[The first to respond is Mary Kassian, Distinguished Professor of Women's Studies at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, award winning author, and Council Member at CBMW.]

Brent and I have been married for almost thirteen years. In that time, he has always honored, blessed and encouraged me. He has never, ever said or done anything that would give me the impression that I am lesser than he. He trusts me completely, and gives up much on my account. When he fails, he is quick to seek forgiveness. I am left with the impression that he regards my desires and interests as more important than his own, and I feel cherished.

Therefore, the question of male-female equality has not been an issue in my mind. I am secure and confident in who God has made me as a woman. Brent upholds and guards my "equality" so I do not feel the need to do so. And because of Brent's great love, I am delighted-indeed overjoyed-to have the opportunity to respond to his leadership and encourage him in it. I try to do so on a daily basis by communicating to him all that has happened during my day, including what has happened in the lives of our children. I open my heart to him, pour out all my daily disappointments, victories, joys and struggles. I invite him to share himself with me and to provide me with his wisdom, insight and leadership.

On a very practical basis, we seek to set aside some time each day for this to happen. "Couch Time" is a time when the children, the computer, the paperwork, the housework, the phone and all the other demands of life are set aside in order to concentrate on each other.

This simple exercise does a number of things: First, it reinforces the equality part of our relationship. My views, perceptions and opinions are voiced equally alongside his. Second it provides Brent with the information necessary to establish God's vision and direction for our family. If he does not know what I am thinking and feeling, he cannot lead wisely.

"Couch Time" also provides me with a glimpse of his heart. I delight in responding to his leadership because I know that he has listened to me, heard me, and that he considers my views very, very seriously. I have seen how his heart is motivated, not for pleasing himself, but for doing what is right.

"Couch Time" builds trust. I trust Brent's leadership, and he trusts me that I will be honest with him, support him and never ridicule or mock his efforts to lead. Finally, "Couch Time" is just a lot of fun! We have a lot of laughs and enjoy the beauty and goodness of all God intended marriage to be.

[Dr. Daniel Heimbach serves on the Board of Reference for CBMW and provides the following counsel to parents on adolescent sexuality and  'The Golden Compass'.]

End of the year moviegoers, and especially parents of pre-teen children, need to know that what promises to be the most alluring blockbuster of the Christmas season, a movie entitled ‘The Golden Compass,' is a dose of spiritual poison packed in sweetness designed to capture and mislead trusting children.

Marketed as a wholesome family story resembling the tales of Narnia or ‘Lord of the Rings,' the film coming out December 7, starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, is a celluloid version of the first in a three-book series by British author Philip Pullman entitled ‘His Dark Materials.' It is a story in which two 12-year old children-a girl named Lyra and a boy named Will-have adventures saving the world from institutional Christianity, learning along the way that sin is the key to "wisdom" and saving the universe depends on killing the God of the Bible.

Replete with sympathetic talking animals and heroic battles, Pullman's story rides a wave of well-publicized books by atheists crusading to rid the culture of its debt to Christianity. These include ‘The God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins, ‘God Is Not Great' by Christopher Hitchens, and "Letter to a Christian Nation' by Sam Harris. But while these are written for savvy adults, the Pullman story aims at leading children to reject the biblical God.

Some could wonder if Christian reaction to Pullman's books popularized by the coming movie is perhaps overstated or hypersensitive. But it may, if anything, be understated because there is simply no doubt in this case about what the author intends. Philip Pullman has made that all too clear in repeated statements reported in publicity surrounding his work.

Pullman graduated in 1968 with a "Third Class" BA in English from Oxford University, meaning he barely graduated and was awarded the lowest possible grade below which he would have washed out. Nevertheless, Pullman has risen to sensational status due mainly to the opening provided by the extraordinary popularity of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Pullman credits the Potter series for easing acceptance of his own work saying, "I was quite happy for Harry Potter to get all the attention so I could creep underneath all of it." He explains that while the Potter series conditioned readers to favor the occult, he was "flying under the radar, saying things that are far more subversive than anything poor old Harry has said." Subversive in what way? That is because, he admits, "My books are about killing God."

