Why Headship Theology May Be Dangerous for the Nations...and For Women

A few years ago, a colleague told me about three widows he had trained in India. They were leading a movement of new believers in the Muslim world.

Women? I said. They're the leaders of your house church movement?

Oh yes. Forty-ish year old widows. Single moms.

I didn't know what to do with that. My first reaction wasn't celebration. It was confusion. And honestly, a little disbelief. Because somewhere deep inside me, I had a theology that made widows in their 40s seem like an unlikely choice for God to use to start a movement. Because that requires teaching and leading — pastoral gifts.

That conversation planted a seed. And today I want to talk about what grew from it.

Today I'm wading into waters I've been circling for a while. I know this topic is controversial. I want to say that upfront. But I've passed half a century of life now and I've just had too much experience — in the church, in marriages, and in the nations — to stay silent about something I believe is foundational. Something that shapes everything.

So today I want to talk about headship theology and why I think it's costing us — women, men, marriages, churches, and especially our ability to reach the nations.

I'll say upfront: there are genuinely godly people on both sides of this issue. This is not a salvation issue. I'm not saying people who hold to headship theology are terrible people. I'm saying I think the theology itself may be wrong. And yes — actually dangerous for the nations. And for women.

There. I said it.

And I'm willing to say that now in a way I couldn't before — because I finally have the language for it. So stay with me, because this is going to be a gentle walk through my own journey of discovery.

What Is Headship Theology?

Headship theology is simply this: the idea that man is the head — meaning the authority — over woman, spiritually speaking. And that belief, that theology, plays out everywhere.

In a marriage, he gets the final say. In a church, a woman needs his covering to teach or lead. It shapes who sits at the table, who speaks up, and who has learned to hand their ideas to someone else to be the voice.

Most of us in the Western Christian world — on the more conservative side — have just accepted this as biblical truth, based on a few difficult passages in Paul's epistles, developed into very practical application within the Western church. Including myself. I had never really questioned its validity.

So today I want to look at whether that system is actually what Scripture teaches.

The Sunday Morning That Gave Me Pause

When my book came out — Across the Street and Around the World — churches started inviting me to speak. Global Outreach weeks, training events, conferences. I love teaching. I love equipping people to go. So I started saying yes.

I'd come in for a church's global outreach week and teach their elders, their staff, their youth, their goers — different sessions, different nights, different audiences. Then came the invitations to speak on a Sunday morning.

I remember one church in particular. After I had taught pretty much every person in that building across multiple sessions throughout the week — including their staff and elders — they asked me to give a ten-minute testimony on Sunday morning. Not a sermon. Not a teaching. A testimony. Because, as they explained when I pressed them, some elders had an issue with women preaching to men on a Sunday morning.

I respected their conviction. I honored it. I'm used to navigating many different cultures and I can adapt.

But then — that same afternoon — in the exact same building, in the exact same room, they asked me to come back and teach two full sessions to everyone. Men and women. The whole church.

And I sat with that for a while.

Something about that moment crystallized what I had been feeling for years. Something just felt off. Kind of legalistic. But I didn't have words for it.

The underlying issue, I realized later, wasn't really about teaching. It was about covering. In headship theology, a woman needs a man's spiritual authority — his covering — over her in order to speak into a mixed room. I didn't have that on Sunday morning. So I could give a testimony — personal experience, fine. But I couldn't preach — because preaching requires spiritual authority. And authority in this framework belongs to men.

That's what headship means in practice. It's not just about who stands at the pulpit. It's about who holds spiritual authority. And the answer, in this theology, is always a man.

What I Felt But Couldn't Name

Growing up, I believed that women weren't allowed to lead men spiritually or to speak publicly teaching men. The Apostle Paul's words in Timothy about women being silent, learning in submission, being deceived first — the words headship and submission — seemed clear to me. That's just how I grew up.

I remember my husband and I both knew I would be better suited to facilitate our church small group — because of gifting, desire, and time. He did not want to lead our small groups, but we both believed he had to. So I played the role of shadow leader — writing out the questions, thoughts, and plans, and handing them off to him to be the voice.

Women could sing on stage on Sunday but never give the sermon. Women could teach women or children from the Bible but not men. Women on church staff could be called directors but not pastors — and do the exact same thing.

And it wasn't just in the church. Headship theology shapes marriages too, deeply. I was taught — and many of you were also taught — that a husband should ask his wife for her opinion, listen, consider, even lay down his life for her. But at the end of the day, he makes the final decision. That's his role as the spiritual head.

