Tag Archives: Women in Ministry

008 I Rev. Dr. Jennifer Powell McNutt on The Mary We Forgot

Posted on January 28, 2026 by Ruth Perry | Leave a comment

In this episode, Dr. Jennifer Powell McNutt discusses her insights on Mary Magdalene from her book, ⁠The Mary We Forgot⁠.

Dr. McNutt describes her own faith journey leading her to the dual ministry of Church historian and Presbyterian minister, and then delves into the historical mischaracterization and significance of Mary Magdalene, and what “the apostle to the apostles” can teach us today: from the importance of her healing from demons to her financial support of Jesus’ ministry, being the first witness and messenger of the resurrection, and as a missionary to France in her later life.

Dr. McNutt and her husband, Rev. Dr. David McNutt, have a ministry called ⁠McNuttshell Ministries⁠, a teaching, preaching, and writing ministry that serves both the church and the academy by sharing the Christian faith “in a nutshell.”

You can find Dr. McNutt on ⁠Facebook⁠, ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠Threads⁠, ⁠Substack⁠, and more! Find today’s episode notes and transcript on ⁠The Beautiful Kingdom Builders⁠ blog.

In our conversation, Sandra Glahn’s book, Vindicating the Vixens: Revisiting Sexualized, Vilified, and Marginalized Women of the Bible comes up, and Dr. McNutt encourages us to read all the books in her bibliography.

I was really excited to speak with Dr. McNutt after reading her beautiful, pastoral book, which was gifted to me from my brother, Rev. Dr. Matthew McNutt. It’s always fun to meet another McNutt doing good work out in the world! Here’s that adorable picture of my family with our nut shell sign my dad made; I’m guessing this is 1983 or 1984:

If you enjoy this episode, please Subscribe to The Beautiful Kingdom Builders podcast on your favorite platform, rate and review it, and share it with a friend! Every little bit of encouragement helps! You can watch our episode on YouTube or find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and more!

TRANSCRIPT:

Ruth Perry (00:16)
Well, Welcome to the Beautiful Kingdom Builders podcast, Dr. Jennifer Powell McNutt. I’m so honored to have you here today.

Jennifer Powell McNutt (00:20)
Yay! Thank you so much for having me. What a delight.

Ruth Perry (00:25)
I feel like, like you talk about in your book, our sibling relationship in Christ, and then we have that added layer of the last name.

Jennifer Powell McNutt (00:30)
haha McNutt. I know we are definitely related. Well, by marriage. yeah. Yes.

Ruth Perry (00:38)
Absolutely. I’m married out of it, so I’m Perry now, but growing up McNutt was very special, and so I thought that I should have my brother Matthew on so we have extra McNutts to join the fun. I wanted to show you this cool picture of my family. My dad made this sign with a bunch of different nuts, and I thought of this picture when I read the name of your ministry, McNuttshell Ministries. Very cute.

Jennifer Powell McNutt (00:46)
I love it. Can’t have enough McNutts. Lean into it, you know? Just embrace it.

Matthew McNutt (01:04)
I always just, yup, I always called my stuff the Nutt house, cause it’s like, we’re…

Jennifer Powell McNutt (01:09)
Oh yeah. When I started teaching there was the McNutty professor, that movie or whatever had come out, know, so there’s that too. I was like, oh no.

Ruth Perry (01:19)
I appreciate you bringing a lot of nobility and dignity to the name, you’re doing us well.

Jennifer Powell McNutt (01:23)
Good, I’m glad I’m accepted. I’m earning my stripes. That’s good.

Ruth Perry (01:29)
Yeah! My brother actually bought me your book for Christmas last year. And so that’s another reason why I wanted to have him in on this conversation, because he’s an avid reader and he loved your book. And I loved your book. I’m very excited to talk with you today about Mary Magdalene. But first, I want to talk to you about you. I’d love to hear about your personal faith journey, your testimony and just a little bit more about your background before we get into the book.

Jennifer Powell McNutt (02:02)
Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, my faith journey just begins with my family and the ministry that my parents led and as pastors, co-pastors even in our denomination, we’re Presbyterian and having met in seminary and all of that and just knowing Jesus from the beginning and loving Christ and wanting to follow Him and feeling like a part of my parents’ ministry in a very powerful, compelling, persuasive way. And those church communities, you know, just really embracing us too. In California and Texas. But also churches that they had after I went to college in Pennsylvania, San Diego, and now they live here with us, retired, mostly retired.

And so for me, there isn’t a time that I don’t remember loving Jesus and wanting to follow Him. But there were many particular moments where the Lord has directed me in my life and calling and desire to be equipped for this vocation that I’m in as a professor at Wheaton College, but then also as an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church and hoping to bridge that church and academy, that work, that it will enrich students and also churches. So for me, it just came from really as a child being called into ministry and that was like a pivot for my whole life. I was 10 years old and I was like, I’m going to seminary. yeah, it’s just been so interesting to see how I’ve been directed, in terms of my discipline too, and then just loving, especially the life of the classroom and know, adult education in the church and kind of the preaching parts came a little bit later for me. And I enjoy that as well so much, but my primary call is to the classroom. And so, you know, just how you go through life and make your decisions and do the best you can to be faithful and somehow the Lord directs you in the right path. So that’s been my hope at least.

Ruth Perry (04:20)
That’s really beautiful that you have the academic and the pastoral dual calling. I’m curious to know, what do you see as the, greatest benefits of your church history background and expertise in your church ministry?

Jennifer Powell McNutt (04:35)
Yeah, I just love to make that knowledge accessible that I really feel the importance of that to come in and to help deepen those roots and a sense of confidence in the faith and growth in the faith and also inviting those questions to that faith seeking understanding I think is so important.

To be able to grapple with the places where we’re uncomfortable, where we feel a tension, where we find a disconnect or a dissonance with our context and what Scripture’s saying or how we understand things. Those are all opportunities for going deeper, for the Lord using that in deeper ways. And so I love that part of it.

I’ve been doing a lot more just with all different denominations, churches all over the country and even outside of the US that come from their own history and their own context and the value of knowing the fullness of church history to the best of my abilities. Obviously there’s more than I could ever fully grasp, but nonetheless that you can speak

to people in their local spaces, in their local context in a way that maintains that larger story and helps them to see how they fit into God’s particular story and that universal story. So I’d to distill a richer perspective and connection that Christians have with one another today and with the past. So that’s my hope.

Matthew McNutt (06:14)
Is there something about Wheaton College in particular that drew you or that you’ve particularly enjoyed serving there?

Jennifer Powell McNutt (06:22)
Yeah, thank you. So I did go to Westmont College. It was Christian, liberal arts education. That was where I was really nurtured and knew about Wheaton. I never really expected to be at Wheaton. California girl going to the Midwest wasn’t exactly in my bingo card. yeah, but having taught as a doctoral preceptor in the university settings, I did long for the kind of relationship that you can have with your students, the mentoring relationship that you can have with your students at a Christian school and being able to like care about them as whole people and not just about their grades, or just about their minds, but about their whole life and who they are and kind of shepherding them through this time that we have together. And I found that there was kind of more of a distance at some of the university settings. We were required to have quite a distance. And so it’s just really wonderful to be at a school where you can just like pray with the student and they can share more about who they are and their sense of calling or vocational purpose. And yeah, you can just support them in a holistic way.

And so that’s the thing I’ve loved the most. And I think you would get that at other Christian schools too. But Wheaton does that really well, that integration of faith and learning, the connection between Scripture, theology, and context and just seeing how all those pieces fit together. And a lot of it too is how they valued me and supported me and made a place for my expertise and a place for me to thrive. So I’m very grateful for that. It’s been 18 years, so there’s definitely been ups and downs. Nothing is perfect, but on the whole, I would say, yeah, I think it’s been a really good experience.

Ruth Perry (08:28)
Another follow-up question I have about your background is thinking about the Presbyterian denomination with their theology and their tradition and their history. What do you feel like the Presbyterian church has to offer to the broader Christian family that is of particular value and beauty?

Jennifer Powell McNutt (08:45)
Well, I love that question. Thank you. We don’t always get to answer that. You know, like so many traditions, the Presbyterian Church is pretty fragmented, you know, in terms of so many different branches, certain branches that wouldn’t allow me to do ministry in as a woman. Other branches that don’t necessarily align with my own theological convictions fully.

So it’s always complex to navigate. And then there’s perception too, you know, of like a dominant voice in the tradition or majority voice in the tradition. So I always want to be very generous in my Reformed perspective. And the things that I love are the elements of humility that come into play for the tradition. I think it’s really important to remember, and I’ve spoken on this many times in different venues about that if we go back to our origins, our inception points, like in the 16th century, in the Reformation with John Calvin in Geneva, that so much of his ministry was dedicated to people who were displaced and living in exile and suffering from persecution. And so the theology that he emphasizes is God’s power and ability to be present with us, to save us even through the most devastating, catastrophic moments in our lives and that God’s goodness and God’s ability to save us is never diminished by those circumstances. And really trust in God’s loving, fatherly activity in our lives.

Also, I would say, that, as I mentioned, the humility, but that, the transcendence between, like, us humans and God, I think those are good reminders, too, as well that he’s capable to save and willing. Those are parts that I love, also love about Scripture, you know, Scripture as like, glasses that we put on to understand, to see the world clearly and to understand the world around us. I really strongly affirm that I believe that and experience that just at many different levels. So of God’s activity through that. Those are two things. I’ll add one third one. And that is something called, a little lesson here, duplex gratia, double grace.

I love the duplex gratia, which is that we are, just as we’re justified, that that is linked to our sanctification, that the Holy Spirit is at work in uniting us to Christ, in transforming our lives and sanctifying us, that we might be holy and righteous. So, those are three things I think that are sometimes missed in perceptions of the Reformed tradition, that context can give us some gratitude and appreciation for.

Ruth Perry (11:34)
Beautiful, praise God.

Matthew McNutt (11:35)
You wrote later in the book that Mary Magdalene’s place in the biblical story has been buried in the cellars and attics of our churches.” What drew you to study and write about Mary Magdalene?

Jennifer Powell McNutt (11:43)
Yeah, thank you so much. There are a lot of layers to the story. So I’ll just say kind of one thing and then maybe you want to follow up. But one thing that I have been struck by is in coming out of a tradition in the branch of the Presbyterian Church that I was in, they were very attentive to women in the Bible. And there was a place to talk about that and to think about, I would say, kind of a Galatians 3.28 like, you know, church experience so that you could be called, you have gifts from the Holy Spirit that are not gendered and you know, that God could call you to serve anyone.

But even in that space and even in that context, there was still kind of a separation between some of the focus on the women in the Bible, in the pulpit, and the focus on the women of the Bible in the women’s ministry. So we still had that. And then in addition to that, in another layer, I don’t think anybody wanted to touch Mary Magdalene. So I grew up knowing Lydia and Deborah and Phoebe and those names before I was ever taught how to understand, think about Mary Magdalene.

And I think that’s a much larger problem. It’s not just in certain types of Protestant churches. It’s not just in the Protestant tradition. It’s in the Roman Catholic Church. It’s much broader than this. It’s kind of a Christian issue of how to interpret and understand Mary Magdalene. And so when, as a professor with many years in my research, I began to notice more and more in my classrooms and discussion theology I was doing references to women in the Bible and the Reformation and seeing how they are talking about Mary Magdalene kind of brought it to the surface of this is really different than what we see in our culture because there’s a cultural discussion and also what we’re seeing in our churches.

Kind of seeing the need. And for me, first, I only saw it as for women. Like, let’s talk about Mary Magdalene for women. And I was invited to have those opportunities to share that kind of perspective. But through the process of getting the book to be accepted and published, I began to realize, this is for the whole church. It’s not just for women. And that’s because the gospel writers invite the whole church to see Mary Magdalene’s presence and her witness and her calling by Christ to proclaim. So that’s been great. So it’s kind of like a growth process, I would say like over time, you know how the Lord plants a seed, you know, I was a doctoral student when the Da Vinci code took off, I was in Scotland, everybody was talking about it. It was in every bookstore window. There were bookstores back then. you know, every bookstore window, everybody’s talking about it. And now when I look back at that time, I realized that the church was so susceptible to that cultural moment and the confusion that erupted from that cultural moment because there had been no clarity about her, you know, before that.

So I bring also that to the writing of the book, that experience as well. Did you guys experience that? I don’t know. Like when, you know, when the DaVinci code came out and.

