A ViewPoint by Elizabeth Troyer
I learned what a Christian woman was supposed to be before I learned who I was.
She was gentle, but not powerful. Helpful, but not authoritative. Present, but never central. She served in the background, carried everyone else’s burdens, and called that holiness. She knew how to make casseroles, teach children, host Bible studies, and pray for everybody else’s pain. But she was not supposed to want too much, speak too directly, ask too many questions, or possess a calling that made other people uncomfortable.
In the version of Christianity I inherited, womanhood was always being measured. Not openly, not in ways anyone would have admitted, but constantly. Was she modest enough? Soft enough? Quiet enough? Supportive enough? Beautiful, but not vain? Smart, but not threatening?
Ambitious, but only in the right ways, only when her ambition benefited others, only when it did not disturb the men around her?
For a long time, I thought this was discipleship.
I thought following Jesus meant becoming smaller.
I thought holiness looked like self-erasure. I thought obedience meant swallowing my instincts. I thought spiritual maturity meant learning how to disappear without resentment. I thought if I were godly enough, I would stop noticing the unfairness of it all.
But unfairness has a way of pressing on the soul until it becomes impossible not to name.
I began to notice that women in church were praised most when they were exhausted. We admired women who gave and gave until they had no self left apart from what they offered others. We called them “servants.” We called them “faithful.” We called them “Proverbs 31 women,” even if what we really meant was women who could hold up entire communities without ever asking who was holding them up.
At the same time, women with strong voices were treated like spiritual problems in need of correction. A woman could organize, lead, write, teach informally, mentor, build ministries, and sustain the emotional life of a congregation—but if she crossed into visible authority, suddenly the room changed. Suddenly there were Bible verses. Suddenly, there were concerns about order, about submission, about God’s design. Suddenly, the same gifts that were celebrated in private became suspect in public.
It was a confusing thing to absorb as a woman of faith: to know you were made in the image of God, but to feel that image continually edited for male comfort.
Is it God’s will?
So much of what the church taught me about womanhood was not presented as cultural at all. It was presented as eternal. That is part of what made it so powerful. These were not framed as preferences or traditions or inherited gender norms. They were framed as God’s will. To question them felt like questioning God. To feel wounded by them felt like personal failure. If a teaching diminished me, I assumed the problem was my pride. If a rule made me feel invisible, I assumed I needed more humility. If I felt restless inside the boundaries drawn for me, I assumed restlessness itself was sin.
What makes religious patriarchy so potent is not only that it restricts women. It teaches women to distrust the very part of themselves that recognizes the restriction.
And yet, the more seriously I began to read the Gospels, the more disoriented I became—in the best possible way.
Jesus did not seem particularly interested in preserving the gender arrangements that so many churches treated as sacred.
He spoke to women publicly, even when it was socially scandalous. He allowed women to accompany him. He received women not as decorative followers but as moral, intellectual, and spiritual agents. He taught women directly. He healed them without condescension. He listened to them. He let them question him. He dignified their grief, their hunger, their intelligence, and their faith.
Again and again, I found a Christ who was not anxious about women. That alone felt revolutionary.
Jesus did not seem afraid that women’s presence would pollute holiness. He did not police their voices into submission. He did not insist that their highest spiritual purpose was to remain useful but secondary. He did not reduce women to wives, mothers, temptations, helpers, or cautionary tales. He encountered women as people.
That should be the most obvious thing a Christian could say, and yet for many women it is a truth we have had to recover from beneath layers of doctrine, culture, and pious distortion.
Consider women in scripture
Consider the Samaritan woman at the well. So often, her story is flattened into a lesson about personal brokenness, as though her main purpose in the text were to illustrate sexual failure redeemed by Jesus. But the encounter is far richer than that. Jesus speaks to her at length, in public, across boundaries of gender, religion, and ethnicity. He engages her in theological conversation. She is thoughtful, responsive, and perceptive. And after their exchange, she becomes a bearer of witness to her community. She is not silenced by encountering Christ; she is activated by him.
Or consider Mary of Bethany, sitting at Jesus’ feet in the posture of a disciple. The scandal of that image is easy to miss now, precisely because Jesus normalized it so completely. But discipleship in that setting was not symbolic. It was not sentimental. To sit at a rabbi’s feet was to receive instruction and to be formed seriously. And when Martha objects, Jesus does not correct Mary back into domestic duty. He defends her right to remain there.
How many women over the centuries have been sent back into the kitchen by people who claim to follow the same Christ who refused to send Mary?