I have looked and I cannot find that in Scripture. I cannot find a passage that says the husband is the final decision-maker in a marriage.

What I find is mutual submission. What I find is mutual love and mutual sacrifice regardless of gender. The idea that he gets the final say — that specific practice taught in conservative Christian churches, written into marriage curricula, passed down through premarital counseling for decades — I believe that is a human addition to the text. And it has done real damage.

It has created marriages where women silence themselves. Where they learn to present their opinions carefully, strategically, in a way that doesn't threaten his sense of authority. Where they feel they cannot fully disagree, cannot push back, cannot lead — even letting their husbands make wrong decisions for the family — because it feels like stepping outside of God's design.

What Changed Everything: Studying It for Myself

What changed everything was deciding I needed to actually study this — to find out for myself from the Bible what is true and what isn't.

While I was in a mastermind creating my Neighbors and Nations digital course, I met my friend and colleague Dr. Cynthia Hester, who was completing her doctorate on the theology of women and creating a course called Theology of Women Academy. I took it. And it's phenomenal.

She doesn't actually tell you what to think. She walks you through Scripture passages and history and helps you develop your own theology of women. We all need that. I highly recommend it — link in the show notes at cynthiahester.com/course.

That course gave me language. And helped me develop my own theology of women.

Complementarian vs. Egalitarian: What We're Actually Debating

Before I go further, let me define two terms — just long enough to clarify what we're wrestling with.

Complementarians believe that while men and women are equal in value, God has assigned them different roles. In marriage and in the church, men hold a headship authority over women. Men lead and make final decisions in the home. Men hold senior teaching and leadership roles in the church. Women operate under the spiritual covering of male authority.

Egalitarians believe that men and women are equal in both value and role. That spiritual gifts and talents — not gender — determine who leads.

Here's the thing most people don't realize: both sides believe men and women are equal in value and dignity before God. Both also recognize that women and men are different — we have different bodies, we're made differently. The debate is specifically about role. Equal in value, yes. Equal in role — that's where the divide is.

I'm not going to use these labels much beyond this point, because they make people stop listening and start categorizing. But I wanted you to know what we're actually talking about.

What This Has to Do with the Nations

Here's where this gets really important for Global Goers specifically.

Women have made enormous headway in overseas movement contexts — movements among least-reached peoples, movements in the Muslim world. And a significant reason is that women are more unleashed in these contexts. This headship theology just doesn't hold the same grip there. And so women go. Women lead. Women disciple. Women start movements.

A couple of widows in their 40s starting a movement in the Muslim world — because God looked at those women and said yes, them, exactly them, and nobody told them they couldn't.

Women like them come back to the West, back to their home churches, and suddenly the freedom they had on the field evaporates inside four walls on a Sunday morning. Suddenly they need a covering again. Suddenly their gifts have a ceiling.

How many movements are we missing because we've decided — often without even examining it — who is and who isn't allowed to lead or teach?

What I Didn't Know I Didn't Know

After taking Dr. Hester's course, digging into the history, the Hebrew and Greek words, the cultural context of Paul's letters, and the women in Paul's and Jesus's actual ministry — what I found changed everything.

Here are some big-picture principles that set the stage. 

1. Spiritual Gifts Have No Gender Label

Scripture is full of passages about spiritual gifts — leadership, teaching, prophecy, administration, service. And when Paul and Peter describe these gifts, how they're given, who receives them — there is no mention of gender. None.

God gives gifts freely according to his will to whomever he chooses. If you have the gift of leadership, lead. If you have the gift of teaching, teach. The gift itself is the call — and it is not related to gender.

2. The Words We Thought We Understood

Translations can be problematic. It helps to understand the original words — especially when a specific difficult verse doesn't match the general overarching message of a letter or of Scripture as a whole.

Take the word translated helper in Genesis, describing Eve. In Hebrew, it's ezer. It's the same word used to describe God sixty-six times in the Old Testament. It means strength, power, rescuer. Not a subordinate or an assistant. A warrior coming alongside.

And then there's the word head — kephalē in Greek. There is genuine scholarly debate here. It seems possible — and some scholars argue persuasively — that kephalē in the first century could carry the meaning of origin or source, rather than primarily meaning authority. Like the headwaters of a river.

If that interpretation holds, when Paul writes that man is the "head" of woman, he may be pointing back to Genesis — where woman came from man's side — rather than establishing a hierarchy of authority. That's not settled. But the debate exists. And a lot has been built on one translation of one word.

