Christianity Today published short essays by two moderate voices in the Complementarian vs. Egalitarian debate called Wounds of a Friend: Complementarian and Wounds of a Friend: Egalitarian respectively.

John Koessler and Sarah Sumner do a good job of each pointing out the pitfalls of each view and how some problems can be remedied.

If someone forced me to be pick a side I would choose Egalitarian, but for the life of me I have been seeking a third way out of this mess.  I think the problem lays not in Male/Female but in the immense discrepancies between titled roles within the early church and what they are called today.  Bishop, Deacon, Elder, and Pastor are all viewed differently by different denominations and mean different things than they did two thousand years ago.  This makes the problem very complex.

I have been deeply saddened by the treatment of women as wheelbarrels to dump problems, children, and errands onto by many men in the church.  Those men work eighty hour weeks and never see their kids, but God forbid a woman get a part-time job.

Egalitarians, on the other hand, have been suspect of diminishing the masculinity of the church and neutering the interaction of the church with men: the lopsided numbers of men versus women who attend church attests to this. 

Our culture's obsession with the manliest of men and the womanliest of women has created a polarization where everything is an extreme stereotype.  One person at our church made fun of me to my wife's face when she was casually telling him how I like to cook and will help out with the laundry.  A reading of Proverbs 31 with American (or the church's) stereotypes in mind will raise a few eyebrows, as the beautiful woman not only raises children, cooks, and makes clothing but also buys and sells land while maintaining vineyards.  It is important to realize as well that in a more agrarian society men were thought to be "motherly" to the land as they planted it, watered it, nurtured it, and watched it grow, much in the same way a mother views her children.

Am I an egalitarian?  Yes.  Am I a complementarian? Yes.  When held in tension, these two views actually begin to view the reality of the situation we live in, where churches are made up of individuals with gifts to bring to the table and marriages that are complex, loving, and varied---much like the Church itself is.