Next week, the Southern Baptist Convention will hold its annual meeting in Indianapolis and vote on the second reading of what has come to be known as the Law Amendment. A proposed amendment to the SBC’s Constitution, named after the…
This is what support looks like: The Harrisonburg Baptist Church story
When Eli Withers, associate pastor at Harrisonburg Baptist Church in Virginia, found out she was on the infamous list of female pastors a leader in the Southern Baptist Convention circulated in March 2023, she found herself feeling “a little pissed…
Weeping with Daughter Zion
Maybe you’ve seen the social media meme. Hundreds of old-timey cars are parked willy-nilly on the lawn of an old country church. The faithful are streaming into the sanctuary. “Back in the day,” the caption reads, “everyone went to church…
Churches that support women in ministry should leave the SBC preemptively
Once again, the SBC Executive Committee has decided that a church who called a woman as their senior pastor should be disfellowshipped. This time, the church is Immanuel Baptist Church in Paducah, Ky., where Katie McKown was called to become…
Those who say women cannot be pastors are ‘wrong,’ open letter asserts
Christians who insist God cannot call women to pastoral ministry are “wrong,” according to an open letter drafted by Baptist Women in Ministry and so far signed by 540 women who are pastors and almost 2,000 others. Unlike a letter…
Of Lent, Beth Moore and the role of women in church leadership
Our Lenten journey begins with ashes, followed by 40 disciplined days of charitable giving, fasting and prayer, trekking through an interior wilderness, waiting on grace, hoping it leads us back to God. On the evening of Ash Wednesday, though, I…
Challenges for Baptist women in ministry today
I first saw a clergywoman in 2007 visiting a small, rural Church of England church in Yorkshire, UK. Brought up in mostly Catholic Poland, with limited religious literacy, I only had a vague idea that this was possible in other…
Becoming a ‘midwife of grace’ — an interview with Molly Marshall
At age 12, Molly Marshall’s pastor asked if she’d ever considered working with young people as a career option. She thought to herself, “Well of course I haven’t, I am one!” Two years later, at age 14, while at a…
Glimpses of grief reveal reality for women in ministry
During the summer of my Clinical Pastoral Education residency at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, all eight of us in the cohort experienced many deaths and sleepless on-call shifts. One day during education, we were noticeably and collectively “out of it.”…