Pullman is not shy about his spiritual views. He announces: "I'm an atheist. There is no God here. There never was." He is "all for the death of God" and attributes his writing success to "pigheaded self-belief, undamaged by the facts, that's what you need." Though Pullman writes in the genre of C.S. Lewis, he despises Lewis intensely, not for lack of talent but for his Christian faith and biblical morality. Pullman once panned the Narnia books as "a peevish blend of racist, misogynistic and reactionary prejudice," and, when Disney produced ‘The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe,' he opined that, "If the Disney corporation wants to market this film as a great Christian story, they'll just have to tell lies about it."

Pullman claims his trilogy for children-composed of ‘The Golden Compass,' ‘The Subtle Knife,' and ‘The Amber Spyglass'-is not "pure fantasy." Rather, he says the story is about "stark reality," meaning he uses fantasy as a mechanism for teaching children something "real," something about the way things are in "real life." So the author of ‘The Golden Compass' and its companion volumes specifies they are crafted to get children to accept what he thinks and believes they should think and believe about the real world, the real church, and the God that Christians really trust and worship.

Pullman says that his story is about "mirroring the consciousness of growing, learning, developing (moral-spiritual) consciousness," and "The theme of the whole thing is the ending of innocence and the beginning of wisdom." But while this might sound reassuring, parents need to understand that Pullman does not mean what they most likely assume. That is because, for Pullman, the "ending of innocence" and "beginning of wisdom" is not what comes from fearing God but the reverse. Pullman's is a wholly contrary "wisdom" that requires killing the biblical God and embracing what God calls sin.

‘The Golden Compass," the first volume in Pullman's trilogy, covers the least overtly offensive part of his three-part story, and the film version opening this weekend tones down some of the more blatantly anti-Christian elements still occurring in that book. Yet Pullman's alluringly sweet anti-Christian, anti-God story line is the same in the movie as in the book, which makes it all the more critical that parents realize the author truly means to capture the minds of their children not merely for commercial but for spiritual reasons.

It is crafted to fire interest, not only in purchasing books and spinoff products or in packing theatres to see movie sequels, but also in adopting the mindset or spirituality conveyed by the Pullman's story. And this has to be sobering for thoughtful parents.

The story beginning with ‘The Golden Compass' features clergy who torture children as lab rats, gay angels, wise witches, revered shamen, getting in touch with inner "daemons," sinning to unleash spiritual energy, and a brilliant ex-nun who reenacts the Serpent in the Garden of Eden-but this time as a trusted mentor who leads the new Eve and Adam to embrace the "wisdom" of lost purity and to seek cosmic power from killing God.

Pullman explains that "Lyra is Eve, Mary Malone is the Serpent who teaches her how to fall in love, and Will is Adam." Mary Malone, an ex-nun who will not appear until the sequel to ‘The Golden Compass,' is the one who by the end of the story encourages Lyra and Will to eat forbidden fruit, destroy God, and explore unmarried sex to attain god-like power for running the universe on their own terms.

The sort of "reality" Pullman wants children to embrace is one in which sinning is the key to moral discovery, temptation points the way to spiritual life, biblical evil is actually good, biblical good is actually evil, the Serpent in the Garden of Eden is their most trustworthy mentor, and their ultimate enemy is the biblical God-the one called "the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty."

As is so often the case with atheists, Pullman's aversion to all things biblical boils down to forbidden sex. In the second book of the series-what will be the basis for the sequel to this season's film-the Serpent figure, ex-nun Mary Malone, explains how sinful sex was her reason for rejecting God. She says: "And I thought: am I really going to spend the rest of my life without ever feeling that again? . . . And I took the crucifix from around my neck and I threw it in the sea. That was it. All over. Gone. . . . So, that is how I stopped being a nun."

‘The Golden Compass,' the blockbuster "family" movie this Christmas is a not so subtle apologetic for reversing biblical truth and subverting virtue by the "wisdom" of sin. And it does that perfidiously by turning parents into accomplices for leading their own children toward spiritual destruction. Parents are warned that Pullman's story will likely harm children far more than adults and will more surely mislead unformed minds than minds already made up one way or the other. That is because it takes the innocent trust children render empathetic adults, and uses it to teach children to loath what they should most trust and to trust what they should most loath.

