As I watched Katie Murray preach Sunday morning, I thought of the many blessings Joanna and I have experienced, since joining Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas 22 years ago, from hearing women command the pulpit in numerous worship services.
Joanna and I joined Wilshire in August 2004, leaving a church where we had spent the previous 17 years. (Joanna’s cremains were inurned in Wilshire’s Columbarium on Easter Sunday 2021, weeks after kidney disease took her from me.) Months before we left, the pastor of that church had issued an edict from the pulpit during a Sunday morning sermon, declaring that henceforth no woman would be permitted to teach men in Sunday School. Yes, not only was he “convicted” that God didn’t want women preaching. Over a three-day period, God had shown him that women weren’t even to teach the Bible to men! If any member of that church disagreed with him, he went on to say, “God will prune you from our church.” A few months later, Joanna and I “pruned” ourselves, not wanting to be a part of that rotting tree any longer.
In the months after we joined Wilshire, we saw equality – of women and men, of laity and clergy, of young and old – modeled on the chancel and in worship leadership every week. We heard Senior Pastor George Mason preach equality of women and men before God – at home, at church, in the workplace, wherever. The icing on the cake was seeing and hearing Ann Bell (now Ann Bell Worley), a pastoral resident, preach. Every time George spoke of such equality, or Ann preached, tears filled my eyes, and I reached over and squeezed Joanna’s hand, for we knew where we had come from, and we carried burdensome baggage from our former church and pastor. What we were experiencing at Wilshire was refreshment for our souls.
Through the years, we have heard numerous female pastoral residents preach from that pulpit:
- Ann Bell Worley (2005 “graduation” from a 2-year residency)
- Amy Grizzle Kane (2007)
- Anne Jernberg Scalfaro (2008)
- Julie Merritt Lee (2009)
- Tasha Gibson (2011)
- Annette Thornburg Owen (2013)
- Britt Carlson Clarno (2015)
- Erica Whitaker (2016)
- Leanna Coyle-Carr (2021)
- Leigh Curl-Dove (2021)
- Ashley Robinson (2022)
- Jenna Sullivan (2022)
- Brianna Childs Davenport (2023)
- Georgia McKee (2026)
- Maggie Morey (2026)
- Amanda Hines (will graduate in 2027)
- Jordann McMahan (will graduate in 2027)
We have heard widely-renowned Baptist leaders – including Julie Pennington-Russell, Suzii Paynter March, Pam Durso, and Meredith Hare Stone – preach from the Wilshire pulpit. During our 2022 interim between George Mason and Timothy Peoples, we heard Jaime Clark-Soles preach on “The Legacy of Lois and Eunice,” mentioned by the Apostle Paul in 2nd Timothy as the grandmother and mother who laid the foundation for Timothy’s faith. A few years ago, we heard Victoria Robb Powers, then a Wilshire member but soon to be named senior pastor of our sister Dallas church, Royal Lane Baptist. Last year, our own minister of missions and advocacy, Heather Mustain, preached a powerful sermon that challenged us to be honest in acknowledging and confronting our questions and doubts. Yesterday, Katie Murray – Wilshire’s minister of pastoral care and to senior adults – gave us fresh insight and perspective on Jesus’s description of the kingdom of heaven.
Why do some Baptists feel so threatened by different perspectives? At our former church, Joanna and I rarely heard fresh insight. In Sunday School classes and worship services, we rarely heard anything other than the same pat answers, the same biblical interpretations recycled over and over again.
This is what it’s really about. It’s not just men feeling threatened by women making inroads onto “men’s turf.” It’s a fear that women might bring fresh insight to old scriptures and expose the shallowness of the preaching their congregations have been hearing.
In February 2008, after attending my first board meeting as a trustee of the T. B. Maston Foundation for Christian Ethics, I expressed to the chair, Dick Maples, my concern that – with a handful (or less) of exceptions – I saw around that table nothing but white men, of whom I – then 57 – was the youngest. Dick replied, “I noticed the same thing, Bill, and I think Dr. Maston would be embarrassed.” In 2012 and 2014, the Board elected me to serve two terms as chair. During my four years as chair, I encouraged our Nominating Committee to diversify our Board in every way – but particularly race/ethnicity, age, and gender.
Katie Murray, by the way, who was then in her first tenure on Wilshire’s staff (as Christian advocacy specialist), joined the Maston Board during that period, nominated by our Nominating Committee upon my recommendation.
I stressed that the main purpose of this initiative was to bring different perspectives onto the board – different backgrounds, different interests, different priorities. We couldn’t truly live out and promote the ethics of Jesus, meeting the needs of a diverse world, if we didn’t represent the people of that diverse world on our Board. We needed trustees who could speak for them because they identified with them – their pain, their fears, their oppression, their ostracism and marginalization.
Wilshire’s senior pastor, Timothy Peoples, is Black. He tells a most compelling story of the racially divided Oklahoma town in which he grew up. I’ve told Timothy how meaningful I’ve found it when he brings his life experiences as a Black man into the pulpit. Our mostly white congregation is hearing things that no one but a Black man could bring to us, and we need to hear them, backed by the way in which Timothy connects these experiences to our relationship with Jesus. By the same token, women bring their life experiences into the pulpit, experiences that we men need to hear. We need to hear from people who have been oppressed by a hierarchy – whether based on race or gender or both. We need to be convicted of our own complicity in that oppression.
But it’s not just about that. We simply need the widest possible variety of perspectives in the pulpit to open our minds to the wide variety found in Jesus and his gospel of all-inclusive good news. Otherwise, we find ourselves locked into a biblical worldview that reflects only the narrowest of interpretations, the narrowest of backgrounds, the narrowest of perspectives, and we wind up shutting out the very people that Jesus – in Matthew 25: 31-46 – compels us to serve.
As I listened to Katie preach yesterday, I found myself feeling sorry for our former church and for the many churches that have that same narrow perspective, for the Southern Baptist Convention, which threatens to push out any church that calls a woman to pastoral ministry. They’re missing the point that yes, God DOES call women to preach, and their denial of that call is a denial of God’s sovereignty.
More than that, though, they’re missing the blessing of hearing the rich messages that God-called women bring into the pulpit, as well as the understanding and empathetic pastoral ministry they give to a variety of church members. I regret that it took Joanna and me so long to leave our former church, but thanks be to the God who brought us to Wilshire and Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, at whose General Assemblies we have also heard numerous women preach – and teach – over the years, because their call from God is celebrated there, not denied.
A church without women on the chancel and in the pulpit is just an “old boys’ club.” So sad. They just don’t know what they’re missing.