Turning 50, Trusting God, and Other Things I Didn’t See Coming

Turning 50 as a Christian woman: Trusting God with the Age I Never Saw Coming

I am in the last year of my 40s.

I’ll pause so you can absorb that with me.

The big 5-0 is sitting at the end of this year like a toll booth I cannot avoid, and I am standing here patting my pockets going, how did I get here so fast and do I have exact change for this?

Listen, turning 30 and 40 had their moments, sure. I remember bracing for each one like you brace for a cold shower; a little dramatic, slightly unnecessary, over pretty quickly. But 50 feels different. 50 feels LOUD. Because 50 was the age I associated with other people. Specifically: grandparents. Older parents. My mom.

I am turning my mom’s age.

(Let that sink in. I’ll wait.)

It’s not that I think 50 is ancient or that the women around me who are 50 and beyond are somehow “less than”… absolutely not. It’s more that somewhere in my brain, 50 always meant grown up. Like, fully, undeniably, no-takebacks grown up. And I still feel like I’m waiting to feel that way. I still sometimes get to a situation and think, shouldn’t there be an actual adult here to handle this? And then I remember, oh. That’s me. I am the adult.

What I Expected Versus What Actually Happened

My senior year of high school, I had one of those little journal books. You know the kind—full of prompts like Where do you see yourself in 10, 15, 20 years? I filled that thing out with such confidence. Such vision. Such delightful naivety.

Here is a brief summary of how that went: almost none of it happened.

I did go to college. I was a teacher. So, partial credit, I suppose.

But the marriage I expected? Didn’t happen. The kids I longed for, genuinely longed for, not just as a checkbox but as something I truly wanted? Also didn’t happen. And I want to be honest here without throwing a pity party (nobody RSVPs to those anyway): if I let myself sit in what didn’t happen, I could spiral fast. The gap between what I wrote in that little journal and where I actually am is wide enough to drive a truck through.

There are days when the enemy of my soul would love nothing more than for me to set up permanent residency in that gap. To stare at the unmet expectations, marinate in the longing, and spend my remaining years grieving a life I didn’t get to live.

But here is what I keep coming back to:

God is sovereign over all of it.

Not just the good parts. All of it.

What God Did Instead (Spoiler: It’s Better)

In my early 20s, I called myself a Christian. I thought I was going to heaven. I had the vocabulary, the vague church attendance, the cultural Christianity that felt like enough.

Looking back, I was on a fast track to somewhere that was decidedly not heaven.

I did not know God. Not really. I knew about Him the way I know about quantum physics—I’ve heard of it, I couldn’t explain it, and I’m not living my life by it.

But the Lord, in His mercy and patience and relentless grace, did not leave me there. Over the years, and especially in the last six years, He has done something in my life that I never could have engineered on my own: actual, deep, sometimes uncomfortable sanctification. Real knowledge of His Word. A genuine fear of the Lord that has replaced the casual, culturally convenient faith I used to carry around in my back pocket.

And I’ll tell you—that changes everything about turning 50.

Not everything. My knees still sound like a bowl of Rice Krispies. That part hasn’t been sanctified away.

But when I think about all the years I have lived, and I hold them up to what God has done in and through them, even the hard years, even the years of unanswered prayers and unmet expectations—His goodness is not hard to find. It is everywhere. I just have to be willing to look.

My Body, My Betrayer

Can we talk about the physical stuff for a second? Because I feel like we have to.

I just got back from a camping trip. A genuinely wonderful, fun, memory-making camping trip. I drove home, unloaded the car, sat down, and was done. D-O-N-E. Finished. Depleted in a way that required horizontal recovery and probably an embarrassing amount of time staring at the ceiling.

Ten years ago, I would have bounced back the same day. Possibly gone out that night. Now? I need 48 hours and a very specific ratio of sleep to quiet.

This is the body at 49, ladies. It keeps the receipts and it is not shy about presenting them.

And I know it only continues from here. More aches. Slower recovery. The reading glasses that show up on every surface of your home because you’ve panic-bought twelve pairs. The moment you stand up from the couch and make a noise that you genuinely did not authorize. The way a full week of activity now requires a full weekend of doing approximately nothing.

It is humbling. I won’t pretend otherwise.

But here is what I keep reminding myself: my body was always going to do this. It was designed with an expiration date. Not because God made something faulty, but because this world is not our home. These bodies are temporary. They are, as James puts it, a vapor. Here for a moment, then gone.

“Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.” James 4:14 (LSB)

That’s not a morbid thought. It is an anchoring one. Because it means I’m not supposed to be holding onto this body, this life, this decade, this age with white knuckles. I am supposed to be holding onto the One who is eternal.

A Word to My Fellow Women (And It Is Not “Just You Wait”)

I want to say something directly, with love, to the women who are a few years ahead of me on this road:

Please, I am begging you, stop saying “Oh, just you wait.”

I know you mean well. I know it comes from a place of solidarity and hard-won experience. But when a woman is already white-knuckling her way toward a milestone birthday, “just you wait” is not the encouragement she needs. It is, in fact, the exact opposite of encouragement. It is a preview of coming horrors delivered with a knowing smile, and we have to stop doing it to each other.

What we can do instead is this: we can tell each other the truth about the hard parts and point each other to the God who is faithful in all of them.