Jesus warned that we should pay close attention to "signs of the times" (Mt 16:3), meaning that we should be alert to cultural indicators signifying the approach of major shifts affecting the knowledge and practice of spiritual-moral truth-what Francis Schaeffer called "true-truth" because there is only one genuinely real truth, that being what God defines for us, not what we chose for ourselves.

Certainly one of the "signs of the times" marking our culture today is zeal for atheism coupled with growing intolerance, ridicule and disrespect for all things biblical-for Christianity in general and for the biblical God in particular. Christians are not yet facing overt religious persecution, but a film that sweetly leads children to fight their Savior and embrace the Enemy of their souls is an indicator-an early indicator-of the warning given by Jesus that, "If the head of the house has been called Beelzebub, how much more the members of his household" (Mt 10:25).

A pastor in Finland and two of his evangelical colleagues are suffering the consequences of obeying the Bible's injunction that forbids female pastors in an egregious violation of the separation of church and state.

A Finnish district court last week convicted and fined Ari Norro, a preacher in the Luther state church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland (ELCF), with criminal discrimination for refusing to conduct a worship service with a female pastor, according to a Christianity Today report. 

Norro was fined the equivalent of 20 days of his salary, according to CT. Acting vicar Tauno Tuominen and Pirkko Ojala, chairman of the Lutheran Evangelical Association of Finland, were also found guilty of similar charges and fined. All three men will now have a criminal record.

The case first unfolded in March when Norro was scheduled to preach at a Sunday morning communion service in southern Finland. Fifteen minutes before the service, female preacher Petra Pohjanraito arrived to serve at the altar. Norro offered to leave the church, but Pohjanraito chose to leave instead. A church council requested a police investigation into the matter, leading to charges against Norro, Tuominen and Ojala.

Finland's laws prohibit any discrimination either in the workplace or in public based on race, language, age, family ties, health, religion, political orientation, work, sexual orientation, or gender.

The ELCF has been ordaining women since 1986, and in 2006 the Bishop's Conference ruled that pastors do not have a right to refuse to work with female pastors, even if they believe it to violate the teaching of Scripture. Pastors who don't accept women's ordination cannot be appointed vicar of a parish.

Norro fears that the case has set a dangerous precedent and will lead to pastors being put on trial if they refuse to work with a gay pastor or teach that homosexuality is a sin.

"It's sad that the church can't resolve problems like this one," Norro told CT. "In this case, the church itself winds a rope round its neck and gives the end of the rope to the state."

A fundamental issue in the Norro case is the grossly unbiblical nature of a state-sponsored church; by intervening in this case, the governing authorities of Finland have overstepped their proper sphere of authority.

Scripture is clear that God has ordained government to wield the sword of steel (Rom 13:1-7, 1 Peter 2:13-15) and Christians are duty-bound to submit to these authorities insofar as they maintain their proper domain in a way that is commensurate with Scripture.

However, the church, and the church alone, is called to wield the sword of the Spirit. Genuine effectual faith cannot be coerced; similarly, certain convictions, such as the Bible's teaching on leadership in the church, cannot be regulated by human authorities. The government is not called to be a conduit of the Gospel; that is the domain of the church. Neither complementarian nor egalitarian teachings should ever be enforced by human courts. 

I am thankful for the courage of Norro and his co-laborers and their willingness to suffer for the sake of truth. May God use these circumstances to grant these men and other faithful truth-telling evangelicals in Finland rock-ribbed perseverance and profound growth in their faith in accord with James 1:2-4: "Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing."  (ESV)

The so-called sexual revolution has given to the culture more than it bargained for. At least that's what I thought as I watched Paul Janka being interviewed on NBC's "Today Show" on Monday (see video, Rated PG).

Janka is a case-study in sexual libertinism gone to seed. He is a self-confessed "Cassanova" who claims over 100 "conquests," and now he's telling other guys how to do the same. Here's how Janka says he approaches "dating":

"Let me say I have a dual aim when I spend time with a woman: to have fun and to maintain my integrity as a man. Maintaining my integrity means honoring what I want in the process and not being manipulated by a woman's agenda. This has to be an active process because I've found that women in the City - consciously or not - operate by a societal script that doesn't incorporate my interests as a man."