3. The Women Paul Actually Trusted

Let me say some names out loud.

• Phoebe — called a deacon (same word used for male deacons), entrusted with carrying Paul's letter to Rome, almost certainly the one who read it aloud to the congregation and explained it. That sounds like preaching.
  
  
• Junia — called an apostle. Outstanding among the apostles, Paul said. For centuries, translators changed her name to a male ending because they couldn't accept that an apostle was a woman. But Junia is a woman's name. Scholars don't debate that anymore.
  
  
• Lydia — led a house church. No mention of a husband or a male covering.
  
  
• Philip's four daughters — prophesied publicly, with no restriction mentioned.
  
  
• Mary Magdalene — the first witness of the resurrection, sent by Jesus himself to tell the men. In a culture where a woman's testimony wasn't even legally valid. Jesus chose her.
  
  

These are not footnotes. These are the full big picture. And they sit in the same Bible as the passages used to restrict women — said by the same Apostle Paul. Either we're not understanding what Paul is saying in those difficult passages, or he's not doing what he preaches.

A Quick Look at the Thorny Passages

I want to recommend Preston Sprinkle's book From Genesis to Junia: An Honest Search for What the Bible Really Says About Women in Leadership for anyone who wants a thorough, fair, easy-to-read deep dive. Both complementarians and egalitarians will appreciate how he handles it. I read it in one or two days.

Here's my quick, honest take on four passages. 

1 Timothy 2:12 — "I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man"

This is the most quoted passage for restricting women from teaching men. But notice: this is a letter from Paul to Timothy, who is dealing with a specific crisis in Ephesus — a city where wealthy, influential women were being domineering.

Is Paul making a universal rule for all women for all time? Or is he addressing a specific power dynamic in a specific troubled church? Just a few verses earlier in this exact same letter, women and men are prophesying — a form of teaching. So Paul clearly doesn't mean all women everywhere forever.

And look at his actual ministry: Junia was an apostle. Phoebe almost certainly preached his letter to Rome. His actions don't match a universal ban on women teaching.

1 Corinthians 14:34-35 — "Women should remain silent in the churches"

Same questions apply. Paul consistently worked with the culture rather than overtly against it — more subversive, like the slaves and masters passages (which we don't read as an endorsement of slavery). In a first-century patriarchal society, a woman talking over a man in a public gathering was considered disgraceful.

And just chapters earlier in this same letter, he's describing women prophesying and speaking in the gathered church. The contradiction is too glaring to ignore. Something else is going on in chapter 14.

1 Peter 3:1-4 — "Submit yourselves to your own husbands… with a gentle and quiet spirit"

This one has specific context built right into the passage: Peter is talking to women who are married to husbands who are not followers of Jesus. He's saying — your life, your gentleness, your conduct is going to win them over. This is not a universal instruction for all women everywhere. It's specific pastoral advice for a specific situation.

A gentle and quiet spirit, by the way, is how Jesus himself is described. This is not just for women. And it does not mean meek and silent.

⚠️  A Critical Word on Abuse

These verses have been misused to harm women in abusive situations. I have heard of well-meaning pastors counseling women in genuinely dangerous marriages by telling them to submit, to be quiet, to endure — because it's their biblical duty.

That is not what these passages are about. We are not called to have sin done to us. We are not called to stay silent while we are being harmed. And it's not just physical abuse — sin done to you comes in many destructive forms.

If someone is using these verses to keep you in harm's way, please hear me: that is not what Scripture is asking of you. That is not God's design for marriage or for you. Please talk to someone safe.

Ephesians 5:22-33 — "Wives, submit to your husbands… in everything"

I used to read this and think: that seems pretty clear.

But here's what I see now. This passage is not about authority. We have read the word head to mean authority, and that one interpretive choice colors everything. But if head means source or origin, the whole passage reads completely differently.

Read the whole passage. Paul begins with submit to one another out of reverence for Christ — that's the frame. Mutual deference. Then to wives: defer. Then to husbands: lay down your life, wash feet, die to yourself. That is not a boss. That is a servant.

And about "in everything" — a blanket requirement for one person to be completely submissive to another human in everything? That's not marriage. That's closer to slavery. Paul must mean something different. And when you read the whole passage, I believe he does.

But here's the strongest point of all.

Go back to creation. Before the fall, was there any hint of an authority structure between Adam and Eve in the garden? Absolutely not. They were co-regents. Equals. And then the fall happened. The curse includes this: your husband will rule over you. That was the curse — the broken distortion of God's original design. So why has the church taken the curse and built a theology around it as if it's the ideal?

