Those words ended a harsh, lengthy letter I received when I was editorial department director for the national Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU), an independent auxiliary to the Southern Baptist Convention. Well, at least, the writer called me brother!
This was in the 1970s during what proved to be the unsuccessful effort to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U. S. Constitution. Some Southern Baptists -- men as well as women -- were making a parallel effort to heighten awareness of the need for equal standing for all Christians in the churches.
That letter writer was a retired military chaplain who took exception to an article titled “A Woman’s Place,” which I wrote for Royal Service, at that time, the flagship publication for WMU.
I wrote that a woman’s place need not be restricted to the home. Moreover, a woman’s place in the church need not be restricted to subservient roles. I cited the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:5-6, who imposed no restriction on women praying or preaching in church, so long as they observed the accepted dress code of the day and kept their heads covered.
The chaplain preferred chapter 14, verse 34, in the same biblical book in which Paul told women to be silent in church. That verse is open to varied interpretations, but it is difficult simply to ignore the earlier chapter 11.
My article was adapted from Bible studies I led during WMU weeks at Glorieta and Ridgecrest Baptist Conference Centers. I highlighted godly women in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian New Testament in ministry, business, and the home.
Word about these spoken presentations excited the editor of a Baptist state paper. He contacted my supervisors at the national WMU offices in Birmingham, Alabama, to verify that a WMU employee had actually said those troubling words. I stood by what I had said from the pulpit and in print, and the executive leadership stood with me.
I had an ongoing job assignment to write for the various WMU magazines. Contempo, the magazine for Baptist Young Women (BYW), was edited by a young woman, recently graduated from Baylor University. She was eager to address the issue of the place of women in home and church.
A bachelor named Bill Gothard was filling public auditoriums across the South with a week-long lecture series, elucidating his vision of the God-ordained chain of command in the home: Children are answerable to their mother. The wife-mother answers to her husband, and the husband answers to God for the whole lot.
Large numbers of Southern Baptist women and men attended Gothard’s lectures, absorbing these instructions. This was almost twenty-five years before the 1998 Southern Baptist Convention passed an amendment to the document known as The Baptist Faith and Message Statement, declaring: “A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ."
Another amendment to that document, in 2000, stated, “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” That statement, which is not binding on local congregations or families in those congregations, goes on to say this:
"The husband and wife are of equal worth before God, since both are created in God's image. The marriage relationship models the way God relates to His people. A husband is to love his wife as Christ loved the church. He has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family. A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation."
When the Contempo editor asked me to do an article on family relationships. I wrote that Pansy and I both were mature Christian adults when we married, and the question of who should be the human head of the house was never asked nor answered. We both had heads, and we both intended to use them.
This caused a tempest in the WMU teacup. One distressed BYW member, in the Gothard mode, wrote that, after reading my article, unless or until her BYW director gave her specific permission, she could no longer read Contempo.
In my years as “the Token Male at WMU,” there were attempts at dialogue among SBC agencies and WMU regarding the place of the Christian woman. In a mostly male gathering in Nashville, someone asked about gender sensitivity in language. What about addressing Sunday morning worshipers collectively as “brethren”? Many of the men in the meeting insisted “brethren” and “brothers” were gender-inclusive: women shouldn’t feel left out when those terms are used. A woman, probably Carolyn Weatherford (now Crumpler), our CEO at WMU, turned that around: “How would you men feel in a congregation if a speaker greeted everyone as ‘sisters’?” Most of the men thought that was different. “Sisters” just isn’t inclusive like “brethren.” So a quarter century before the 1998 amendment to the faith statement, Southern Baptist women already were expected to submit graciously to male-oriented language.
Several times since the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC began in 1979, the men at the helm have tried to convert WMU from an auxiliary to an agency, which would place WMU under SBC control. Each time, WMU has graciously submitted word that they have no intention of submitting graciously to SBC’s male servant leadership.
The SBC was organized in 1845, primarily for sending missionaries to foreign countries and to areas in this country deemed under-evangelized. But, ironically, when women began the effort to form a national organization to enhance mission work, they met resistance from pastors. Catherine Allen, who was one of my colleagues on the national staff, in her centennial book, A Century to Celebrate: History of Woman’s Missionary Union, documented the ambivalence of pastors in the 1880s, the decade leading up to WMU’s founding in 1888.
When women began having missions-themed sessions parallel to SBC meetings, men attended in large number, but they refused to recognize women as “messengers,” the preferred SBC term for delegates.
At the women’s gathering in Baltimore in 1884, when a woman spoke ardently on behalf of missions, some of the men shouted against her, accusing her of “preaching.” When they asked whether she was “ordained,” she said, “No. I was foreordained,” and went on with her message.
