I spent 15 years inside churches. The women were doing everything. Nobody was paying them.

She Was Running the Whole Thing. For Free.

I've been doing some uncomfortable work lately.

Deconstructing my faith. Pulling threads. Holding things up to the light that I used to just accept because that's how it was, that's how it's always been, that's what God wants.

And one of the things that's been sitting with me, bothering me more the longer I sit with it, is this:

Women were running those churches. And nobody was paying them.

I went to church off and on as a kid. Nothing that left a deep mark. But then, as an adult, I spent over 15 years working inside churches, running live sound on the weekends. Different buildings, different denominations, same basic machinery humming underneath all of it.

And from that seat, behind the board, in the back, watching the whole operation run, I had a front row view of exactly who was doing what.

The women were doing everything. I mean everything. The secretary at one of those churches wasn't even on the payroll. She was running the entire operation: scheduling, communications, pastoral support, knowing every family's situation, every ministry's needs, every Sunday's logistics. The connective tissue of the whole place.

Volunteer. Not paid. Doing it for the Lord.

I'm sitting with slow-burning rage on her behalf right now.

Because here's what I also watched for 15 years: the men had titles. The men had positions. The men stood at the front. Pastor. Elder. Deacon. Board member. Men overseeing, men deciding, men being thanked from the pulpit on Sunday morning.

And the women? They had ministries. Coffee ministry. Children's ministry. Hospitality ministry. Prayer chain ministry. They had tasks dressed up in holy language so it didn't look like what it actually was.

Free labor with a Scripture verse stapled to it.

Here's where it gets harder for me to say, because it implicates me too.

I was inside that machine for 15 years, and I didn't say anything. I just ran the board. Showed up, did my job, went home. I told myself it wasn't my place. It wasn't my church, not really. I was just the sound guy.

But I watched it happen week after week, and I normalized it. That's its own kind of participation.

And honestly? Part of me understood the women who kept showing up and giving everything. Because I feel the pull to be seen as faithful, as committed, as good. Signing up for one more thing to prove your worth. Trying to earn something that was supposed to already be free.

It's like being a pick-me for God. Look how much I can give. Look how little I need in return. See how devoted I am.

That's not faith. That's a transaction dressed up as devotion.

Now here's why I'm bringing this to the He-Man Club: this isn't just a church problem.

This is a mirror.

How many of us watched our mothers run the household the same way those women ran those churches? Invisible labor. Emotional labor. The labor of keeping everything and everyone together while the man "led" from a position that mostly involved being thanked at dinner and deferred to in public?

How many of us absorbed that as the natural order of things?

How many of us brought it into our marriages without ever questioning it?

I'm not here to bash Christianity. I'm here to say that any system, religious or otherwise, that extracts maximum labor from people while giving them minimum recognition and no compensation has to be examined. Has to be named. And if you're a man who claims to love the women in his life, you have to be willing to see it when it's happening.

The church I worked in wasn't some outlier. I worked in enough of them to know that. Talk to almost any woman who grew up in church. They'll tell you the same story with different names.

And the marriage I grew up watching? Same story. Different setting.

I don't have a clean bow for this one.

What I have is a question I keep turning over: What did the women in my life give for free that I just accepted as given?

That's the work. That's where it starts.