Exit the Debate. Enter Your Life.

There is a conversation happening about you. It has been happening for a very long time. It happens in pulpits and in elder meetings. It happens in books with serious covers and footnotes. It happens in podcasts where men with good hair discuss, calmly and at length, what you are permitted to do with the one life God gave you.

Can she teach? Can she lead? Can she preach, vote, pastor, prophesy, or speak when men are in the room? Can she, can she, can she?

You were invited into that conversation. Not to settle it. To stay in it. You were handed a chair at the table of your own limitation and told that politely participating in a discussion of what you can do was the godly thing to do.

Be humble. Be teachable. Keep the conversation going.

So you did some research. You read the complementarian argument and the egalitarian argument. Weighed the Greek. Considered the historical context. You listened to both sides. You sat in the small group where everyone was very respectful and nothing was ever decided. And you told yourself that all of this careful, prayerful, endless discussion was a form of progress.

I want to tell you something that took me far too long to learn.

The debate is the trap.

The Deception of Productive Sounding Circles

The debate feels like something is happening. It has the texture of progress. You are reading, thinking, praying, discussing. Your brain is busy. Your calendar has things on it. You feel engaged, serious, intellectually honest.

But put your hand on your actual life and ask one question. Has anything changed?

Are you doing the thing God put in you? Are you teaching, building, leading, creating, going? Or are you still in the waiting room, magazine in your lap, certain that any minute now the conversation will reach a verdict that releases you to live?

It will not. That is not what the conversation is for.

The conversation is designed to keep you seated. Every minute you spend defending your right to exist fully is a minute you are not spending existing fully. The argument consumes the very energy you would have used to live. It is motion without movement. It is running on a wheel and mistaking the spinning for a journey.

I have watched brilliant women spend a decade in that conversation. Ten years of articles and rebuttals. Ten years of proving, explaining, justifying. And at the end of the decade, the men who control the table have not changed their minds, and the woman has not changed her life. She is exactly where she started, only older, and more tired, and somehow convinced that the exhaustion would actually move the needle.

It was not holy. It was theft. And she handed over the key herself.

You Cannot Win a Game Designed to Keep You Playing

In many corners of the church, the debate about what women can do is not a search for truth. It is a holding pattern. It is the thing they offer you instead of your freedom.

As long as you are debating, you are not leading. As long as you are explaining, you are not building. As long as you are asking, you are not living. The conversation is not a road to your release. It is the fence around the yard, and they have convinced you the fence is a discussion you are welcome to join.

You will not argue your way out. You cannot win permission from people whose authority depends on never granting it. The verdict you are waiting for is not coming, because the people you are waiting on have no incentive to deliver it. It is the same reason Congress will never vote for term limits and take away their power.

The debate is not stalled. The debate is working exactly as designed. So stop waiting for it to end. Walk out while it is still going.

What God Already Settled

I am not waiting for a committee to tell me I am fully human. God already did that on page one.

“So God created humans in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Genesis 1:27.

Both. The image of God in both. Not the image of God in the man and a supporting role in the woman. Both bear the image. Both were blessed. Both were told to be fruitful, to fill the earth, to subdue it, to have dominion. That was the original commission, and it was given to her with the same breath it was given to him.

When God needed a judge to lead a nation, He raised up Deborah, and she led, and the nation had peace for forty years. When God wanted the news of the resurrection delivered first, He gave it to women, and they carried the most important message in human history to the men who were hiding. When the early church met, it met in the home of Lydia, and in the home of Priscilla, who corrected the theology of a gifted male preacher and was commended for it. When Paul listed the people who labored with him, he named Phoebe a deacon and Junia outstanding among the apostles.

These are not exceptions God apologized for. These are women God used, on purpose, without a disclaimer.

So I am settled. I have read the arguments. I have done the work. My other books make the full case.And the verdict is this. You are made in the image of God. You are commissioned. You are gifted. You are called. You do not need the table to agree before you go and live your God-given life.

Some People Will Disapprove. Oh Well.

Let me be honest about what this will cost you. It is going to cost you.

When you exit the debate and just live your life, some people will think you have gotten proud. Some will say you are rebellious, unsubmissive, deceived, worldly, divisive. Some will quote a verse at you. Some of those will be people you love. Some will be people whose approval you have spent your whole life collecting like a currency you were sure you would need someday.

You will not need it. You cannot spend it because they won’t let you. And the day you stop trying to earn it is the day you get your life back.

So here is what I want you to be able to say, out loud, “Some people are not going to like this. Oh well. I will live my life as God has designed anyway.”

That is not arrogance. That is freedom. It is the simple recognition that you cannot live a God-sized life and a small-enough-to-keep-everyone-comfortable life at the same time. You have to choose. And the women who change anything, in their homes, in their churches, in the world, have all chosen the same way. They chose the life. They let the disapproval fall where it falls.

The Decision Is the Whole Thing

This isn’t about what you feel. It is a decision.

You are leaving the conversation. You are not slamming the door. You are not writing a manifesto. You are not announcing it on the internet or starting a fight at Thanksgiving. You are simply, quietly, finally, getting up from the chair and walking out into your actual life while the discussion continues behind you, without you.

Let them talk. Talking is what they do. You are going to live.

You have exited the debate. Now let’s enter your life.

*I am done debating whether I am allowed. I have my answer. I am going to live.*

Today, you stopped asking the room. Tomorrow, start on the voice in your head that is there to limit you and teach it to love who you are.