lord. But even more transformational is that we are now to have these same committed, submissive relationships between each other in the Christian community, regardless of gender!

So what could submission possibly mean? Whether in German, French, Greek or English, the word “submit” has a self-defining character. “Sub” means “under” and mission/ mettre (fr)/ ordnen (ger) / tasso (greek)/, “to place yourself,” so together they suggest a “lowering yourself under.” It is a gift I give of myself to another as I come under them to lift them up.

I am reminded of our home in Germany which was surrounded by a wall. The next-door neighbor was a rather stern, elderly woman and my children would never dream of trespassing in her yard. Occasionally a ball would sail over the wall. I can still see Johnny grasping his hands together so that Sarah could step up on them and look over the wall to see its location. Alone she could never climb high enough to see, but when he put himself under her and boosted her up, she could catch a glimpse of the lost ball. That is what it means to submit: to willingly invest my strength in the life of another so that he or she can become what God wants him or her to be—not what I want them to be!

The idea of submission speaks nowhere of weakness, enslavement, subjugation or oppression. Indeed it takes great strength to submit. It is only because of what Christ has done for me that makes me capable of not demanding my own rights but helps me voluntarily invest myself so that others—and that includes my husband—can grow into Christ’s likeness.

I remember when we first moved to Germany in 1980 and began to learn German. It was a much easier task for me than for John. At our first student retreat we were to share the speaking. It took hours of preparation, and quite often when one of our three tiny children would need attention, John would say, “You keep studying, honey; I’ll help the kids.” As a result, I was well prepared and he was not. I felt sick at heart—I wanted John to succeed in what God had called him to do, and suddenly my own “success” was not so important. I knew then that I would pray earnestly before agreeing to take on an assignment, and I would choose to put John’s ministry before my own.

The amazing part is that he loves me as Christ loved the Church, and he is also voluntarily giving up his life for me. To this day he is still saying (figuratively speaking), “You keep studying, honey; I’ll help the kids!”

So what happens when my ministry tugs at my heart to stay in Munich while his moves us on to Brussels? Or does the husband automatically get the “last word” in discussions because he is the “spiritual leader” in our home? You can see how easy it is to pick up our “Genesis 3 natures” and allow life to become a struggle for power instead of self giving.

John is a spiritual “leader” in our home—not because he is behind me with a whip telling me what to do, nor does it mean that he always has the last word—because he doesn’t. He is a “leader” because he is the kind of Christian that I want to follow! He stays strong in His walk with Jesus so that I can lean on him as a source of encouragement and strength. He places himself under me to lift me up so that I have become more than I ever could have had I not known him. I gladly lay my “rights” down—not primarily because he is my husband—but because he is a brother in Christ and we both want to please the same Master. Almost all decisions we make are egalitarian. We have a lot of discussion and prayer together, along with laughter and tears. When a decision is made, it is not what John wants and not what I want, but hopefully it is what God wants. In the end when John says, “This is the way I think God wants us to go,” I am right there with him saying, “Let’s go!”

Fee, Gordon D. 2004 Male and Female in the New Creation: Galatians 3:26-29. In Discovering Biblical Equality: Complementarity Without Hierarchy. R.W. Pierce, R.M. Groothuis, and G.D. Fee, eds. Pp. 172-185. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press.

Thomas, Gary L. 2000 Sacred Marriage. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan.

Tournier, Paul. 1967 To Understand Each Other. J.S. Gilmour, transl. Richmond, Va.: John Knox Press.

• home
• about us
• resources
• women in ministry
• faq
• past themes
• contact us