We can say, “Yes, it’s hard sometimes. And God has been so good.”

We can reflect on His mercy. We can talk about what we’ve learned. We can share how our faith has deepened rather than how our joints have worsened… or at least, we can share both, in that order, with the right emphasis.

We are not here to scare the women behind us. We are here to encourage them. To walk alongside them. To say, “I’ve been on this road. It has hard stretches. But the One leading you is trustworthy.”

What I’m Learning to Do With 50

I am learning—slowly, imperfectly, sometimes mid-anxiety-spiral—to trust God with this.

To trust Him with the things that didn’t happen the way I planned. To trust Him with the years ahead that I cannot see. To trust Him with this body that is aging on its own schedule regardless of my feelings about it. To trust Him with the number on my birthday cake.

When Job had nothing left but questions and anguish, God didn’t give him a tidy explanation. He gave Job Himself. He showed Job who He was: the Creator of the cosmos, the One who laid the foundations of the earth, the One who commands the morning and sets the boundaries of the seas (Job 38-39). And Job’s response was not “ah, that clears everything up.” It was awe. Repentance. Worship.

That is where I want to live. In the awe and wonder of who He is—not in the grief of what I don’t have or the fear of what’s coming.

My last breath on this earth has already been appointed. I don’t know when it is. God does. And between now and then, I want to be faithful. Obedient. Grateful. Present.

Grateful for friends who make me laugh until I can’t breathe. For family. For a church that teaches me God’s Word. For a job that lets me serve people well. For a home, food, enough. For air in my lungs, however many years those lungs have left in them.

And someday—someday—this aging, aching, vapor of a body gets exchanged for something eternal. And I will worship the Lord forever, without the knee sounds and the recovery days and the reading glasses.

Oh, what a day that will be.

Until then? I’ll take the senior discount. I have earned it.

But What About Deborah?

The Conversation You’ve Probably Already Had

You’re talking about women in pastoral ministry—maybe you just shared an article, or maybe the topic came up at Bible study—and someone leans in and says it: “But what about Deborah?” She was a judge in Israel. She led men. Case closed, right?

If you’ve spent any time studying what the Bible says about women in leadership, you have run into this argument. It is one of the most common responses to a complementarian position, and honestly, it’s not a bad question. Deborah in the Bible is a remarkable figure and she deserves a real answer, not a dismissal.

So let’s give her one.

This post is not about diminishing Deborah. She was extraordinary. But “extraordinary” is not the same as “prescriptive,” and that distinction matters more than almost anything else when we’re reading scripture. Let’s dig in.

Who Was Deborah? (Let’s Actually Honor Her First)

Before we talk about what Deborah’s story does and doesn’t prove, it’s worth slowing down to actually look at who she was, because she is genuinely impressive.

Judges 4 introduces her like this:

Now Deborah, a prophetess, the wife of Lappidoth, was judging Israel at that time. She used to sit under the palm of Deborah between Ramah and Bethel in the hill country of Ephraim, and the people of Israel came up to her for judgment. (Judges 4:4-5, LSB)

She is called a prophetess. She is functioning as a judge; settling disputes among the people. She summons the military commander Barak and delivers to him a word from the Lord about the battle against Sisera. And then in Judges 5, she co-authors (with Barak) one of the most vivid songs in all of scripture. She calls herself “a mother in Israel” (Judges 5:7).

Deborah in the Bible was real, she was used by God, and she was clearly a woman of wisdom and faith. None of that is up for debate. She is not a made-up figure and her story is not embarrassing to complementarians. She’s in the canon for a reason.

But here is the question we have to ask: does her presence in the text mean her situation is the pattern God intends for his people? That is where we need to talk about something called descriptive versus prescriptive.

Descriptive vs. Prescriptive: Hermeneutics for Normal People

I know those words sound intimidating. Stick with me for just a minute because this concept is actually very simple and it will change how you read your Bible.

Descriptive means the text is telling us what happened. It’s a record of events.

Prescriptive means the text is telling us what should happen. It’s an instruction or a command.

Not everything recorded in scripture is endorsed by scripture. The Bible describes plenty of things that God never intended to be the norm and sometimes it records them in a matter-of-fact way without pausing to editorialize. That doesn’t mean we’re supposed to replicate them.

Here’s a quick example. In 1 Samuel 8, the people of Israel demand a king. They look at the nations around them and decide they want to be like everyone else. God tells Samuel, essentially, that they are rejecting him as their king by asking for a human one. And then God grants the request. He gives them Saul.

Was the kingship described? Yes. Was it God’s ideal for Israel? No. Did God work within it anyway? Absolutely. But nobody reads 1 Samuel 8 and concludes that every nation should demand a king because Israel did.

The same principle applies to polygamy in the Old Testament, to Samson’s relationships, to a lot of things in Judges, frankly. The book of Judges is not a highlight reel of godly behavior. It is a brutally honest account of what happens when “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25). That context matters enormously when we sit down with Deborah’s story.

Deborah in the Bible is a description of what God did during a dark and chaotic period in Israel’s history. It is not a prescription for church leadership structure in the New Covenant age.

What the Text Actually Shows Us

Here’s where it gets really interesting. When we read Judges 4 closely, not just the parts people quote, but the whole thing, there are some details that actually cut against the egalitarian argument.

