My home church always will feel like a home to me — not because of the building or the denomination, but because of the people. I am Baptist enough to believe the people are the church.
Like so many others, I grew up in a Southern Baptist church. I was dedicated there as a baby. I was baptized there. I first served in ministry there. I felt the call to be a pastor there. I was married there. And I was ordained there.
Lucy Cauthen
My church family preached to me. Both the men and the women preached to me. They preached from the pews, from service sites and from their homes. They preached Jesus — a Jesus who loved me and called me to serve.
They supported me, even when it meant changing bylaws and wading into murky waters and difficult conversations.
My mind is filled with people like Gordon Davidson, my youth minister, who first recognized and named my gifts for ministry. Buddy Leach, a deacon, who was the first to encourage me to pursue ordination before I ever considered it myself. Ellen Hester, who prayed over me and spoke difficult but necessary truths about what I would face in ministry.
These are just a few of the people who first preached to me and who continue to do so all these years later.
“The church is not simply what happens from a pulpit.”
They represent the heart of the Southern Baptist church to me because they remind me the church is not simply what happens from a pulpit. It is what happens when God’s people call out gifts, speak the truth in love and encourage one another to follow Christ faithfully.
Don’t misunderstand me: I never have preached from that pulpit, and I maybe never will. No woman has been ordained there since, and there are no female deacons. (Although it is worth noting and celebrating that one of their student preachers on Senior Sunday was a female.)
Some wanted conditions attached to my ordination: “OK, as long as she doesn’t want to be a senior pastor.” Or, “Fine, but I don’t think she should be able to perform weddings.”
And yet, the framed certificate hanging on my wall carries no asterisk.
As one of my childhood pastors said at my ordination: “We do not gather to bestow upon Lucy a position of power but to recognize and affirm that the Lord has gifted Lucy to assume a servant’s role in the kingdom. And as the body of Christ, we have gathered to bless her and to stand with her. Just as Aaron and Hur held Moses’s arms during the battle against the Amalekites, it is our commitment to come alongside Lucy and to support her and to encourage her.”
A servant. My home church ordained me and called me to be a servant, and they committed to support and encourage me in that calling.
Would some of them prefer that I not preach or officiate weddings? I’m sure they would. But I am still theirs, and they are still mine, because that is how family works, especially the family of Christ.
“I believe, as a Baptist, that the church is the people — not the resolutions.”
Yes, I grieve the SBC’s decision, and the optimist in me hopes for a different outcome next year. I grieve the hatred and division that continue to surface. I grieve that many, like me, will have to find new church homes in order to truly live into our God-given callings.
But I also believe, as a Baptist, that the church is the people — not the resolutions.
Just like the early church, we will continue to have our disagreements, but I will remain hopeful for all the Spirit will continue to reveal to them and to me as we support and encourage one another along the way.
In the meantime, I will continue to live fully into my calling without their qualifiers.
As we read in 1 Corinthians 2: “Yet together, we resolve to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified. Our message and our preaching are not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that our faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.”
So while I have moved on, I continue to give thanks to God for my home church and for all those preachers of the gospel.
Lucy Cauthen serves as minister of youth and missions at Boulevard Baptist Church in Anderson, S.C.