Question isn't whether Baptist women should be 'ordained,' but who is 'gifted'

Baptist women have played a prophetic role since the movement's dawn, four centuries ago, said Curtis Freeman, director of the Baptist House of Studies at Duke Divinity School in a Vivian B. Harrison Memorial Lecture at Mount Olive College last week.

That role is for modern Baptist women a matter of controversy, especially in the Southern Baptist Convention. But Freeman reminds us that "the church doesn’t really call people into ministry. We help people discern God’s call on their life."

As a result, "Asking whether women should be ordained to the ministry is the wrong question, says Freeman. The question is, 'Who is being gifted in the church?'" And historically, the Baptist answer to that question has not been uniformly gender specific.

Steve DeVane wrote that according to Freeman there were nine Baptists among the roughly 300 "prophetesses" in England between 1640 and 1660. They were objects of controversy at the time and recorded in the writings of "the English Presbyterian controversialist, Thomas Edwards" in 1646.

Reasonable estimates indicate that between 1640 and 1660 as many as three hundred women prophetesses were active in England. A checklist of women’s published writings during this period suggests that more than half of these women’s writings could be described as “prophetic.” Most of them published nothing, but many of the forty-seven well-known women visionaries during the revolutionary period did write. Nine of these writing prophetesses were Baptists. . . . these women told their stories in their own words . . . .

Freeman focused on the life and ministries of four women who wrote:

. . . all of whom were associated with the Particular (or Calvinistical) Baptists: Sarah Wight (1632-?), Anna Trapnel (1642-1660), Katherine Sutton (1630-1663), and Anne Wentworth (1629/30-1693?). By my count, the combined total of the writings of these four women was no less than 748 pages, which is no small record. And because many of these writings were published as cheap pamphlets, and thus available to even the poorest laborers, they were able to reach a wide audience and often went through multiple editions.

Freeman in his presentation addresses the question of "whether this survey of prophetic women suggests anything more than the fact that it took early Baptists a few years" to establish "a male ministerial monopoly." There is, he says, history to the contrary, "even in the Old South:"

The Haw River Baptist Church, for example, founded in 1758 near the town of Bynum in Chatham County, was one of the mother churches among Baptists in the North Carolina Piedmont. The church’s pastor, Elnathan Davis, who served for over thirty years, was converted and baptized by the Separate Baptist patriarch, Elder Shubal Stearns. When Morgan Edwards, the noted colonial-era Baptist preacher, traveled through the South in the 1770s, he observed that the Haw River Church permitted "ruling elders, elderesses, and deaconesses."

They may have exercised "their office only among their own sex," but there were women among the Separate Baptists in Virginia who "crossed over and exercised their gifts among the brethren."

One of them, Margaret Meuse Clay of Chesterfield County, was convicted of unlicensed preaching and escaped public whipping only because her fine was paid" by a stranger. She and her sisters apparently remained unaltered in their conviction that "the right to pray and preach was based, not on ordination credentials, but on charismatic endowment. They exercised their gifts whenever the Spirit moved and among whomever they were so led without asking permission from any man." He further writes:

These women surely were convinced that Jesus was addressing them directly just as he spoken to the primitive Christian community, and they certainly believed that they were women of whom the Lord had promised, “I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy” (Acts 2:18). The possibility that the Baptist vision might be enhanced by the standpoint of these prophetic women suggests that it might be important to ask how we might be prepared to look at history, and indeed the future, differently through their lives.

Finally, Freeman offers the modern example of Addie Davis, who was ordained by Watts Street Baptist Church in Durham, N.C. on Aug. 9, 1964, to suggest that:

Ultimately it is not a matter of gender or ordination, but of spiritual discernment. For such radical democracy to work perhaps we might begin by looking again to the horizon of the new creation with our sisters in the Spirit who may help us once again to see it afresh.