Thread by @BenjLesLantz

Man. The memories from my four years in seminary at BCS keep trickling back.

On #InternationalWomensDay, let me share this memory with you, as a kind of apology to the women (especially pastor’s wives) who have been taken for granted.

TW: Christian patriarchy.

In one of the later years of my M.Div program at BCS, I took a “Biblical Eldership” class. It wasn’t a hard class, but it did have a rather demanding requirement: that we all attend the Spring “Weekender” retreat at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington D.C. together.

CHBC holds these retreats twice a year, I believe, and the design is to help pastors and ministers see what congregational life and pastoral leadership should look like, essentially. Retreat-goers get behind-the-scenes snapshots of how this big Baptist church “does church.”

Well, BCS sends every M.Div cohort to these retreats. 15-20 men travel from Minneapolis to D.C. for the better part of a week (“Weekender” is a misnomer.) When I took the eldership class, and as we got details about how long the “Weekender” was, my wife got (justly) indignant.

She and I had a 3yo and a 1yo. I was the main breadwinner, and she had put in the lion’s share of the time at home with the kids, strictly so that I could pursue my rigorous, 4-year M.Div degree. Her thinking was: “If my husband is taking a week of vacation from work...

...it’d better be a real vacation, and I’d better get to go on it, too!” The Weekender failed in both respects. But it was a requirement for my degree! Regardless of how pissed we were about me having to go on this trip and leave her for a week with the kids, we had no options!

So I went.

Long story short, the trip didn’t feel right to me. None of us guys in the M.Div cohort were vocational pastors yet, and much of the Weekender was over our heads, or worse: propaganda from a certain Christian tribe (i.e. Reformed SBC).

What’s more, all of the guys in the cohort were married, and the majority had young kids like my wife and I had. And we *all* left our wives at home so we could—yes, fulfill a degree requirement—but it felt more like a bro’s hangout, a club to play “pastor” and drink beer in D.C.

I engaged what I could at the Weekender and then cut corners to get home ASAP to my family.

I was not happy with the situation. I wasn’t happy how BCS required us to jet away from our families for that extended period of time. It was already a rigorous program for me...

and it had been even harder in almost every respect on my wife. We didn’t need this trip!

I knew I wasn’t alone with my frustrations: other guys in the cohort had felt the same dissonance.

I decided to bring it up to my seminary prof-mentor. I laid out candidly why I thought this was putting an undue burden on families and wives especially, and for such little payoff.

My mentor essentially responded that this trip was something that they’d always done, and that it was “training for when pastors [husbands] would go off with their leadership teams on week-long retreats.”

In other words, the Weekender was intended just as much to train wives to know their place and stay at home as it was intended to “prepare us” as the husbands for the pastoral retreat scene.

I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t see the pathology in that at the moment.

But now I know better.

And I want to say I’m sorry to all the women and families who found themselves on the receiving end of their own “Weekender,” whether that lasted for a week, or two, or for a season of a spouses’s seminary, or for decades of ministry, or for longer.

It’s evil for men to expect to have bro’s getaway time at their wives’s expense.

It’s terribly twisted for a prof, or a seminary, or any institution, to force women into a space that Jesus was constantly calling women out of in order that they’d follow him!

And I am sorry that it took so long for me to see it, and even longer to come out of it.

If it’s any consolation, I’m dedicated now to making those glass ceilings come crashing down.

And with books like “Jesus and John Wayne” by @kkdumez around for awhile now, and #MakingBiblicalWomanhood by @bethallisonbarr coming out in a matter of weeks, I think I hear more glass getting ready to shatter.