SBC racism, sexism and repentance

Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) actions toward women "fall short of Biblical standards (Acts 2:17-18)" and require public apology, prominent Southern Baptist and African-American pastor Dwight McKissic argues on April 1 -- an apology like the SBC's 1995 renunciation of racism and slavery.

There are good historic and modern reasons for such an apology:

The SBC was formed in 1845 when women were not allowed to vote in the vast majority of SBC churches. Consequently, women by and large did not attempt to register as delegates/messengers to the annual SBC meetings. In 1885 women were excluded by the vote of the convention from being seated as delegates. The convention voted to only accept “brethren” as representatives from churches to the annual meetings. Josiah Lawrence made a motion to seat women as “messengers” in 1917 and the vote actually occurred in 1918 with overwhelming approval.

McKissic

McKissic also cites well-known examples of modern Southern Baptist mistreatment of women [1, 2, 3], finally weaving mistreatment of Southern Baptist women, SBC racism and the sexual abuse of SBC women together around the case of now-imprisoned former pastor Daryl Gilyard.

Results of the earlier renunciation suggest that apology to SBC women, while clearly merited, would accomplish little of measurable value. For as McKissic demonstrates via damning examples in his April 7 blog, there are still serious problems:

• There was no black representation on the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force. McKissic brought that to the attention of Frank Page at the Louisville Airport in June ’09. Page called SBC President Johnny Hunt, who corrected the oversight, which McKissic calls "symptomatic of the problem."
• "Ten years after the ’95 racial reconciliation and apology statement, there has not been one African American appointed to a position as the Chief Executive Officer of a SBC entity," although there are three vacant spots.
• At the Southern Baptists of Texas Evangelism Conference in February, SBC Evangelist Jimmy Davis "communicated that President Obama was not a Christian" and "encouraged the Southern Baptist of Texas Convention to 'pray that God providentially remove President Obama from office.'" Yes, something about the image of all of those Anglo Southern Baptists kneeling in prayer against Obama does seem racist.
• Baptist Deacon Bill Fortner in a blog entry described President Obama as "the Tragic Negro," a characterization which McKissic accurately characterized as "clearly racist and beyond the pale."
• An Anglo SBC church in Louisiana refused to let Anglo missionaries who had adopted children of color speak in their church because of the color of their children.
• "A Black Baptist Arkansas Pastor who disassociated himself from the SBC in recent years" explained to McKissic that during a missions trip to Mexico with an Anglo Southern Baptist congregation, "one of the Anglo mission team members use racial slurs" for which, when confronted, he did not apologize.
• Ergun Caner, president of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary, preached a sermon at First Baptist of Jacksonville, FL., in which he said to "approving laughter" that Black churches take up “twelve offerings.” Caner went on to relate:

  "… you go to a Black church gentlemen, you are not going to have on a blue suit, you are going to have blue shoes to match, and your handkerchief is going to match your tie, and your whole outfit is going to match your car. It’s BEAUTIFUL. And ladies: when we talk about black church, we’re talkin’ about hats. And I’m not just talkin’ Easter hats as some of you may wear, I’m talkin’ ’bout satellite dish hats. [laughter]. Big enough to receive a signal, with a curtain rod goin’ down the front that you can just pull the curtain across."

How the SBC can accomplish a resurgence while driving away people of color and, woman by woman as well as church by church, spiritually inspired women, is unclear. Thus McKissic suggests changing the name of the organization to "The International Baptist Convention" to create the opportunity for "a new start in a new millennium." Which might work almost as well as the 1995 renunciation of racism and slavery (the one he dissects by recent example).

Woman-pastored church pushed out by Ga. Baptists [Addendum]

As expected, the Georgia Baptist Convention took the knife to its own throat by cutting out 148-year-old First Baptist Church of Decatur, Ga., because it chose Julie Pennington-Russel as pastor.

It was the formal conclusion of a process whose end was foreordained in February and driven by the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) descent to inquisitorial enforcement of the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message (BF&M).

Oklahoma pastor Wade Burleson has warned:

The FORCED acceptance of the BFM 2000, by threatening to “disfellowship” from those churches who don’t agree with every single one of its tenets, is patently absurd. Those who push “disfellowship” from churches that disagree with a portion of the BFM 2000 will destroy our convention if they are allowed to succeed. The SBC will have to eventually disfellowship from over 25,000 Southern Baptist churches. That is the number of SBC churches, at least according to one seminary professor, that have expressed disagreement with the BFM 2000 in either church practice or church doctrine in areas other than women pastors.

The number of Southern Baptist women known to be ordained has grown from less than 200 in 1982-83 to more than 2,000 by the end of 2007, according to Baptist Women in Ministry [.pdf] (BWIM).

The SBC is breaking the threads connecting it to women in the pew. That will in time be the ultimate SBC divorce.

Addendum

• Southern Baptist Convention disdain for women-pastored churches and failure to protect children from clerical predators is cult-like, suggests prominent pastor.

Dorothy Patterson's submissive hats and midnight dinners

Unsubmissive Dorothy Patterson? The wife of Dr. Paige Patterson, President of Southwestern Theological Seminary, Fort Worth, Texas, dining with radical terrorist political leaders, Wade? Are you sure?

Oh my! Here it is:

... she's been the guest of Yaser Arafat at a midnight banquet in Saddam Hussein's palace guest house in Baghdad.

Now, someone's going to explain in painstaking detail how that life history fits neatly with the rather patriarchal Danvers Statement to which Southwestern Theological Seminary recently subscribed. Because there has to be a pile of Southern Baptist Convention patriarchy hidden in this Dorothy story somewhere. Otherwise, there's a glaring conflict of walk with talk here.

Hand me that shovel, will you?

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.

(bWe) Baptist Women for Equality

Shirley Taylor, a former employee of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, has founded a group called bWe - Baptist Women for Equality, whose goal is to open Southern Baptist leadership roles to women.

Specifically, they "advocate for women deacons and women pastors in Baptist churches."

Their Web site offers An Open Letter to Baptists (.pdf) which introduces the group and includes brief discussions of scripture and the Southern Baptist Convention's 2000 Baptist Faith and Message.

It begins:

Even if you think everything is all right in your church, please consider those other churches where women can be Ministers to Children, Ministers to Youth, Ministers to Women, can be on all committees which make church policy and pertain to theology, and financial matters, but who cannot serve a piece of bread and cup of juice.

Do you know why your church does not have women deacons? It can be found in “the cold heart of the church” which is your church’s By-laws. Church By-laws can be changed. When women decide that enough is enough, the cold heart of the church will be changed to include women as Deacons and accept women as Pastors.

Closing the site home page is:

How often do you tell your daughter that she is scripturally inferior to your son?

You tell her every time you take her to church.

How often do you tell your son that he is scripturally superior to his sister?

You tell them every time you take them to church.

Unless your church recognizes women deacons and women pastors.

The site has been frequently updated with new materials, thus far all in .pdf format.

Southern Baptist policies appear to us to be the focus of the site and its literature, since there are other Baptist organizations whose policies with regard to women are far more inclusive.

We look forward to learning more about the group and following their progress.