We Are Not That: What the Church of the Nazarene Actually Believes About Men, Women, Marriage, and Why It's Time We Said So.

The Complementarian Elephant in the Room

May 4, 2026

We Are Not That: What the Church of the Nazarene Actually Believes About Men, Women, Marriage, and Why It’s Time We Said So.

I owe some people an apology.

When I was in college, training for ministry, I was handed a set of resources for conducting premarital counseling. I used them. I recommended them. I sent couples home with them and trusted that I was helping them build something solid.

I wasn’t.

I didn’t know it then. But I know it now. The materials widely used in evangelical churches to teach on marriage, gender roles, and what it means to be a husband or wife have been, and I want to choose this word carefully, harmful. I don’t believe it was intentional. Not always. But harmful in the quiet, slow way that a wrong foundation damages a house. You don’t see the cracks right away. You see them later, when the storms come, when there is an underlying dissonance in a marriage and you can’t seem to put your finger on the angst.

What breaks my heart most is that we’ve known something was off for a long time. And we’ve been afraid to say so. Partly because it’s what we had. Partly because it’s what we knew. And partly because it’s what gets promoted on Christian radio stations across the country — voices so loud and so confident that it felt easier to go along than to ask whether they were actually right.

They weren’t always right. And the Church of the Nazarene — your church — has never actually agreed with them. We just haven’t found the courage to tell you.

So consider this me telling you: I am so very sorry.

If you’ve been impacted because your church stayed silent, or because your pastor handed you resources that did more harm than good, this is me apologizing. We could have done better. I should have done better. God’s Kingdom comes when imperfect people learn to live, love, and lead through mutual submission. And I am so very sorry we didn’t say so sooner.

It Sounds Like Such a Lovely Word…..Complementarian.

It really does sound lovely. Generous, even. Of course men and women complement one another — what a beautiful thought, right?! Who could possibly argue with that?

But here’s what I’ve learned: the most consequential words are often the ones that sound the most harmless. And this one has been doing a lot of quiet work underneath that pleasant surface for a very long time.

Complementarianism, at its theological core, teaches that God designed men and women with distinct and hierarchical roles — particularly in marriage. The husband leads. The wife submits. Not as a partnership two people work out together. Not as a seasonal rhythm that shifts with circumstances. But as the divine order. God’s design. Fixed. Permanent. Non-negotiable. “After all, ‘Someone has to be the one to break the tie,’ or so the argument goes.”

To many people in our churches, this simply sounds like traditional marriage. Like what Christians have always believed. Like what the Bible plainly teaches. This, of course, must be what The Church of the Nazarene believes/teaches!

But I need you to hear this clearly: complementarianism is a specific theological position with a name, a history, and an argument. It is not the only way faithful followers of Jesus have read Scripture. It is not a neutral default. And it is not, despite what you may have absorbed from the loudest voices in Christian media, what your Church of the Nazarene believes.

There is another word. A better word, I’d argue. One that belongs to us (and the holiness movement).

Egalitarian.

At its heart, egalitarianism teaches that men and women are created as equals — not just in worth and dignity, but in calling, responsibility, and voice. In marriage, this doesn’t mean the erasure of difference or the pretense that husbands and wives are identical. It means something far more beautiful and far more demanding: mutual submission.

Two people who have covenanted not to a hierarchy, but to one another. Each considering the other’s needs, gifts, and voice as equally valid. Each laying down their life — not because a role demands it, but because love does.

This is not a new idea. It is not a cultural compromise. It is, in fact, the oldest idea in the room — woven into the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition that gave birth to the Church of the Nazarene (side note: before most of the loudest complementarian voices in America were even born).

The Church of the Nazarene was born in 1908 out of the Wesleyan-Holiness Movement….a revival tradition that was, from its very beginning, radically countercultural in its view of women and men.

This wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a footnote. It was central to our theology.

The Holiness Movement preached that the Holy Spirit was poured out on all flesh…..not some flesh. Not male flesh with female flesh in a supporting role. All flesh. That meant ordinary women were told, explicitly and unapologetically, that they had equal access to the power and calling of God. Equally capable. Equally responsible. Equally sent. Equally loved and seen and validated.

John Wesley himself — the theological father of everything we are — advocated for women in ways that were virtually unheard of in the 18th century. He encouraged women preachers. He appointed women to significant leadership. He counted women among his closest advisors and his truest equals. This was not a reluctant concession (as we often seem to make it by not addressing it). It was a conviction.

And so when the Church of the Nazarene was founded, it ordained women from day one. Not eventually. Not after a long debate. From. Day. One.

That history matters. Because it tells us something about what we believed then — and what we still officially believe now — about the equality of men and women. Not just in the pulpit. In the home. In the marriage. In the daily, ordinary, sacred work of two people building a life together. Two imperfect people gifted and created differently so that, together, they may adequately represent Jesus in His fulness to a watching world.

This confusion around our position has left me dumbfounded recently so I want to say something in this section that I’m not sure has been clearly said enough in our denomination. I want to state it plainly. No footnotes. No hedging. No assuming you already know.

Here is what the Church of the Nazarene believes about men, women, and marriage:

We believe men and women are created equally in the image of God, equally bearing the Imago Dei … with equal dignity, equal worth, and equal calling. We are proudly egalitarian.

We believe marriage is a covenant between two equals. Not a hierarchy. Not a chain of command. A covenant. Built on mutual love, mutual respect, and mutual submission — each partner considering the other’s needs, gifts, and voice as fully valid and fully valued. When there is mutual submission, there is no need for a “tie breaker.”

We believe the model for marriage is not “someone has to be in charge” but rather the model Jesus gave us: “the greatest among you will be your servant.” Servanthood offered freely by both genders, required of neither as a condition of their gender is the architecture of a Nazarene marriage.

We believe that when Paul wrote “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” in Ephesians 5:21, he meant one another. Not one of you to the other. Both of you. To each other. Always.This is what Jesus modeled with His very life.

We believe that hierarchy in marriage is not God’s design — it is the result of the Fall. And that Jesus came to restore what the Fall distorted. Which means the movement of the gospel in your marriage is always away from hierarchy and toward mutuality.

This is not liberalism. This is not cultural accommodation. This is Wesleyan theology. This is who we are. This is what we have always believed — we just haven’t always said it out loud where you could hear it. And, if you are part of the Church of the Nazarene it matters that you fully understand this.

This me saying it out loud — for those in the back, for those who didn’t read the fine print, for those who never knew this was even a conversation, and for those who have been quietly living under a theology your own church never actually taught: We are egalitarian. We are not complementarian. We never were. And you deserved to know that a long time ago.

This is Part 1 in this series. In Part 2, we will look at what happens when egalitarian churches don't act like it — and what that silence has cost the people in our pews.

Photo by Anna on Unsplash