The 1987 Danvers Statement institutionalized complementarian male headship

Evidence

In 1986, in an address before the Evangelical Theological Society, theologian Wayne Grudem had called for a new organization to uphold biblical manhood and womanhood. The next year an informal group gathered to discuss the rise of “unbiblical teaching” about women and men, and in December of that year they convened more formally, this time in Danvers, Massachusetts. There, under the leadership of Grudem and fellow Reformed evangelical John Piper, they crafted a statement affirming what would come to be known as “complementarianism”: God created men and women “equal before God” yet “distinct in their manhood and womanhood.” The statement attested that God had established male headship as part of the order of creation and closed the door to women in church leadership. In 1989, CBMW published this “Danvers Statement” in a full-page advertisement in Christianity Today, drawing “a huge response.” — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 382

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precise origin story and definition of complementarianism as a formal theological position.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ‘dominant strand vs. white evangelicalism’ contest — this shows the theological institutional mechanism by which the strand got embedded.