GEORGETOWN, Ky. (ABP) – Dormant for a decade, a Baptist Women in Ministry chapter in Kentucky was rebirthed Nov. 8 at Baptist Women in Ministry Day at Georgetown College.
Pam Durso addresses Georgetown College chapel on Baptist Women in Ministry Day.
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Pam Durso, head of the national Baptist Women in Ministry organization based in Atlanta, said when a group of women spearheaded by Becky Caswell-Speight, minister to children and families at Broadway Baptist Church in Louisville, began discussing the need to support and network with women ministers throughout Kentucky they envisioned creation of a new organization. They soon learned that a Kentucky BWIM chapter had been in existence since the mid-1980s but stopped meeting about 2001.
Members of the initial group shared stories and supported reinstitution of the organization. Twenty-seven women from across the state and both generations met two hours at Georgetown Nov. 8 before moving to a chapel service where Durso was guest speaker.
Durso said many of the women who began preaching and teaching in Southern Baptist churches in the 1980s experienced exclusion from their association and attended seminary when women called to be pastors were a small minority of the campus population.
“Many of these women lived out their calling in hard places and in hard times, but their faithfulness in following opened the doors through which many of us in this room have walked,” Durso said. “We owe a spiritual debt to our mothers who traveled before us; those who paved the way. Today we stand on their shoulders.”
Challenging the new generation of women ministers — including students from the Baptist Seminary of Kentucky that recently relocated to the Georgetown campus — Durso said: “We are the shoulders for our daughters and for the next generation. We are the ones paving the way, the ones shaping our Baptist culture, our Christian culture, our world. Today we are here to dream of all the possibilities of the way God’s Spirit can work.”
Durso said that there is a “new openness” to female leadership in many Baptist churches, but too often she still hears “words of exclusion” from Baptist men who tell her they don’t want women deacons and from search committees who say their church isn’t ready to consider a woman pastor.
She urged BWIM members to seek out girls in middle school and high school discerning a call to ministry and provide places for them to talk about and explore their gifts. She suggested encouraging older girls to sing, preach and pray in public worship and connecting them with women seminarians and helping them with financial support.
“When they are ready we need to open doors for them,” Durso said. “We need to open the doors of our churches, the doors of our ministries and the doors of our hearts and welcome them in.”
Kentucky Baptist women discuss ideas for a new Baptist Women in Ministry chapter Nov. 8 at Georgetown College.
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During the dialogue session, participants voiced the need for networking and emotional support for isolated women in ministry, mentoring younger women and creating opportunities for them to preach and teach in churches to help build their resumes and connecting with other women ministers, including perhaps non-Baptists. They also mentioned a need to support and affirm women in all ministry positions, and not just to advocate for pastors. A steering committee will refine a list of ideas and report at a subsequent gathering.
The reincarnation of the BWIM chapter recalls a time when Kentucky was viewed as a Mecca for women encouraged to study for M.Div. degrees at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the 1970s and 1980s. Soon after Southern Baptist Women in Ministry formed in 1983, a Center for Baptist Women in Ministry opened at Louisville’s Crescent Hill Baptist Church and began publishing a newsletter called Folio.
With the coming of a new president in the 1990s, Southern Seminary turned back the clock, discouraging women’s ordination and relegating females to traditional roles like teaching children and other women and homemaking.
In 1996 Baptist Women in Ministry moved offices to Kansas City at the invitation of Central Baptist Theological Seminary. The organization struggled financially for several years, and then in 2009 relocated to Atlanta and hired Durso as full-time executive director.
Baptist Women in Ministry estimates about 2,200 women in formerly Southern Baptist congregations have been ordained to ministry, but most serve in roles other than pastor. In 2010 the group identified 135 Baptist women serving as pastor or co-pastor of a church aligned with the Alliance of Baptists, Baptist General Association of Virginia, Baptist General Convention of Texas or Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
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Bob Allen is managing editor of Associated Baptist Press.