“And the LORD God said, “It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him.” Out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name. So Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper comparable to him. And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which the LORD God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man. And Adam said:

“This is now bone of my bones
And flesh of my flesh;
She shall be called Woman,
Because she was taken out of Man.”

Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.” (Genesis 2:18-25 NKJV)

“To the woman He said…Your desire shall be for your husband,
And he shall rule over you.” (Gen 3:16 NKJV)

I’m going to jump straight in here. Is headship, particularly in the church, exclusively the province of the men, or can headship – and especially church eldership – be female as well? As we know, opinions are divided. The following opinion is mine. I think it’s an important topic at the moment, because if Smith Wigglesworth’s 1947 prophesy is true, the move of God that is coming on the earth is going to be unlike anything seen before. And I don’t think the Holy Spirit was just talking about the scope of the revival as it spreads worldwide; I think He was also referring to what the church in revival will look like. It’s going to be different.

So what does it look like now? As far as we can see, the elders of the early church were all men, and Paul’s teaching on the place of women in the church certainly seems to put them below men in the hierarchy. He says to the Corinthians that women should “Keep silent in the churches,” (1 Cor 14:34), and teaches that “the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.” (1 Cor 11:3) In my experience at least, women are not expected to keep silent in church any more, any more than they are generally expected to cover their heads (although there are exceptions): the societal norms of the first century don’t apply today. More difficult to dismiss is the “headship hierarchy” that Paul gives: God over Christ, Christ over man, man over woman. Many (but again, not all) evangelical denominations hold to the “complementarian” view that men and women are equal before God in value and worth, but have distinct roles in the home and church, one of which is the role of headship that falls to the man.

The previous verse says this: “Now I praise you, brethren, that you remember me in all things and keep the traditions just as I delivered them to you.” The word translated here as “traditions” (Greek paradosis, if you are interested) is literally rendered as “ordinances,” and was used particularly to describe the body of precepts that illustrated and expanded the written law particularly as it applied  to ritual. Strong’s defines the word as “transmission, i.e. (concretely) a precept; specially, the Jewish traditionary law:—ordinance, tradition.” (Strong’s G3862) Paul was establishing a new culture in a society of Roman licentiousness and temple prostitution, where women without a head covering were communicating a message of sexual availability; where women drawing attention to themselves by speaking out in public again signalled a desire to be noticed for more than just their words.

Paul was a Pharisee, a passionate keeper and self-appointed guardian of the Law, who had had a life-changing encounter with Christ, the fulfilment of the Law. He had exchanged his vision of the law for his vision of Christ, but he still would have had some of the ways of of a pharisee: his intention was that the church of Christ should not be brought into disrepute in the society of his day, and I imagine he would have given weight to the “traditions” he delivered because of the importance of tradition in his past. Ordinances, or traditions (paradosis), were an integral part of Jewish law, and carried its full weight. But the church is not under the law, as Paul is repeatedly at pains to remind us. By his own description, Paul’s instructions were the commands of a man: just because he shows an authoritative manner in applying them to a situation that could affect the reputation of the church within its community does not necessarily mean that we can infer from those instructions a timeless principle that Jesus applies to building His church today.

Principles of headship
Such principles can be found elsewhere: in Ephesians 4, for example, where we read how we “may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ— from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.” (Ephesians 4: 15-16) There is no hierarchy of headship here: men and women together, the whole body, grow up in all things into the one Head. In fact “joined and knit together by what every joint supplies” has an echo of Adam’s joyful “bone of my bones” – the original creation reflected in the new. Again, Colossians 1:18 tells us that Christ has supremacy in all things, and specifically that He is “the head of the body, the church.” In Ephesians 1: 22-23 we read that God has put all things under His feet and appointed Him as “head over all things to the church,” and again in Ephesians 5:23 Paul states that “Christ is the head of the church, His body, of which He is the saviour.” There is no reference in any of these verses to Christ’s headship of women being delegated through men. God has “raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” (Eph 2:6) To infer from Paul’s instructions on maintaining order in the early church that men and women are anything other than “together” under the headship of Christ, seems dangerously close to falling into the same trap as the religious leaders of his day whom Jesus castigated, quoting Isaiah, for “teaching as doctrine the commandments of men.” (Matt 15:9)