Matthew McNutt (15:16)
I remember when it came out.

Ruth Perry (15:16)
I felt like reading, one of the things I loved about your book is that all of the references you made were a part of my life. I just felt like we would be friends if we knew each other. And I really enjoyed that aspect of reading your book too. I was thinking about when I first started, so Matthew and I grew up conservative Baptist. And so we were definitely of a mind that, spiritual authority belonged to men in the church and the home and read the Bible through that lens. And when I started rethinking that, because I had received a call from God when I was 30 years old, so I was way behind you in that process.

But it was when I was 30, so I started trying to read the Bible through a new lens. And I was frequently told I was reading the Bible through a flawed hermeneutic because most of the people I knew were still conservative. So they were being critical of my questions and the new things I was discovering in the Bible. And I just love that you describe it as a hermeneutic of surprise. Just seeing how God elevates women in the Bible. I don’t know that everybody listening to my podcast knows what the word hermeneutic means, so maybe explain the word hermeneutic and then also just talk more about that hermeneutic as a surprise.

Jennifer Powell McNutt (16:32)
Sure, absolutely. Thank you. So hermeneutic means basically just interpretation. And so when you study hermeneutics, you’re studying different ways of interpreting. So there’s different approaches or methods for interpreting Scripture. Of course, hermeneutics can be used for other sources as well. But there are those critical lenses that are used to understand the text and methods to get at the meaning of the text in its context or how it, you know, the different, they would say, percopes or like portions of Scripture, how they are placed intentionally side by side and what the meaning is for that. There’s all different approaches.

So I was coming from a context that was kind of more like saying, there’s not enough women in the Bible. It’s not enough and it’s not empowering to women because they’re not really present enough in the gospels or in the texts. And so as a historian, it’s important that we understand literature in its context, you know, what were the practices and approaches that you would expect in that time period for how they would write about it. And the thing is, is that they wouldn’t reference women at all.

And so when we say like 200 named women isn’t enough, we’re kind of coming at it from, I think, the wrong side. We need to turn around and go the opposite direction about what does it mean to add 200 women into the text and to highlight their names. Or just to leave them unnamed even, but still present in the story is really interesting. So the hermeneutic of surprise is intended to challenge the hermeneutic of suspicion to an extent, to say that suspicion isn’t always the best disposition of a reader of Scripture because we can miss all the surprising ways that the text in its context is telling the story. So we can be surprised ourselves from our own context, we don’t expect, you know, gentleness to be emphasized or whatever it might be.

And that’s like us growing in how the text relates to our place today as Christians. But the text itself already has embedded moments of surprise within the text that we miss if we only read it from our context. We have to try to read it from the space in that time to see what is being highlighted. So I just have a few different examples that I try to show, but I think once you approach it that way, you’ll begin to see the whole of Scripture, so many surprising parts of Scripture that just sometimes requires to sit a little bit more with, to seek to learn and to study and to, sit under a, knowledgeable teacher to help you to read Scripture with more insight and perspective. I think that can be very useful. All of us can benefit from that at different points, including myself.

Matthew McNutt (19:52)
I mean, you’ve already touched on this a little bit, right? That Mary Magdala’s story has been muddled and obscured throughout history. And even just talking about how the church is not very familiar with her. How do you disentangle her from the other Marys in the Gospels, from the unnamed women that she gets lumped in with?

Jennifer Powell McNutt (20:13)
Right, yes. Well, I think the first thing, my first question was how did this happen? So again, coming in as a historian and trying to go back to some of the original interpretations of Mary Magdalene. So especially looking at Irenaeus of Lyon is a father for the church in the West and the East. So it’s a really interesting starting point to see a trajectory that’s established there and to understand how the early church especially was engaging with Mary Magdalene because the church can’t ignore her because she is the only one who is named by all four gospels as present at the empty tomb and then as first witness by both John’s gospel and Matthew’s gospel.

And so there’s no Easter sermon without Mary Magdalene. And that means that she is someone that we can kind of track in the history of interpretation and see some of the shifts that took place. The thing that I became alert to was how, and I talk about in the book, so with charts, which I think are really helpful because it gets complicated. But what I noticed was especially the importance of Augustine’s voice for the Western branch of the church in his readings of the women that anointed Jesus, that there’s a story of a woman anointing Jesus in each of the four gospels, and that three of the women mentioned are anonymous, but that one woman is noted as Mary, who’s coming from Bethany.

And so we know her as Mary Bethany. And that was really the beginning of the shift to see her as a prostitute because of Luke 7. So just go back and read Luke 7 and then notice too that Luke 8 is where Mary Magdalene is named and identified with Magdala. so the church kind of gets into seeing her as the sinner woman and so there’s first the conflation of the anointings and then there’s a conflation with the Marys and that’s formalized in the seventh century and that continues to be the tradition. But what I loved about the history of it too is that it’s not a very simple story, it’s not so consistent.

And there are many other layers to how the church has also remembered her because there’s other parts of her story because she’s so prominent in so many elements of Christ’s ministry from Galilee to Jerusalem, all the way to the empty tomb. So she’s there, you know, for all these things. And so sometimes when the church is emphasizing, evangelism and preaching, they focus more on her as a preacher and as an evangelist and as an apostle to the apostles. And so I was able in that research and in that tracking also to correct some of the confusion around the history of her reception, as well as to confirm, that this has been very complex. Like, it’s not surprising that we’ve been confused about it for so long.

And then I think because of that confusion, the church has been uncertain about what it means when we point to her. What does it mean when we point to Mary Magdalene? I never had anyone say to me, you should be like Mary Magdalene. You know, as a young Christian woman, like that would be like, is that an insult? Like, what are you saying to me right now? And so I think the church has been a little bit maybe afraid even to point to her because of the, you know, lack of clarity in that message. And so my hope is that the book can kind of give her back to the church in a clearer way to say, we actually really need to grapple with this because she’s pointing us to the risen Christ and she has such an important role in the gospels. It’s not something you can set aside. It’s actually really critical to our understanding of Jesus. And it’s okay, you know, to point to her because this is what she means according to the Bible.

Ruth Perry (24:37)
Yeah, you use the language of the church playing telephone with Mary Magdalene, which I thought was really appropriate. And then you also talk about our collective memory loss about her. But it was very fascinating for me to read about Mary beyond the Bible. I had never heard anything about her history past the Bible. I’ve heard about the apostles. And so that was really fascinating. Would you tell us more about where Mary went after the biblical text?

Jennifer Powell McNutt (25:07)
I mean, we don’t know for sure, so I’ll just start there. But it is pretty remarkable that the church has held on to the remembrance of her, her accepting Christ’s call to proclaim that he’s risen and also the words that he gave to her and that he doesn’t that she doesn’t stop doing that. I like to it’s not like she’s just like passing a note to the remaining disciples, and then goes on her way. the church has remembered her as living out that call for the rest of her life. And that makes so much sense to me as someone who, as Mary Magdalene was someone who was welcomed into his ministry from Galilee, who was a benefactor and disciple, was a student of Jesus’s.

Then was the cross and at the tomb and all these places. So I like to highlight that she’s there for everything and the Gospels mention that to us. So then the church remembers that she continues in her ministry and that she actually travels to France and that she evangelizes France, which by the way is the beginning of Christianity in the western side of the Roman Empire.

So for her to go from Jerusalem to France is absolutely possible. And the fact that all of the followers of Jesus are really scattered or missional in their work after Pentecost and even kind before that or in the Jerusalem area, but Pentecost really is like moving people outside of Jerusalem into these other locations and places. And then the dangers that were present for Christians in this time. We know that from a second century Greek philosopher who was an opponent of Christianity, that he knew about Mary Magdalene.

He knew that the Christian faith was based upon her testimony of Christ’s resurrection. That was like a widespread thing that was known. And he is very critical of her because she was weeping and she’s a woman and you’re not supposed to have those things as the basis of your truth. Which is surprising, by the way, the hermeneutic is a surprise.

So we know that she was known at the time and so her life could have, very likely would have been in danger as a result. so, yes, there’s lots that is possible about that. And we as Christians in the West, though in France they remember this, but outside of France, a lot of people don’t know this part of our Western story that it’s rooted in Mary Magdalene’s claim and witness to Christ, the apostolicity comes through her for the Western Church. And so, and that’s not just a Roman Catholic tradition, but that’s also evident in recognized in the Reformation among some of the Protestant traditions that are emerging in the Reformation. yeah, so that’s very exciting, I think, to highlight and feature.

But in later periods as the Roman Catholic Church was moving towards a hermetic monasticism, in kind of isolated living in caves, that kind of thing, her story takes on a lot of hagiographical elements. It too easily lines up with the way that you’re supposed to be devoted to the church in that time. Like she suddenly seems like a medieval woman. She’s definitely not a medieval woman. So that’s when you’re like, that’s, that’s pretty ridiculous. You know, that’s, that didn’t happen. But, did she come initially to France? She certainly could have. And so that’s something to know, I think, and, to allow for the possibility of.

And yeah, in the book, I’ll just say our family went there, I share about our journey going to those churches and those locations where she is remembered and just kind of sorting that part of the story out and thinking through it. yeah.

Ruth Perry (29:19)
And possibly seeing her skull. That’s quite something. Yeah.

Jennifer Powell McNutt (29:22)
Yes, we saw a skull that is attributed to Mary Magdalene. That was shocking.

Ruth Perry (29:33)
I was also thinking in your answer about the danger that she was in in France, the danger that you point out that she was in at the foot of the cross, bearing witness to Jesus’ crucifixion. I had never thought about that before.

Jennifer Powell McNutt (29:37)
Yeah, just the Roman Empire. Yes, it’s so interesting to think too about how the Gospels do give us all the pieces, even though we don’t get the fullness of the story. But we have to remember that there is a selectivity for all of the people in the biblical stories. You know, we don’t get to hear very much about Joseph, you know, but we know he was so important and that he had this, you know, what is highlighted about him is what we are invited to remember.

And, you know, we love to see more about Jesus’s mother. There’s a few glimpses. And then the last time we see her is in the upper room waiting for Pentecost to take place. So that also allows us to see that she was present in other ways. so we want to value the ways in which Scripture reveals portions of the story to us, even as we recognize that the full, all of the elements are not always revealed to us. And I don’t think we need every element in order to appreciate the pieces that Scripture does reveal.

Matthew McNutt (30:50)
You talk about the importance of correcting mischaracterizations of Mary Magdalene, and there’s a part of it, as a youth pastor for 25 years, I’m kind of dancing around my head, man, what would it look like to more intentionally teach about Mary? You know, when there’s time looking at the calendar to teach and do all of this, why should Christians care about teaching about her, about correcting these mischaracterizations, about taking time to invest in knowing Mary’s story.

Jennifer Powell McNutt (31:26)
Thank you so much. I love that question. I’m going to have a hard time keeping this tight. So I can talk about this a lot. Okay. So the first thing I would say is we need to expand our imagination for how we can see her as theologically and biblically significant in our ministries.

There are many pieces to her story, but oftentimes it becomes reduced to was she a prostitute or not? It’s an easy answer. She wasn’t. Okay, so now we have to move on. Who was she? Okay, so this is where I think actually churches could and should emphasize her as an example for stewardship, right? What is she doing? She is a patron of Jesus’s ministry. Luke chapter eight highlights her and other women that are financially supporting Jesus’s ministry and traveling with him. And when we realized that not everybody was allowed to go with Jesus, not everybody was invited to be with him in that kind of intimate way.

We can say, this is really significant. Their presence there is significant. So it actually completely transforms. And I would say that I was writing this before The Chosen was kind of starting to do this, but The Chosen is such a helpful step forward in allowing us to reimagine beyond the 12, right? So there are the 12 men that are invited to be part of Jesus’ ministry, but there are many women, that’s what Luke chapter eight says, many women, and then certain women who have key roles that are with Jesus and traveling with him and receiving teaching and being part of his ministry and probably were part of the 70 that were sent out because many times these were male and female, like married couples, according to some of the best scholarship on the topic. So we just need to expand the ministry to, and we need to be clear when we say disciples, we actually mean men and women. We say the 12 we are talking about these men. And those are not exactly the same.

