corrects this practice, and corrects any lurking sense in our own hearts that
boys are more valuable than girls, when it says we are both created in the
image of God.- The fact that both men and women are baptized stands in contrast to the Old
Testament, where the outward sign of inclusion in the community of God’s
people was circumcision: circumcision by its nature was only administered to
men. By contrast, in the New Testament church both men and women are
baptized. In this way, every baptism should remind us of our equality in the
image of God. - I realize that there is an opposite mistake, in which the husband “listens” so
much and the wife has so great a “voice” that in effect the wife becomes the
governing partner in the relationship. I am not advocating that mistake either,
and in what follows I will argue for the necessity of a male leadership role in
decision making within marriage. - Policy statement announced and distributed to Campus Crusade staff mem-
bers at a biannual staff conference, July 28, 1999, at Moby Arena, Colorado
State University, Fort Collins, Colorado. The statement was reported in a
Religion News Service dispatch July 30, 1999, a Baptist Press story by Art
Toalston on July 29, 1999 (www.baptistpress.com), and an article in World
magazine September 11, 1999 (32); it was also quoted in full in James Dobson’s
monthly newsletter Family News from Dr. James Dobson(September 1999), 1-2. - Throughout this chapter, I use the word “egalitarian” to refer to those within
the evangelical world who say that no differences in the roles of men and
women should be based on their gender alone. In particular, “egalitarians” deny
that there is any unique male leadership role in marriage or in the church.
Sometimes I use the phrase “evangelical feminists” to mean the same thing as
“egalitarians.” - The Danvers Statement was prepared by several evangelical leaders at a
Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood meeting in Danvers,
Massachusetts, in December 1987. It was first published in final form by the
CBMW in Wheaton, Illinois, in November 1988. See the appendix for the full
text of this statement. - The entire statement in the form adopted by Campus Crusade for Christ is
available at http://www.baptistpress.com, in the archives for July 29, 1999. - The entire statement is available from the website of Christians for Biblical
Equality, http://www.cbeinternational.org. I should add that the CBE statement reg-
ularly portrays a non-egalitarian position in pejorative language such as “the
rulership of Adam over Eve,” and fails to even mention a third alternative,
namely, loving, humble headship. (For a discussion of repeated ambiguities in
the CBE statement, see John Piper and Wayne Grudem, “Charity, Clarity, and
Hope,” in Piper and Grudem, eds., Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
[Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 1991], 403-422.) - Bruce Ware adds yet another indication related to this temporal priority in cre-
ation, namely, that woman was created “from” or “out of” man. See his dis-
cussion in “Male and Female Complementarity and the Image of God,”
80 BUILDINGSTRONGFAMILIES