Can a Woman Minister?

Dear Boo and Bubble,

I’ve been at this Bridge Project now for over three years and the challenge of not repeating myself has surfaced.  Sometimes a seed of thought planted in an earlier blog goes unnoticed in the recesses of my mind until it somehow and somewhat miraculously breaks through as a conscious idea which must be shared with you.  It is incumbent upon me, then, to research the project and make sure there is no redundancy.  None of what I’m telling you in this and the next post has been told before (although looking back on it, the topic might have triggered from two previous places: Sunday, April 21, 2013 - “Don’t Wake Me Up” and Saturday, May 11, 2013 – “He That Breaketh the Hedge Shall Be Bitten by a Serpent”). 

Great Granddaddy Schaefer grew up as a staunch Baptist.  It was the denomination of his forebears – intensely independent, rooted in the Gospel, fierce in its proselytizing, and robust in the missionary field – and he was very proud to claim it.  Even though each church controlled its own internal organization and selection of ministers, Baptist churches historically belonged to a national convention to oversee funding for and management of common concerns such as seminaries and mission work. The issues that plunged our country into Civil War during the mid-1800’s also rendered asunder this national connection and out of this fracture, the Southern Baptist Convention was formed.

My family’s home church, First Baptist of Greenville, traditionally maintained a rather pivotal membership in the SBC because of its size and financial wealth.  The relationship between church and convention remained symbiotic and all was well until 1970 when an intense struggle arose between conservative and more moderate forces within the convention over the ideological direction of the denomination.  No doubt the turmoil of the times – the Civil Rights and Feminist Movements, the Viet Nam war protests, and overall liberalization of societal norms – instigated the conflict. At stake as well was control of SBC’s vast resources found in the brick and mortar on seminary campuses and in the missionary support system that spanned the globe.  By 1979, the conservatives gained control of a majority of delegates to the annual SBC meeting and the new national organization cleaned house, replacing all leaders within Southern Baptist agencies with conservatives.  

During this time, the membership of First Baptist watched intently.  The congregation as a whole fell into the moderate category and they monitored official votes at the annual meetings with the result moving the convention ever more into a less tolerant position on issue after issue. Grandaddy Schaefer was among them and the straw that broke his SBC back came in 1973 when the convention voted to disallow the ordination of women, thus denying them the opportunity to officially be ministers.  At the annual meeting that year, the delegates passed a resolution that read in part: “Man was not made for woman, but the woman for the man.  Woman is the glory of man. Woman would not have existed without man.”

 

In response to this edict, Granddaddy always scoffed “A man who thinks a woman can’t minister….didn’t have a mother!”

(To be continued….)