So we need to change the way we talk about it so that people don’t associate disciples with male exclusive participation. So that’s one part of it. It transforms the way we see Jesus’s ministry. We can see how stewardship is involved, right? How we’re using finances to support him. And then we can also expand our understanding of the importance of the empty tomb. My experience has been, and again, even in a tradition that has been alert to women’s call to ministry that we don’t know anything about the women of Luke eight. And then all of a sudden on Easter morning, we’re like, we hear that there are women there and we think that they’re just any women, but they aren’t. They have been there the whole time. And so their witness is so much greater actually than just that they happen to be there at the empty tomb in that moment. But it’s everything that Jesus has done for them up until that moment.

And so in Mary Magdalene’s case, now we have to grapple with demon oppression, right? We have to, and that is something our churches definitely don’t want to talk about in my experience, right? How do we talk about this part of her story? So these are women who have been healed from the grip of basically the greatest evil that they could experience. In Mary Magdalene’s case, seven demons, Jesus talks about how significant seven demons are in Matthew chapter 12, he highlights that for us, what could happen with seven demons, and that’s what she has. And so that’s where we have to say, what does it mean when the gospels are highlighting for us that Jesus conquers demons, right? What does that tell us about who Christ is and about the power of the Lord and about God’s kingdom and the kingdom come?

And Mary Magdalene’s witness then, if we are so wrapped up in thinking about her as a prostitute and unwilling or afraid to talk about her as a woman who has been delivered from demonic presence, she is the witness at the tomb, then we are going to miss the fullness of what it means when she points us to the risen Christ. We’re going to think it’s one thing when it’s actually another.

So there are many women, there’s different groups of women that are there, but the particularity of Mary Magdalene’s presence is highlighting for us that Jesus is King, that he has conquered evil for us and that God’s kingdom has arrived. And so that’s how Jesus invites us to understand this part of his ministry.

And when we do that, we can also embrace the texts that are outside of Scripture that recognize and identify Jesus as exorcist, that this is widely known at the time that he is a very successful exorcist. So that brings us also into their context, into that time and what that means for us today. Then pastorally, I would just say it means that whatever the thing is that has gripped you, right? In that, you know, I like to talk about a sheep that is, you know, at the bottom of that pit.

Jesus talks about this in Matthew 12, you know, the sheep that’s at the bottom of the pit, it’s the Sabbath and no one can save this sheep. And yet the Son of God can, right? The Son of God comes in and can save the sheep, pull it out of the pit. And that’s us. That’s a proclamation of God’s power in our lives and the possibility of his work in our lives. So that’s a message that the church needs to hear, I think, it’s exciting to hear that and when we receive her, we can receive that kind of biblical theological message. Does that answer the question? Okay.

Matthew McNutt (37:14)
That’s good. That’s good. And it’s funny. I was even kind of reacting to, know, when you talk about people’s aversion to talking about her because they think she was a prostitute, which she was not. But then I was also sitting here, but it’s funny. We have no aversion to talking about Paul, who was a murderer and a blasphemer before he started preaching. We have no aversion to talking about Matthew, who was a tax collector, which was, you know, a traitor to the people. And, such a horrible practice that they would separate sinners and then you had tax. It’s like we don’t have that same aversion for the men with complicated pasts as we do for her.

Jennifer Powell McNutt (37:53)
Yeah, exactly. That’s so true. Or we make all the women former prostitutes, right? That’s the other thing that we end up doing is saying this is the only story that a woman in Scripture can have. And so we miss, you know, these other stories.

Matthew McNutt (38:08)
I love the book, Vindicating the Vixens, which is just a collection of stories of how we’ve sexualized and vixenized all these different women whose stories were not actually like that. It a really cool book.

Jennifer Powell McNutt (38:11)
Yes! I love that book too, thank you for highlighting that. It’s really important book.

Matthew McNutt (38:24)
Except we’re talking about yours.

Jennifer Powell McNutt (38:26)
That’s okay. I tried to fill up my book with footnotes, with citations, so people can go. You’ll see that book is in there and referenced, and many other wonderful books. I was kind of bringing those biblical voices together, seeing a need even in biblical scholarship and commentaries, to try to piece together the story of Mary Magdalene. So I’m bringing the church history, but also some of the best biblical scholarship out there to help us to see the story. So yeah, please use those footnotes and read these other books, because they help me too. That’s how I was able to do my work.

Ruth Perry (39:03)
You say, “In an era of de-churching and faith deconstruction, Mary Magdalene can serve as a model of steady faith in Christ, even when our churches fail us and hurt us.”

And “Her readiness to run is the outworking of her readiness to follow and give of herself and her resources to Christ’s ministry.”

I thought those are two beautiful quotes about Mary Magdalene from your book, but I was also wondering, How does her faith challenge and inspire you and your discipleship in ministry? Dr. McNutt.

Jennifer Powell McNutt (39:33)
Thank you so much. I was really struck when I was kind of piecing together her story, how everything around her was really crumbling or changing rapidly, you know, in just a very short amount of time. The shock of, the betrayal that took place within their community, and her being elevated out of that in a very special way. There are so many surprising things going on and it did really strike me because working in church history, you will very quickly come to all the failures and problems that the church has faced, the mistakes, the blind spots, the failures.

They’re there. And of course, in our church today, we see those too. I think church history can help with that, to see there is an enduring struggle for the church to live in to sanctification and to keep repenting. Just as individuals, are called to live a life of repentance to continually turn back to Christ, so too are our churches, and to focus on Christ, to put Christ really at the center. And I think for me, Mary Magdalene has become such a powerful example of centering Christ in your life. I’m amazed.

Whatever it was she was doing before, we don’t really know what was going on exactly before that, except for her suffering. But we don’t know exactly what that looked like or anything. But the Gospels invite us to remember that she, her whole life becomes focused around Christ walking. I love this walking literally in his footsteps. The direction of her finances become focused on building Christ’s ministry, being a faithful witness, and she is faithful and doing something very hard that she’s called to do. And that does inspire me. It does remind me.

And so when I see the structure of the church, and I’m speaking as a Reformation scholar, so I talk about this all the time, right? The failures of the structure of the church to keep our focus and center on Christ and building Christ’s ministry. And I do think that that can be helpful. That doesn’t condone the mistakes or the pain or the importance of whatever actions might happen. But we don’t abandon Christ even when our churches fail us, and they certainly do. So that’s a hard reality as being saved by Christ and being transformed by Christ, but also being transformed by Christ at the same time and all the future that we look to in that transformation. yeah, so those are a few thoughts for how she’s inspired me.

She really has become such a central voice in my faith. And I would say I’ve gotten this question from other podcasts where they’re like, did you always love her, always feel drawn to her. And my honest answer is no. I wasn’t because I didn’t know what to think about her because my church also didn’t know what to think about her. So it’s been a delightful surprise to see how she can have a more prominent place in my own faith journey with Christ.

Ruth Perry (42:58)
And what do you think Mary would say to the church today?

Jennifer Powell McNutt (43:01)
What would she say? She would probably say the same thing. You have been, the words that Jesus gave to her, which is that Jesus is our brother and God is our father, and we are part of this family, and basically proclaim that he is risen, and keep it about the resurrection and all that that means for us today. But I’ve think she would have a lot of good insight beyond what the text can reveal to us. How are we using our money? There’s another one. Right.

Matthew McNutt (43:31)
This has been, I’ve really appreciated the insights and just hearing some of your heart and passion behind your work and what led you to this and expanding some of what we’ve read in your book. So thank you so much for that.

Jennifer Powell McNutt (43:31)
Thank you, Matthew. It was a wonderful conversation with you both. I’m so grateful for the invitation and I look forward to, yeah, I hope more conversations together and we’ll meet in person someday, I hope.

Ruth Perry (43:59)
Thank you for the gift that your life and testimony is to the church, Dr. McNutt. We appreciate you. Thank you for your time today.

Jennifer Powell McNutt (44:03)
I appreciate you. Thank you for having me. I was blessed by our conversation. Thank you.

Thanks for visiting The Beautiful Kingdom Builders! Here is the link again for Dr. McNutt’s book, The Mary We Forgot. It is an amazingly pastoral work that will give you so much food for thought and moments of surprise!

We’re excited about our new podcast and hope to bring light to the darkness through these conversations about gender, abuse, justice and healing in the Christian Faith. Follow along here (you can subscribe by email on the right-hand menu under our page description) or on your favorite podcast platform and social media: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Pinterest, and TikTok!

oo5 I Dr. Roy Ciampa on Paul’s Household Instructions in Ephesians 5

Posted on January 7, 2026 by Ruth Perry | Leave a comment

My guest this week is my former Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary professor, Dr. Roy Ciampa, whose transformative class, Ephesians in Depth, has stayed with me over the years as my faith has grown and changed. In this conversation, we discuss the theological implications of Paul’s writings, the cultural context of the Greco-Roman world, and the significance of mutual submission in relationships. Dr. Ciampa shares insights from his academic background and teaching experiences, emphasizing the importance of understanding scripture in its historical context. The dialogue highlights the beauty of God’s love and grace, encouraging listeners to reflect on their own faith journeys and the role of women in ministry.

I think my favorite thing Dr. Ciampa said to me, was that Ephesians was “written in the key of worship.”

Dr. Ciampa mentions a document he compiled to help students understand first century Greco-Roman views of women and marriage, beginning with Old Testament and Classical Greek texts up through the time of the New Testament, so that NT texts might be better understood in light of the developing contexts. You can read that insightful document here. And find more of Dr. Ciampa’s scholarly writings on his website, viceregency.com.

You can watch our conversation on YouTube, or stream it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and more–find all those links on Podlink! Please like, subscribe, rate and share with a friend if you found this interview helpful!

Transcript:

Ruth Perry (00:16)
This is a new thing for me and I appreciate you being one of my very first guests, Dr. Ciampa.

Roy Ciampa (00:22)
Well, I’m honored to be invited and hope this will be helpful to people.

Ruth Perry (00:26)
What I’m hoping to share on my podcast for my first season is I’m going to go back and have conversations with people who helped me as my faith has shifted and changed over the last 20 years. Because my background is very conservative, complementarian, traditional, But it’s changed a lot over the years through crises of faith and through cognitive dissonance that’s happened and different things that have gone on. And I’m just really grateful that my faith has remained strong because I’ve encountered people like you who’ve helped me to reimagine my faith and think about things differently.

Roy Ciampa (01:04)
That’s nice to hear.

Ruth Perry (01:04)
And so at the time that I had you as a professor, I was a complementarian student, pretty committed to that perspective. And I was an educational ministries student at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. And I think that I took Ephesians as one of my core theology classes. And it’s the only class that I encountered you as a professor. But looking back on my seminary experience, I really loved that class so much and the book of Ephesians has just remained my favorite book of the Bible.

And I’m really grateful that I had that experience because I didn’t have to learn Greek or Hebrew in seminary as an education student. And this was the only class where we really went through word by word and you taught how to parse Paul’s Greek into English and how to make sense of his run on sentences and you taught the importance of understanding the context of the passage. And I just learned so much from you. And so I’m really excited to talk about that with you today. But I thought before we get into that, I would like to know more about you. I don’t really know what your faith formation was like, your background, where you’re coming from. If you’d like to just go back and tell us a little bit about your own spiritual journey.

Roy Ciampa (02:15)
Sure, I’d be happy to. I grew up in an nominal Christian family. We went to church about once a year because my grandmother wanted us to. I was confirmed in a Congregational church when I was, I suppose, a young teenager. But it didn’t really mean much. I never really understood anything about the Bible.

I came to faith when I was in my first year of college, I owe it, a large part of it, I owe, I think, to next door neighbors who moved in when I was in middle school. Wonderful, dedicated Christians, the Monk family, and they had two sons, one a year older than me and one a year younger, Robert and Stuart. And the whole family just modeled for me, a wonderful Christian faith and love. And so they took me to evangelistic events.

But I didn’t think that I thought I was a Christian. I remember sitting during one, in a roller skating rink while somebody was speaking and we had our heads down and I’m saying that this isn’t for me. I’m already Christian. They’re not talking about me. I’m a Christian. Anyway, it was my first year of college. Some guys shared the gospel with me and I realized that this was the message that had transformed their lives and their family and I realized it was true and I was in need of it and so I trusted in the Lord and I was baptized, came to faith, I was discipled.

But I was in a very conservative context. I was listening to the guys that discipled me had me listening to some fundamentalist preachers. John R. Rice wrote a book I Am a Fundamentalist and after a year I felt like God was calling me into ministry and I went to Jerry Falwell’s school at the time was called Liberty Baptist College for a year. And then after a year there I transferred to Gordon College where I did my undergraduate degree.

