Healing After the Scars of “Biblical Manhood”
A conversation with Aimee Byrd
If you don’t run in deeply evangelical circles — or never experienced the challenge of trying to suggest women’s equal authority in a church setting — you might have thus far lived ungrazed by the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. This group, founded in 1987, was the fever dream of a group of conservative and reformed pastors. They wrote up The Danvers Statement, which stated among other theological declarations that “Adam’s headship in marriage was established by God before the fall,” that sin inclines women to “resist limitations on their roles” in ministry, and that some church governing and teaching roles are restricted to men.
The influence of their ideas spread like a patriarchal virus among evangelical, conservative and non-denominational churches. In 1991, two of the leading signatories, Wayne Grudem and John Piper, wrote a book so good they eventually gave it away for free: Recovering Biblical Manhood & Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Womanhood.
These fellows represented a whole front of men so secure in their [biblical] manhood that when author and speaker Aimee Byrd published her book Recovering from Biblical Manhood & Womanhood… they lost their ever-loving minds.