Deborah summons Barak and gives him God’s command: go, take ten thousand men, and fight Sisera. And Barak’s response?

“If you will go with me, then I will go; but if you will not go with me, I will not go.” (Judges 4:8, LSB)

He will not go without her. Now, you can read that a few different ways. Some commentators see it as a lack of faith. Others see it as Barak honoring the prophetess. But notice what Deborah says back:

“I will surely go with you. Nevertheless, the road on which you are going will not lead to your glory, for Yahweh will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman.” (Judges 4:9, LSB)

The honor of the victory is going to go to a woman and the text frames that as a consequence of Barak’s hesitation. This is not presented as a celebration of female leadership over men. It is presented as a result of a man stepping back from the role he was called to.

The whole scene reads less like “look at this great model of women leading men” and more like “this is what happened when the man called to lead wouldn’t step up.” That is a meaningful distinction.

A Quiet but Interesting Detail from Hebrews 11

You may have heard of Hebrews 11—sometimes called the “hall of faith.” It’s the chapter where the author of Hebrews rehearses the great figures of faith from the Old Testament: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, and on and on.

And then in verse 32:

And what more shall I say? For time will fail me if I tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets… (Hebrews 11:32, LSB)

Barak is there. Named specifically. Recognized for his faith despite his very public moment of hesitation in Judges 4. And Deborah in the Bible? She’s not listed.

Now, that is not an argument that Deborah lacked faith. The author of Hebrews was not writing a comprehensive list of every faithful person in Israel’s history. But it is worth noting: the New Testament, when it looks back at the Judges 4 account and identifies who to hold up as an example of faith, lands on Barak—not Deborah.

That’s a quiet detail. But it’s there.

And Then There’s Jael

Okay. We have to talk about Jael for a moment because she is something else entirely.

While Barak is chasing the retreating Canaanite army, Sisera the enemy commander, flees on foot and ends up at the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite. She comes out to meet him, invites him in, covers him with a blanket, gives him milk when he asks for water, and tells him not to be afraid.

And then she drives a tent peg through his skull while he sleeps.

The text delivers this information with complete composure. Judges 4:21 just… tells you what happened. Matter of fact. And then Judges 5, the victory song, celebrates it:

Most blessed of women is Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite; most blessed of women in the tent. (Judges 5:24, LSB)

She is praised. She is celebrated. God used her to accomplish a decisive military victory.

But here is the thing: nobody reads this passage and concludes that all women should keep tent pegs nearby for defensive purposes, or that hospitality-followed-by-sudden-violence is a model for Christian living. We understand instinctively that this is a description of what happened in a specific, wild, brutal moment in Israel’s history.

God can and does use whomever He chooses to accomplish His purposes—a foreign woman with a tent peg, a donkey (Numbers 22), a burning bush. That is a testimony to His sovereignty. It is not a template for church order.

The same logic applies to Deborah.

What Deborah in the Bible Cannot Prove

So let’s put this together. Here is what Deborah’s story shows us:

•  God is sovereign and works through whom He chooses, even in the messiest seasons of history.

•  Deborah was a woman of genuine faith, wisdom, and prophetic gift.

•  Israel in the period of the judges was in a state of spiritual and social chaos.

•  When the man called to lead hesitated, the honor went elsewhere.

Here is what Deborah’s story cannot prove: that God’s design for leadership in the church includes women serving in the role of elder or pastor over men.

Why? Because Judges is a narrative. And a narrative exception, even an inspired one, does not override explicit apostolic instruction. When Paul writes to Timothy, he is not describing what happened in one chaotic moment. He is prescribing how the church is to be ordered:

But I do not allow a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet. For it was Adam who was first formed, and then Eve. (1 Timothy 2:12-13, LSB)

Notice where Paul anchors this instruction: not in Greco-Roman culture, not in the peculiarities of the Ephesian church, but in creation order. Adam was formed first. That’s not a cultural argument. That’s a theological one, and it predates every culture that has ever existed.

Titus 1:5-6 reinforces the same thing, with qualifications for elders that include being “the husband of one wife.” The office itself is described in gendered terms.

You cannot use a descriptive narrative from the period of the judges—a period the Bible itself describes as anarchic—to override clear prescriptive instruction from the New Testament. The hermeneutics simply don’t work that way.

Honoring Deborah the Right Way

Here’s the thing I want to leave you with. Deborah does not need to be a proof text for egalitarianism to be worth celebrating. She was a mother in Israel. She judged with wisdom. She delivered God’s word faithfully. She sang.

Honor her for what she actually was, not for the argument people want her to make.

The Bible’s picture of godly womanhood is not small or limiting. Titus 2 describes women who teach, who model self-control and love and faithfulness, who pass the faith to the next generation. Proverbs 31 describes a woman whose husband trusts her completely, who runs a household and a business and is known at the city gates. These are not consolation prizes.

When someone throws Deborah at you in conversation, you don’t have to get defensive. You can say: “I love Deborah. She was remarkable. And I don’t think her story means what you think it means.” Then you can walk them through it.

Because Deborah in the Bible is not a trump card for egalitarianism. She is a testament to a God who works in and through and despite the chaos of human failure and who has, in his wisdom and care, given us clear instruction for how his church is to be ordered.