By the time I graduated from Gordon College, well certainly I was no longer a fundamentalist, was I would say mainstream evangelical and probably still conservative on women’s issues but very open to other ways of understanding that issue.

I don’t really remember at what point, if it was near the end of my college experience or beginning of my seminary experience, I went to Denver Seminary, had some great mentors there. And I know while I was at Denver Seminary, I became a convinced egalitarian.

And that came out of various kinds of experiences. Part of it was coming to have a much better understanding of the world in which the New Testament was written, and especially Paul, in the context of his letters and the things that he says about women, among other things. And part of it was just understanding more broadly what theology would say about how I should relate to my own wife and other women as well.

But maybe we’ll get around to that later. After seminary, my wife and I were appointed to go overseas and we had two kids by then and we took our kids and we went to Portugal where I trained pastors. And overall, our time in Portugal span about 12 years, and in the middle of that, I spent a couple of years in Scotland doing my PhD.

I had wonderful time training pastors and Christian leaders in Portugal, worked with the Bible Society there to help with their contemporary Portuguese translation of the Bible. And then I was invited to go teach at Gordon-Conwell in 2001. So I taught the New Testament studies at Gordon-Conwell from 2001 to 2014. At a certain point became the Chair of the Division of Biblical Studies there.

And then after or 13 years there, I went and worked for four years for American Bible Society, training Bible translators and Bible translation consultants around the world. I still taught for Gordon Conwell on weekends while I was doing that, but my main gig was training Bible translators and Bible translation consultants. So that was a great experience, but I missed the full-time academic community.

So in 2018 I accepted the invitation to take on the role of Chair of the Religion Department which soon became the Department of Biblical and Religious Studies at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. But.

In 2024, I retired and moved back to New Hampshire, which is where my wife and I had had a place for a while, and it’s our happy place. And so I’m now a professor emeritus at Stanford University, and I teach a course a semester for Gordon Conwell. I’m teaching Interpreting the New Testament for Gordon Conwell on Thursdays right now. So I mean, that’s that’s more than you wanted, probably, but that’s kind of the overview.

Ruth Perry (06:38)
No, that’s great. Congratulations on retiring and then continuing your work.

Roy Ciampa (06:44)
Thank you. Well, there’s lots of what I’ve done that I love. I’m still writing books and articles and teaching one day a week scratches that itch. so it’s fun.

Ruth Perry (06:53)
I’m a Gordon College graduate myself. I was a music major there and the reason why I decided to study music was because I loved the church and I wanted to be in ministry and that’s where I saw women serving in the church. So I studied music and then I decided to go to Gordon Conwell in 2003 when I graduated from Gordon College because I still loved learning so much and I wanted to continue learning and in my conception of my ministry life, I always conceived myself as just being in volunteer ministry in the church. And that I would be a pastor’s wife, likely, or a missionary’s wife. I really wanted to live overseas. I went backpacking through Europe while I was in college, and Portugal was my favorite. I loved Portugal.

Roy Ciampa (07:41)
It’s a great country.

Ruth Perry (07:41)
And so I would have liked to have been a missionary or a musician, but those were really the only two ideas that I had in my brain that a woman could do in the church. I knew that I loved the church more than anything and I really wanted to serve the church. So that’s what brought me to Gordon-Conwell and brought me to your classroom. And it sounds like it was early on in your teaching there.

Roy Ciampa (08:00)
Yeah, it was early on at Gordon-Conwell. I taught for a number of years in Portugal, but that was in my early years at Gordon-Conwell, yes. And I remember that course called Ephesians in Depth, as I recall.

Ruth Perry (08:09)
It was in depth for sure. Yes. I remember we went word by word and we would, I can’t even remember how to explain what you did with us in the class. I was trying to find my class notes because I know that they’re in my basement somewhere. But I remember we parsed every sentence and figured out what the structure was. And you really brought it.

Roy Ciampa (08:29)
Ha

Ruth Perry (08:37)
It was hard work and it brought the book to life for me.

Roy Ciampa (08:41)
That’s so kind of you to say. I’m grateful to hear that.

Ruth Perry (08:43)
And it’s such a beautiful book. Ephesians, it just, the words that come to mind when I think about Ephesians is, Paul keeps talking about peace and love and unity and the power of the Holy Spirit and all the blessings that we’ve received from God. And it’s just such a beautiful theological grounding of then why we should follow Christ and live in a way worthy of the calling we’ve received.

And so I don’t know how much you want to talk about Ephesians itself before we get to the household codes in Ephesians 5. But what I really want to talk with you too for my Beautiful Kingdom Builders audience is the context of the book of Ephesians and what was going on in the cultural world at that time that would have helped the people who are hearing Paul’s message in that day understand it maybe differently than we understand it today.

Roy Ciampa (09:35)
Well, yeah, there’s a lot to talk about. So many different aspects of it. And I think one of the things, actually in our church, we’re in a small group right now that’s going through Ephesians. And so it’s been kind of fun to do that in a church Bible study again. But one of the things I think that’s key to Ephesians, you just have this joyful, kind of, I would say worshipful kind of tone to the whole thing.

Many people have pointed out that the letter has a different style than most of Paul’s letters. It has these kind of run-on sentences and these kind of complicated sentences. There’s lots of what we call pleonasms where you could say something simply, but in a pleonasm you could put up two or three different ways of saying it within the same sentence. So over and over again Paul will say we have kind of this blessing of redemption, the forgiveness of our sins. And it’s like, well, those are two different ways of talking about the same thing, or he’ll talk about within one line, he does this a couple of times in the opening part of Ephesians, that everything’s happened according to God’s purpose and his will and his choice. It’s like, well, those are just three different ways of saying God did what he wanted to do.

And I’m reminded that, We find examples of this in various contexts. We find it in poetry and we find it in worship music. An example I typically use is the song Majesty, Worship His Majesty. And if you go through that song over and over again, it finds different ways to say the same thing in new words. Kingdom authority, majesty, kingdom authority, so exalt, lift up on high. Those are two different things, they’re not. Exalt, lift up on high, the name of Jesus. Magnify, come glorify. What’s the difference between magnifying, it’s all the same thing.

Singing this is just a worshipful, excited, rich, different way of expressing yourself. And Paul begins the letter with what’s called a Jewish Baruchah, which in Hebrew would be blessed, be like Baruch HaTah, Adonai Eloheinu, blessed as the Lord our God. he starts out, blessed is the…

God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every blessing in Christ. And so I think the style is different and I think it’s different for a purpose because Paul’s wanting to express his theology in a very worshipful almost liturgical kind of way.

And it’s remarkable that he’s doing that while he’s under arrest. He says he’s in chains, which reminds us of Acts of course, when they’re imprisoned in Philippi and they end up singing songs and praising God in prison. And here Paul is, he’s in prison and he writes a letter and he writes it in the key of worship. And partly that’s because just who Paul is and partly because he’s writing to readers who are Gentiles, who are so far away from where Christianity began in Jerusalem and Judea. And they’ve got to be thinking as Gentiles, like their spiritual leader is now in prison and could lose his life.

What does this mean? Have they gotten themselves messed up with something they shouldn’t have? Has a train gone off the rails and they’ve got to be concerned about Paul. They’ve got to be concerned about what all this means. And here’s Paul, he writes from prison, he’s like, God’s plan is working itself out in this wonderful way and it’s such a blessing to me to be a part of this. let’s praise God for all the blessings that we have. And let me just list off some of these blessings for you.

And it really is, I think, meant to reassure the readers that… the train hasn’t gone off the rails, that God is in charge, that everything that they’ve experienced is part of God’s plan of redemption and of reconciling Jews and Gentiles together and to God, and that Paul is not at all, know, fretting or depressed or himself concerned that something’s gone wrong because he’s in prison, but he sees God’s hand in all of this. So I think that’s a, for me, that’s a very important part of the background.

And then you have to be careful because I’m tempted to try and lecture my way through a whole semester’s worth of stuff on Ephesians in one little conversation. But I do think, you know, that most people recognize that two halves of the letter have different tones and sometimes they describe the first half as doctrine and the second as practical teaching.

But an important key is that it’s not just that Paul decided to talk and discuss theology for a while and then look at his watch and said, well, that’s maybe enough theology for them. Maybe I should give them some practical stuff. And so let me talk practical stuff for a while. But the theology underwrites the practical part. That is, the theology, the first part is there to support everything he’s going to tell the church that they ought to be doing.

And the second part, they are organized organically related to each other. And the whole first part is about God’s grace, his mercy, his love, how he hasn’t treated us the way we deserve when we were, you know, children of wrath by nature. He hasn’t treated us that way, but he’s shown us love and mercy and grace and blessing upon blessing upon blessing. And then we get in the second half of the letter. And in my understanding, the second half of letter is primarily all about imitating God.

And so we get that theme early on how we should be imitators of God. We shouldn’t live like the Gentiles live. That’s one of the themes. But we should be imitators of God. And then he talks about how God has shown his love to us in Jesus Christ who gave himself for us and his love for us. And so we have sections that talk about how we should be one, united together as one body.

And then we have material talking about how we should and love and we should walk in the light and then later how we should walk in wisdom and then finally the last part is where we should put on the full armor of God and we look at those things they come what do these things have in common being one walking in love and light and wisdom well love and light are two main attributes of God God is love God is light

And then wisdom is another very well-known attribute of God, the all-wise one. And there’s large sections of scripture dedicated to wisdom and Proverbs 8 and elsewhere. And that’s understood to be an attribute of God. And then you think,

When we walk in love, we’re imitating God. When we walk in light, we’re imitating God. When we walk in wisdom, we’re imitating God and His wisdom. And then you realize that the full armor of God we’re supposed to put on is not just armor that God gives us, but the Old Testament background tells us this is the armor that God puts on. He puts on a helmet of salvation. He puts on a breastplate of righteousness. When he goes and he fights spiritual battles for his people. So even when we put on our spiritual armor, we’re still imitating God.

That earlier part about being one, it’s like, that’s right, God is one. So when we’re one, you there’s one God, one Lord, one baptism, and when we act as one, we’re also imitating God. So one of the greatest ways we imitate God then, when you understand the relationship between the first half of the letter and the second half, is by treating other people the way he’s treated us.

He hasn’t treated us as he could have, but he treated us with love, with mercy, with grace, over and over again. And this ends up becoming very important for, as you referred to, the household codes, because they’re a main theme is about how people in charge with authority treat people that in that culture were under them, wives were under their husbands and children under the parents and slaves under their masters. And so one of the main themes that comes out there is, again, the emphasis tends to be on the person with power, treating the one with less power with grace and mercy and not being harsh with them. But I mean, that raises all kinds of other questions about why do we have household codes and what’s this about?

We’re talking about household codes, we’re talking about slaves and masters. And we don’t have slaves and masters in our household. We think of those as something outside the family. You get your family, and then you get your employees or other people. But of course, that was part of the family. But hey, I’ve been going on for a while now, Ruth, so maybe feel free.

Ruth Perry (18:02)
No, you’re cooking. I’m enjoying it immensely. I was thinking about back to your class, I remember that before we got into the household codes, you started that passage in Ephesians 5.18, be filled with the Holy Spirit, singing songs and hymns and spiritual songs to each other, making music in your heart to the Lord and always giving thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and submitting to each other out of reverence for Christ. That all of those things were under that same heading of be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Roy Ciampa (18:42)
Yes, it is. And being filled with the Holy Spirit is under the heading of walking in wisdom. So, because it’s one of the things is if you look for the term walking, which is often translated as live, like live in love or live according to light. The metaphor is walking in the light and walking in love and walking in children of light or walk wisely. And then the wisdom part underneath that is all the stuff about being filled with the spirit and submitting to one another.

And then so all that stuff about husbands and wives and parents and children and masters and slaves comes under the submitting to one another part, which comes under the being filled with the Holy Spirit part, which comes under the walking in wisdom part.

And it’s Paul providing his readers with wisdom about how to live in family in the first century Ephesian or, you know, Greco-Roman context. And of course, it’s important that context is radically different from ours.

Ruth Perry (19:44)
Can you describe that context for us.

Roy Ciampa (19:47)
Sure. Well, in a few different ways. Maybe one way to start is by, just as we were already kind of hinting at…

that when we talk about a household code, we do talk about husbands and wives and parents and children and masters and slaves because the household was very differently structured than we think of it today. That many households, they had slaves within the household and they’d have also freed men and free women in some cases in the household as well. And so we think of a household typically as, you know, parents and their children and nuclear family.

