Navigating False Teachers: Jen Wilkin Exposed by translating her essay into what she’s *really* saying
By Elizabeth Prata
I critique an older essay of Jen Wilkin’s, labeling her a false teacher whose trajectory since 2014 has been downward. I translate her false teacher-speech into what she is really saying, in order to demonstrate that even seemingly soft words and faux-kindness have hidden barbs that destroy. I warn that false teachers use persuasive language, urging discernment when evaluating their messages.
I’ve been asked a few times this past week about Jen Wilkin. I don’t know if she is circulating more frequently in ladies church circles these days, or if Jen has done something trendy lately, but the interest in whether she is a good or a false teacher is still there. I am glad when I receive questions like these. It shows me women care about their soul, their Savior, and their friends.
I have written negatively about Jen several times.
In the distant past she seemed solid. I read her first book “Women of the Word” (11 years ago) and it was good. I recommended it back then. Since 2014 she exposed herself as a false teacher. Over the years, I critiqued her doctrine and her behavior negatively several times on my site. Here is one of those critiques, it’s short:
Cut to the Chase discernment: Avoid Jen Wilkin
And another time I wrote a longer 2-part series after she came out with her terrible Rahab sermon in 2019,
“If I ever meet him I’ll probably sock him in the face” said Jen Wilkin, Redefining Rahab, part 1
If you search my blog in the search bar at the-end-time.org, I have other essays about Jen. My conclusion, I personally avoid her and I tell people who ask that she is a false teacher with dangerous ideas and behaviors that are unhealthy for women to absorb. Avoid Jen Wilkin.
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On the same but different topic, I’d like to take a moment and analyze an essay Jen Wilkin wrote in 2015. This is a year after her book Women of the Word was published and she was riding high in new-found wider popularity. People often wonder when or how a seemingly good Bible teacher ‘goes off the rails’ or when she started to become false. Please take this to heart: If a teacher has shown by behavior or by doctrine compared to the Bible that she is false, she has always been false.
Doves don’t become snakes. Sheep don’t become wolves. Figs don’t become thorns. Grapes don’t become briers (cf Luke 6:44). False teachers have always been unconverted, evil people. They just manage to hide their fangs for a while.
Here is Jen’s essay she published in 2015 called “More Pressing than Women Preachers. False teachers always have an agenda and it is always at odds with Jesus’ standards. In Jen’s case, it has been pushing for women to preach, something the Bible forbids. She took her rising popularity in 2015 to begin pushing for women to take over the pulpit. Her falsity was always there, if you understood what she was really adovcating for.
Language is a major tool of the false teacher camp. The most false teacher of all, the Antichrist, will conquer by flatteries, Daniel 11:32 tells us. Language. It’s a tool of the devil. See Genesis 3:1.
In the Cold War, for example, spies and intrigue and undercover ops and especially propaganda battled against forces of good.
Let’s take a look at Jen Wilkin’s tools of spiritual war: words. She wrote:
The women e-mailing me regularly are not worried about winning the pulpit. They’re still facing opposition over teaching the Bible to other women. They are fighting to be seen as necessary beyond children’s ministry and women’s ministry. They are fighting to contribute more than hospitality or a soft voice on the praise team.
Translation: IF women were even really emailing Jen, what Jen was saying is that she fielded numerous emails from discontent women who find that teaching the Bible to other women, engaging in hospitality, teaching children, or leading the singing is NOT ENOUGH. These ministries are NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Their list is long of ministries they find unfulfilling.
Jen said: They are looking for leadership trajectories for women in the local church and finding virtually nothing.
Translation: ‘Trajectory’ means “a path, progression”. They want to move UP. But the blood-soaked ground at the foot of the cross is even. There is no better or worse, lower or higher. Jen is saying these women want to LEAD. They are ‘finding nothing’ because the Bible has nothing for women in leadership in the church. That’s why.
Jen said: They watch their brothers receive advocacy and wonder who will invite them and equip them to lead well.
Translation: They’ve rejected the biblical roles and ministries Jesus set aside for them, that is why they are not ‘being invited’ and that is why they are not ‘being equipped.’ They are malcontent, ambitious glory hogs. No one advocates for that.
Jen said: If the contributions of women are equally valued in the church, shouldn’t we see some indication in the way we staff? In who we groom for leadership, both lay and vocational?
Here we see the slyness of Jen Wilkin and her ilk. She created a false dichotomy- if-then causal relationship. It goes like this: If I am not leading, then I am not valued. If I am not leading, then I must be lesser. But these women reject the opportunity to contribute to children, reject hospitality, reject helping women in study, reject singing His glories on the praise team. It’s not that men leading the church don’t value the women, it’s because the women don’t value ministries Jesus set before them.
Jen blames church leadership. She never mentions the husbands. Husbands can and should support their wives in training their spouse. In the rebel women’s world, it’s always “the church” at fault. Wilkin frames these emails she allegedly receives as complaints and the women pleading for upward trajectories as victims. ‘We’re never invited…we’re never trained…we’re on an unfavorable trajectory…we don’t want the pulpit, we just want to lead.’ (Which is an oxymoron and is also untrue. The pulpit is THE agenda).
I’d love to be a fly on the wall when any of these women study the New Testament and realize Lois and Eunice didn’t wait for permission to teach their grandson Timothy. Did Dorcas/Tabitha wait for an upward trajectory to start her sewing ministry? Susannah gave out of her own means, did she wait to be trained by her pastor to do that? Did Lydia stand on the sidelines wringing her hands waiting for her leadership to OK opening her house to Paul? Or being led by the Spirit, did Lydia urge, persuade, and prevailed on them to come?
urge us, saying, “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house and stay.” And she prevailed upon us. (Acts 16:15).
So, they don’t want hospitality. The don’t want to sing. They don’t want children’s ministry. They don’t want women’s ministry. They want LEADERSHIP. These women, Jen says, should be on a trajectory, a path that leads to leadership. They know that once the camel’s nose was under the leadership tent, the pulpit would come later. And it has.
As early as 2015, Jen Wilkin began pushing for women to insert themselves into places the Bible does not invite them. Jen Wilkin has always been false.
What Jen and her pack of wolves forget is that serving is leadership. The last shall be first and the first shall be last. Christ came as a humble servant. If these women would model humble servanthood in whatever gifts the Spirit has given them, in whatever realms they are equipped, they would thrive. Discontent would disappear from their hearts as quickly as morning dew under rising sun. If they are actually saved, that is.
Watch the words of false teachers. They are not soft and gentle. Think of a false teacher’s words like glochids, a type of cactus. We all know to avoid spines and barbs and thorns like this. that is obvious:
But these! They are insidious! Painful! Sneaky!
Glochid spines are hairlike, which means they are hard to spot once they embed in your skin. They look like your own hairs. Very hard to find once they embed. They have backward barbs so when you finally find one and pull it out, it takes a chunk of skin with it. They leave behind pieces of themselves and you soon get infected as your body tries to isolate the foreign object. If you even go near these kinds of cacti, the glochids will launch themselves at you, they do not wait for you to touch them. They grow densely together so a single encounter may result in hundreds of these hairlike spiny, barbed irritants embedding in your sin.
Those cacti hairs are like a false teacher’s words.
Avoid Jen Wilkin and watch out for these seemingly soft, innocent-sounding words. Examine everything, especially when your discerny-senses are warning “something’s off!”