That instruction is worth standing on, even when it’s not the popular thing to do.

To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no dawn in them. (Isaiah 8:20, LSB)

Can Women Be Pastors?

Can women be pastors? I know that question is loaded. I know it makes people uncomfortable. And I know that depending on which church you attend or which circles you run in, you might already have a firm answer—one way or the other. I also know that for a long time, I had convinced myself I did too.

I grew up in an LCMS (Lutheran Church Missouri Synod) church, where the male-only pastorate was simply assumed; it was doctrine, it was practice, it was never really up for debate. So by the time I was twenty and started attending a large evangelical church, I carried that assumption with me. In my naivety, I figured everyone else did too.

What I didn’t realize walking through those doors in 1997 was that this church placed women in pastoral roles. Women who preached on Sunday mornings. Women with pastoral titles. It was the first time in my church history I had encountered that and instead of stopping to ask whether it was biblical, I reached for a rationale that felt reasonable at the time: as long as the head pastor was a man and he was in charge, the women serving under his authority must be okay. The church grew into a congregation of a couple thousand people over those years, and I stayed for most of them—from 1997 until around 2020—telling myself my reasoning held up.

And then, from 2012 to 2014, I relocated to Chicago and started attending a church where both the husband and wife served as lead and preaching pastors. Same rationale, higher stakes. He was still “the head pastor.” There was still male authority at the top. So it must still be okay, right?

I kept telling myself that. For years. And underneath it, there was a quiet, persistent voice that kept saying: something isn’t right here. I just didn’t know scripture well enough to name what it was. So I kept overriding it.

If you’ve ever been in that place: attending a church with women pastors, feeling a low-grade unease you can’t quite articulate, or finding yourself on the receiving end of someone else’s confident argument that women in pastoral ministry is completely biblical—this post is for you. Not to shame you. Not to make you feel less than. But to open the Word and look at what it actually says.

What the Text Says

The two passages that speak most directly to the question of whether women can be pastors are 1 Timothy 2:11-15 and Titus 1:5-9. Let’s look at them honestly.

In 1 Timothy 2:11–13, Paul writes: “A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire submissiveness. But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet. For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve.” (LSB)

This is the verse that tends to make people squirm. And the most common rebuttal you’ll hear is: “That was cultural. Paul was writing to a specific audience in Ephesus. It doesn’t apply today.”

Here’s the problem with that argument: Paul doesn’t anchor his instruction in Ephesian culture. He anchors it in creation order. “For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve.” That’s not a cultural argument. That’s a theological argument rooted in Genesis 1 and 2, which predates every culture. When someone says the passage was “descriptive, not prescriptive,” they have to reckon with the fact that Paul himself didn’t treat it that way. He grounded his instruction in the order of creation; not in the customs of first-century Ephesus.

Titus 1:5-9 reinforces this from a different angle. Paul instructs Titus to appoint elders in every city, and the qualifications listed assume a male officeholder throughout: “the husband of one wife,” “managing his own household well,” a man whose life is marked by specific character qualities. This isn’t an accident of grammar. It is consistent with the same theology Paul lays out in 1 Timothy.

1 Corinthians 14:34-35 adds another layer: “The women are to keep silent in the churches; for they are not permitted to speak, but are to subject themselves, just as the Law also says. If they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is improper for a woman to speak in church.” (LSB) This passage has its own interpretive complexities, but taken alongside the 1 Timothy and Titus texts, a consistent picture emerges: the authoritative teaching office in the local church is reserved for qualified men.

One more thing that tends to come up quickly in this conversation: head coverings. The argument goes something like this: “If you’re going to take the ‘women be silent’ passages literally, then you also have to require women to wear head coverings. And since nobody does that anymore, clearly these passages were all cultural. You can’t have it both ways.” It sounds like a solid gotcha. But it falls apart when you look at how Paul actually argues in each passage.

The head covering instruction in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 is rooted in the honor and shame dynamics of the Greco-Roman world. An uncovered head carried a specific social meaning in that culture—one associated with disrepute. Paul’s concern is that Christian women not bring shame on themselves or on the gathered body through a culturally loaded signal. The principle he is protecting is timeless (honor, order, the proper reflection of God’s glory in worship). The specific practice he prescribes is culturally situated. Paul even signals some flexibility at the end of the passage in verse 16. So when the church applies the principle of head coverings today without mandating the exact first-century practice, that is actually consistent and careful interpretation; not inconsistency.

The passages about women and teaching authority are doing something entirely different. Paul does not ground his instruction in Greco-Roman custom. He grounds it in creation order: “For it was Adam who was first created, and then Eve” (1 Timothy 2:13, LSB). That argument reaches back to Genesis 1 and 2, before any human culture existed. When Paul roots a command in creation rather than in cultural context, he is telling us this principle transcends time and place. The two passages are not parallel in kind, which means the “you can’t have it both ways” argument actually backfires. We are not being inconsistent. We are doing exactly what good hermeneutics requires—paying attention to how Paul himself argues, not just what he concludes.

