From what I’ve seen recently on my Twitter feed and email in-box, it appears Southern Baptist Convention preachers and professors are putting forth the argument as to why women should neither preach nor be pastors.
Really, guys? You’re going to go there again?
More than 30 years ago, I was a seminary student. I was a born-and-raised Southern Baptist, blessed by children’s Sunday school teachers who gave me butter cookies and grace, youth retreats that challenged me and Sunday school lessons from the Baptist Sunday School Board at 127 Ninth Avenue North in Nashville, Tennessee, that grounded me in scripture. I was such a Southern Baptist geek that I still know that address by heart.
I was educated at a Baptist college and now was a student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina. The summer before my final year, the SBC met in Kansas City and passed a resolution declaring that because Eve was first in the fall, women should not be ordained or serve as pastors.
“As women, we’re still not at a place of full freedom to follow our calling, but it’s a different world than when I graduated from seminary.”
I was shattered. A lot of us were shattered. One day in Hebrew class, our professor, Elmo Scoggin, reminded us of Gamaliel’s advice to the Pharisees that they should be cautious in opposing this new movement of Jesus followers, lest they be found opposing a new movement of God.
So it felt like deja vu all over again when I saw the stream of articles filled with all the same old arguments. If it were not for the fact that I know these arguments are terribly painful to women who are called of God but still in the SBC, I’d want to pinch the cheeks of the men writing, or being quoted in, these articles and say, “Bless your little hearts!”
Bless your little hearts. It didn’t work before. You threw the power of an SBC resolution at these women, you even had their churches thrown out for ordaining them and calling them to pastoral ministry – and yet God’s Spirit kept right on moving. As Joel prophesied and Peter declared a present reality at Pentecost, young women and men (and some of us not so young anymore) are now prophesying (preaching).
As women, we’re still not at a place of full freedom to follow our calling, but it’s a different world than when I graduated from seminary. I was advised that seeking a position as an associate minister on a church staff was probably asking for too much. There was some truth to that, for it took almost a year before a church was willing to risk calling me to be the first woman to serve as their associate minister.
Women are now serving as pastors and associate ministers in all kinds of different settings and situations. Women are being ordained and serving in congregational settings, serving as chaplains, social workers, teachers and counselors, and finding a hundred different ways to reach out to human need with God’s love.
This reckless Spirit of God keeps blowing where it will, falling on and calling forth people who don’t fit a narrow profile. It’s true that many – maybe even the majority – of us have had to find new spiritual homes (Baptist or otherwise) in order to cooperate with the work of that Spirit, but it hasn’t stopped God from using us. It hasn’t stopped us from serving God and the world.
We are not yet where we need to be, but we are not where we have been.
Bless your little hearts, I want to tell them, these men making their case for excluding women. Thirty years ago you thought you could stop the Spirit of God.
You thought you could stop women from being seminary professors. Some of them not only went right on teaching but also became seminary presidents. You thought you could stop women from becoming pastors, and yet nearly every month I read of another woman being called to serve as pastor somewhere. You thought you could keep ordination as a privilege only for your club, yet almost 34 years ago I was gladly and joyfully ordained by a Southern Baptist church.
“This reckless Spirit of God keeps blowing where it will, falling on and calling forth people who don’t fit a narrow profile.”
We are not yet where we need to be, but we are not where we have been.
Bless your little hearts. Maybe you thought that if you wrote better articles or preached louder sermons and posted your views on Twitter and Facebook you could reach more people, and maybe then you could stop this movement. I hate to tell you, but all you’re doing is either driving more gifted, God-called women out of your fellowship, or you’re getting in the way of God’s callings in the lives of those who choose to stay. In the words of Gamaliel, you may be found opposing God.
Bless your little hearts, but I’m not debating this anymore. I stepped into the fray back in those seminary days (even being interviewed by a local television station to make the case for women in ministry.) That was then.
These days I have no energy for trying to persuade people who have no intention of hearing a different perspective. I have no need to justify why it might be okay for me to do the work for which God has called and gifted me. Despite a still-fresh SBC vote declaring otherwise, the church that raised me from childhood to adulthood judged me to be called of God for ministry and duly ordained me.
Women, called and gifted by God, if this is your battle to fight, you have my blessing and my prayers. If you need support because it feels so awful in so many ways, I’m right here. Just know that whatever opposition you face, Spirit finds a way. Maybe not the way you planned or the way you expected, but Spirit finds a way.
Women and men, if you doubt this, I know some women clergy I’d like for you to meet.
Related opinion:
Molly T. Marshall | Women as pastoral leaders render a different vision of God
Christy Edwards | Don’t strip our voices from the Baptist pulpit