DECATUR, Ga. (ABP) — A female pastor who broke the “stained-glass ceiling” in Texas Baptist life is expected to move to a historic church near Atlanta, making it by far the largest Southern Baptist church led by a woman.
A search committee of the 2,696-member First Baptist Church of Decatur, Ga., presented Julie Pennington-Russell's name May 27 as its recommendation to fill the open office of pastor. Since 1998 Pennington-Russell has been pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Waco, Texas.
According to a Decatur church member familiar with the process, the congregation reacted to the announcement with “solid approval.” Pennington-Russell, 46, is scheduled to preach June 17 in anticipation of election the same day.
First Baptist of Decatur — a 141-year-old church in the Atlanta suburb of Decatur — will immediately become a centerpiece in the effort to elevate and celebrate women in pastoral roles. But the congregation is not seeking that notoriety, said one church leader.
“Calling Julie was definitely not about 'making a statement,'” the longtime member said. “Our committee and the deacon council really felt the leadership of the Holy Spirit as we navigated this decision-making process. And to have our entire congregation — minus five or six folks who are not happy about this — stand at the close of the service yesterday and applaud our committee was overwhelming to us.”
Calvary Baptist in Waco was the first church in the Baptist General Convention of Texas to call a woman as senior pastor. At the time, it also reportedly was the largest congregation of Southern Baptist heritage to be shepherded by a woman.
First Baptist of Decatur is affiliated with the moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship but also maintains ties with the Southern Baptist Convention.
In the past 30 years, the Southern Baptist Convention has taken an increasingly hard line on women in leadership. That move — which happened as part of an overall rightward shift in the denomination — culminated in 2000, when the denomination added a clause to its official confession of faith that said the Bible restricts the office of pastor to males.
However, the confession is not binding on local churches, and many congregations affiliated with the SBC have ordained women as ministers and deacons for years.
Nonetheless, several local associations and a handful of state conventions have dismissed churches that have called a woman as a pastor in recent years.
The Decatur congregation would be the third that Pennington-Russell has led. Prior to her tenure at Calvary, she served for five years as pastor of Nineteenth Avenue Baptist Church in San Francisco. She also served that church previously as an associate pastor.
During her time in San Francisco, fundamentalists in the California Southern Baptist Convention tried three times, unsuccessfully, to get the convention to withdraw fellowship from the Nineteenth Avenue congregation.
Pennington-Russell also faced protesters when she went to Waco. However, Calvary has — according to multiple accounts — experienced a significant renaissance under her leadership. What had been an aging, shrinking congregation in a troubled neighborhood has grown numerically and attracted many young adults, as well as faculty and students from nearby Baylor University and Truett Theological Seminary.
While records on Baptist women in ministry are hard to track, experts in the field said May 29 that the Decatur congregation would likely be by far the largest church of Southern Baptist heritage ever led by a woman.
“I can't think of any other church that would have been bigger,” said Pam Durso, a Baptist historian who serves as an officer with Baptist Women in Ministry.
Her group is finishing work on a new study that, its leaders say, will be the most comprehensive survey of the extent of women's ordination in modern-day Baptist life in the South. Durso said the study has identified female senior pastors in 117 congregations that either are affiliated with the SBC or trace their roots to the denomination. She said the study has documented 1,825 women who have been ordained as ministers in such congregations.
The vast majority of those churches are affiliated with moderate splinter groups — such as the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and Alliance of Baptists — that grew out of the conflict in the SBC. However, while such groups are officially supportive of women in ministry, few large moderate churches have called women as senior pastors. A 2006 report from Durso's group said only 5.5 percent of churches that are affiliated with CBF had female pastors.
In comparison, 2005 figures from the American Baptist Churches USA showed more than 400 congregations in that denomination had women either as senior pastors or as co-pastors alongside a man.
Durso said Pennington-Russell's resume might mark a turning point in that regard.
“We've found that women are getting more jobs as pastors, but they're not moving from one job to another very easily; they can't get that second pastorate,” she said. “But this is her third [senior pastor position], which makes her very unique, I think.”
Sarah Frances Anders, a sociology professor at Baptist-affiliated Louisiana College, has tracked Baptist women in ministry for decades. She said that she thinks the actual number of ordained women of Southern Baptist heritage is “pushing toward 2,000” and that the number of ordained Baptist women in the former SBC “has jumped rather phenomenally in the last seven years even.”
Decatur is adjacent to Atlanta, but is an independent city encompassing wealthy and gentrifying areas as well as pockets of poverty. The church is located near Emory University, Agnes Scott College and Columbia Theological Seminary.
If elected, Pennington-Russell would succeed Gary Parker, who resigned from the Decatur pastorate a year ago.
Pennington-Russell is a graduate of the University of Central Florida in Orlando and Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in Mill Valley, Calif. According to a biography provided to members of the Decatur church, she is “in the final phase of completing” a doctoral degree in ministry at Truett Seminary. She and her husband, Tim, have two children.
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Read more:
Study counts 1,600 ordained Baptist women in the South (6/29/2006)