Now, before you picture women sitting stone-faced and mute in the pew while their husbands field all questions—that is not what this passage is saying, and it is not what is happening in healthy complementarian churches today. The context Paul is addressing is the gathered worship service: the public, authoritative elements of corporate worship where scripture is taught and the congregation is led. Women are not to occupy that teaching role. They are not to be the ones preaching, leading the congregation in prayer from the front, or doing the work of expounding and applying God’s Word to the body. And yes, that extends to elements of the service that carry an authoritative, shepherding function—a call to worship, an offertory prayer, a scripture reading with commentary. Those roles belong to the men who lead the congregation.

What it does not mean is that a woman cannot open her mouth for the rest of her life inside a church building. After the service? Talk to your friends, your pastor, your fellow members—chat it up. Ask your pastor a question on the way out. Participate in a Sunday school class discussion. Sing with everything you have. The passage is about the authoritative teaching function within the gathered worship service, not about women going silent the moment they walk through the door.

One more thing worth addressing: Paul’s instruction to “ask their own husbands at home” was a specific correction to a disorder in the Corinthian church—women were likely interrupting the teaching time with questions or challenges, creating confusion in the service. It was not a universal command that single women must funnel every theological question through a male relative. The principle is orderliness in worship and the proper placement of teaching authority; not a speech restriction on women as a category of human beings.

But What About…? (The Gotcha Questions)

I want to talk about a conversation I had with a former pastor. He was making the case that women in pastoral roles was biblically defensible, and he threw two arguments at me that I wasn’t prepared for in the moment.

The first was the lone missionary scenario. He described a woman missionary serving in a remote area where she was the only Christian—preaching the gospel to the people around her—and asked me, almost dramatically: “So what would God say about that? Is she disqualified?”

It felt like a trap. And at the time, all I could say was, “I just know what scripture says.”

Now I have a better answer. The passages in question—1 Timothy 2, Titus 1—are not addressing whether a woman can share the gospel with an unbeliever. They are addressing church office and authoritative teaching within the local church body. A woman faithfully proclaiming Christ to people who have never heard His name is not the same thing as a woman serving as pastor or elder over a congregation of believers. These are categorically different situations, and conflating them is an emotional argument, not an exegetical one. The question “is she disqualified?” is a false dilemma. The answer is: she is doing something the New Testament passages about church office were never addressing in the first place.

The second argument he raised was Philip’s daughters. He mentioned them with some weight, as if they were a trump card: “What about Philip’s daughters? They prophesied.” (Acts 21:9)

Yes, they did. Philip the Evangelist had four daughters who prophesied. But here is what scripture does not say about them: it does not say they pastored a church. It does not say they held authority over men in a congregation. It does not present their example as prescriptive for all women in all churches. Prophecy and the pastoral office are not the same thing. Even for someone who holds a continuationist view of spiritual gifts, the argument still doesn’t land because nowhere does the New Testament present the gift of prophecy as equivalent to the office of elder or pastor. You cannot use Acts 21:9 to overturn 1 Timothy 2:12 and Titus 1:5-9. That’s not how hermeneutics works. You let the clear, prescriptive texts govern how you interpret the narrative ones.

(A quick note: Deborah comes up in these conversations too, and she deserves a careful, thorough response—more than I can give her here. I’ll be doing a full post on Deborah soon, because she is genuinely the most complex figure in this conversation and she is worth doing right.)

What About Deaconesses?

This is where complementarians sometimes disagree with each other, and I want to be honest about that.

Romans 16:1 refers to Phoebe as a diakonos—the same Greek word translated “deacon” elsewhere. 1 Timothy 3:11 mentions women in the context of the deacon qualifications, though there is debate about whether Paul means deacons’ wives or women serving as deaconesses. What is clear is that the office of deacon is distinct from the office of elder/pastor, and the authority structure is different. Many thoughtful complementarian churches make room for women to serve in diaconal roles—serving, caring for the congregation, administering mercy ministries—without that constituting the teaching authority reserved for elders. It is worth studying with your own church leadership and examining the texts carefully.

This Is Not a Lesser Calling

I want to be clear about something, because I know how this conversation can land.

Complementarianism is not the belief that women are less intelligent, less spiritually mature, or less valuable than men. It is not a punishment. It is not a ceiling. It is a recognition that God designed men and women differently and assigned different roles within the structure of the local church and that those roles are both essential and good.

We live in a culture that has shouted very loudly for a very long time that equality means sameness. That if women cannot do everything men do, in every arena, then something has been taken from them. That logic has crept into the church in ways that are subtle and in ways that are not subtle at all. And it is easy, I know because I did it, to absorb that framework without realizing it and then go looking for scripture to support a conclusion you’ve already reached.

Titus 2:3-5 paints a picture of older women teaching and training younger women in godliness, in love for their families, in self-control. That is not a consolation prize. That is a calling with profound and lasting impact. Women teaching women, discipling women, shaping the next generation of believers—that work is irreplaceable and the church is weaker when it goes undone.

The song lyrics are wrong, by the way. Anything you can do, I can do better… that’s not the posture scripture calls us to. The posture scripture calls us to is one of trusting that God’s design is good. That His word is sufficient. That when He says something clearly, we don’t need to find a workaround. We need to believe He knew what He was doing.

