"HAVE PATIENCE." KIND AND GENTLE WORDS. Words spoken to encourage--with one light hand on the shoulder, eye meeting eye, a slight and knowing smile--"Have patience." They are words so often spoken to women Baptist ministers looking for a church to serve. They are words usually spoken with the voice of one who is sympathetic to our struggle yet securely employed in our religious institutions, while attaching the extra line: "Church people are just not ready for you women yet. Have patience!"
We should live so long!
Being a female Southern Baptist pastor means being part of an endangered species. Never having been a prolific lot, we now find ourselves even more threatened with extinction as the fundamentalists maneuver to take full control of our denomination.
In 1987 the trustees of our Home Mission Board voted not to provide financial assistance to any church that has a female pastor. The message sent from such an action is clear: Women pastors are unwanted.
Three years ago the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution, "On Women," to discourage women from pastoral leadership; the resolution states: "While Paul commends women and men alike in other roles of ministry and service (Titus 2:1-10), he excludes women from pastoral leadership (1 Timothy 2:12) to preserve a submission God requires because man was first in creation and the woman was first in the Edemic fall (1 Timothy 2:13ff.)."
This is certainly not the first time in history that the policy of singling out scripture verses for justification of discriminatory practices has been used. The history of slavery is sad evidence of such ways. Selective reading of scripture to support our own ends is a danger to all of us.
The "women's issue," as we are distantly and amorphously referred to, has provided yet another battlefield for moderates and fundamentalists to draw their war-game charts. No matter what the battle cries ("We think women have a place," "We believe women can be pastors"), whether one is a fundamentalist, conservative, moderate, or liberal, few of our pastors and denominational leaders have been willing actually to hire women.
In Southern Baptist life, the pulpit is where the power is. Not long ago a Missions Service Corps volunteer in resort ministry was called before the local Baptist Association meeting. She had been doing vesper services, and the gathered pastors wanted to know if she stood in front of or behind the table. If the former, she was preaching; if the latter, she was only "giving a talk." You can guess what their recommendation was.
Currently there are some 350 ordained Southern Baptist women. Most of these women serve in roles with youth, music, education, counseling, or chaplaincy. Approximately 22 percent of Southern Baptist campus ministers are women. Southern Baptist agencies and state conventions have a handful of women in administrative leadership. Of the six seminaries, 16 percent of the student body are women. Women seminary faculty make up 2.7 percent, with three women teaching in the schools of theology.
WITH ALL THIS discouraging news, those of us who have remained Southern Baptist are repeatedly asked why we stay. It is a good question. As one who looked for three years for a church staff position after graduating from seminary, I am painfully aware of the frustration. I have been one of the fortunate women who found a supportive place to serve amid my missionary endeavors in the denomination. From what I understand from my sisters in other denominations, signs of light are shining forth in the darkness, but they appear in most corners as a pen light. It will take some time before the whole room is lit.
Yet pen lights are beginning to shine from various places. Support groups for women in ministry are popping up around the country. In my own city, a small group of us meet monthly for fellowship and prayer. We desperately seek words of hope as we face the struggles of limiting our limitless jobs, of defining and redefining our styles of leadership, and of using our gifts, sometimes in the face of enormous resistance and restriction.
The national Women in Ministry SBC organization, and its sister publication, FOLIO, also offer avenues of networking and support. Our annual gathering in 1987 brought together 500 people for a service of worship.
Signs of new life and some hope are also evident in the Southern Baptist Alliance. This is a group of individuals and churches who are coming together within Southern Baptist life to support those people and programs severed by fundamentalist-controlled agencies, such as the SBA's first project to financially assist" churches that have a woman pastor:
I have entered this struggle to have women's gifts recognized and affirmed with more than a little regret. Why? Because there are so many important and pressing needs that need addressing.
My major concern is that women be allowed to take up equal responsibility: equal "ability to respond" to the cries of the world, equal responsibility for servanthood in the very manner which our Lord taught and demonstrated for us, equal responsibility for leading our communities of faith in the ways of righteousness for his name's sake. We want to share more equitably in the task of urging our congregations to proclaim, with their thousands of tongues, the gospel's good news, of which Jesus spoke in his inaugural sermon:
good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovering of sight to the blind liberty to the oppressed, the proclamation of God's acceptable year (Luke 4:18-19).
It is not enough simply to be replacing male clergy with female clergy. The women clergy I know are beginning to realize that our battles have only just begun when we find ourselves ordained in the church.
We need to be exploring alternative structures to the oppressive ones that hesitantly accept us. Rather than trying to beat the doors down for Pharaoh to let us into the big house, it is time to think about letting Pharaoh go.
I am not much interested in assuring a place for women to be pastor of First Big Deal Baptist Church. I'm ready to follow Shiphrah and Puah--the Hebrew midwives who courageously disobeyed Pharaoh's order to kill the newborn sons of the people of Israel--into our vocation of assisting in life. We must replace the current structures with ones that serve life.
Promoting women in ministry to serve in our local churches and denominational bodies is only a premise to a conclusion, not a conclusion itself. The premise is that our congregations need more leaders who come to the task with a renewed vision of power and authority, leaders who might convince us to give up our triumphal and self serving ways in order to follow that narrow, winding road of obedience and discipleship. The conclusion is that the church might relearn the joy of losing its life for Jesus' sake and in his name.
Nancy Hasting Sehested was associate pastor of Oakhurst Baptist Church in Decatur, Georgia, and a steering committee member of Women in Ministry SBC when this article appeared.
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