We should be pointing back to the garden. To the way God originally designed men and women to walk together as equals. Not enshrining the curse as doctrine.

This Is Not Anti-Men

I feel this topic in my bones. I think there is a real injustice happening in the spiritual space and in the world. And I can't pretend I don't see it.

But I am not anti-men.

I had someone tell me his wife was always asking him to be the spiritual leader. Be the leader. Be the spiritual leader. And he wanted to — but felt the pressure of it. Here's what I think she was actually asking for: not a boss. An equal.

In most of the marriages I've observed, the woman is the one who is more spiritually engaged. She's asking her husband to step into that space with her. She doesn't want to be the only one leading spiritually. That's not how it was designed.

So to the men: be the kind of spiritual leader who amplifies your wife's voice. Work on yourself. Step into the spiritual space — not to be the authority over her, but to be her equal, her partner, her fellow co-regent. That is what she is asking for. And I believe that is what God designed.

The Pushback — and My Response

"If we go back to the Greek and try to reinterpret everything, we can make the Bible say whatever we want. And if you do that, pretty soon you're going to be saying homosexuality is acceptable too."

I hear that concern. I've thought it myself. But consider this: if someone had said to Martin Luther — if we challenge what scholars and church leaders have taught for centuries, we can make the Bible say anything — would the Reformation have happened?

Luther challenged a belief system that had developed over centuries inside the church. He went back to the text and said: that's not what it says. Are we really going to say that kind of re-examination is dangerous?

As a side note: Preston Sprinkle used the same hermeneutical approach for both women in leadership and the question of homosexuality — and using the same principles, wrote a book proving biblically that God's design for marriage is between a man and a woman. Method matters. Careful re-examination is not the same as making the Bible say whatever you want.

Here's questions I ask when studying a passage:

1. What is the cultural and historical context? Who is this letter written to and what situation were they in?
2. Is this a command for all time or is it addressing a specific situation?
3. What did the original Greek or Hebrew word actually mean in its time and context?
4. Does the interpretation fit the larger pattern of how this topic is addressed throughout Scripture? If it contradicts everything else, we need to look again.

A Personal Admission

My kids grew up in a complementarian home. They went to a school that holds to headship theology. Several of them go to churches that hold to it. My journey on this has not been easy for them to swallow.

We've had some fairly heated conversations. And I've had to learn — I'm still learning — to hold my convictions with less heat and a lot more patience. Changing your mind on something this foundational is a journey. How you grow up, what your community reinforces week after week — those things don't shift overnight.

And I'm not just asking others to grow. I'm working on it too. My goal this year, as I told my kids, is to be more curious and less immediately opinionated. More interested in someone else's perspective before I push my own. Freedom doesn't mean bulldozing people. It means listening and serving them well.

So Here's What I'm Asking

We cannot take one verse — women should not teach men — and build a whole theology around it that silences half the world. That does not collaborate with the rest of Scripture. It doesn't line up with how Jesus ran his ministry or how Paul ran his.

For over a hundred years, the majority of the long-term overseas cross-cultural workforce has been single women. We've had absolutely no problem sending them to the hardest places on earth to plant churches and start movements. And then they come home. And they're not allowed to preach on a Sunday morning.

I'm asking for consistency. I'm asking for open minds. And at the very minimum — even if you retain your headship theology — please make sure women have a voice in your church and in your home. Equip women to be church-planting, disciple-making apostles whereever they live. Because that word apostle is clearly in Scripture and clearly applied to women.

Read Scripture for what it is. Ask what kind of literature it is. Ask who it was written to. Ask whether the interpretation fits the larger pattern of Scripture. Don't take one verse in isolation and build a system from it that stifles the Spirit in half your congregation.

We are all growing. We are all learning. I want to hold that with much humility. And I'd love to hear from you — email me at [email protected]. Let's keep this conversation going — gently and respectfully.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• From Genesis to Junia: An Honest Search for What the Bible Really Says About Women in Leadership by Preston Sprinkle
• Theology of Women Academy with Dr. Cynthia Hester
• Neighbors and Nations Course with Jeannie Marie
• Across the Street and Around the World Following Jesus to the Nations in Your Neighborhood...and Beyond by Jeannie Marie

If today's episode stirred something in you, I'd love to hear about it. Drop me an email at [email protected] or visit me on Instagram @jeanniemmarie