This has been a tough but clarifying week for the North American evangelical church. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination, voted 3-to-1 to further restrict the roles of women, limiting their ability to pastor or preach to congregations....
Let's react to pastors, influencers, and more! One of the things that we like to do periodically is play some of the horrid reels that get sent to us and react to them. Yes, the reels are interesting and there's lots of commentary to be made. But one of the biggest...
Alisa Childers recently critiqued The Great Sex Rescue on her podcast. Childers calls herself an apologist. She became well-known in Christian spaces as a member of ZoeGirl, and now hosts a podcast where she critiques anyone who doesn't endorse conservative Christian...
Is it necessary to critique complementarianism to help people have a better sex life? One of the critiques I get at Bare Marriage is that I'd be more impactful if we stopped critiquing complementarianism so much. I was talking last week about a big podcast that did an...
Complementarians often warn about the slippery slope of egalitarianismFor the last few years, the Southern Baptist Convention has been trying to get rid of female pastors. At first it was just about expelling churches that called women pastors. Now it's becoming more...
Complementarianism is threatened when women see there are alternatives. I've got some quick new findings for you today, and then some birthday reflections I had yesterday (took the day off to celebrate my 56th birthday, mostly by building new garden beds, which was...
There's been a big uptick lately of men especially on social media accusing us of having biased research in our study of 20,000 women. I don't normally address these issues from the blog, because, quite frankly, our work speaks for itself. We did the largest study of...
A funny thing happened last week for Mother’s Day. The Gospel Coalition, a rather mainstream evangelical organization founded by the late Tim Keller and having entirely male leadership, published a Facebook post. And what was their message for Mother’s Day? Was it...
I’m often accused of swinging the pendulum to the other extreme. Note: this article appeared on my Substack last week, and I wanted it here to to preserve it on my website! Plus I added some good stuff to it! I remember a commenter writing about how her husband was...
Yesterday I had a message from a woman being summoned in to defend herself to a toxic elders' board. She had been going to a very hierarchical, controlling church and had realized it wasn't healthy and had decided to take her family and go elsewhere. The elders' board...
What if pity is actually a good strategy? And what if pity reveals a bit of God's heart too? Let me tell you about something that blew my mind yesterday, and I was dreaming about all night. I saw a reel last night where Jameela Jamil was talking about our reaction to...
How do yo find yourself again after emerging from fundamentalism? Many of us have had religious trauma from our church upbringing, or a dysfunctional marriage where we've stayed because we thought God wanted us to. We've endured so much, and have been taught that our...
Sometimes Jesus shows up in weird places--like cleaning shows. I want to do something different today and let you in a bit on my personal faith reflections. I'm currently on Day 9 of a really bad cold (likely COVID) and my husband is on Day 11 and I think has finally...
Can you tell if a church is healthy using its website? Absolutely! Or at least you can make a pretty good start and eliminate a lot of obviously unhealthy churches. And you can do it in under five minutes! One of the big things we've noticed in our surveys of 40,000...
I've been thinking about the lectionary this Easter holiday. It's still a holiday here in Canada, and I'll be taking most of the day to relax and recuperate from a cold, but I thought I'd write some thoughts I had after all the services at my Anglican church this...