And sometimes we think of the extended family as well. Maybe there are grandparents around or something. But we don’t think of parents and children and slaves and freed men and women as part of a household. But that is a part of what a fairly well-to-do or a somewhat well-to-do household would have all those components. And then, you know, we realize

When people preach through Ephesians, when they get to the stuff about slaves and masters, they realize what we don’t approve of masters and slaves today. And so if they’re to preach on that, they kind of adapt it and say, well, this might apply to like employees and employers and that sort of thing. And so here we can get some wisdom for how we can relate to each other as employees and employers. And maybe there’s it’s OK. But it’s really important to point out that employees are not slaves and employers are not masters. And so you have to make adaptations.

You can’t just say all the employers shouldn’t treat the employees the way Paul thought, you know, masters should treat slaves. And we have to be reminded that Paul’s not endorsing slavery, but early Christians were living in a world where this is just part of the social fabric. They weren’t put in charge. They weren’t asked to take over the social fabric and restructure it. They had to learn how can they live as Christians within that social fabric and within these institutions. And so Paul provides wisdom for those who are in these situations.

But as I was saying, when we get to that stuff about masters and slaves, people say, we have to make adjustments. We can’t just apply that to employees and employers because that’s not the same thing. But when we preach about husbands and wives, people look around and say, I know husbands and wives, and many of us will say, well, I’m a husband or I’m a wife and I have a wife or a husband. And so they’re all around us. So when he starts talking about husbands and wives, we’re like, okay, we know what he’s talking about.

This is something very familiar to all of us, except that it isn’t because marriage has evolved in many ways. And so to go back and realize that in the Greco-Roman world, Men didn’t typically marry until they were 28 to 30 years old. And partly because there was no expectation with the double standard that’s typical in all of history, the double standard with regard to sex is that men weren’t expected to remain pure or virgins until marriage. They had access to prostitutes and household slaves and other sexual outlets and that wasn’t considered a problem by most people in the Greco-Roman world. Whereas women were expected to be married shortly after going through puberty.

When I was in class, I have like a 40 page document, you may or may not recall of this kind of material from the Old Testament and quotes from the Greco-Roman world and different sources where people are talking about husbands and wives and it talks about age at marriage and it talks about, you know, the understanding that it’s good if a woman or girl can know how to carry on a conversation and maybe do a little bit of sewing, a little bit of cooking, but that’s about it because she’s supposed to learn everything she learns from her husband that she’s supposed to be like a tabla rasa, she’s supposed to be like a blank slate on whom the husband can leave his impressions.

I was just reading, reviewing again because something came up on social media. I don’t remember what it was anymore, but it was about, that’s what it was, this woman’s book recently. A woman wrote a book on misogyny in America and the publisher accidentally put out an ad or an email inviting people to submit for exam copies. whoever prepared the text for that forgot to replace the name of the author from a previous book they must have worked on. And so they had the title of the book in the book cover, but the author’s name was a man who hadn’t written anything like this, who writes in very different subjects.

So here’s a book on misogyny in the church, and the publisher puts out something that attributes it to a man instead of the woman who wrote it, and reminded me of this ancient… thing about somebody who’s talking about some man’s wife who’s a man who’s great at poetry and he’s presented some poetry from his wife and he claims that his wife wrote this wonderful poetry and this person’s saying it’s great poetry but you know I’m not sure if his wife really wrote it but either way the husband deserves the credit because either he’s the one who really wrote it or He’s the one that taught her.

So whatever the woman produces, it’s always back to the man. Because again, she’s expected to have learned whatever she knows through her husband, a woman getting married right after puberty and a man not marrying until he’s 28 or 30 years old. There’s a huge difference, not only in age, but maturity, knowledge of the world and in the Greco-Roman world, the extent to which women were expected to be more or less confined to the home, whereas men could go anywhere and could have a greater education so their knowledge of the world is different. Their human development at marriage and then throughout marriage. You might say, 10 years later it’ll be different. Well, 10 years later they still, they would have already formed a kind of relationship where he’s practically like a parent.

The husband’s practically a parent or Ben Witherington describes it as almost an uncle-niece relationship between a husband and wife at that time. And that changes a lot. I mean, that helps you understand all kinds of things in the New Testament when people are talking about how husbands and wives should relate to each other. It’s a significant thing in terms of submission if the wife has always only been kind of tutored by her husband and taught by him and mentored by him.

You know, three stages of human development behind him, then it’s natural that the man’s going to be treated as though he’s more knowledgeable, wiser, more experienced, better able to provide any kind of leadership needed, and that that’s the role that he should have. Which brings us back to that whole thing about love and mercy.

One of things that I realized when I started looking through these texts and thinking about it more was if one of the main themes of the letter is that we should treat each other as Christ and God has treated us, if my wife is my peer, which is something that just was not normally ever the case in the Greco-Roman world, right? We were just talking about that. But my wife is more or less my age. She has the same experience of the world. She hasn’t been cooped up at home. She’s got college education. She has, a master’s degree. She’s wiser than I am on many things and just as intelligent as I am. If she’s my peer in every way, does Jesus, does God really want us to pretend as though I’m much wiser and more knowledgeable than she is and better able to lead in every situation than she is?

Because that was the traditional slot of a wife in first century Ephesus and the slot of a husband in first century Ephesus or should I actually treat her for who she really is? And to recognize her strengths and her knowledge and her wisdom and her abilities. And this relates to something I’ve sometimes referred to as the mapping of identities. That is, we look at women today and we map onto them the identity we find of a wife in the first century Ephesus. We look at a husband today and we map onto them the identity of a husband in first century Ephesus. And we do that in other ways as well. I have an whole article about ways in which this mapping of identities can create real problems.

But I don’t think I should ask my wife to try and fill a slot from a different culture and time, asks her to treat me and asks me to treat her as though we are so different, as though we are as different as the first century Greco-Roman husband and wife, when in fact we’re actually peers. And then I’d go back and realize that if this whole second part is about learning how to treat other people…as God has treated us, and I realize, well, even if you look at the household code, the instructions to husbands and wives aren’t exactly the same as the husbands to parents and children, and neither of those are the same as the instructions to slaves and masters. So Paul recognized that although we’re all supposed to be Christ-like and treat others in Christ-like ways, the nature of the relationship is going to impact what that looks like.

And so the first century Greco-Roman husband-wife relationship is different from the parent-child relationship is different from the slave-master relationship. So Paul provides different instructions. So then I begin to think and realize, well, then we can treat this as a case study.

We have at least three case studies and what it means to apply Christ-like, God-like love and mercy and grace to other people. And it’s one thing in the marriage, one thing with the children, another thing with masters and slaves. Maybe it would be something else if it was with a spouse who is my peer and who is as intelligent and wise and able to lead and do other things as I am, as my same age, same experience of the world, what would it then mean for me to treat her in a Christ-like way and for her to treat me in a Christ-like way and not try to fit them into some…

You know, I’m reminded we have a two and a half year old granddaughter, you know, those cubes you get that have the different shapes, there’s the triangle and there’s the square and the rectangle and the star and you have the blocks, you’re trying to fit them through the right shapes, you know, and I feel like lots of times they’re taking, you know, modern men and women who are very different shapes and we’re trying to fit them into the shapes of the first century husband and wife, male and female.

And those pieces just don’t fit. And the key question still comes back to, if I’m looking at the second half of Ephesians, I’m learning how to walk wisely in acting in Christ-like ways towards people around me.

And so there lots of different relationships. There’s the student athlete relationship. There’s the police officer citizen relationship. There’s the teacher student relationship. There’s the husband wife relationship. There’s the employee employee employee relationship. And all of these we learn how to treat each other in loving ways. But we don’t have to find some first century Greco-Roman slot to fit people into to make that relationship match the one we have.

Ruth Perry (31:02)
I feel like the way my brain works is that I have a sieve inside my brain and when I go to class I learn the information and it all goes away. But for some reason I really latched on to all of that that you taught 20 years ago and then I went off and I got married the next year and it just fell completely into traditional rules because that’s what I grown up with and that’s what had been modeled to me and same for my husband. And so it was just natural to not even think about how we’re going to relate to each other. We just fell into the traditional rules that we had been taught through example and direct teaching. And almost immediately for me as the woman, I could recognize that my voice was diminished, my importance was diminished, and it created some cognitive dissonance for me. But I didn’t, I just tolerated it. I didn’t really rock the boat any.

And then we had another experience early on in our marriage. I’m thinking maybe three or four years after we got married, our church had a really terrible conflict and split. My dad was a pastor and so it was deeply personal. And you’re teaching again on the book of Ephesians. I looked at that experience and it was a traditional church structure with men in leadership. And it was clear as day to me that if the women had a voice and a place at the table in that conflict, things wouldn’t have been as ugly as they were and as destructive and terrible. And so those two things, like my early marriage years and walking through that church conflict,

The importance of your teaching on the book of Ephesians really snapped into place for me crystal clear that if we are walking in a manner worthy of the calling we’ve received, we’re going to submit to one another, male, female, slave, free, Gentile. Like there’s no distinctions that if we’re truly living in the way that God has called us to live, that we’re going to love each other. And that means we’re going to listen to each other’s voices, that every voice has a place and has value.

And we’re going to submit the mutual submission piece that we often gloss straight over and go into, OK, but wives, you’re submitting, and then the husband is the head.

Roy Ciampa (33:12)
Mm-hmm. Right, yes. No, it really, it ends up being, and I hate to say it, but in many cases, not a loving sort of thing, but a very obedience, command-centered sort of thing, which kind of is pushing them back against the grain of the letter as a whole, and the way I understand the theology of the letter as a whole.

By the way, one of the key texts that I think is helpful for thinking about this is in 1 Corinthians chapter 14, where Paul has that part that says, and some people think that this doesn’t belong in the Bible, and I don’t know what you think, but I think verses 34 and 35 are supposed to be there. But it’s the part that says women should remain silent in the churches, they’re not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says.

They want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home, for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church. Now Paul had already taught that both men and women could pray and prophesy, right, back in chapter 11. And that’s remarkable in itself because a lot of people look at 1 Corinthians 11, they think, because it starts off about who’s the head of who, who’s the head you know, God is the head of Christ, who’s the head of the man, who’s head of the woman. it sounds like, okay, yeah, very much what sort of subordination here and all this sort of thing.

But when he actually gets into it, he talks about ministry in just two terms, prayer and prophecy. Gordon Fee has suggested, and I think he’s probably right, that those are like big terms for discourse directed to God. That’s prayer and discourse directed at the congregation, which is prophecy. But in any case, those are the only two things he talks about. And he says both men and women can do it. They just have to dress appropriately when they’re doing it. So there’s nothing in there about any kinds of ministries that men can do that women can’t.

But anyway, so he’s already said that they can pray and prophesy. So what’s this all about? They should remain silent. And so obviously he’s not speaking about speaking in general. He has certain kinds of speaking. And in that very passage, he says, if they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home. Well, that may be the hint that what he’s talking about is women who don’t understand something that’s going on.

Again, remember the women would have less education, less experience of the world, less knowledge of what’s going on around them. And if they don’t know what’s going on and they’re asking questions that are interrupting them in the church, and in that culture, for a woman to ask another man, somebody else’s husband their question, would be really offensive and would raise all kinds of concerns. Anyway, so.

If that’s what’s going on, Paul says if they have things they should inquire of their own husbands at home. Now, you know, I may have said this when I taught you in class, but I mean, I’ve been teaching since, you know, a full-time teacher since I suppose I started in 1991. And I don’t know how many times I could have said, having both a husband and a wife in my class, I could have said to the husband, if you’re not getting all this, you might ask your wife to explain it to you when you get home.

I’ve very often had husbands and wives in the class and it’s not unusual for the wife to understand things better than to be more academically strong than the husband is. I could never say, you know, if any of the women here don’t understand what I’m talking about, why don’t you ask your own husband at home? not that I couldn’t just say it because it wouldn’t be politically correct, but it would just be stupid.

