A Doctrinal Correction and Marketing Tip for Complementarian Church Plants

The Acts 29 network is a church planting movement that establishes Bible-believing churches in various places throughout the world, including in Australia. I recently came across a peculiar item in their doctrinal statement about love, Christ, leadership, and gender (HT: Megan Du Toit).

You can read their doctrinal statement here, which is fairly straight forward, tries to be non-adversarial, but takes a stand on certain issues. Given who they are and what they are doing, that’s fair enough, even if you disagree with them.

The dot-point I question is this one:

We are not egalitarians and do believe that men should head their homes and male elders/pastors should lead their churches with masculine love like Jesus Christ.

A couple of comments I want to make.

First, it is undoubtedly true that Jesus’ divinity does not transcend or swallow up his humanity, including his masculinity. Jesus became a human being, a man no less, with the specific physiological, neurological, and biochemical make-up of a man. However, that is not to say that divine love is thereby defined in terms of his masculinity (that’d be Rahner’s rule gone very wrong!). While the man Jesus undoubtedly loved others as a man, he exercised love prior to the incarnation, prior to taking on human and male qualities into himself. What is more, male love is not a separate species of love compared to female love, not everything about the incarnate Jesus’ love is man specific. For case in point, self-sacrifice is the ultimate love and men and women are equally capable of that (see John 15:13). Thus, God’s love is no more masculine than it is feminine. Not because God’s love is neutered, but because divine love encompasses all that is specific to male and female expressions of love for one another and even exceeds them. Christians are undoubtedly exhorted to imitate divine love and Jesus’ love – see especially the Johannine Letters – but that love is never, ever defined in terms of a specific gender. In fact, if it was, it would imply that women can never really express or experience divine love in a full sense. To identify divine love or even Christ’s love with a particular gender is just as mistaken as identifying divine love with a particular race or ethnicity. Should we talk about the middle eastern love of Jesus or the circumcised love of Jesus or the semitic love of Jesus? No, of course not.

Second, does anyone really think  that unbelieving and unchurched men will be more attracted to church because they can experience the “masculine” love of Christ. I don’t know, but when I think of all the reasons I have for going to church, the prospect of “man-love” is not one of them. Now maybe it might work for an episcopalian church plant in San Francisco, each to their own, but I wouldn’t use masculine love as my part of my church marketing campaign.

So, I would suggest that Acts 29 tweak their doctrinal statement to as follows:

We believe in the complementarity of men and women and that men therefore should head their homes and male elders/pastors should lead and love their churches in the same way that God loves the world and that Jesus Christ loves his church.

No reference to masculine love required, unless you want to mess up the concept of divine love, disenfranchise women, and reach out to the gay community with a message of man-love.