ASHEVILLE, N.C. (ABP) — When Nancy Sehested finished her powerful sermon at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina state meeting in March, people were moved both by the message and to ask, “Where has she been?”
As one of the earliest Southern Baptist women ordained to the gospel ministry she became cause célèbre when her Tennessee church was pushed out of its association for hiring her. She was in high demand to speak to other denominational and ecumenical entities about her experiences.
Sehested was a pioneer and helped to dream into reality the Baptist Women in Ministry organization.
Baptist women in ministry pioneer Nancy Sehested is chaplain at a maximum security prison in North Carolina and co-pastor of Circle of Mercy in Asheville. (ABP photo by Norman Jameson)
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She pursued her call to ministry in her birth denomination where her father and grandfather were pastors amid Southern Baptist Convention resolutions that reserved the pulpit for males and said women could not be “in authority over men” because they were “first in Edenic sin.”
After six years as associate pastor of Oakhurst Baptist Church in Atlanta, which ordained her in 1981, Sehested accepted a call Prescott Memorial Baptist Church in Memphis as pastor in 1987.
Sehested described Memphis as “Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood” – a reference to SBC “conservative resurgence” flag bearer Adrian Rogers. “He didn’t like me just the way I am,” she quipped of her former nemesis who died in 2005.
Rogers was SBC president and pastor of mega Bellevue Baptist Church, with attendance 60 times larger than Prescott. Rogers and the SBC opposed women in the pulpit. “I became a symbol for what they weren’t going to tolerate,” Sehested said during an interview in her Asheville, N.C., home July 24.
Before she even got to the field Shelby Baptist Association disfellowshipped the church and thrust Sehested into the limelight. Ironically, local interest in Prescott surged because of the publicity, with people saying, “I always wanted to be in a church like that.”
Sehested led an active church, was raising two daughters with her husband, Ken, who was executive director of the Baptist Peace Fellowship and traveled frequently to tell her story of a distinct calling from God that her tradition said could not be true.
It exhausted her. “I put extra pressure on myself as a pioneer to prove that I could do it,” she said. “It was clear I couldn’t keep up the pace I was going.”
With no specific study to verify it, Sehested suspects many women involved in the early struggle for acceptance are no longer in church leadership. “It was an extremely difficult time to get positions and once we got positions we had to work so hard to prove ourselves, to meet the expectations of the congregation and the expectations we had on ourselves,” she said.
“I think I would have left the church completely if it had not been for the fact I cannot figure out any other community that has this grand story of Jesus,” Sehested said. “I find that life blood for me.”
She left Prescott Memorial after eight years, during a “Saturday of the soul” time, that figurative period between Good Friday and Easter, between the pain of the cross and the joy of resurrection. She had a “profound sense of having failed at being a pastor” and “in being able to balance attention to family and husband and children and my own soul.”
It didn’t help that the mailman brought her letters from others in the movement saying, “You have let us down.”
She moved to North Carolina on the promise of leading a retreat center. Her husband moved Baptist Peace Fellowship offices there and their children were at a place in school where consistency was essential. When the retreat center didn’t happen she needed to stay in the area, and found an interim pastorate at tiny Sweet Fellowship Baptist Church. She found a home, too, among the least loved and furthest outcast of society when she became a prison chaplain.
Every day she enters the walls of maximum security Marion Correctional Institution expecting to glimpse the holy in the midst of a population that has committed unholy acts. “I’m a priest in the village of the damned,” she said.
Even as she transitioned to the chaplaincy she, Ken and Joyce Hollyday started Circle of Mercy as a fellowship dually affiliated with the Alliance of Baptists and with the United Church of Christ. It has outgrown the capacity of two Episcopal churches in Asheville to host its Sunday evening worship services, each of which is followed by a community meal.
“Whether or not we grow financially or in numbers is irrelevant,” Ken Sehested said. “That’s up to the Spirit. Whether we tell our story is up to us and we must do that regularly and vigorously.”
Nancy Sehested’s drop from the pioneer radar screen and presence on conference programs is no more complicated than her being a chaplain, she said. Her congregation numbers 350 staff and 800 prisoners who claim one of 13 religious affiliations recognized by the state for which she must provide accommodation.
Sehested said she seeks to be a “companion for those who are seeking healing, who are really shattered souls.”
“Prisoners are the truth bearers in our culture,” Sehested said. “Regardless of what we say, this is what we model: money is all; end a conflict with violence; address any difference of opinion with blame, dismissing or shunning. They bear that truth to us in vivid and destructive ways.”
Volunteers tend to preach salvation messages. She prefers volunteers who will come regularly to demonstrate and teach discipleship in the severe environment. “If you can practice discipleship here, you can do it anywhere and be an example of God’s peace,” she said.
“This place challenges me every day in my faith about what I really believe about grace and redemption,” she said. “I’m so grateful that Jesus showed us how to live in the midst of turmoil and suffering.”
The landscape is different for women in ministry 30 years after her ordination threatened to rock the SBC’s Home Mission Board (now the North American Mission Board) where her father C.B. Hastings directed interfaith witness. She credits the persistence of called and committed women.
Pam Durso, director of Baptist Women in Ministry, called Sehested a “founding mother” of her agency and “the dreamer behind getting BWIM started.”
Durso can name 135 women pastors or co-pastors who serve in moderate to progressive Baptist churches and over 400 among American Baptists.
“She really paved the way for this organization,” Durso said. “She put the dream into motion. I consider her one of the great heroes in our journey as Baptist women in ministry.”
Norman Jameson is reporting and coordinating special projects for ABP on an interim basis and is a contributing writer for the Religious Herald.