And I’m not saying Paul’s stupid, The expression assumes a culture and a context where the husband can be virtually guaranteed to know more and understand things better than their wife, which is perfectly reasonable for the Greco-Roman context of Corinth that Paul’s speaking to, not Corinth and Ephesus and the whole world in which Paul’s speaking because of this age and education and experience gap that we talked about at the beginning of our conversation. So a verse like that makes perfectly good sense in that context, but would make absolutely no sense in a world where men and women can both be educated and experienced And so again, I think it really is a problem of, I think, very harmful biblical interpretation when

We end up trying to act as though we are living in roles that were filled by first century people. And we’re gonna figure out how to treat each other in those roles as opposed to treating people for who they actually are. And that’s at the core of love, isn’t it? To know someone, to respect them for who they are, for what they bring to the table, and to learn from each other and to submit to each other.

And that’s really a large part of what effusions is about.

Ruth Perry (38:10)
I think from my background being very conservative, there was a lot of warning against listening to people who didn’t share traditional values because they were being influenced by the culture around them or they were playing fast and loose with scripture and they weren’t taking the word of God seriously or this or that. Like there were so many warnings against listening to someone who might suggest mutual submission or sharing authority between men and women in ministry and in the home.

And in my experience, just with my encounter of you, Dr. Ciampa and since you, many other egalitarian scholars and pastors, they’ve all taken the word of God seriously, and their life has shown the fruit of the Spirit in ways that isn’t always readily witnessed in other people’s lives who are really clinging to the authority structures and having power over others. And so I’m really grateful that I took this Ephesians class with you 20 something years ago and that I remembered all the information even though I compartmentalized it at the time and filed it away and went on with my traditional ways. I’m grateful that it was accessible when I needed it and when things started falling apart. And so then I didn’t just say Well, if this is what Christianity is, I don’t want it. But I could imagine a more beautiful Christianity because of what you had taught me.

Roy Ciampa (39:42)
That’s very kind, but I think that it is very sad to see people turning away from Christianity because the presentation they’ve received is not wholesome, it’s not healthy, it’s not edifying. And too often it is, as you said, very much about power and who can have power. And so it’s very sad to see large parts of a whole generation are more that are turning away from the church because of the way the church in Christianity has been presented, which is sad. And we do think it’s such a beautiful thing. The truth of God’s grace and the grace that he teaches us to live by ought to be something that ought to attract people from all over the globe to this great God of love and grace and mercy who’s worthy of all our praise.

Ruth Perry (40:30)
the message of Ephesians is speaking to us today. And I pray we all have ears to hear.

Where can we find your papers and your writing? Dr. Ciampa, do you have a website or do you have the online presence?

Roy Ciampa (40:43)
I have a website. Yeah, actually, but it’s not it’s just a purely pedagogical sort of thing. And I, and I’ve spent hundreds of hours, if not thousands, thousands in the heyday of my career. So I have a I have a website called viceregency.com And the.com is a joke, because I’ve never done any commercial stuff with it. should be a.org. But I have vice regency.com. And then it’s it’s all links to different things you can learn from and

Maybe I’ll go there and add a link to this paper. I’ll tell you what, I’ll send it to you in case there’s some place you want to post it on, on anything you’re doing.

Ruth Perry (41:20)
I have a Facebook page called the Beautiful Kingdom Builders. I will put it there and I want to give you the last word before we sign off.

Roy Ciampa (41:31)
Well, thank you for having me. It’s been a blessing to be with you and it is anything I can do to help people see how great and marvelous, as Paul was trying to say in Ephesians, how beyond anything we can imagine is the love of God, how deep and high and wide, and in every dimension you can imagine this love of God that we find in Jesus Christ and the mercy and love that it teaches us to express towards others.

May God advance that through the knowledge of Jesus Christ. So thanks for having me.

Ruth Perry (42:02)
Thank you so much. Amen. Have a great time in your retirement and as you continue to teach. Thank you so much. Bye.

Roy Ciampa (42:08)
Thank you very much. Bye bye.

Thanks for visiting The Beautiful Kingdom Builders and listening to this podcast episode. You can subscribe by email here up on the far right of this blog, and find TBKB on all your favorite podcasting and social media platforms. God bless!

003 I Jenna Dunn of Ezer Bible

Posted on December 24, 2025 by Ruth Perry | Leave a comment

In this episode, Jenna Dunn, writer and theologian at Ezer Bible, describes her personal journey out of complementarian theology and the toll that patriarchal bible interpretation and church culture took on her faith and marriage. You can follow Jenna’s ministry on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and more! I hope to have more conversations with Jenna in the future about the Bible and interpreting it through an egalitarian lens. Here is the video of our interview, and you can listen to it on your favorite podcasting platforms.

TRANSCRIPT:

Ruth Perry (00:15)
My guest today is Jenna Dunn, who has a ministry called Ezer Bible. You can find her website at ezerbible.com, E-Z-E-R-B-I-B-L-E.com. And if you scroll down to the bottom of the homepage, there are links to all of her social media.

I wanted to explain briefly that word, ezer. In Genesis 2:18, God says, he made an ezer, a helper, for the man. In English, the word helper can mean someone of a subordinate status. But if you look at the other places where ezer occurs in the Bible, it mostly refers to God, who is our help. So certainly not a subordinate help, but rather a strong help.

Jenna and I talk about the toll that Complementarian Theology took on her faith and her marriage. And we talk about her love for the Bible, even though reading it through a patriarchal lens almost cost her her faith. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Jenna Dunn and follow her Ezer Bible ministry.

Ruth Perry (01:14)
Well, tell me more about your background. So you live in Oregon? Is that where you’re from?

Jenna Dunn (01:18)
Yeah, yeah, I’ve lived in Oregon my whole life. I was not really raised in the church. I used to go to the church a little bit. Like as a teenager, I went to a Baptist church, but, when I got married, my husband’s family was very involved in Calvary Chapel. And so for a long time we were Calvary Chapel people and he became a pastor. He went to the Bible college.

Calvary Chapel has like a Bible college in Arizona. And you know, he read systematic theology, the Wayne Grudem stuff, you know, in Bible college. And then we started a church. And I mean, if you’re familiar with Calvary Chapel, you probably kind of know.

Ruth Perry (01:50)
Yeah. So I’m thinking it’s charismatic. I don’t really know much about Calvary

Jenna Dunn (02:02)
It’s like a charismatic Baptist church. It’s not reformed, but it’s complementarian. And it’s a little political, at least ours was.

Ruth Perry (02:12)
Is Calvary Chapel, is that the one that the Jesus Movement sprang out of? Okay.

Jenna Dunn (02:19)
Yeah. So, I mean, there’s some really neat things about that, the origin of that movement. Like I do like that origin story, but I think what Calvary Chapel has become is much more similar to like the Southern Baptist Convention or like the Reformed Complementarian Movement.

Ruth Perry (02:22)
Yeah.

Jenna Dunn (02:41)
Most the people in Calvary Chapel are reading a new King James Version Bible, not an ESV Bible. But they very much listen to teachers of the Complementarian Reformed Movement. And I remember, that was always like a point of contention is there would be certain Bible teachers or leaders who were Reformed and it’s like, well, we’re not Reformed. So, you know, trying to figure out like where the theology lined up, but…

but definitely that commonality of holding to, you know, complementarian theology or the idea of gender roles and women not being in leadership. And I think, once you accepted that viewpoint, it opens you up for some of the more extreme Christian patriarchy ideas. So in the church context, I was in, it wasn’t a part of our church’s belief system, but I was still exposed to the Pearls. So like I have Created to be His Help Meet. That was a book that was given out to all the women, not from the church leadership, but just from somebody going to the church. you meet a nice homeschool family and like they give out these materials. I was also exposed to
a lot of Mark Driscoll type teaching. And the pastor that ended up coming in and kind of being the lead pastor was an Acts 29? is it? Yeah, the pastor was trained through that. And he quoted Mark Driscoll a lot. So there was that influence. I remember my ex-husband

Ruth Perry (04:00)
It’s 29. Yeah, Mark Driscoll was one of the founders of that. Yeah.

Jenna Dunn (04:15)
like going to a men’s leadership retreat at Mark Driscoll’s church and it, you know, like Voddie Baucham. We were very adjacent to some of these more extreme things. And, and I was always, I’ve always been more like inclined towards theology. I read it, you know, like I go and look up these people and like, I read it and I’m like, whoa, these ideas are, you know.

Ruth Perry (04:24)
Yeah.

Jenna Dunn (04:35)
I just, it was, it’s a weird position to be in because I, I do like actually listen. Like if I go to church, I listened to what the person says and, and I read my Bible and in some ways I had more theology training or a Bible training than the men in leadership around me in Calvary Chapel. Like usually the pastors don’t actually have very much seminary training. They’re just charismatic men who I don’t know, there may be mentored a little bit by older pastors.

Ruth Perry (05:00)
They are called and God equipped them. That’s all they needed.

Jenna Dunn (05:05)
Yeah, and you’re not really in a position as a ministry wife to change anything, so. I did that for over a decade and I was very unhappy for like the last five years and it did slowly tear apart my marriage. There’s a lot of ideas within Complementarian Theology that are really unhealthy for couples and for families. And then I think if you add to that, there’s ideas in our culture, right? So like even though

My ex-husband didn’t really embrace, like he was just not a theology person. He just was like, I just love people and he didn’t think about it. But he also didn’t understand that like the things that we were a part of were problematic. Like he just didn’t see it. And, you know, it caused a lot of conflict. Like it was just very hard on our relationship to navigate that and not have the same understanding.

But I think a lot of good has come from it because it forced me to learn the Bible really well. I always had a message prepared. I always had like in my, the Bible I used at the time, I had seven passages bookmarked and I’ve made a Bible study guide about that, but there’s seven verses starting with Romans 16 that I would break down, This is what the Bible actually says about women in ministry and about men and women. And I was always kind of ready.

And I think, I had convinced my ex-husband and he was kind of just, you know, we kind of had this understanding, he would open the door for me, given the chance. Like if there was a chance I could convince other people in leadership that this is what the Bible really taught. Then, you know, he wanted to see me be able to do that. But he also encouraged me to just pray and And, you know, things change slowly. And so we stayed in this really unhealthy church structure for probably way too long and just kind of hoped that like, people would change, you know, but I, I don’t really recommend people stay in those types of environment. It’s, it’s tempting too, cause you’re like, well, these people all believe the Bible and they love Jesus. So they’ll figure it out, you know, but it, just, it’s a hard,

Ruth Perry (07:08)
Yeah.

Jenna Dunn (07:11)
It’s a hard mindset to bring people out of. But the good of it in my life is just what I’ve learned over the years. I was really influenced by so many amazing theologians and Bible teachers. When I started Ezer Bible, I was really influenced by Is it Carolyn Kustis James? I read Half the Church and it was the best thing I ever read. mean, it was like water in the desert for me. just, she was so brilliant. And I was really influenced by Rachel Held Evans. This was like a lot of women over the years that I just found people online to learn from and to learn what the Bible actually says was better to me than to just leave a sort of toxic mindset and just not believe anymore, which, you know, was the initial path, but when God brought me back to Him and I began healing, was mostly through learning what Scripture actually says. That’s far better than just saying, I don’t want anything to do with that over there. Sometimes I tell people I left Christianity. I walked away from God over one Bible verse. There was this one thing I could not accept and it made me so angry.

First Corinthians 14 with the whole women are to be silent where Paul’s quoting the oral law or quoting the law, “As the law says “. In my Bible at the time, which I think was, the new King James, it has a footnote to Genesis three 16 as if that’s the law that it’s quoting from. That was what I was being taught about that, that Paul is saying that women are to be silent in church. And I just couldn’t, dismiss that and be like, that’s just cultural. And, you know, I just don’t like Paul. I just couldn’t accept that the Bible said that. So it was kind of a final straw moment for me where I was like, I know I’m technically a pastor’s wife, but I just, was sort of a closet atheist for a while. I I walked away from God and I remember at that time in my life being in the position I was, was actually easier. Like if I kind of thought atheism was true, I still cared about people. I remember a few times people would ask me to pray for them and I was like, well, yeah, that’s fine. It helps them. I still wanted to help people, but I didn’t really believe that.

the way the Bible had been presented to me and that understanding of God could possibly be true and I didn’t want to be a part of it and I just thought that’s ridiculous that God would silence women and that.

Ruth Perry (09:30)
What was the emotional journey of that, of losing your faith? What was that like?

Jenna Dunn (09:37)
Yeah, think that there was really so much behind that. Like I had gone through years and years of hurt and being sidelined in the church and I had a very, very traumatic birth experience with my fourth son. And I had been exposed to all kinds of toxic ideas. I had a lot of things that happened.