Standing Firm When It Isn’t Popular

Can women be pastors? The answer scripture gives is no—not in the office of elder/pastor that carries authoritative teaching and governance over the congregation. And I know that answer is not popular. I know there are evangelical churches, many of them, that have decided otherwise. I sat in one of them for years and told myself it was fine.

But here is what I keep coming back to: we cannot compromise the truth of God’s Word because the culture around us has decided it is outdated. We cannot let the discomfort of an unpopular position push us toward a reading of scripture that requires us to flatten Paul’s argument, ignore the creation order anchor, and elevate narrative passages above prescriptive ones.

The same Word that tells us God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9) is the Word that tells us how He has structured His church. We trust one, we trust the other.

If you’re in a church with women pastors and something has been nagging at you—that quiet voice you keep overriding—I’m not here to tell you what to do. But I do want to encourage you to take that voice seriously. Open the text. Read it in context. Let it say what it actually says. And trust that God’s design for His church is not something to be embarrassed about or argued away.

It is something worth standing firm in. Even when it’s hard. Even when it costs you something.

Whatever Is Lovely: What It Looks Like When Scripture Shapes Your Wants

Can I tell you something I’ve never quite said out loud before?

At the height of my involvement in church—leading ministry, discipling women, showing up every Sunday—I was also making choices that didn’t line up with what I said I believed. Not dramatic ones. Just quiet, consistent ones that I didn’t examine too closely.

I’d go to a concert that I knew wasn’t glorifying to God and tell myself it was fine. There were nights I drank a little bit more than I should have and brushed past it without much thought. I wasn’t living in scandal. But I also wasn’t living like someone whose mind was being actively renewed.

And here’s the part I have to be honest about: it’s not like I didn’t know. There was always a voice. A quiet, nagging awareness that this probably wasn’t a great decision. But I’d push past it with something like “it’s not that bad” or “it’s not like I’m out at a club somewhere or do this every week.” I chose to override it. Not out of malice. Just out of a kind of low-grade spiritual numbness that I didn’t have language for yet.

I want to say upfront: I own that. The preaching environment I was in absolutely played a role, and we’ll get to that, but it didn’t make my choices for me. I did. This post isn’t about finding someone to blame. It’s about understanding what was actually missing, in the pulpit and in me.

I didn’t need more willpower. I needed deeper roots. But I also needed to want them.

Before We Go Further: This Is Not About a List of Rules

I want to say this clearly up front, because I know where some minds go when a post like this starts taking shape.

This is not a post about what you should and shouldn’t watch, listen to, or do. I’m not going to hand you a checklist. I’m not going to tell you that drinking alcohol is a sin, or that certain music is off-limits, or that your movie choices are a measure of your sanctification. That path leads to legalism, and legalism is not the gospel.

Legalism says: follow these rules and God will be pleased with you. It puts the engine of change outside of you—in a standard you perform toward.

What I’m talking about is completely different. I’m talking about what happens on the inside when the Word of God is genuinely getting in. When you are saturated in Scripture, something shifts. Not because you’re white-knuckling it. But because your wants begin to change. Your appetite moves. What used to be appealing starts to lose its pull—not because someone told you to avoid it, but because you’ve developed a taste for something better.

That’s sanctification. And it’s a very different engine than rule-following.

The Renewed Mind Is Not a Metaphor

Romans 12:2 says: “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”

We quote this verse a lot. But I’m not sure we always take seriously what it’s actually claiming. Transformation comes through the renewing of your mind. Not through trying harder. Not through accountability partners and behavior modification. Through a mind that is being actively renewed.

And what renews the mind? The Word of God. Not in a passive, occasional way. In a saturating way. The kind of saturation that only happens when you are under faithful preaching week after week, reading Scripture for yourself, and letting it do its work in you over time.

When that’s actually happening, transformation is not something you manufacture. It’s something that emerges. You begin to see differently. To want differently. The world’s pull on you quietly loosens. Not because you declared war on it, but because you’ve been filled with something so much better that the old things simply start to lose their grip.

But here’s the part I had to reckon with personally: the Word working in me doesn’t override my will. I still have to choose to submit to it. I still have to choose to pause when that quiet voice speaks. Saturation in Scripture produces new desires but walking in those desires is still a daily, active choice. The two things work together. The Spirit through the Word changes what I want. And then I have to choose to act on what I want.

Whatever Is Lovely: What Paul Actually Meant

Philippians 4:8 is one of those verses that gets quoted so often it can start to feel like a nice sentiment. But when you understand who Paul was writing to and what he was asking of them, it lands very differently.

Paul wrote this letter from prison—chained to a Roman guard, awaiting trial before Nero, fully aware that his execution might be close. He was not writing from comfort. He was writing from a cell.

And the church he was writing to was under its own pressure. Philippi was a Roman colony populated by retired military veterans who were fiercely loyal to Caesar. The imperial cult was alive and documented there, demanding public veneration of the emperor. To be a Christian in Philippi was to swim against a very strong cultural current. The congregation was also navigating internal conflict—there was tension between members, external opposition, and the kind of everyday pressure that wears people down.

It’s into that context that Paul writes: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, think on these things.”

This wasn’t a gentle suggestion for people living easy lives. Paul’s command to discipline their thought life was the psychological and spiritual framework for unity and perseverance under real pressure. He was telling people who were surrounded by a culture pulling hard in the wrong direction: you have to actively, intentionally set your mind toward what is good. Not as a rule to perform. As a posture of survival and faithfulness.