And then there is Mary Magdalene, entrusted with resurrection news before the male disciples understood what had happened. The first witness to the risen Christ was not a powerful man, not a religious authority, not someone whose testimony would have been socially secure. It was a woman. Christianity itself emerges through a moment in which Jesus entrusts the central news of the faith to a woman and sends her to tell the others.
If the resurrected Christ was not embarrassed to commission a woman, why is the church so often embarrassed by women who speak with authority now?
These are not side notes to the Gospel. They reveal something essential about Jesus. He does not merely make room for women in his ministry. He refuses the logic that would confine them to the margins in the first place.
And that is where the gap between Jesus and church culture became impossible for me to ignore.
Limitation as virtue?
I had been taught a version of womanhood that emphasized limitation as virtue. Stay in your lane. Be supportive, not central. Be discerning, but not directive. Be gifted, but not governing. Be passionate, but not prophetic in ways that trouble the institution. Above all, do not confuse your humanity with permission.
Yet the Jesus I met in Scripture did not seem invested in teaching women to accept a smaller life. He restored people to fullness. He confronted structures that burdened the vulnerable. He named hypocrisy in religious systems. He announced good news to those living under the weight of somebody else’s power.
Why, then, had I been taught to treat diminishment as devotion?
The answer, I think, is that patriarchy is strengthened when it borrows the language of faith.
It is one thing for a culture to tell women they should be smaller. It is another thing entirely for the church to tell women God prefers them that way. Once subordination becomes spiritualized, it becomes very difficult to challenge. Women are no longer merely disobeying leaders or customs; they are made to feel they are disobeying God himself.
That confusion has cost women dearly.
It has cost women their voices, their confidence, their callings, their sense of self, and even their safety. It has kept women in marriages, churches, and systems that demanded endless sacrifice without mutuality. It has trained women to endure what should be resisted. It has rewarded women for overfunctioning and underliving. It has made women feel guilty for wanting the very things men are encouraged to call leadership, conviction, and purpose.
Christian feminism, at its core, is not rebellion against Christ. It is resistance to every distortion that makes women less visible than Jesus did. That distinction matters deeply to me.
Christian feminism
I did not come to Christian feminism by abandoning my faith. I came to it by taking Jesus more seriously than the structures that claimed to speak for him. I came to it because the Gospel made me ask better questions. I came to it because I could no longer reconcile the dignity Jesus extended to women with the diminishment so many churches demanded of them.
And I came to it because I began, slowly, painfully, to believe that God was not glorified by my disappearance.
There is grief.
Grief in realizing how much of yourself was shaped by fear and religious performance. Grief in recognizing the years spent trying to become acceptable in systems that benefited from your silence. Grief in understanding how often women have been told that suffering quietly is the same thing as spiritual maturity.
But there is also freedom.
Freedom in reading Scripture with new eyes. Freedom in naming patriarchy as patriarchy, even when it dresses itself in biblical language. Freedom in discovering that Jesus does not ask women to be less alive, less truthful, less called, or less fully human.
There is freedom in stepping out of inherited scripts that confuse compliance with holiness.
To follow Christ is not to vanish.
To follow Christ is not to baptize inequality.
To follow Christ is not to spend your life making yourself smaller so other people can feel more secure in their power.
If anything, the ministry of Jesus suggests the opposite: that the kingdom of God is always threatening hierarchies that depend on the silencing of the vulnerable. That divine love does not reinforce domination. That those pushed to the edges are brought near, heard clearly, and entrusted with holy work.
The echos of what we have been taught
I still live with the residue of what the church taught me about womanhood. Many women do. These lessons do not disappear overnight. Even after we name them, they echo. They show up when we apologize for speaking too directly, when we doubt our authority, when we feel selfish for having boundaries, when we confuse exhaustion with faithfulness, when we assume that being loved by God must somehow require us to be less ourselves.
But I return, again and again, to Jesus.
Not to the curated Christ of patriarchal comfort, but to the Jesus of the Gospels. The one who saw women clearly. The one who welcomed them as disciples. The one who trusted them with truth. The one who did not demand their smallness in exchange for belonging. That Jesus has become, for me, the beginning of unlearning.
Perhaps that is part of discipleship too: not only learning what faith is but also unlearning everything that made faith feel like bondage. Maybe the holiest thing women can do is reject the lie that God ordained their diminishment. Maybe reclaiming our voices is not arrogance but obedience. Maybe refusing erasure is not rebellion, but truth.
And maybe the church will look more like Christ when women no longer have to choose between being faithful and being fully human.
© 2025 by Elizabeth Troyer and Christian Feminism Today
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