Preston Sprinkle didn’t arrive at his views on women in church leadership through a trendy deconstruction arc or a sudden urge to challenge tradition. He got there the old-fashioned way: by studying Scripture closely enough to realize the answers he inherited weren’t as airtight as he once believed.
For years, Sprinkle — who just released his latest book, From Genesis to Junia: An Honest Search for What the Bible Really Says About Women in Leadership — held a firmly complementarian view, shaped by church spaces where women in leadership weren’t simply discouraged but treated as a direct threat to biblical faithfulness. It wasn’t a casual preference or a side issue. It was presented as part of the package deal of taking the Bible seriously.
“I was raised in a really strong complementarian background, meaning, you know, women can’t teach or preach or shouldn’t get near a stage sort of thing — very strong complementarian. And it was like, if you don’t believe that, you don’t believe the Bible and you may not be a Christian,” Sprinkle said.
Positions like that rarely fall apart all at once. More often, they start to loosen when someone encounters a question they can’t dismiss or a person they can’t easily stereotype. Sprinkle said his shift began when he met Christians outside his theological camp who cared about Scripture just as much as he did but read it differently.
“I was like, man, maybe they know something I don’t, because I haven’t heard that yet. And as I looked at passages, I started to see, there’s some complexity here,” Sprinkle said.
Complexity isn’t usually welcome in church debates about gender and authority. Both sides often want quick certainty, preferably in the form of a proof text that ends the conversation. Sprinkle’s journey moved in the other direction. The deeper he went, the less interested he became in defending a position simply because it was familiar.
“I’m, by trade, a biblical scholar. So I’m nerdy when it comes to the Bible, and I want to go where the text leads, even if it leads me away from previously held things I believed. Maybe it’ll confirm those. I want my views to arise from the text and not be imposed on the text,” Sprinkle said.
That kind of line gets thrown around a lot in Christian publishing, but in Sprinkle’s case, it seems to describe the actual process. He didn’t go looking for a more culturally acceptable reading of women in leadership. He started doing what scholars are supposed to do: reading slowly, asking better questions and paying attention to context instead of flattening everything into a modern talking point.
“I was truly trying to understand what the text says. So that took me on a lot of rabbit trails. It’s been months researching words and looking at background stuff that wasn’t even directly relevant to the question. I just wanted to understand the text on its own terms,” Sprinkle said.
One of the major turning points came when he stopped assuming modern church categories lined up neatly with the first-century world. A lot of today’s arguments revolve around titles, offices and authority structures that feel obvious to modern Christians but aren’t always presented the same way in the New Testament.
“I wrote a whole chapter on what leadership and church were like in the first century, and I didn’t plan on doing that. I didn’t know how significant that would be. But the more I would look at the New Testament and then look at the modern debate, I’m like, I don’t know — are we imposing modern church categories onto the text? I just kept seeing this incongruence,” Sprinkle said.
That question is more disruptive than it first appears. Once you stop assuming the modern church org chart is the biblical baseline, a lot of long-settled arguments start to wobble. The debate shifts from “Can women fill this office as we currently define it?” to something more foundational: What did leadership actually look like in the early church, and how were women functioning within it?
Sprinkle’s shift didn’t come from one isolated verse or a sentimental desire to be more inclusive. It came from cumulative study. Piece by piece, the framework he had inherited started to feel less like the plain teaching of Scripture and more like one interpretation among several. An interpretation, he realized, that serious Bible readers had challenged for good reason.
He’s careful, though, not to turn that realization into a cheap caricature of everyone who still disagrees with him. That restraint makes his perspective more credible. He knows many complementarians aren’t driven by fear or misogyny. They’re trying, in good faith, to be obedient to Scripture as they understand it.
“I’ve also met complementarians who honor women. They treat women well, they respect women, they listen to a woman’s voice. They are not misogynistic. They’re just genuinely constrained by their best interpretation of Scripture. And I can respect that,” Sprinkle said.
That posture matters because conversations around women in leadership tend to collapse into accusation within minutes. Complementarians are often painted as sexist dinosaurs. Egalitarians are often dismissed as people who’ve caved to modern culture and stopped taking the Bible seriously. Sprinkle has little patience for either reduction.
“Some of the most rigorous, deep exegetes of Jesus-believing, authority-of-Scripture people are egalitarians. You can’t read their stuff and say they’re not taking the actual text and Scripture seriously,” Sprinkle said.
That observation cuts to the center of why this conversation continues to matter. For a lot of Christians, especially those raised in conservative church environments, the women-in-leadership debate has never just been about women. It has been framed as a referendum on whether the Bible still has authority at all. Once a question is loaded that heavily, it becomes almost impossible to examine it honestly. People feel like they are defending Scripture itself, when in reality they may be defending a particular tradition of interpretation.
Sprinkle knows that world because he came from it. His own shift wasn’t powered by rebellion. It was powered by intellectual honesty. He kept finding evidence that demanded a second look, and he chose not to ignore it.
That choice is probably what makes his story resonate beyond this one issue. Plenty of Christians have experienced the disorienting moment when a long-held belief no longer feels as settled as it once did. Some panic and double down. Others swing hard in the opposite direction. Sprinkle’s path offers a third option: stay rooted in Scripture, stay rigorous and stay open to being corrected.
He also seems aware of how many people are quietly stuck in the middle of this conversation. They don’t feel an intrinsic problem with women leading. They also don’t want to abandon the authority of Scripture. What they want is permission to ask the question honestly without being branded compromised or naive.
“I do want to foster better conversations where there’s less mudslinging, less accusations, more understanding,” Sprinkle said.
He was even more direct about who he hopes might benefit most from his work and from the wider conversation surrounding it.
“I think the person who might benefit from it the most would be somebody who leans complementarian, doesn’t really have an intrinsic problem with women leading, but just hasn’t been convinced from the text — somebody who’s really like, ‘I’m just biblically centered, and I want to know, what does the text say?’” Sprinkle said.
That audience is probably larger than many churches realize. A lot of Christians aren’t looking for slogans or tribal cues. They’re looking for clarity, honesty and a process that doesn’t require intellectual shortcuts. Sprinkle’s journey offers all of that. It also offers something the Church could use a lot more of right now: a reminder that changing your mind doesn’t always signal compromise. Sometimes it signals that you finally took the text seriously enough to let it challenge you.
