Sugar Coated Submission

Back in June, I sent about 90 letters to pastors of Baptist General Convention of Texas churches.  I didn’t expect much, and I got less. 

My intent was to herald that something was coming.  What I knew and what they didn’t know, was that I would be presenting a Demand for An Apology from the Council on Biblical Manhood and Biblical Womanhood at a convention in Florida.

This week I revisited some of those churches websites. 

I found one pastor’s sermon on their website.  It was a Father’s Day sermon, June 20.  My letter to this pastor was dated June 7.

1 Peter 3 was the passage for his Father’s Day sermon. 

He said “I love that 1 Peter passage.”  Now why do you think he loves this passage?    Why would a pastor love a submission passage?

Out of his 30 minute message on Father’s Day, he spent the first 16 minutes telling wives how wonderful they are and that a marriage is a partnership, but that she was created by God for her role, and that she must willingly submit to her husband.  Not because the husband demands it, but because God demands it.  He then read from Ephesians that husbands are to love their wives. The last 14 minutes was reinforcing the first 16.

These are direct quotes from his sermon:

• In order for them to honor God, they have to submit  (he was telling husbands this about their wife’s role)
• The ground at the cross is level (how can it be level if the wife has to submit)
• He knows a guy that gives his wife a list of things to do and when he gets home, he checks the list
• God made men to be rough and tough and He made woman to be nurturing
• Women want their men to be men
• His pastor gave him this advice when he got married “make her queen of your house, and she will break her neck to make you King.
• Who’s going to wear the pants in your family?
• The feminists want to wear the pants
• When families follow these scriptures they are less likely to get divorced

Interspersed throughout all these sentences, he was sugar-coating the submission thing.  Women are not to submit because they have to, he said, but because as a loving wife who is doing God’s will, she will want to.  She is not to be a door mat.  In fact, he brought in an actual doormat to show how dirty and trampled a door mat is. 

When your pastor tells you that “In order for you to honor God, you have to submit to your husband,” all the sugar in the world can’t cover up an ugly concept that has been fostered on women.  The scriptures do not tell us that. 1 Peter 3 certainly does not tell us that. Read it for yourself. See if you can find what he said in those scriptures.  We’ve written on this many times and will again.

This pastor demonstrated his fear of the dreaded “feminists” after he got my letter on the week before Father’s Day, and he had to get his church under control, so they would not be influenced by the heretical teaching of female equality.

I don’t think it was a coincidence that he preached this sermon on Father’s Day after he got my letter. 

My son laughed at me when I told him this story, and said that the women in that church would not thank me.  That I caused their pastor to hammer home wife’s submission. 

Yes, but my experience is that women do not like to hear these kinds of sermons, and while he thinks he corralled them again, there are some who will slip from that corral to freedom.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said: 

I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.
I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?
Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.

I am preparing a new Newsletter to send to those churches.  Another arrow to shoot into the air.