Notice also that Paul isn’t writing a prohibition list. He’s describing a direction of desire. A renewed mind doesn’t have to be dragged away from what is impure—it is drawn toward what is lovely. It begins to hunger for what is true, honorable, right, excellent, worthy of praise.

If Paul could ask that of believers chained under Roman occupation and cultural hostility, he can certainly ask it of us. And the mechanism he’s pointing to is the same one Romans 12:2 names: a mind that is being actively renewed.

What This Actually Looks Like

I want to be concrete here, because this can start to feel abstract.

When I was being formed primarily in an environment where the Word was used as a launching pad rather than faithfully opened and taught, I was getting enough Scripture to feel fed but not enough to be genuinely saturated. And the gap showed up in my choices—not in dramatic ways, but in the quiet, accumulated decisions of an ordinary week.

I wasn’t asking myself whether what I was about to do was true, honorable, right, pure, lovely. That grid wasn’t active in me. Not because I didn’t know the verse—I did. But knowing a verse and having a mind shaped by the fullness of Scripture are two different things. And I was also choosing, in those moments, not to listen to what I already knew. That’s on me.

As I moved into an environment where Scripture was faithfully and fully preached—where the hard passages stayed in, where the text was actually opened rather than launched from—something started to shift. Not overnight. But gradually.

I started noticing things that hadn’t bothered me before. I’d find myself less drawn to things I’d once considered harmless. The nagging voice that I used to override started to carry more weight because I was being formed in a way that gave it more weight. Not because someone handed me a standard to perform toward. But because the renewing of my mind was producing a new set of instincts. A new appetite.

That’s not legalism. That’s transformation. And there is a significant difference.

The Formation Question Nobody Is Asking

Here’s the question I wish someone had put to me years earlier:

What is forming you?

Not what do you believe. Not how often do you attend. Not whether you’re serving in ministry. But what is actually getting into you, week after week, shaping how you see, what you want, and who you are becoming?

Formation is always happening. The question is what’s doing it. If Sunday morning is primarily producing inspiration and good feelings, that’s forming you toward something. If Sunday morning is producing genuine saturation in the Word—if you are leaving knowing God better through His Scripture, if the hard parts are staying in, if your mind is being actively engaged with the text—that’s forming you toward something very different.

And your own personal time in the Word matters here too. Sunday alone was never meant to carry the full weight of your formation. What are you reading? What are you sitting with on a Tuesday morning? The preaching you sit under and the time you spend in Scripture yourself both matter. Both are either forming you or leaving a gap.

The woman who is deeply formed by Scripture doesn’t have to try harder to want what is lovely. She finds herself wanting it. The pull of what is impure or incongruent quietly loosens—not through discipline alone, but through a mind that has been renewed enough to recognize the difference.

If You See Yourself in This

Maybe you’re reading this and recognizing something. Not scandal. Not crisis. Just a quiet gap between who you are at church and who you are the rest of the week. Choices you don’t examine too closely. A nagging sense that your faith isn’t quite reaching into the ordinary parts of your life. A voice you’ve gotten good at talking yourself past.

I want to say this as gently and directly as I can: that gap is worth paying attention to. Not because you’re failing. Not because your church is entirely to blame. But because something—in what you’re being fed, in what you’re feeding yourself, or both—might not be producing the saturation your soul actually needs.

You were not designed to top off on Sundays and run on fumes the rest of the week. You were designed to be formed. To be transformed by the renewing of your mind. To grow into a woman whose wants are being actively shaped by the Word of God so that what is true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, and worthy of praise becomes not a checklist you perform toward, but the natural direction of a heart that has been genuinely fed.

That is what faithful preaching, combined with a life in the Word, produces over time. And you deserve to be in a place, and to be a person, where it is actually happening.

The want changes when the Word gets in. That’s not legalism. That’s the promise.

The Feeling Fades: What’s Really Missing on Sunday Morning

Can I ask you something honest?

When you leave church on Sunday morning, how long does it last? The warmth. The sense that God is near. The tears during worship, the nod during the message, that feeling that something real just happened…how long before it’s gone?

For a lot of women, the honest answer is: not long. By Sunday afternoon it’s fading. By Monday morning it’s mostly gone. And then next Sunday, you go back and fill up again.

If that’s your rhythm, I’m not here to make you feel bad about your church or your faith. I’m here to ask a question that took me years to ask myself:

What if the feeling fades because of what’s actually happening, or not happening, on Sunday morning?

I Know What That Church Feels Like

I spent years in seeker-friendly church environments. And I want to be careful here, because I genuinely loved those years in many ways. I loved the people. I loved the worship. I was a ministry leader. I read my Bible. I loved the Lord—truly, genuinely, not performatively.

But there was something I couldn’t quite name for a long time. Something that felt a little… off. The sermons were good. Inspiring, even. Scripturally grounded enough that I didn’t have alarm bells going off. The pastor was relatable. The messages were applicable to my real life.

And yet. Monday would come. The feeling would be gone. And I’d wait for Sunday to fill back up.

I didn’t understand then what I understand now. The problem wasn’t my faith. It wasn’t even necessarily the pastor’s heart. The problem was the diet.