In Montgomery, Alabama, in 1886, several men failed to get the Convention to invite the women to attend as visitors. That year and again in 1887 in Louisville, the women retaliated, excluding men from their meeting.
When WMU was officially launched in 1888 in Richmond, some men continued their opposition. Even so, Pastor F. M. Ellis made this statement: "There is in our churches a great power, which has not yet been utilized but has remained dormant, the power and influence of woman. The lines of destiny seem to point to her as the great power by which the gospel is to be sent to the ends of the earth.”
In the 1880s, because men refused to associate with the women, the women formed their own organization to support missionaries the men had appointed. Now, the men want to bring that women’s organization into the SBC.
Baptist historian H. Leon McBeth wrote that men “have had an almost irrational fear of women even standing in the pulpit, whether they were preaching or not. . . . It is almost as if we fear that if you approach too closely, you will somehow contaminate or desecrate the holy places and holy things of our faith.
One concrete example from McBeth: After WMU officially formed, they prepared a written report to the Convention each year. But the first forty years, they had to submit the report (graciously?) to a man who would read it to the gathering. In 1929, when the national WMU president gave her own report for the first time, McBeth said, “several men walked out rather than witness such desecration.”
To avoid further contamination of the holy precincts, for several years for the Convention adjourned from the church sanctuary and reassembled in Sunday school facilities to hear the WMU report.
When I joined the national staff in 1974 (approximately the eighty-fifth year of WMU’s founding), I was not the only man on the payroll. One of the artists for our publications was a young African-American man, working alongside “all those women” in the art department (I wonder whether that affected his mind). The other male employees were either janitors or in the shipping department, packaging publications for shipment to churches across the country.
Decades earlier, when WMU was in charge of missions education for boys, J. Ivyloy Bishop led the Royal Ambassador organization for the SBC. He was the first man in a position of professional leadership at WMU. Though I never met Mr. Bishop, I suspect he faced the same question: “How can you stand it, working with all those women?”
I did not feel less a man by “submitting graciously” to the women in my line of supervision. My division director Bobbie Sorrill, our CEO Carolyn Weatherford, and I were all mature Christian adults who could relate to each other as Christian professionals. Today, we are Facebook Friends.
Women’s issues from the 1970s are still with us, in the nation and in the SBC. Many church groups move forward, acknowledging that God calls women as pastors and bishops and blessing them in these positions. Meanwhile, the SBC has stepped boldly into the nineteenth century when a woman’s place was in the home. In church, she can work with children and pray for the missionaries.
More recently, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, launched a “women only” homemaking curriculum, consisting of classes in nutrition, meal preparation, and textile design. There’s nothing wrong with courses in home economics at a Baptist school, but it seems odd in a theological seminary’s curriculum. Though it may seem strange to exclude men, I guess if the instructors are women, men should not be expected graciously to submit, either in church or in a seminary classroom. A news release from the seminary quoted Titus 2:5, indicating this curriculum is intended to make the students “good homemakers, and submissive to their husbands.” President Paige Patterson was quoted as saying the curriculum is “for the sake of the church and the ministry and for the sake of our society. If we do not do something to salvage the future of the home, both our denomination and our nation will be destroyed.”
While the SBC looks backward and constricts the role of women, new seminaries and divinity schools which relate to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) are recruiting and nurturing women. These women are free to pursue theological studies leading toward pastoral service. CBF is a small but more progressive group which broke away from the SBC after fundamentalists gained rigid control of the entire SBC structure.
When I was on the national WMU staff, we were aware of a very limited number of women pastors in SBC churches. As the saying goes, you could probably count them on one hand. Over the past decades, the number of women in CBF-related pastorates has increased, though not in the SBC.
Though growth has not been not phenomenal, more churches are recognizing the legitimacy of the sense of pastoral calling in the lives of women. Still, the war continues, as demonstrated in the Georgia Baptist Convention’s action against First Baptist, Decatur, because a woman, Julie Pennington-Russell, is their pastor. Not only will the state convention refuse to seat Decatur folks as messengers, they no longer accept contributions from the church.
The path will not be easy as more churches stay open to the possibility that God is calling women as their pastors, but my prayer is that they will not limit their options by eliminating women from consideration.
When WMU hired me, this was a reverse spin on putting a woman in a “man’s job.” But they didn’t just draw my name out of a bonnet. Along with congregational work, I had wide experience as a journalism professor and writer for Baptist publications, including WMU. So some of the editors knew me as one of their writers, and they thought I would be able to “work with all those women.”
And, yes, I freely confess: Working with all those women did affect my mind, causing me to see our sovereign God work in the lives of both women and men who graciously submit to His leadership.
1 comment:
Interesting reading.
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