Don’t Go
The only winning move in a nuclear war is not to play
Christianity Today is keeping an eye on this summer’s denominational conventions. The SBC. The LCMS. The ACNA. The CREC. The Global Methodist Church. Millions of churchgoers represented. Dozens of decisions to be made. Abuse investigations on the agenda.
Here is what they will not tell you: the abuse survivors are women. And the women will be ignored.
This is not a prediction. It is a pattern so well-established that predicting it is barely different from reading last year’s minutes.
In 2019, Beth Moore preached a Mother’s Day sermon and the SBC lost its mind. This was a woman who had spent decades carefully framing her ministry around her husband’s headship, who had never publicly challenged the denomination’s position on women teaching men, who had built one of the largest women’s Bible study ministries in American history entirely within the lines she had been given.
She preached a sermon. They came for her anyway.
By 2021 she said she could no longer identify with the SBC. She has since found a home in the Anglican church. She is still speaking. She is still prophesying. She did not stop. She just stopped pretending the institution deserved her presence.
Beth Allison Barr, historian, has documented in careful academic detail what the church did with women across centuries. She is still naming the score: the SBC has not listened, has walked back abuse reforms, and continues to push women out. Kristin Kobes Du Mez spent years tracing how evangelical masculinity became a theology of dominance. Her next book is already written.
Notice the pattern. The women who pressed hardest for reform did not give up. They left. They kept speaking from outside the walls. And the walls did not move.
Here is the question nobody is asking about these conventions: if the same bodies that built the structures enabling abuse are now convening to address abuse, what exactly do we expect to happen?
I want to be precise about the mechanism, because the usual response is “bad implementation, not inherent design.” That response is wrong, and here is why.
In a complementarian polity, ask yourself who holds authority at every single checkpoint in the justice pipeline. Who receives the initial report? A male pastor or elder. Who investigates? A male-led committee. Who adjudicates whether the woman’s account is credible? Men. Who can overturn that decision? Men. Who holds disciplinary authority over the perpetrator? Men. Who decides whether to involve outside authorities? Men.
This is not a description of a justice system. It is a description of a protection system with justice vocabulary. When every investigator, every adjudicator, every appeals body, and every disciplinary authority shares a demographic with the primary class of perpetrators, cover-up is not a risk. It is the structural inevitability. You have not built a pipeline with a leak. You have built a pipeline that flows in one direction, and that direction is away from accountability.
This is not a bug in complementarian theology. It is a feature. It operates exactly as designed.
Last week, Joseph Duggar was arrested and charged with molesting a nine-year-old girl in 2020. His wife Kendra was arrested on charges of child endangerment and false imprisonment. This comes five years after his brother Josh was convicted of downloading child sexual abuse images — the same Josh who had previously been credibly alleged to have molested four of his sisters and a babysitter.
Two brothers. Same family. Same theology. Same culture. Same outcome.
The Duggar family is the most famous product of Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles — a hyper-patriarchal homeschool movement that fed directly into the same world as the CREC and fundamentalist Baptist networks gathering this summer for their conventions.
But notice something: the abuse Joseph Duggar is charged with happened on a family vacation. No church policy could have prevented it directly. Which means women in leadership — as necessary as that is — is not sufficient on its own.
What would have helped? Policies that no church actually implements consistently: a strict two-adult rule where no adult is ever alone with a child in any church context, no exceptions. Age-appropriate, explicit, repeated teaching to children about body safety and the right to say no to any adult. Mandatory reporting training for every staff member and volunteer, with clear protocols that route disclosures to civil authorities first — not to the pastor’s office. Regular reminders from the pulpit of what grooming looks like and what to do when you see it.
These are not complicated policies. Youth sports leagues implement them. Scouting organizations — after their own catastrophic failures — implement them. Churches do not, because implementing them requires admitting that the shepherd can be a wolf, and that is a sentence complementarian ecclesiology is structurally incapable of completing.
Here is the full picture of what a church that takes this seriously actually looks like.
Women hold autonomous pastoral roles with real authority over mixed congregations — not “women’s ministry director,” not “co-pastor under a male senior pastor,” but women who preach on Sunday mornings to everyone, who sit on elder boards, who hold disciplinary authority. Male leaders are genuinely in a learning posture, not just tolerating female leadership as a progressive brand choice but actively looking to women for vision and direction. Men in the pews are formed by women’s preaching over years, not just attending a church that happens to have a female associate pastor they’ve never heard preach.
And women are present at every level of the justice pipeline. Not as a token voice on a committee. As decision-makers with actual authority to investigate, adjudicate, and discipline — including authority over men.
No denomination achieves this perfectly. Every tradition has its scandals, because men are capable of carving out isolated areas of access regardless of the institutional culture around them. The two-adult rule exists precisely because even good institutions produce bad actors. The question is not whether abuse is possible. The question is whether the structure makes cover-up inevitable or difficult.
How do you find a church that takes this seriously? Start with the staff page on their website. Are women listed with autonomous pastoral titles? Do they preach to the full congregation? Are they on the governing board? These are verifiable facts, not vibes.
The odds improve considerably at Anglican churches — notably, Beth Moore landed there for a reason — and at churches with a rainbow on the sign. The rainbow costs something to display. Churches that put it there have already decided that institutional approval matters less than witness. That is exactly the muscle you want active when a survivor walks through the door.
I have heard the argument for staying inside the declining denominations. Someone has to be in the room. Change requires presence. You cannot influence what you abandon.
Jesus did not reform the Pharisees. He called fishermen away from the existing power structure and built something alongside it. He did not organize a caucus within the Sanhedrin. He told his disciples that when a city would not receive them, they were to shake the dust from their feet and move on — not as a negotiating tactic, not to force the city’s hand, but as a testimony against it.
The SBC has lost millions of members over twenty years. They have had their abuse scandal documented in a three-hundred-page independent investigation. They watched their most prominent women’s teacher leave publicly and explain exactly why. In 2023 they tightened their complementarian requirements.
The groove does not respond to pressure. It deepens under it.
There is a scene in WarGames where the machine finally understands, after running every possible simulation, that thermonuclear war cannot be won. The only winning move is not to play.
This is not a boycott strategy. Boycotts are strategic. This is the recognition that the game itself is the harm. The conventions are not neutral ground where good arguments can prevail. They are the field where women and survivors are systematically outranked, outmaneuvered, and silenced by a polity designed to produce exactly that outcome. Being present to be harmed is not witness. It is just harm.
The survivors already know this. They learned it the hard way — in the room, at the microphone, in the letter that was never answered, in the meeting that went nowhere, in the settlement agreement with the nondisclosure clause. They are not asking whether to attend the convention. They are asking whether the church was ever what it claimed to be.
That is the right question.
The rest of us are still catching up to what the survivors understood long ago: some institutions do not need reform. They need to be walked away from — clearly, publicly, without apology — while you build something true in the space beside them.
Find a church where a woman preaches to you on Sunday. Sit in the pew. Listen. Learn. Watch how the men around you receive it. That is your diagnostic.
The women kept showing up. The church burned their books and buried their names and called it theology.
They are still speaking. They just moved outside the walls.
Where are the Pharisees now?