On the day the Southern Baptist Convention voted on an amendment to prevent women from preaching and serving as pastors, I was trying to figure out the ending to my sermon. It was my ninth sermon at Second Baptist Church in Liberty, Mo., and the 13th sermon I’ve ever preached.
Thankfully, I’m not superstitious.
In a twist of irony, our summer sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer had me set to preach about the phrase “Our Father” on Father’s Day. It still feels clunky to turn the verses over in my mind, analyze them not for an academic paper, but for something meant to be spoken, performed. My process is still slow and clumsy, sorting through books and commentaries, deleting double the words that end up in my final manuscript.
Rachel Mumaw-Schweser
I know it will get easier with practice, but for now I’m still trying to figure out the rhythm of engaging Scripture, listening to the Spirit and capturing it all into something preachable. It’s not perfect, it never will be, but my hope is that I’ll inch ever closer to being reliably good at preaching.
For now, I have the time, space and support to figure it out. I have a senior pastor willing to coach me toward better sermons, and I have a church that’s willing to let me stumble my way through those sermons until the words flow a little easier.
It’s a church where a woman in the pulpit is a normal Sunday. I’m not even close to being the first woman to preach at Second Baptist, and I’ll also be far from the last.
Getting up in that pulpit still feels strange, though. The pulpit was rescued from a fire more than a hundred years ago, a fire that burned down the church building. It was lovingly restored and reinstalled just last year. I have to wear heels to comfortably see the congregation over the microphone.
Standing behind it reminds me that whoever built it probably wasn’t expecting a 5’2” young woman to preach from it. It’s a sign of how far we’ve come as a congregation, and for that I’m grateful.
On Friday, my sermon draft got soaked in red ink as I slashed out whole paragraphs and scribbled ideas for rewrites in the margins. I still wasn’t thrilled with the ending after two days of working on it, but I couldn’t write my way into a better one. I prayed for a flash of inspiration to come at some point, preferably before 9 a.m. on Sunday morning, and I flipped my sermon back to the beginning to talk through it again.
My voice echoes a little more on those Fridays than it does on Sundays, and it makes me nervous sometimes. What if my sermon just ends up echoing in the heads of those who hear it and doesn’t stick?
But making the words stick isn’t entirely my job. That’s up to the Holy Spirit. My primary role is to make sure those words get in people’s ears.
“It’s a role I didn’t hear a woman fill until I was 20 years old, having been raised in a Baptist church.”
It’s a role I didn’t hear a woman fill until I was 20 years old, having been raised in a Baptist church. In another twist of irony, it was a Baptist preacher who couldn’t find a Baptist pulpit in Dallas and was instead serving in a United Methodist church. Thankfully, Victoria Robb-Powers is now the senior pastor of Royal Lane Baptist Church in Dallas and is doing a wonderful job preaching the word every Sunday. I still catch her sermons almost every week, and hopefully I’ll end up with just a fraction of her ability someday. I think I’ll be all right if I do.
When I made the decision to leave the ordination process in the UMC and step back into the Baptist world, I knew how precarious a decision it was. To be able to find connections into Baptist churches and pulpits that wouldn’t blink an eye at a woman standing behind them is a blessing. And to not be the first woman to preach to a congregation is a gift from every single woman who was the first, who broke that glass steeple.
But as the SBC reminded us, there are still so many glass steeples left to break, and plenty of people trying to reinforce them with iron bars to prevent them from shattering.
I may end up being one of the first women to preach at a church some day. But right now, 13 sermons in, I haven’t had to do that yet. Instead, I’ve been given the time and space to practice and mess up and gain confidence without feeling the pressure of being “the first one,” the pressure of having to prove women are just as able to stand behind a pulpit and preach the word of God.
Not that any of us really have anything to prove. We’ve been called by the same God whose son told Mary Magdalene to go and be the first preacher of the resurrection. She was the first female preacher, we’re just following in her footsteps.
As I got up in the pulpit that Sunday to preach, having figured out the ending to my sermon at about 8:45 that morning, I walked on my toes to prevent my heels from clomping on the wood floor. Flipping quickly through my pages to confirm they were all there, I laid my sermon on the slightly too-tall pulpit and looked out into an unsurprised, expectant congregation.
I wasn’t the first woman they’d seen in that pulpit, and I won’t be the last. And as I took a deep breath and dove into my sermon, I was thankful for all the women who made that possible.
Rachel Mumaw-Schweser serves as pastoral resident at Second Baptist Church of Liberty, Mo.
