Andrea, a podcast listener in Jackson, Mississippi writes in, hello, Pastor John, thank you

for your books and particularly your new book on Providence, she writes, it has proven

to be life altering for me. Thank you. I was wondering if you could take a moment to address

an entirely different topic, a marriage question actually. I have started to notice an emerging

view of complementarity online and in my own circles, that seems a little off to me.

It's called complementarity and holds to the idea that the husband and wife should take on

different roles in the home, roles that mostly don't overlap. But to me, it often sounds like

simply a functional idea. So if the wife is a better teacher, she teaches the children,

the Bible, and the husband doesn't, or if the wife makes more money, the husband takes the

primary role in caring for the daily needs of the kids. It's called complementarity in the sense

that each spouse is not duplicating the role of the other. Each compliments what the other is doing,

but I don't know what else to call it, except to say it feels like a genderless complementarity.

The husband and wife do not overlap duties out of efficiency, not from deeper convictions.

In fact, gender rarely, if ever, is brought in to define which roles the man has that the woman

does not advise first up. Do you see this functional complementarity? If so, how do you respond

in what roles in the home are most gendered? I would love your thoughts on this.

I suppose it's inevitable that the longer a label is used like complementarianism or complementarity,

the easier it is for the label to replace the reality. The label complementarian as a designation

for how men and women relate to each other has been around for about 35 years. I would want to stress

that labels are only valuable if they capture and communicate reality. It's the biblical reality

that we really care about, not so much the label. I think Andrea is right that the label today is

less clear and less precise in the reality it refers to than it used to be, and she's pointing

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