But was like, that was the final straw. And I think that there was really a lot of wounds and things underneath that. But I do remember just throwing the Bible across the room and just, I just stopped reading my Bible for a while. And I was very mad at God about that one verse. But you know, years later, I did eventually come back to God through that verse. What God showed me about that verse was so healing for me. So I’m…

I’m glad to have what I think is the proper interpretation of that section of scripture and a better understanding of Paul.

Ruth Perry (10:23)
Yeah. Did God reveal it to you in some way that you weren’t anticipating? How did that come about?

Jenna Dunn (10:37)
Um, yeah, I just remember I had read like different interpretations of it. I’m always researching things, who knows? But at one point I remember reading these quotes about what some of the beliefs were about women. You know, like there’s a quote outside of the Bible, but about women not knowing anything but the use of their distaff and about it would be better for the words of scripture to be burned than to be entrusted to a woman. There’s some different quotes that float around in the teachings of the rabbis.

And I remember seeing a quote that was… It literally said, the voice of a woman is filthy nakedness. And when I did a word study on 1 Corinthians 14:36, it says, the voice of a woman is shameful. And I looked up the word shameful and it was the same word as like filthy. And I was like, wow, that’s really similar.

you know, to say that a woman’s voice is filthy, it really sounds like Paul’s quoting this Jewish oral statement or some kind of slogan or, you know, he’s quoting this idea and then rebuking it. So like, that’s the thing that was so healing for me is like, Paul’s not agreeing with that. He’s rebuking that idea. And then you see that combined with how affirming he is.

Ruth Perry (11:53)
Yeah.

Jenna Dunn (11:59)
And how he’s partnering with women in his work. It made the whole Bible more consistent. Like now I see a more cohesive picture of Paul where he’s affirming female leaders and calling them coworkers and co-laborers. And I’m like, okay, that’s a Paul that I can understand. And then also the strength of his rebuke, like to actually, you know, be like, you men, you think that the Bible came from you. You think the word of God came from you, but it came to us all, you know, it’s actually a really strong rebuke. And so I find that really comforting, like Paul’s on my side.

But yeah, It was a process. I was mad at God for a long time. I was really in a bad place for several years. I kind of came back to God and I was still a pastor’s wife and I was still in an unhealthy situation. I tried to make the most of it, but you know, it was really hard on my marriage. It was really hard to raise my kids in that environment.

I have some really sad stories about women who I was very close to that, I saw them go a different direction. I saw them embrace a more strict legalistic form of Christianity. You know, there’s women I know who I watched their marriages just turn very ugly, People that I even knew before we were saved, before we got involved in ministry, there’s people I was friends with. And so to see the fruit of complementarian theology play out in people’s lives and marriages and how they parent their kids, I have a pretty strong aversion to some of those ideas. And I also just think it’s such an incredibly twisted way to read the Bible. I think it imposes this framework on to Scripture that just makes it really difficult for people to understand the Bible.

Ruth Perry (13:48)
Yeah, that’s one of the hardest things for me. I appreciate so much of my upbringing. I grew up Baptist and there’s so much that I appreciate and I definitely always met God in the churches I’ve been involved in and I appreciate the sincerity of the faith I’ve seen, but I have also seen so much dysfunction and so much spiritual abuse and harm.

And it’s hard, the experience of starting to awaken to the dysfunction, the toxicity of the theology. Talk to me about that experience of your relationships in Calvary Chapel. How were they impacted by your journey away from that culture and that theology?

Jenna Dunn (14:28)
I think you could probably imagine like in a small town, if there’s a couple that’s the pastor and the pastor’s wife and they go through a divorce, It was just it was a nightmare. mean, I was just kind of trying to do things in the least dramatic way possible. Like, as quiet as possible. didn’t want it to harm my children. Like, I just didn’t want there to be rumors, that my kids would hear. My kids were, you know, all their friends were in the church. And, you know, like the church was our family. And, you know, those people that we had birthday parties and baby showers and people that we had known for years and years.

I actually had to work together with my ex-husband to be like how can we make this the least traumatic possible? And I really thought that they would have him stay in ministry because he was more like the administrative pastor. He did all of the the building projects and maintenance and sound equipment set up and like that type of stuff. He wasn’t like the guy in front. He wasn’t like the teaching pastor. But it was a pretty unhealthy leadership dynamic. The church I go to now is a Four Square Church, and a few Sundays ago they had a new pastor and pastor’s wife that they were installing is what they call it in four square but so they were this couple was like gonna start being in ministry and it was, I literally still cry about it. I cried during that service. I came home and cried because it was so healthy. Like everybody in the church promised to pray for the people that are leaders, pastors, and their families. They said, we’re going to pray for you. We’re going to support you. And like, make sure you put your marriage first. Make sure you take care of your kids first. And it was so beautiful to see like the community sort of rally behind these people that were willing to dedicate their lives to serving.

Just the recognition of the toll that that takes on your family. But we care about you first, not just what we can get from you. We’re not gonna put you on a pedestal. You’re just like us, but you’re willing to do this. And it was so beautiful. And that was not my experience at all being in ministry It was very toxic. And we were so afraid to let people know that we were struggling in our marriage or in our family. We didn’t, have support and, yeah, it’s like, it’s just completely different. I’d say there was like a lot of bullying. So like I remember one man that was a leader for a while, they ended up moving away, but it was like his wife was too domineering, right? So was like he was kind of made fun of, like, your wife wears the pants. None of these women were trying to control anything, but it was just like the men had to be a certain, have a certain sort of traditional masculine vibe about them. And so there was some bullying that happened if they weren’t and the main teaching pastor was very much like the guy in charge and everybody else is a yes man. And, you know, we were very afraid of not being able to pay our rent and not be able to pay our bills if we stepped out of line. So yeah, that’s basically what happened is we were forced into a position of of just having to be like, yes, okay, but this is not good. And if you’re the weak link, if you show weakness or they know that you’re struggling in your marriage, they’re gonna turn against you. It’s like you’re the sick chicken in the flock and they’re gonna pick you to death. So it’s like, you can’t show that weakness when you’re in a team like that. I very much identify when I hear people talk about what happened at Mars Hill. Like there’s people that were involved in leadership there and they talk about what that felt like. it just, was so, it was similar to the dynamic of what we were involved with.

Ruth Perry (18:08)
Yeah. My family, my dad was a senior pastor and my brother was his associate pastor and then my family attended the church and they had this big conflict erupt. And it was like, the church just kicked us while we were down. It was just like that. It was like, oh my God, this is so much worse than it had to be. And I’m just so frustrated that Christians aren’t the most loving, caring people. It makes me so mad.

Jenna Dunn (18:42)
Yeah, yeah, it’s weird to see those dynamics and you know, I kind of imagine that in the healthier churches, know, part of what besides there’s sort of being a system of checks and balances so that there’s not just like one main guy that’s the whole everything’s around that guy, you know, but I think in some of the healthier churches, it’s like you do see like the husband and wife ministry teams and you see women in positions of leadership so that they can provide like perspective of like what things are like for women in the church.

I remember saying that at one time I was like, well, if I was struggling, where would I get help? Like all of the leadership are all men and I don’t want to talk to them about that. They’re like, be like, oh, so and so’s wife. And I’m like, yeah, but she’s not in a position to change anything. The wives have to support their husbands. Like I knew, how many times I was in a leadership meeting and I knew that they did not want me to open my Bible and to say something that contradicted what they were saying. Like I know to stay in my place and not make my husband look bad. They don’t want me to lead or to be interested in theology or to have the right answer or to help them. They actually just want me to stay quiet and play my part.

And it was always hard for me because I knew what God wanted me to do. I feel like God called me to be a teacher. Like I actually would find myself in situations where we’re having a two hour long meeting about this topic and I know the answer and I could very easily show you in scripture and it would just end this meeting and we would just all be on the same page. But it was like, that was not what they wanted from me. And I didn’t want to risk my, you know, it’s sad. I wish I…hindsight I wish I would have been more willing to risk my reputation or my standing or whatever like even if it caused a huge problem I mean my life fell apart anyways like staying quiet didn’t serve me either you know so I wish I would have had more courage

Ruth Perry (20:34)
Well, it takes so long to undo all of the toxic teaching that we’ve absorbed and learned. I’ve been doing the Beautiful Kingdom Builders page for a long time. And just recently I’m finding my own voice in personal relationships with other people. Or pursue my own goals apart from my husband and stop waiting for my husband to be the ministry person that I support. It really takes a lot of time, even as your eyes are opening decades before, it still takes time to undo that cultural conditioning that we received.

Jenna Dunn (20:55)
Yes. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think I bought the domain name Ezer Bible, like, 2012. I mean, so that’s how long ago I’ve been, not doing this. And it’s because of the mindset hurdles that I’m up against. So, I started my business and all of the same issues that I was having just in my relationship with God were manifest in my business. So I’m like, why am I struggling so much as a small business owner? I’m chronically undercharging, devaluing my time, devaluing myself. I just came across so much personal problems, because of my background. I just really can’t, can’t, you know, let God fully heal me from like some of these really toxic mindsets.

And I think too, when I go back and read some of the stuff I was writing during that time for probably five years, most of the things I wrote, if I read it now, it’s not the voice I want to put out there. That’s not how I want to sound. Cause what it is, is like, I’m, I’m talking or writing from a place of feeling really inferior, trying to prove myself, right? Like trying to say I actually know something about the Bible. I know something about theology and this is why you should listen to me. And, you know, God isn’t asking me to do that, but I just feel like I know the person I was when I was a Calvary Chapel ministry wife, I felt…so disempowered and so not worthy and like my voice didn’t matter and nobody would want to learn from me or hear from me. They just wanted this silent role, a supportive role. And I just thought who am I to think I know something about the Bible or who am I to challenge complementarian theology? I felt just really inadequate and it’s been so hard to overcome that.

Like there has been growth in that area, but I think that’s kind of why I don’t put myself out there. I put my voice out there. I do more with my marketing. And I think that that’s kind of helped me warm up to the idea of like, I have something to teach. But yeah, it was so hard to start kind of moving forward in my gifting just because of how some of those mindsets had. influence me and I think too sometimes I have a voice in my head like I can imagine the objection already without even anybody hearing my ideas I know the voice of these men that come against the ideas that I have. I’m very aware of the other side. I’ve read a lot of complementarian literature I understand all their arguments and positions and And that’s a good thing, because I can refute those objections. But yeah, I very much understand the mindset and there’s so many people who shut down women. so I feel shut down sometimes even without even sharing my idea. I’m like, I’m going to write this and I’m like, I already can hear the objections and the way that they would shut me down if I share this. I was really active. ⁓

Ruth Perry (24:07)
I would really encourage you, Jenna, to please use your voice. I’m really impressed and amazed by all that you’ve just shared in this short conversation. I think you definitely have a gifting and a calling from God. And part of the challenge of being a woman that grew up in these complementarian spaces is giving yourself permission to follow that because nobody else is going to. And so you have to just take that leap of faith and you are going to have pushback.

But honestly, I think the complementarian men are not trolling the internet as much as we fear and they’re really easy to block or to just like not approve their comment. Like it’s just, you can protect your space.

Jenna Dunn (24:39)
Thank you. Yeah, I see women with a lot of comments and interaction online. I see it’s not as bad as I think. I think I used to be really active. I would debate things with people on Reddit. And so Reddit used to be very anonymous. And so some of the people representing a very reformed comp view were really harsh.

Ruth Perry (24:59)
Bye. They’re the worst.

I mean, even if you’re not being mean, people can still read the tone of your whatever you write and whatever tone they’re hearing in their head. You can’t control that. You just have to like put the message that the Lord has on your heart out there. And it’s not going to be for everybody. if it only reached one person, I feel like you’ve made an impact that matters. So I would encourage you.

Jenna Dunn (25:20)
Yeah.

Ruth Perry (25:35)
to go ahead and be courageous. And I think that it would be really meaningful and fulfilling to you to start putting your work out there. I would listen to your podcast and I’ll share your articles. I’m excited for you.

Jenna Dunn (25:35)
Thank you. Yeah.

Yeah, think I’m going to spend some time this upcoming year focused on developing as our Bible. I definitely over overthink. You know, I overthink a lot.

Ruth Perry (25:59)
Yeah, have you done any enneagram work?

