"Leadership in Your Home"

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.

- Ephesians 5:21 - 27 NIV

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When riding a tandem bicycle, you need to have a leader. The leader, however, doesn’t sit in the front barking out signals to the person in the back. The leader merely is the appointed Captain of the team, sitting in the front, turning the wheel, and executing the riding plan the team made together at the start of the ride. ​The Stoker sits in the rear feeding power to the bike pedaling while watching the back, providing navigation and signaling to others around them showing where the tandem is going.

​It’s essentially a submit / submit model where neither of the riders can do whatever they please. They have to submit to the goal of the ride and be predictable to each other for the safety and success of the team. If one of the two riders did something unexpected, the team could crash.

​As couples, we also can’t go through life making independent and spontaneous decisions reacting to whatever we stumble upon. For most decisions, you need time to allow each other’s opinions to come out to make the right decision and the leader to have a framework in which to operate.

​The wisdom God has is that every couple needs a leader. The position is appointed, but it comes with a lot of responsibility. This leader is not a dictator, but one who leads in loving service of his spouse. In general, he makes cooperative decisions by relying on the strengths, gifts and opinions of his spouse to navigate through life.

​So, who is steering this marriage thing anyway? The quick answer is, both of you do in a unified, submissive way.

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