Submit to One Another
It’s Complicated: Family as a Means of Grace - Part 4
May 25, 2025
Ephesians 5:20-6:4
Always give thanks to God the Father for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ; and submit to each other out of respect for Christ.
Ephesians 5:20-21
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Paul’s instructions for Christian households can be a hornet’s nest for bad interpretation and abuse.
In the evangelical church where I spent my teenage years, I often heard Ephesians 5:22 and 6:1 quoted — “Wives submit to your husbands” and “Children, obey your parents.” What’s ironic is how rarely we heard verses like 5:25 or 6:4 — “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church” and “Parents, don’t provoke your children to anger.” And even less proclaimed were the verses that introduce the entire section: “Submit to each other out of respect for Christ.”
That mutual submission sets the tone for everything that follows. Yet historically, many faith communities have twisted these verses to uphold hierarchies of control — where men dominate, women disappear into the background, and children are to be seen but not heard.
In Jesus and John Wayne, historian Kristin Kobes DuMez describes the cultural fascination with domineering, militant masculinity. Like John Wayne, they are men who “sit tall in the saddle, who are not afraid to resort to violence to bring order, and who won’t let political correctness get in the way of saying what has to be said or the norms of democratic society keep them from doing what needs to be done.”
Such “alpha-males” don’t show weakness, they “protect” with power, and they rarely make room for those who don’t fit the mold. One man with a physical disability said he felt there was no place for him in evangelicalism because he wasn’t a “sports or hunting fanatic.” I’ve felt that too. At one church I served, the men told me they couldn’t respect me because I didn’t own a gun. Apparently, not owning one meant I wasn’t a “biblical man” because in their words, I “was refusing to protect my family.”
The sad irony is that many churches preach these roles as biblical while ignoring the harm they can cause. I've seen men praised for “leading” while acting more like bullies. I've watched women, outwardly submissive, quietly manipulate and control everything behind the scenes in a dynamic that only pretends to honor Scripture. And far too often, these façades have hidden emotional manipulation, spiritual neglect, and even abuse.
Children grow up believing they are either invisible or inherently flawed, because their needs and voices are rarely valued. When I was a youth pastor, I had two 6th grade girls ask me, “If you had kids, would you talk to them?” Their pain was deeply felt as most of the adults in their lives completely ignored their existence.
When our family systems are built on control instead of Christlike love, everyone loses.
So what if we stopped asking who’s in charge and started asking who needs to be seen, heard, and loved?
To follow Christ is to dismantle power plays and choose the harder way: honoring one another as beloved members of God’s family. This is the kind of household is bound together by grace, where mutual love and surrendering our will and desires to the needs of one another builds something truly holy.
