Baptist Women in Ministry announces Davis Award recipients for 2009

ATLANTA (ABP) — A support group for Baptist women in ministry has awarded a recent graduate of Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary and a student at Central Baptist Theological Seminary for excellence in ministry.

Marquette Bugg, who graduated in May with a master-of-divinity degree from Truett Seminary in Waco, Texas, is 2009 recipient of the Addie Davis Award for Excellence in Preaching.

Tammy Jackson Gill

Bugg, whose winning sermon was from the story of blind Bartimaeus in the Gospel of Mark, is headed for Ghana, where she plans to begin a sports ministry.

Tammy Jackson Gill, who currently is studying for her master-of-divinity degree at Central Seminary in Shawnee, Kan., is recipient of the Addie Davis Award for Outstanding Leadership in Pastoral Ministry.

Gill is pastor of children and families at Holmeswood Baptist Church in Kansas City, Mo. She also is clinical director for Wellspring Ministries in Lee’s Summit, Mo., and founder and executive director of Healing Grace Counseling Centers in Lee’s Summit and Warrensburg, Mo.

Each year Baptist Women in Ministry selects two recipients for the Addie Davis Award — one for preaching and one for pastoral ministry. The award includes a $1,000 scholarship. This year BWIM also gave $100 awards to 15 other women nominated from various schools.

The award, first given in 1994, is named after the first woman to be ordained a pastor in a Southern Baptist church. Addie Davis, who was unaware she was making history when Watts Street Baptist Church in Durham, N.C., ordained her to the gospel ministry while she was in seminary on Aug. 9, 1964, died in 2005 at age 88.

Marquette Bugg

Baptist Women in Ministry estimates that since Davis there have been about 2,000 women ordained by Baptist churches in the South, most since the 1980s. The majority work as counselors, chaplains, campus ministers or in a church-staff role other than senior pastor.

About 40 percent of students at seminaries, houses of study and divinity schools affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship are women, while 6 percent of CBF churches have a woman serving as pastor or co-pastor.

Formed in 1983, Baptist Women in Ministry is a network dedicated to advocating for and nurturing the gifts of women in ministry. Its offices are located on the campus of Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology in Atlanta.

Along with the Addie Davis Award, BWIM supports women preachers with its Martha Stearns Marshall Women’s Preaching Month, which recruits congregations to invite a woman to preach from their pulpit on a Sunday in February.

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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.