Now this is astonishing. Masculine integrity has nothing to do with truth, rightness, or even what one's obligation is to one's fellow man (or in this case woman). Rather, Janka turns his "integrity as a man" into a prop for his own self-centered desires. He does it with a straight face and in a forum that implies his behavior is in the cultural mainstream.

What was remarkable about the interview, however, was the inability of anyone to make a definitive condemnation of Janka's behavior. Meredith Vieira gave hints that she disapproved of his behavior, and a "sex addiction" therapist was brought in to show that Janka's exploits could possibly be hurtful to women. Junka's response was simply to say that he's up-front with his intentions and that the women he "dates" are on board with his lechery.

Janka styled himself as living out authentic manhood, and neither Meredith Vieira nor the therapist could express an ounce of moral outrage, even though it seemed to be simmering beneath the surface. Their secularism and moral neutrality gave them no resources for doing so. In a culture that says that the only moral requirement of human sexuality is that it occur between consenting adults, there really isn't any consistent basis for censuring Janka.

How different all of this is from the ideal of manhood presented in the Bible. The paradigm of masculine integrity in the scriptures is King Jesus, who for love set aside his own rights and privileges in obedience to His Father and who laid down his life for His bride (Philippians 2:5-8; Ephesians 5:25). Likewise God intends marriage as a reenactment of Christ's love for his bride. Just as Christ lays down His life for His wife, so husbands are called to lay down their lives for their wives.

Would that Janka might see another ideal of manhood-the one that was embodied by Jesus Himself, who alone can free men from the enslaving moral confusion of our day.

Christians in California are beginning to awaken and respond to the dark implications of four pro-homosexual measures signed into law in October by the Golden State's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

These laws, on which Gender Blog first reported last month, promote homosexual, bisexual and transsexual indoctrination of schoolchildren through prescribed textbooks and activities. Further, the laws prescribe "harassment training" for offenders who express a belief that there are only two genders, male and female, or who use such language as "mom" and "dad" to describe a typical family. The law effectively bans the use of traditional language such as "mom" and "dad" as discriminatory.

Advocates for Faith and Freedom has filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn what they not-so-subtly call "stupid laws"- laws that are aimed at wholesale social reconstruction in California schools. Several other Christian and pro-family groups have joined the suit, including the California Family Council, Northern California chapter of Alliance Defense Fund and Campaign for Children and Families,

Robert Tyler, general counsel for Advocates of Faith and Freedom, points out the obvious conundrums school officials will face if the laws take effect as scheduled on Jan. 11. 

"What will prevent a 250-pound linebacker from deciding he wants to share the locker room with the cheerleaders?" asked Tyler. "If implemented, this bill will have disastrous effects in our school system. This social experiment defies common sense."

The laws prohibit "instruction or activity that is perceived to promote a discriminatory bias against gender, including cross-dressing and sex-change operations as well as so-called sexual orientation." Offenders could face discipline, including lawsuits, from the California Department of Education.

Allan Carlson, global coordinator of the World Congress of Families, supports the action, calling the legislation "a blatant attack on the natural family orchestrated by the alternative-lifestyles lobby." He points out that the upshot which supporters of the laws seek is a brave new gender-free world.
"It will prohibit anything that suggests that the natural family-a man and a woman, married, with children-is typical," Carlson said. "Thus, under this latest advance toward a Brave New World of polymorphous perversion, California textbooks will no longer be able to use words like ‘mother and father' and ‘husband and wife,' because they suggest that heterosexuality is the norm-even though that is manifestly the case, even in California."

The suit names Schwarzenegger, state Attorney General Edmund Brown Jr., Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell and others as defendants.

Pray for believers in California and their efforts at opposing this wicked agenda. God's Word stipulates that his people must obey His commands when they conflict with the laws of man. Pray they will stand steadfast while exhibiting the aroma of life commensurate with the Gospel.

Social engineers may tell us that gender and sexuality are mere social constructs, but God has objectively defined these fundamental human attributes for the good of His people and the glory of His name.