The Seeker-Friendly Church and the Sermon That Launches

Here’s the question I now ask when I’m evaluating a church or a preacher:

Does he exegete the passage, or does the passage become a launching pad for application?

That distinction might sound technical, but it’s actually simple. Exegesis means the preacher goes into the text—he works through what it actually says, what it meant to its original audience, how it fits into the larger story of Scripture. He lets the text drive the message. You leave knowing the Word better than when you arrived.

A launching pad sermon works differently. The pastor opens to a verse, reads it, and then takes off into an illustration, a principle, a life application, a story. The verse was the runway. The destination was always going to be the same message. You leave feeling inspired, maybe even moved. But you didn’t actually learn the text.

Seeker-friendly church culture tends to run almost entirely on launching pad sermons. And again, this often comes from a genuinely good place. Pastors want to be accessible. They want people to feel like the Bible is relevant to their actual lives. That’s not a bad instinct.

But over time, something quietly breaks down.

What a Diet of Inspiration Without Foundation Actually Produces

When the sermon is primarily a vehicle for application and inspiration, a few things start to happen in a congregation:

People come for the feeling, not to hear God speak through His Word. The Sunday experience becomes about what you walk away with emotionally, not what you understand scripturally. And when the feeling is the product, you’ll always need a bigger feeling next week.

People never develop the skill of sitting under Scripture. Faithful preaching doesn’t just give you conclusions, it shows you how to read. Over time, you learn to see how a text works, how context matters, how one passage illuminates another. A launching pad sermon skips all of that. You get the takeaway without the foundation.

The hard verses get quietly skipped. Seeker-friendly preaching tends to stay in the comfortable parts of Scripture. The passages that challenge, convict, or require real theological wrestling get softened, reframed, or avoided. And a congregation that is never taken to the hard verses is a congregation that doesn’t know what the Bible actually says.

The pastor’s personality becomes a load-bearing wall. When the message depends on the preacher’s charisma, creativity, and relatability more than on the text itself, the whole thing is more fragile than it looks.

And here’s the one that hit me the hardest when I finally named it: people who were never taught why the text says what it says can’t explain it to anyone else. Surface in, surface out. The seeker-friendly church often produces the weakest witnesses, not because people don’t love Jesus, but because they’ve never been shown how the Word actually works.

About That Feeling

I want to speak carefully here, because I don’t want to dismiss something real.

Those Sunday mornings where you were in tears, where something moved in you, where you felt close to God—those weren’t fake. God is gracious and He meets us even in imperfect environments. Emotion is not the enemy of sound doctrine.

But emotion was never meant to be the foundation. Romans 10:17 is plain: “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” Not from remembering a feeling. Not from holding onto a Sunday moment when Monday gets hard.

You might have heard something like this: “You felt it. You know it was real. Remind yourself you felt it even when it goes away.” I understand why people say that. But a faith built primarily on remembered emotion is a fragile thing. It has to keep being topped off. It doesn’t have deep roots.

The Word of God is what builds roots. And a church where the Word is faithfully opened, carefully handled, and fully preached, including the hard parts, is a church where that can actually happen.

Topical Sermons Aren’t the Enemy

Here’s a caveat worth making, because I don’t want to overstate this: topical sermons have a place.

My own church preaches expositionally week after week; working through books of the Bible, verse by verse, not skipping the hard parts. But there are moments—cultural crises, pressing social questions, things the congregation needs addressed directly—where a pastor needs to plant a flag. To say clearly and without ambiguity: here is what Scripture says about this. Racism. Sexual ethics. Marriage. Whatever the moment calls for.

That’s not lazy preaching. That’s pastoral care.

The problem isn’t topical sermons. The problem is when topical and application-driven becomes the entire diet. When inspiration is the goal every single week, and the text is always just a starting point, the congregation is being underfed. Consistently. Week after week.

What to Start Paying Attention to This Sunday

If any of this is resonating—if there’s a quiet unease you’ve been setting aside—I’m not telling you to walk out the door this Sunday. Your church might be your community, your closest friendships, years of your life. That’s real and it matters.

But I am inviting you to start paying attention. Ask yourself this Sunday:

Is the pastor working through this text and showing me what it means? Or did he read a verse and then take off in a direction he was already headed?

Does this church avoid certain topics or certain passages? Are there things you sense would never be addressed from the pulpit?

When you leave on Sunday, do you know the Word better? Or do you have a good feeling and a takeaway point?

You are not being disloyal by asking these questions. You are being a Berean. Acts 17:11 tells us the believers in Berea were called noble precisely because they examined the Scriptures daily to see whether what they were being taught was true. That’s not suspicion. That’s faithfulness.

And If You’re Already on the Other Side

Maybe you’re reading this and you’re already out. You left that church—maybe recently, maybe years ago—and you’re still processing what that season was. Still sorting out what was real and what was surface. Still grieving friendships that didn’t survive the leaving.

That grief is real. What you built there was real. And the love you had for the Lord in that season was real, even if the foundation underneath the preaching was thinner than you knew.

You’re not alone in the processing. And what’s on the other side—a church where the Word is actually opened, where the hard verses stay in, where you leave knowing more of God through His Word than when you arrived—is worth it.

The feeling was never meant to be the thing. The Word was.