A help meet for him
Finally, if headship was male we could expect to see evidence of this in how God ordered His creation before the fall, yet it seems to me at least that the opposite is the case. His intention to create Eve is stated in Genesis 2:18, where He says He will make a helper, or literally a help, suitable for Adam. The  KJV translates the original Hebrew words ezer kenegdo as a “help meet for him,” which is rendered variously in different translations as “a helper suitable for him” (NIV, NASB), “a helper comparable to him” (NKJV) “a helper who is just right for him” (NLT) etc. The KJV translation reads “a help meet for him” (“meet” meaning “suitable” in the English of the time), and the two have become combined into a single noun, “helpmeet.” If we read this with a male-headship mindset, we can, if we aren’t careful, see God creating a sort of sous-chef for Adam’s kitchen; someone who “helps out” with the jobs he can’t manage on his own in his task of tending and watching over the Garden of Eden. But the Hebrew phrase “ezer kenegdo” literally means “a helper corresponding to him,” or “a matching counterpart.” And if we look at how and where else the word ezer is used in the Old Testament, we find that it occurs many times in the book of Psalms. Well known verses include

Psalm 46:1: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”

Psalm 121:1-2: “I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”

Psalm 33:20: “Our soul waits for the Lord; he is our help and our shield.”

Psalm 124:8: “Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”

In the New Testament, the original language is different, but the concept carried into our English translations is the same: “But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me.” (John 15:26)

Jesus called the Holy Spirit “the Helper.” In other words, God used the word “Helper” for Himself, and He made man in His image. God made woman for man so that man wasn’t alone, not because he could not manage. She was the helper that was kenegdo, corresponding to him like a mirror image. He created Eve to work in the garden alongside Adam, not under him. Just as God had made Adam in his own image, so He also made Eve. Just as God is one who helps, so is Eve. Just as God is our companion who strengthens us and provides succour, and is the one who rescues and protects us, Eve can do the same. Ezer kenegdo means all of that. Yes, she can carry Adam’s tools in the garden; and at the same time no doubt God intended that Adam should also give help to Eve. Eve was not created to be Adam’s assistant: she was his ally. And just as we are only complete in relationship with our Helper, so Adam was only complete in relationship with his. You can’t have an incomplete head. The text suggests to me that the man and the woman were created to be side by side in the Garden, tending it in relationship, and that neither was head over the other.

And it was good… until the Fall
The fact that Eve was “taken out of Man” is sometimes construed as suggesting an innate superiority in the male; that woman was derived from Man and therefore is in some way secondary; that Man came first in creation and is therefore at the top of the hierarchy. But when Adam saw Eve, I think his reaction was entirely different. “This is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh” tells me that he saw his helper as someone who was the same as him, equal in every way. God was not establishing a hierarchy; He was establishing an equality. If it wasn’t “good” for man to be alone (remembering how the word “good” when used in the creation narrative describes the perfection of creation before the fall), it certainly was “good” for man to have an equal helper who would tend Creation in relationship, one flesh, with him. It was this relationship that Satan destroyed at the Fall.

We know the story of course. Eve listened to Satan, Adam joined in, they disobeyed God, and creation came under the curse of sin and death. The equality between man and woman was ruined at the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

“To the woman He said…
Your desire shall be for your husband,
And he shall rule over you.” (Gen 3:16)

So male headship didn’t begin at creation but was written into the curse, and enshrined into human traditions thereafter. But just as the curse of sin and death destroyed the relationship that God had originally created, it all changed again when Jesus went to the cross to set us free from it (Romans 8:2). Seated together in the heavenly places that Jesus paid for on our behalf, the original “good” relationship of Eden is restored. Paul’s instructions to the Corinthians addressed situations that could arise as men and women gave in to their carnal nature. But we walk after the Spirit and not after the flesh, and surely the question of headship in the church should be decided according to the truth of where men and women sit in heavenly places, in the Spirit, and not according to what Paul said to the church at Corinth that clung to the flesh. And I think we should be guided by what Genesis 2:18 seems to say about Eve being Adam’s “matching counterpart,” not by the consequence of their sin and the curse that ensued.

“The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.” (Romans 8:2) This is the only law that we should be applying when we think about headship in the home and eldership in the church.