By David Gushee
My last column was filed from Australia, and this one is inspired by a question I often received when first meeting Baptists in Sydney. The question was: “What kind of Baptist are you?” Which meant: “What branch of that mysteriously divided community of Baptists in North America do you belong to?”
I received my answer in a fresh way last Sunday night, at church.
My home church now, First Baptist Church of Decatur, Ga., like many Baptist churches no longer offers regular Sunday-night services. But last Sunday evening we gathered for a special ordination service involving two recently graduated seminarians preparing to leave us for full-time service elsewhere.
We gathered in the sanctuary at 5 p.m., all of us together in one place. Whereas we usually split up on Sunday mornings for an early contemporary service in the fellowship hall and a later traditional service in the sanctuary, for this evening we were all together in “big church.”
Getting together on a Sunday night, escaping into the cool sanctuary while the sun was still blazing hot, felt like such a throwback to my very earliest days as a new Baptist convert in 1978. It was 32 years ago — this week, as I recall — that I prayed to receive Christ. I quickly developed the Baptist habit of being in church every time the doors were open. That included Sunday at 4:30 p.m. for youth choir, followed by supper, Training Union and evening worship. My Catholic parents were quite surprised by how much time I voluntarily spent in church.
So there we all were last Sunday night. I was half-expecting the youth choir to come out singing “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.”
It was a classic ordination service. The candidates gave testimonies about their sense of call to ministry, their journeys to this point, their new places of service, and their gratitude for our church. The families of the young ministers were introduced, beaming and proud. The pastor gave a personalized charge to the candidates, which was also a deeply honest and heartfelt reflection on the joys and challenges of serving in pastoral ministry.
I listened closely for the theology of ministry and understanding of ordination articulated in this message. It was classic Baptist — all Christians are called to serve, but some are gifted and called for special roles of service in the life of Christ’s church. They sense this call, respond by exercising their gifts in Christian community, and the community likewise responds with a “yes” to the evidence of God’s special calling and gifting. Ordination is a public “yes” of both congregation and minister to God’s calling and gifting for the ministry of the church.
Soon the candidates knelt on opposite sides of the sanctuary as congregants came and laid hands on them, whispering prayers for their faithful service to Christ and his church. There were few dry eyes during this enormously powerful experience. Finally, two associate pastors gave the candidates final words of encouragement and presented each with ordination certificates and Bibles. We headed down to the fellowship hall for finger food.
I recall that my 1987 ordination in a Southern Baptist church differed very little from this one. Except that the senior pastor of our church is a woman. One of the two ordinands wis as a woman. And the two associate pastors who presented the certificates are women. And I don’t think anyone in that sanctuary on Sunday night thought twice about it.
What kind of Baptist am I? The kind who needs to be in a church where the rich blessings of this very traditional kind of Baptist ordination service could fully include that half of the species that God created female. That’s what kind of Baptist I am, and that’s what kind of Baptist congregation we are.
Occasionally in this space I have wrestled with issues of Baptist identity. I have asked, for example, about what the future might be for “moderate” Baptists. Last Sunday night I was reminded that at least in my congregation, Baptist theology is really very little changed from what I experienced as a teenager in Virginia. But one thing has changed — traditionalist limits to the full inclusion of women have been abandoned, on biblical grounds.
I see both continuity and change — but more of the former than the latter, and both grounded in Jesus Christ and the authority of Scripture.