Missing: the spiritual leader

A Baptist deacon wrote “The man of the house is the spiritual leader and is responsible for seeing his family loves the Lord and accepts Jesus as their Lord and Savior.”

I tried to find the scriptures that tell women that their husbands are their spiritual leaders, but there aren’t any.

Look around in church on Sunday morning. You’ll see that the “spiritual leaders” are still home in bed, while the wife and the kids got up and went to church. Guess he will tell her about Jesus when she gets home.

Making the husband a spiritual leader responsible for his wife’s and family’s salvation denigrates the gospel – the good news of Christ. Jesus did not say that men were heads of their wives, and he did not indicate that men would be elevated to headship after his resurrection.

Jesus did not bind women before his resurrection to their husbands, and there is no reason to believe that Jesus would bind women to their husbands after his resurrection. Jesus said an Advocate would come and we know that Advocate to be the Holy Spirit, not Husband.

In fact, male headship is contrary to everything Jesus said. The apostle Paul recognized this in his letter to the Galatians (3:26-28) where he wrote, “You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ.”

Therefore, we are presented with three scriptural challenges to the doctrine of men being the heads of women:

1) It is contrary to Jesus’ teaching and actions;

2) it makes men the vicars of Christ on earth if men are the head of women (the Advocate);

3) it removes Christ from headship over women; otherwise you have to believe that it takes two—one divine God and one earthly god—to be the head of one woman.

Oh, don’t forget, for him to be the spiritual leader, we have to get him up out of bed.