Jenna Dunn (26:01)
What? Yeah. I’m like an INFP. Yeah.

Ruth Perry (26:08)
The enneagram numbers are one through nine and you strike me as number five.

Jenna Dunn (26:13)
yeah yeah yeah, the number one. I’m like a f-

Yeah. What are you?

Ruth Perry (26:18)
I said, you strike me as a five, but I’m a five also, yeah.

Jenna Dunn (26:21)
I think I was a four, but I… Yeah. Yeah, I think so.

Ruth Perry (26:24)
You might have a five wing, but the four part of you would be the more sensitive part. Like for me, I don’t really care if people disagree with me. I’m okay with like online interactions and I actually really enjoy listening to people and reading people who disagree with me. But I think part of that is just my personality is I’m the observer and I enjoy observing people.

Jenna Dunn (26:34)
Yeah, people are interesting for sure. Yeah, no, I am very sensitive and like I think about things a lot and I really take things to heart and like I will sit on an idea for years sometimes before I share it. So yeah.

Ruth Perry (26:49)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Me too. I’m an INFP also. And I don’t feel like I ought to podcast number one, I feel like I have the most annoying voice in the world who would want to like listen to this voice. I don’t know. So I just would I had the idea. So I mentioned it to people and everybody tells me that’s a great idea. So now I feel like I have to try it. But personally, I wouldn’t do it. I have imposter syndrome. I would rather just keep reading other people and thinking about other people’s thoughts. But I do feel like I’ve had this platform on the Beautiful Kingdom Builders page and you can’t really have nuanced conversations when you’re sharing a meme or an article. And I just want to host longer conversations with people that just show that you can be a Christian that loves God and loves the Bible, but you’re not a gun-toting, militaristic, and anti-CRT. You don’t have to subscribe to all of that. You don’t have to believe in penal substitutionary atonement. There’s other ways to be Christian that I feel are more faithful to Jesus.

Jenna Dunn (27:53)
Yeah, it’s so true. And it’s so important to hear other people’s stories. I really do love the medium of podcasting. Like I listen to a lot of podcasts. And some of my favorite Christian ones are just like people sharing their stories.

Ruth Perry (28:26)
Why do you feel like a Beautiful Kingdoms Builder podcast is beneficial to the church?

Jenna Dunn (28:32)
Yeah, so I think it’s such a gift for women just to have a place to share their stories, like just to have their voices heard. I kind of believed I had to like build that all myself. Like I need to somehow earn the right to have my story heard and that’s how I learned web design. Like I was like, I wanna…build a website. But I always had that in the back of my mind that I was going to do Ezer Bible.

So it’s like I went down this whole other path of like, now I have a whole business building websites for people. And I do a lot on the internet. I do all kinds of marketing. But doing it for myself, for my calling has had a lot of obstacles. And I think that a lot of people would never be able to do that. I mean, it takes a ton of time to learn everything, to build your own platform. I love that the internet exists and women can build their own platform, but not everybody’s going to be able to do that. it would be great if there was more places women could just share what God’s showing them and share their stories and share their testimonies. Because if you’re coming out of a context like I was…you’re really feeling like your voice doesn’t matter already, right? And so just the fact that there’s platforms where they’re like, hey, you know, we actually do care about your experiences. We want to know, what following God has been like for you and what God has shown you. I mean, that’s huge. I mean, you just basically holding the microphone up to women and being like, we care about what you’re experiencing and we want to hear from you. Like your voice matters. I think that’s a huge thing. And so

I was going to ask you what prompted the change from Beautiful Kingdom Warriors to Builders.

Ruth Perry (30:09)
The warrior’s name came from Carolyn Custis James. A friend and I, Becky Buck, started the page 10 years or more ago. And we were thinking about the word ezer that it doesn’t just mean helper, it means like a strong help. And then it’s frequently used in the context of military. So like we’re in this battle.

to bring God’s kingdom, which would look like flourishing for all and peace and joy and like the fruit of the spirit and all these things, like building a Christianity. But the, well, see the building part came later in my thought as I’m thinking less about fighting battles, because I’m really tired of culture war. I don’t want to be a culture warrior. But that was so deeply embedded in me 15 years ago.

Jenna Dunn (30:54)
Yeah.

Ruth Perry (30:59)
that warrior seemed like a good name. But now I want to be a part of building something beautiful. Because we’re ambassadors, we’re builders, There is the spiritual warfare aspect of life. But really, the battle is God’s. And I just want to be a part of building a more beautiful Christianity, because I’m really…disappointed in the Christianity that I was formed in.

I know so many people who have walked away from their faith because of the culture warring and the politics and the bad theology and the subjugation of women and the racism and all these things. And I just want to say you don’t have to walk away. There’s a better Christianity that you could be a part of.

Jenna Dunn (31:46)
Wow. Yeah. Yeah, I think about some of the positions that I’ve taken more recently and I’m like, I hope that that focusing on theology or what the Bible really says isn’t just another turnoff for people. Because I’ve known Christians I’ve really cared about over the years who have more of like a shepherd’s heart for people or their…

maybe like more prophetic, they’re, just, they don’t get into theological discussions and they don’t understand half the things I want to talk about. They don’t know the terminology or the different people who wrote whatever books, but they just really love people and they just really have God’s heart for people. And they care about reconciliation or they care about seeing people grow in the Lord. And they don’t geek out about

the Bible or theology like I do and I’m always like, I really want to make sure I keep those people close to me so they keep me in line and I don’t go off in this whole other direction that’s not people focused, right? Because at end of the day, that’s what matters, you know. But yeah, I do think that, you know, that’s a really beautiful change to make it about building the kingdom and being a part of building the kingdom. I was really interested
in that because when I first found the Beautiful Kingdom Warriors, I was very much like, ooh, warriors. And I also was so influenced by the idea. I mean, like, I got like an ezer tattoo. Like, that’s how much ezer was like. And on my muscles, I’m like, it was. It was because I was, I had been influenced and seen so many women’s lives influenced by the ideas.

Ruth Perry (33:16)
Yeah! That was a mind-blowing revelation, learning what AIDS are meant.

Jenna Dunn (33:30)
that are represented by Created to Be His Help Meet and that idea that a woman being ezer means she’s subordinate and then to like see the truth about that in scripture was wow such a radical shift and so yeah I really I really bought into that identity of like being like I’m an ezer like that’s super freeing and healing for me

Ruth Perry (33:53)
Yeah, it is a long process, healing and unlearning and relearning. I think for me, really started, the domino started falling away from my early faith formation about 15 years ago. And 15 years, that’s a long time, almost all of my adulthood.

Jenna Dunn (34:11)
Yeah.

Ruth Perry (34:11)
Or not really, no, that’s because I’m 44 now, so I’m like late 20s. Just really when my home church went through all that conflict and it impacted my family and we experienced a lot of abusive behavior towards us and shunning. And it was just really painful. And then all the little dominoes started falling. And the first thing that I noticed was if the women in this church had any say, this is not how this would be handled.

Jenna Dunn (34:39)
Yeah.

Ruth Perry (34:41)
And then I started wondering why don’t the women have any say? It doesn’t really make sense. And so that was the thing that for me, but I’ve just, last year, I finally went and did some EMDR therapy because over 15 years of me learning new things and working on all of this, I was still carrying the wounds and they were still wide open and painful and

Jenna Dunn (34:45)
Yeah.

Ruth Perry (35:05)
Just going through that EMDR therapy last year was really transformational.

Jenna Dunn (35:09)
Wow.

Ruth Perry (35:10)
And I think maybe that that’s where now I’m getting the I’ll try a podcast courage. I don’t know. I’m not as scared anymore.

Jenna Dunn (35:15)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I think sort of gathering together women especially, but also I know when I think about like the strategy behind Ezer Bible, I didn’t want to make it just for women because if I see a Christian man that’s like actually teaching the Bible like the right way and like is understanding how important the voice of women is and how important women are to building the church. That’s actually so beneficial. I don’t like the idea of men and women are against each other. It’s actually just there’s men and women that are a part of the kingdom and it is a very supportive, helpful… I think about all the women that Paul was partnering with. They wouldn’t have been able to accomplish what the early church accomplished without those partnerships.

I had noticed if I say patriarchy, like I almost don’t want to use that term anymore because I talk to many people who when they hear me say patriarchy, they think I’m saying something against men. And like to me, patriarchy doesn’t mean men, men and women hold up patriarchy. I’m not saying anything negative about men. So it’s like to me that the divide should be the people over there that support patriarchy and then the people that are building the kingdom and following Jesus and laying down their lives and serving and submitting to each other. so but yeah, it’s an interesting thing because I think as soon as you try to bring men like I just was so comfortable talking about talking to women you bring men into it. I think there’s just this default that women will just back down and let men lead like there’s just our culture has conditioned us to be like, there’s a man in the room. Okay, I’ll shut up now and just see what he says. How do you get women to participate and to leave behind that sort of cultural conditioning? That’s something I think about a lot. But yeah, I really am super excited that you’re gonna do a podcast. And I hope that that ends up being something that more women…

you know, will start sharing.

Ruth Perry (37:11)
Is Four Square, that’s the denomination that Amy Semple McPherson founded, right?

Jenna Dunn (37:17)
Yeah, You know, it’s weird. There was a four-square church in the small city that I was a ministry wife in, and I had friends that… Even some of the leadership team had been raised in the Four Square Church. And so it’s weird to me. I’m like always wondering, why did they adopt this view of male and female gender roles and male-only leadership, if that was their background? But that particular Four Square Even though…their denominational belief system included women in ministry. They didn’t actually practice it. There wasn’t any women in ministry that I saw. Maybe the pastor’s wife was a little bit more outspoken than in other faith traditions, but they didn’t really practice what they believed, right? But the Four Square Church, now that I’m in a bigger city, actually the city I’m in, there’s so many good churches. Like there’s also a denomination here called Open Bible.

And it’s a bunch, it’s usually a husband, wife, pastor team. And I went to a few of those and like, I just cry. Like a woman gets up front and starts preaching. I just start crying. It’s just beautiful. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s not about one person. There’s a team of people. They take turns teaching. People take turns doing worship and. They just make decisions together as a team and there’s not like women defaulting to male leadership. The women share what they think and it’s just really healthy. I’m still blown away about it, I guess.

Ruth Perry (38:37)
Yeah, I’m glad you found that church.

Jenna Dunn (38:39)
Yeah.

Ruth Perry (38:40)
And I’m glad I met you, Jenna. This is so nice. We’re friends now.

Jenna Dunn (38:42)
I’m glad I met you too. Yeah, I am happy too.

Ruth Perry (38:47)
Thank you so much, Jenna. You shine the light of God from your whole being and everything you’ve shared has been really beautiful and impactful. And I feel like God has definitely gifted you.

Jenna Dunn (38:58)
Thank you. Thank you so much.

Ruth Perry (39:02)
So if you need encouragement, I’m encouraging you. Take the risk, do it, because I love it. I love it. I feel like you’re a beautiful soul.

Jenna Dunn (39:06)
Aww, that means a lot. Thank you so much. Yeah.

Ruth Perry (39:13)
So keep on keeping on, Jenna. You’re doing great.

Jenna Dunn (39:16)
All right, you too. Thank you so much, Ruth.

Ruth Perry (39:18)
Thank you.

Thanks for following TBKB Podcast! A new episode will drop every Wednesday. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite platform! Next week, we’ll hear from my missionary friend Scott Harris. God bless! Have a very Merry Christmas!!

Tag Archives: Women in Ministry

008 I Rev. Dr. Jennifer Powell McNutt on The Mary We Forgot

oo5 I Dr. Roy Ciampa on Paul’s Household Instructions in Ephesians 5

003 I Jenna Dunn of Ezer Bible

Welcome to TBKB, with your host: Rev. Ruth Perry

Subscribe to TBKB via Email

Like TBKB on Facebook!

Follow Ruth on Twitter

Top Posts & Pages

Tag Archives: Women in Ministry

008 I Rev. Dr. Jennifer Powell McNutt on The Mary We Forgot

Share this:

oo5 I Dr. Roy Ciampa on Paul’s Household Instructions in Ephesians 5

Share this:

003 I Jenna Dunn of Ezer Bible

Share this:

Welcome to TBKB, with your host: Rev. Ruth Perry

Subscribe to TBKB via Email

Like TBKB on Facebook!

Follow Ruth on Twitter

Top Posts & Pages